Mi Xiaobai couldn’t see the makeup styles in the album, yet somehow remained extremely invested.
“So? See any you like?” he asked Yu Qing.
“…”
Yu Qing wanted to drag over that chatterbox teammate and make him swear on his behalf.
The employee holding the makeup album received no answer and finally raised his head.
His brows and the areas around his eyes were blue-black. His glossy pupils showed no whites at all, making his stare look unnervingly fixed beneath the dim yellow light.
Against his deathly pale face, the most conspicuous features were the two round patches of rouge on his cheekbones and…
that gaping, blood-red mouth.
Yu Qing’s brow twitched violently.
It had been a long time since anyone with a face like this had dared come so close to him.
The employee, however, did nothing else. He merely pushed the album closer and urged him, “Hurry up and choose. A face like yours doesn’t photograph well.”
Before Yu Qing could answer, the person haunting him like a ghost spoke first.
“I think I must’ve misheard. Who did he say doesn’t photograph well?”
“Me.”
Yu Qing answered instinctively.
Only after the word left his mouth did he realize the employee was staring at him with his enormous red mouth hanging open.
“What do you mean, ‘me’? Who are you talking to?”
“…”
Damn Mi Xiaobai to hell.
Expressionless, Yu Qing snatched the album away and turned to leave.
The employee looked even more confused.
“Where are you taking the album?”
To stuff it into a certain someone’s mouth and make him stop talking.
Yu Qing thought irritably.
Completely unfazed by the photography studio’s eerie atmosphere, he lifted the curtain and strode into the back.
There was a photography room with a sign on the door, and another room marked Darkroom. Red light seeped from beneath its door like dark, fresh blood.
The remaining three rooms were fitting rooms.
The voices of Three Ks and that Snail teammate could faintly be heard from one of them.
Three Ks was shrieking, “I’m not wearing this! What kind of formalwear has the character for longevity written all over it?!”
Snail tried to talk him into surrendering.
“The others have mourning characters on them. Compared to those, this one’s better.”
Yu Qing thought about Three Ks’s usual volume and decided the soundproofing in these fitting rooms was acceptable.
He opened an empty one, stepped inside, shut the door, and lowered his voice.
“Come out.”
The person who had been making nonstop comments in his ear suddenly decided to play deaf.
No response whatsoever.
Yu Qing called his name with obvious irritation.
“Mi Xiaobai.”
“Calling me?”
The bastard pretended he had only just noticed and laughed.
“I’d love to come out too, but that might be a little difficult for the moment.”
“…”
The tiny figure in the upper-right corner of Yu Qing’s vision seemed to reflect his mood. It was already rolling its eyes.
Mr. Painted Skin’s voice, however, remained perfectly calm.
“Don’t talk to me for a while.”
“Ah…”
The bastard considered it for a moment before reluctantly agreeing.
“All right.”
But Mi Xiaobai had never been one to sit quietly. The moment he got bored, he started looking for entertainment.
So he began whispering temptation into Yu Qing’s ear.
“I actually have an idea.”
Get lost. I’m not listening.
“I know you’ve always been thin-skinned. There’s no way you’ll accept having makeup put on you.”
Obviously. Why would I ever accept that?
“Why don’t you let me force-log in for a bit?”
“Force-log what?” Yu Qing asked in confusion.
“I take primary control of your body for a short while.”
Mi Xiaobai placed particular emphasis on short while.
“I’ll suffer through it for you, and you can take a proper nap. By the time you wake up, everything will be over. How about it? Worth considering?”
Yu Qing: “?”
He stared in disbelief, even forgetting to keep his voice down.
“You suffer through it? The makeup would still be painted on my face. What difference does it make?”
Mi Xiaobai went, “Mm…”
Yu Qing answered without the slightest hesitation.
“Don’t even think about it.”
With that, he turned around and pulled open the fitting-room door.
Outside stood Three Ks.
Snail.
The employee who had dragged them off to change.
The employee whose makeup album Yu Qing had taken.
Even the short-haired studio owner in the qipao.
Every single one of them was staring blankly at him.
If one had to be precise, Three Ks did not look quite as shocked as everyone else.
But what difference did that make?
Everyone else had their mouths hanging open.
Yu Qing: “…”
For the dignity of Mr. Painted Skin, that single second seemed to stretch into infinity.
Mi Xiaobai was tucked away inside the so-called “little room” and could not see the scene outside very clearly.
But he could see the minimized Favorability notification in the upper-right corner of their vision.
The tiny head remained frozen for a long moment.
Then numbers began gushing out of it.
Favorability -1.
-1
-1
-1
…
Mi Xiaobai: “?”
The -1s poured out like a fountain with absolutely no sign of stopping.
He hurriedly raised an index finger and poked the little head in midair.
It did nothing.
And then, in the instant Yu Qing’s mind went blank, Mi Xiaobai seized the opportunity to be a bastard and forcibly force-logged in, taking primary control.
The endless stream of -1s finally stopped.
The tiny figure glared at him with its deadpan face for a moment, then silently turned around, presenting him with the emotionless back of its head and its little wolf-tail.
Mi Xiaobai breathed a sigh of relief.
He pulled out the phone, tapped quickly a few times, switched to the character information panel, and finally saw the total Favorability value.
Deity Favorability: -10
Mi Xiaobai: “…”
Shan Bei, dressed in his formalwear, stood stiffly beside Three Ks.
The clothes felt like fabric to the touch, but once worn, they became stiff and angular, making the two of them look like a pair of perfectly rectangular playing cards. Without doing a single workout, they had somehow achieved shoulders as wide as double doors.
Wrapped in these burial clothes, he shrank back and watched.
The man before them turned his face away in irritation.
When he looked back again, however, his expression and entire air had changed.
It was as though he had become a completely different person in the blink of an eye.
Now there was a careless, unruly quality about him.
After checking the phone, he smiled helplessly, flipped it around his fingers, and slipped it back into his trouser pocket.
His gaze swept over Shan Bei and Three Ks.
One eyebrow rose.
Then he held out a hand toward the employee.
“Where’s the makeup album? Let me see it.”
The employee looked as if he had genuinely seen a ghost.
He pointed toward the fitting room behind Mi Xiaobai.
“Didn’t you take it in there?”
“Ah…”
The boss tapped a knuckle against his brow.
“I forgot. Give me a second, then. I’ll look again.”
Employee: “?”
This was probably the first time any of them had encountered a customer like this.
The employees exchanged looks.
The studio owner in the qipao could barely stand watching anymore. Holding a folding fan, she stared at him.
“You really are strange. The makeup album only has three pages. Is it really that hard to finish looking through?”
“Choice paralysis,” Mi Xiaobai said.
With his long arms and legs, he reached over, hooked the album toward himself, and opened it.
He gave a low commentary.
“Bright reds, gaudy greens, flaming red lips… No wonder he was so unhappy.”
“Who was unhappy?” Shan Bei whispered to Three Ks. “I’m already completely lost. What kind of living-person transformation is this?”
Three Ks whispered back, “I spent an entire instance being lost last time.”
The two of them were still wearing burial clothes and had almost been scared senseless by the atmosphere in the studio.
But after Mi Xiaobai stirred things up, they somehow managed to breathe again.
The employee with the blood-red mouth remained obsessively focused on one thing.
“Have you chosen your makeup?”
“No.”
Mi Xiaobai tossed the album aside and dusted his hands off.
“If you put makeup like this on him, he really will start wanting to kill people. And when that happens, not one of you will get away.”
Employee: “?”
“Compared to him, I’m much easier to reason with,” Mi Xiaobai continued shamelessly. “And for now, I don’t intend to wreck your shop.”
He turned toward the employee.
“So why don’t you try convincing me instead? Why do we need makeup like this to take the photograph?”
The employee’s pitch-black eyes stared at him without blinking.
“A face that’s too plain won’t show up on the camera.”
Mi Xiaobai turned to look at the fitting-room mirror.
When Yu Qing had entered the instance, the game had once again replaced his face with an extremely ordinary one.
Calling those features “plain” would not exactly be unfair.
But that was clearly not what the employee meant by the word.
Mi Xiaobai turned back and casually said:
“You mean it doesn’t look dead enough, right?”
Employee: “…”
Three Ks and Shan Bei retreated farther into the corner.
They ended up beside the discarded album.
Shan Bei made himself as inconspicuous as possible, carefully crouched down, and gingerly picked it up.
He turned around and opened it, intending to show Three Ks.
He only had time to exclaim, “Holy—”
before throwing the album straight back where it had come from.
Burial clothes.
Dead-person makeup.
What exactly these two-inch photographs were meant for had become painfully obvious.
“You sure we’re sleeping on beds later and not coffin boards?” Shan Bei asked Three Ks bleakly.
Three Ks was no fool either.
On the verge of tears, he said, “I’d say the odds of coffin boards are way higher than beds… But what else can we do? We’re inside an instance. Following the NPCs’ instructions and doing what the quest tells us is probably safer than messing around on our own.”
“I really don’t want to die right at the start…”
Mi Xiaobai glanced toward them.
When the employee still gave no answer, he said, “How about this? Tell me the requirements. What exactly does a face need to look like before the camera can capture it?”
The employee seemed to have had a keyword triggered.
He spoke softly.
“The eyes have to be black. The more black area, the better. No whites showing.”
As he spoke, he pulled his own eyelids apart.
His pitch-black eyeballs looked ready to tumble from their sockets.
“The face has to be pale enough. That way the eyes, nose, and mouth will show clearly.”
He slowly stretched his mouth into a grin, exposing an entire row of eerie teeth.
“All the teeth have to show. That makes it festive.”
Three Ks looked ready to cry.
He whispered to Shan Bei, “Even if you cut my mouth wider, I couldn’t smile that festively.”
Mi Xiaobai, however, merely said, “Oh,” and nodded.
“That’s easy enough. No makeup needed. Let’s just do it.”
Not only the employee—even Three Ks and Shan Bei seemed to have question marks erupting over their heads.
After saying that, Mi Xiaobai walked into the photography room on his own.
A stark white wall stood behind him.
He glanced at the marker on the floor and obediently positioned himself on the line.
The employee responsible for taking the photograph stared at him expressionlessly, then sat behind the camera with obvious suspicion and adjusted the lens.
Mi Xiaobai’s face filled the lens in extreme close-up.
His features were perfectly ordinary, but they did nothing to diminish that careless air about him.
Through the lens, the employee saw him mumble under his breath:
“Never tried this before, so I might be a little rusty… but with this body, it shouldn’t be difficult to manage this much…”
The employee had no patience for his muttering.
“Ready? I’m pressing the shutter.”
He even gave the customer a countdown.
“Three, two, one.”
The instant he reached two, he clearly saw the customer inside the lens move his neck.
It almost looked as though the man smiled at him.
In the next second—
an entire intact skin peeled naturally away from that perfectly ordinary face.
Pitch-black eye sockets appeared beneath it.
And stark white bone.
Employee: “………………”
His finger jerked.
Click.
The shutter snapped.
When he finally raised his head from behind the camera in horror, the customer had already returned to normal.
His skin was once again perfectly intact.
Smiling, he asked:
“My eyes are black enough, my face is white enough, and every tooth is showing. So?”
“Isn’t this a little more exciting than your makeup?”