"Are you serious? Why does this sound like a personal attack?" Liu Dao didn't think
"Just pass my advice along to him word for word," Chen Ge said flatly. In his heart, he was already giving himself points for his kindness. "Qin Guang and I are, at the end of the day, just competitors. He may have absolutely no shame, but I can't just watch him walk into his death. Besides, every time he livestreams, he makes a huge spectacle of it — lives are on the line."
Competitors? Walk into his death? Lives on the line? Are we even talking about the same thing?! Liu Dao felt absolutely certain that one of them had to be drunk.
Tell Qin Guang that if he keeps plagiarizing, he might end up killing himself — how was he supposed to relay a message like that?
"Chen Ge, I know you're upset, but I hope you can stay calm. Livestreams are won on content. We don't need to resort to other means to threaten him — that could backfire and give him leverage over us." Liu Dao pleaded earnestly. The contract was already signed, and the two parties were set to begin their first collaboration tomorrow. The last thing he needed was for Chen Ge to do something impulsive at this critical juncture.
"Forget it — there's no explaining it to you." Chen Ge walked to the entrance of the haunted house. "If there's nothing else, let's just meet up tomorrow afternoon to talk."
"You should come early tomorrow. There are still a lot of details we need to finalize with you."
"Sure."
After hanging up, Chen Ge's mind was heavy.
He hadn't really been thinking about the livestream. Qin Guang, the battle for viewership — none of it mattered to him. They were just side issues. The only thing he truly needed to worry about was staying alive and finding the clues his parents had left behind.
Walking to the front of the haunted house, Chen Ge glanced at the nearby tree canopy but didn't see the white cat.
"It left after all."
He still had a good impression of that cat. "Heterochromatic eyes aren't something a stray cat would normally have. But it's a living creature — you can't force it to stay."
Feeling a twinge of sadness at the cat's departure, Chen Ge unlocked the safety gate and stepped inside the haunted house.
The dark, eerie corridor stretched out with only Chen Ge alone in it. The haunted house at night felt lacking in life.
He switched on the hallway lights, and his shadow stretched long across the floor, looking rather lonely — but he had long since grown used to it.
He stepped into the bathroom to wash his face, then headed toward the employee break room. A few steps away, he noticed something was off. "Why is the break room door open?"
There were two keys to the break room. He kept one on him at all times, and the other was hidden above the door frame for the convenience of other employees who needed to use the room. Only people who had worked in the haunted house would know about this.
"If it were
He gently pushed open the break room door. The room was dim, and no one was inside.
"The key isn't above the door frame — that person stole it?" Chen Ge scanned the room and found only one difference from when he had left: a jacket he hadn't had time to wash yet was lying on the table.
"I remember putting this on the bed headboard when I changed out of it this morning. How did it end up on the table?"