The broadcast echoed throughout the inn.
[Game start!]
[Thirty-second countdown.]
As the voice fell, Qi Dengzui noticed his cultivation level slowly increasing.
[Five seconds.]
[Three seconds.]
[One second.]
A ferocious roar howled gloomily through the darkness.
[The vengeful ghost has entered the inn!]
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound of the vengeful ghost’s footsteps came from the corridor.
Suddenly, the footsteps stopped, followed by the shriek of the woman in purple.
The woman in purple, Meng Shu, stared fixedly at the monster before her, her soul floating in the air trembling for a moment.
The vengeful host before her was neatly dressed in a suit, with a slender figure, but growing from its neck was a round bone wider than its shoulders. The bone had only two eye sockets, from which streams of crimson blood flowed down, and its hands were sharp blade-like claws, its entire body exuding an air of eerie mystery.
The ghost’s claws scraped against the door again and again, each scrape causing more damage. At this rate, the door would soon be broken through.
Meng Shu felt a chill run through her entire body, her lips trembling uncontrollably.
Beside the door was a circular object with the words “Repair Array” written next to it. It could be activated using cultivation.
Without a second thought, Meng Shu poured all her meager cultivation into the circular object.
It seemed to work though the scratching continued, the door no longer showed new cracks.
The Repair Array actually worked!
With the immediate danger temporarily resolved, Meng Shu breathed a sigh of relief, a flicker of hope in her heart.
If she kept using her cultivation to activate the Repair Array, wouldn’t the vengeful ghost never break through the door?
Could it really be that simple?
Or was there something else.
As if to confirm Meng Shu’s suspicions, the next second, an ancient, hoarse voice sounded.
[This is a haunted inn. Legend has it that the inn sometimes disappears and sometimes appears. No one knows when or where it will open, but every person who comes here never leaves again.]
[Later, a set of rules about the haunted inn spread through the martial world. As for whether they are true, no one knows.]
[Rule 1: At any time, do not open the door for the vengeful ghost.]
[Rule 2: There is a Repair Array in the room. You can use it to repair the damaged door.]
[Rule 3: There is a liar in the inn. Do not believe anything it says. If you already know the liar’s identity, do not let it realize that you have seen through it.]
[Rule 4: There is a shop in the inn that can provide you with some assistance. If you are in danger, go to the shop immediately.]
[Rule 5: Every so often, the vengeful ghost will grow stronger. The ghost may leave, but do not let your guard down.]
[Rule 6 Do not.]
A burst of static buzzed painfully through her eardrums, and after the noise faded, the rule announcement stopped as well.
There were more rules left unfinished.
This realization made Meng Shu’s scalp crawl. She clearly felt the door’s rate of damage suddenly increase severalfold.
The cracking sounds came endlessly, and Meng Shu’s heart was a mess of panic.
When the door’s damage reached three-quarters, the Repair Array’s cooldown finally ended, and she activated it again with immense relief.
[The vengeful ghost has fled.]
Meng Shu’s spirits lifted.
Just before she pressed the repair button, the ghost had actually left!
“Did it, leave?”
Meng Shu swallowed hard.
She waited a moment longer before letting out a long, lingering breath of relief.
The ghost grows stronger and also leaves that rule was true!
Qi Dengzui drifted over to his own body. With a thought, his soul instantly returned to it. After he stood up and lay back down, a wave of dizziness hit him, and his soul drifted out again.
So it seemed that, whenever he wanted, he could return to his body at any time. Ultimately, whether to be in human form or soul form was his own choice.
“Guan Si.” Qi Dengzui glanced at the door.
“Hm?” Guan Si drifted over leisurely. “What’s up, Brother Qi?”
Qi Dengzui raised his eyes slightly. “Can you get into other people’s rooms?”
The rules mentioned not being able to enter other people’s rooms, but Qi Dengzui had tried earlier and found that it wasn’t that they weren’t allowed it was that their souls simply couldn’t go there.
In this exam, he had both a body and a soul, but Guan Si was different. Guan Si only had a soul. Perhaps Guan Si could be free from the constraints of the rules.
Guan Si said, “Brother Qi, wait a moment. Let me try.”
He drifted to the door of another person’s room, gave the handle a casual twist, and slipped right through with ease.
<WTF, that’s cheating. Reporting this.>
<So he can just walk anywhere? This dungeon is a piece of cake.>
Guan Si left the other person’s room and noticed that his soul had faded slightly.
It seemed that although he wasn’t bound by the rules, he couldn’t keep moving around freely like this forever. Breaking the rules would consume his soul.
He returned to Qi Dengzui’s room and said, “Brother Qi, I can go to another room, but there’s a limit to how many times.”
“Tap, tap, tap”
Outside the door, the resentful ghost’s footsteps suddenly sounded.
“The resentful ghost is here.” Qi Dengzui’s gaze darkened abruptly, his voice low.
“The rules say the resentful ghost will keep growing stronger. There are two of us, so it shouldn’t be able to break through the door and kill us in the early stages. But if we don’t find its weakness, as it keeps getting stronger, we won’t be able to hold out in the later stages.”
The black-suited resentful ghost continued scratching at the door.
Qi Dengzui and Guan Si worked together to reinforce the door with repair arrays. The room fell into silence, the ghost’s scratching sound flooding the entire room like seawater.
“Tap”
“Tap, tap”
Qi Dengzui listened intently to the sounds outside the door.
After a long moment, he suddenly said, “The sounds are off. They don’t match up.”
“There are two sounds one slow, one rapid.”
Guan Si moved to the door and peered through the small peephole, locking eyes with the black-suited ghost’s bleeding, hollow sockets.
The black-suited ghost’s appearance was truly sanity-destroying.
Guan Si pondered for a few seconds, then said, “There’s only one ghost outside.”
“I’m not mishearing it.”
As his words fell, the room returned to silence, leaving only the black-suited ghost’s sounds. Qi Dengzui focused and listened to the scratching for a while longer, then confirmed:
“There must be another ghost we just can’t see it. Let’s set that aside for now. We’ll see what the others have encountered when we discuss things later. But more than that, there’s something else I really want to know.”
The resentful ghost growing stronger proved that while they, the examinees, were developing, the resentful ghost could develop too.
But…
“What exactly is the resentful ghost’s upgrade mechanism?” He watched the ghost’s attack power gradually increase outside the door, his confusion deepening.
Kill count? No the purple-clad woman wasn’t dead yet, yet the ghost kept growing stronger, proving kill count had nothing to do with its upgrades.
Could it simply be time?
[The resentful ghost has fled.]
When he heard that announcement, Qi Dengzui’s eyes darkened. He savored the exam’s announcements and rules with interest, his fascination with this exam deepening.
The resentful ghost’s first target was the purple-clad woman, Meng Shu. To withstand the ghost’s assault, she would have had to pour all her cultivation into reinforcing the door, leaving no time to develop, let alone drive the ghost away.
That left only one possibility: the ghost had left on its own it hadn’t fled.
But why would the resentful ghost run?
He was growing more and more curious about the contents of this exam.
…
Half an hour passed quickly, and the souls of the others drifted into the main hall one by one.
Meng Shu was so terrified her thoughts were in disarray. She stammered for a long time without explaining things clearly, finally saying, “That rule is correct. I only held it off for a moment, and then the ghost ran away. We should follow that rule.”
Qi Dengzui said, “But the announcement and the rule contradict each other.”
He said in a low voice, “The announcement says there’s a shop in the inn, and if you enter, you must leave immediately you can’t buy any items. But the rule says the shop can provide help, and if you encounter danger, you should go to the shop immediately.”
“These two completely contradict each other.”
“Could the announcement be fake?” the silent man in blue robes finally spoke up.
The others glanced at him, and he explained, “My name is Ji Mi. This is my girlfriend, Meng Shu.”
Hearing this, Meng Shu forced a faint, strained smile, whether from lingering fear or being frightened, it was hard to tell.
They were a couple, yet they seemed distant from each other, which was rather strange.
Ji Mi said, “I believe Xiao Shu wouldn’t lie.”
Guan Si shook his head and said, “It’s not necessarily that every announcement is fake, nor that every rule is true. At least the second announcement that a broken door can be repaired with a repair array is sound.”
“Looking at it that way, we’ll have to test the validity of each rule one by one,” Ji Mi said. “What about that contradictory inn rule? Who’s going to test it?”
The man in gold robes narrowed his eyes and immediately said, “I’m not going!”
He swept his gaze over the people around him and said, “Who knows if that rule is even true? If it’s wrong, wouldn’t I be throwing my life away for nothing? If you want to go, go yourselves, I’m not doing it.”
Meng Shu said timidly, “But if no one goes, we’ll never know if the rule is true or false.”
The man in gold robes gave her a cold look, a malicious smile curling on his lips. “Then why don’t you go? Oh, right you’ve got a boyfriend. Why not have him go in your place? Aren’t you two a couple? Shouldn’t you be looking out for each other? Or are you the type to fly off separately when disaster strikes?”
“How can you be like this!” Meng Shu said indignantly. “This is a rule-horror exam! If we don’t cooperate, we’ll easily all be wiped out!”
The man in gold robes sneered and said, “How do I know you won’t screw me over and use my life to test the rules? Besides, a useless waste like you who can only cry, what reason do I have to cooperate with you?”
Meng Shu: “I,”
“That’s enough.” Qi Dengzui glanced at the gold-robed man, speaking flatly. “If you don’t want to go, no one’s forcing you.”
“I’ll find a way to probe the rules on my own, but as for the final result, I won’t be telling you either. Feel free to do as you please.”
〈This gold-robed guy seems to have been in the same exam as me before, a lone wolf, but he’s got some real skill.〉
〈Some real skill? I thought he was supposed to be No.1, acting so arrogant? Pfft!〉
〈The person above isn’t just salty, is he? Chu Yang does have a bad temper and poor character, but what he said is actually true. This is a rule-based horror game, who knows if someone might harbor ulterior motives and trick others? Besides, the rules themselves state that there’s a liar in the inn. Who’s to say the liar won’t use the rules to kill?〉
〈Can you Qi Dengzui stans and Chu Yang stans take your fight outside? It’s really ruining the mood.〉
Before the barrage of comments could finish arguing, the free discussion period had already ended. The discussion time was very short, and the efficiency of information exchange was far from high.
【The ten-minute pause period has ended. The game continues!】