Chapter 121 The cause of the ghost in Room 303: The landlord was trying to increase the ghost's favorability...
After Zhou Fangdong pushed open the door, he found that room 303 was perfectly normal.
Although the presence of a ghostly realm could be sensed in the room, it was not as exaggerated as in rooms 301 and 302; the interior scene was just like an ordinary room.
Zhou Fangdong walked inside, and at the same time, the task panel popped up:
Side Quest 17: Clean and rent out Room 303
① Find the ghost hidden in the room
② Eliminate the ghostly aura in the room and help ghosts break free from their cycle of obsession.
③ Clean the room and tidy up the house.
④ Discard the damaged furniture and buy new furniture.
⑤ Figure out the patterns of ghosts and monsters killing people, draft a rental agreement, and find tenants to move in.
Side Quest Rewards: 800 Ghost Coins, 2000 Experience Points, 1 Random Skill Point
Seeing the experience points, Zhou Fangdong thought of something and asked the system, "By the way, system, I've completed many side quests and should have accumulated a lot of experience points, but I haven't leveled up for a long time. Do you have any ideas?"
A chaotic series of X-ray crackling sounds swept by, followed by a moment of silence, before the system's cold, electronic voice finally rang out:
[The system panel failed to update in time, causing a serious error. The host is hereby given 13 attribute points. The host can allocate these attribute points to the health bar, stamina bar, or spirit bar.]
The experience-based leveling system has been replaced with a system where 2,000 experience points can be exchanged for one attribute point.
It's alright, not too much loss.
Zhou Fangdong instructed, "System, from now on, automatically convert the experience points I gain into attribute points."
He plans to keep these attribute points for now and add them later when needed.
After discussing the experience points with the system, Zhou Fangdong began to carefully examine the ghostly scene in room 303.
The entire ghost realm is a huge one-bedroom apartment, divided in the middle into two mirror-symmetrical children's rooms with the same layout.
The room on the left has sky-blue wallpaper and dark wood floors. The sheets and duvet covers are covered with toy car patterns, a half-assembled robot toy sits on the desk, posters of Ultraman and Kamen Rider adorn the walls, and a soccer ball and brand-new sneakers sit in the corner of the room.
The room on the right has pink wallpaper and light-colored wooden floors. The bed is a princess bed with pink gauze curtains, and it's covered with plush toys. The desk is filled with various playhouse plastic toys, Barbie dolls, and children's makeup boxes. The walls are covered with posters of magical girls and fairy tale princesses, and the clothes rack in the corner is full of extravagantly puffy princess dresses.
These are very stereotypical boy and girl rooms.
But the person in the blue room was a short, middle-aged woman with a blank expression.
The pink room belonged to a burly, middle-aged man with a similarly blank expression.
The two of them stood motionless on either side of the room's dividing line, as if looking in a mirror.
After a moment of silence, the beds in both rooms suddenly changed, and two children appeared on the beds at the same time.
The two children look exactly alike; the only differences are the length of their hair and the color of their pajamas.
The child with long hair and pink pajamas lived in the blue room, while the child with short hair and blue pajamas lived in the pink room.
After the two children appeared, the middle-aged couple also started to move.
They walked to the two children's beds like marionettes, accepting the children's transformation like giant dolls.
The middle-aged woman, her head shaved, was doing various exercises in a blue room under the cold gaze of the children. Even though she was severely exhausted and her limbs were twisted and injured, she dared not stop.
The middle-aged man's face was covered in brightly colored cosmetics as he struggled to put on those fancy princess dresses. The princess dresses, made of a lot of light gauze, seemed fragile, but in reality, they were like steel armor, severely deforming the man's burly figure.
Blood gushed from the man's mouth, but he did not stop tucking himself into the skirt until he collapsed and died.
The woman eventually succumbed to exhaustion and died.
After the man and woman died, their bodies disappeared, and the child on the bed also vanished. At the same time, another pair of identical middle-aged men and women appeared in the middle of the room, standing face to face, their figures stiff, like sculptures looking in a mirror.
It's another new cycle.
Zhou Fangdong scratched his head, completely unable to understand what the ghost that created this ghostly realm was trying to express, so he decisively gave up thinking and took out a kerosene lamp.
The moment the kerosene lamp lit up, the ghostly aura inside the room vanished instantly, revealing the true appearance of room 303.
It was a typical haunted house, abandoned for many years, the interior filled with dust and cobwebs. Three skeletons, two adults and one child, lay on the floor. The two adult skeletons held the child skeleton in their arms, as if they were protecting the child even in death, like a very loving family.
After confirming that the ghost realm had completely dissipated, Zhou Fangdong turned off the kerosene lamp.
Before the ghost realm reappeared, Zhou Fangdong's [Heavenly Eye] captured a distorted ghostly figure.
The ghostly image was made up of two melted humanoid wax figures pieced together. The two faces were misaligned and stacked on the neck, the features melted and blurred, and the limbs were stuck together at a grotesque angle... It was impossible to distinguish the gender or see the appearance; all that could be seen was that it was a twisted monster formed by two human bodies joined together.
When Zhou Fangdong first saw the shadow, he thought that what was in the room was not a human ghost, but some kind of spirit.
But after he used [Soul Absorption] to get 800 Ghost Coins and saw its past life, Zhou Fangdong realized that the reason this ghost had become like this was entirely due to its past life.
The ghost's parents were among the earliest tenants of the Liwan Apartments.
Before coming to Liwan Apartment, they were compensated with a change of household registration from rural to urban due to the expropriation of their hometown land, and received a house to settle down in the city.
Later, in order to pay for their son's medical treatment, the couple sold their house and rented a partitioned room in apartment 303 of Liwan Apartment.
The sub-landlord of room 303 divided the room into four rooms for rent, and the couple rented one of them.
In an effort to treat their son's illness, the couple worked tirelessly, exhausting their savings, but still couldn't save their son.
At the time, the couple was almost forty years old and had passed their prime childbearing years.
Because of strict regulations on having more children than allowed, coupled with their poverty, they only had one son.
Fortunately, after his wife gave birth, she was only forced to have an IUD inserted, not sterilized. Therefore, after the IUD was removed, the couple began planning to have another child.
In the past, people were very obsessed with carrying on the family line. In rural areas, having a son was equivalent to having an important labor force. If there were quarrels or fights, someone would stand up for you. Therefore, there was a strong preference for sons over daughters.
They were no longer young and naturally hoped to have a son. So, after successfully becoming pregnant, they listened to the advice of a barefoot doctor and spent all their savings to buy a "gender-changing pill."
The child was successfully born, but was intersex. Moreover, the male characteristics appeared to be underdeveloped and deformed.
However, the couple insisted that the child was a son and named him 'A-Qiang'.
They took their child to the barefoot doctor to argue, but the doctor said that his wife had been affected by evil spirits during her pregnancy, which caused the child in her womb to be hermaphroditic. He claimed that his "gender-changing pill" had saved the child's life.
To prevent the couple from causing further trouble, the barefoot doctor introduced them to a very 'efficacious' shaman.
So, when A-Qiang was still a baby, he was given talisman water with unknown ingredients and stumbled and fell until he was four years old.
Because his parents always shaved his head and dressed him in boys' clothes, Aqiang thought he was no different from other boys.
Although his parents always forced him to drink strange-tasting talisman water, A-Qiang thought that every family was like that.
The parents' attitude took a sharp turn on the night of A-Qiang's fourth birthday.
Ah-Qiang cautiously asked his mother to sew him a doll using an old pillowcase.
The couple's expressions changed immediately.
The father scolded A-Qiang for acting like a boy, while the mother suddenly broke down in tears.
A-Qiang asked his father, puzzled, "My friend Xiao-Zhi is also a boy, and he also likes to sleep with a doll..."
But before he could finish speaking, his father's hand fell.
This was the first time the father hit A-Qiang, and it marked the beginning of subsequent abuse.
The shaman said that as Ah-Qiang gets older, the evil spirits in his body are becoming increasingly difficult to suppress, and he needs a more yang-energy-based 'exorcising method'.
So Ah-Qiang went from drinking talisman water every day to being burned with cigarette butts by his father, being showered with very hot water, and being whipped with peach wood branches.
After starting elementary school, A-Qiang attracted the attention of the boys in his class because he always went to the cubicle to use the toilet.
After his pants were forcibly pulled down while he was in the toilet, A-Qiang's secret was exposed, and his male classmates beat him up in disgust in the toilet.
When A-Qiang returned home covered in injuries, he mustered his last bit of courage to ask his parents whether he was a boy or a girl, only to be met with another round of beatings.
The dull thud of the hot water-soaked rattan striking flesh mingled with the father's roar. The father said, "He is my son, and can only be my son."
From then on, A-Qiang was not only tormented by his parents' "exorcism" at home, but also suffered from physical and emotional bullying from his classmates at school. "Two-Chair," "Hermaphrodite," and "Neither male nor female monster" became his nicknames at school.
Ah Qiang became increasingly silent, learning to endure in silence and shutting himself off.
As he gets older, Ah-Qiang's feminine characteristics become more and more obvious.
His body developed faster than boys his age, his height increased rapidly, making him look thinner and more delicate. Even with a buzz cut, he looked like a girl.
Correspondingly, the father's temper became increasingly volatile, and his alcoholism became increasingly severe.
One day, after returning home drunk, his father looked at A-Qiang's handsome features and poured boiling water on his body and face. Then, as if he had gone mad, he frantically whipped him with a rattan cane.
Because A-Qiang remained silent and stiff until he stopped breathing, his father did not stop.
During this time, the mother just watched as always, as if A-Qiang was not her own child, as if what the father did was really for A-Qiang's good.
After A-Qiang died, they didn't prepare a coffin. They just put his small body in a snakeskin bag and buried it under the garbage station like throwing away trash.
A-Qiang died just after his eleventh birthday.
From birth to death, it could never distinguish what a boy should look like and what a girl should look like.
They don't even know what a 'human being' should be like.
Its parents always told it to live like a 'man'.
But its parents created a monster from it; it wasn't even human, so how was it supposed to live?
If the father is a man, is a man someone who acts tough and violent on construction sites, drinks heavily all day, treats his family with violence, blames all his failures on others, and doesn't even dare to accept his own children?
If a mother is a woman, does that mean a woman is someone who does housework and cooking even when her work is just as tiring as her husband's, who gives up thinking and blindly follows her husband's ideas, and who is unwilling to even protect her own children?
Before killing its parents, it had asked them this question... what exactly a boy should do and what a girl should do.
They said...
Boys shouldn't like dolls, they should like sports, have short hair, be adventurous, be brave, and be responsible.
Girls should like playing with dolls, like princess dresses, have long hair, be gentle, obedient, sensible, and cute.
So that's how it is.
But it doesn't like that statement.
What bad things will happen if this rule is not followed?
So after the parents died, it trapped them in its ghost realm and explored with them what 'boys should do' and what 'girls should do' would happen if they broke the rules.
Unfortunately, nothing unfortunate happened.
As a result, it became even more chaotic.
It turns out that people can do whatever they want and like whatever they want; those conventional gender stereotypes won't bind a person's entire life...
So, what exactly is it? What should it like? What is the meaning of its existence?
If it can do anything, then why can't it do anything?
So day after day, it explored the rules of the room with its parents, trying to figure out how and how it should survive in the future.
Its methods have also evolved from gentle at the beginning to becoming increasingly bloody and cruel.
Room 303 of Liwan Apartment became a room that could never be opened.
Since that family of three disappeared, all the tenants in the partitioned rooms have been evicted and have been unable to enter room 303 again.
To this day, Zhou Fangdong is the first outsider to enter this room.
After using [Soul Absorption], Zhou Fangdong tried using the kerosene lamp a few more times, but he was completely unable to communicate with the ghosts in the room.
It doesn't care what Zhou Fangdong does at all; it doesn't care if he steals its ghost coins, and it won't even notice if it offers incense.
It withdraws its ghost realm when the kerosene lamp is lit, and releases it when the kerosene lamp is not lit.
It silently endures everything, but stubbornly does its own thing, just as it rebels against its parents with its insignificant strength in the final stage of its life.
Zhou Fangdong couldn't bring himself to use more violent methods to clean it up.
This ghost suffered so many terrible things in his life, and was tortured to death by his own parents. He was only eleven years old when he died.
Even after death, he simply stayed in the ghost realm he created, without doing anything harmful.
Recalling the ghost's past life, Zhou Fangdong suddenly had a flash of inspiration.
Oh, by the way, it seemed to like dolls when it was alive...
In that case, why doesn't he make a paper figure himself and give it to the ghost?
Paper figures are a type of doll, so giving a paper figure as a gift can help build rapport.
After accepting the paper figure he made, the ghost in room 303 might open up and become easier to communicate with.
Perhaps because he owned a paper craft shop in the ghost market, Zhou Fangdong had never made paper figures before, but subconsciously he was very confident in making them and his creative desire was bursting.
Although there were no tools for making paper figures in the apartment, there were in the paper craft shops in the ghost market, and the former shop owner, the ghost tenant and paper craftsman whose shop he had robbed, was still living in seclusion in room 208.
It's time to bring him out and work with him to develop a new type of paper figure. With the help of the paper craftsman, Zhou Fangdong felt he could do it faster and better.
Thinking of this, Zhou Fangdong immediately teleported to the second floor and headed straight for room 208, preparing to take the paper craftsman to the ghost market.
I just don't know if the paper craft shop has a wide enough variety of paint colors. If there aren't enough, it might limit his creativity.
After all, most children like colorful things, and Zhou Fangdong wanted to cater to their tastes by making the paper figures more elaborate.
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