The app on his phone, featuring the haunted house's front gate as its icon, looked a lot like the simulation and management mobile games that were popular on the market. The only difference was that instead of running a restaurant, aquarium, or pet park, you were managing a haunted house.
He carefully scrolled through the app's interface. Every piece of information inside matched his haunted house exactly — the daily visitor count, the facilities, the scenes. The game gave Chen Ge a peculiar feeling, as if the haunted house he needed to manage in the game was the very same one he owned in real life.
The same dire situation, the same verge of collapse — the two had far too much in common.
"Could this game actually have been modeled after my haunted house? If I changed the haunted house in the game, would I benefit from it in reality too?"
Chen Ge continued reading. The existing attractions in the haunted house — Zombie Revival Night — were torn apart and deemed utterly worthless. And the Ghost Marriage project, which had once made the newspaper and even caused a stir, received only a half-star rating in the game's evaluation.
"Even Ghost Marriage only gets half a star. I can't even imagine how terrifying the locked horror scenes further down must be." He tried tapping on the option to unlock more scenes. The moment he touched it, a line of text appeared on the screen, informing him that he needed to complete a certain number of daily missions before he'd qualify for the unlock.
"So the daily missions are the foundation of everything. Only by continuously completing daily missions can I unlock horror scenes. More horror scenes will attract a flood of visitors. More visitors means I can expand the haunted house and increase its area, creating a positive feedback loop."
Chen Ge had played plenty of mobile games in his spare time. He quickly grasped the rules — the completion rate of daily missions would determine the entire haunted house's development.
He tapped open the daily missions, and three options appeared on the screen: **Easy Difficulty:** The three essential elements of haunted house design — story, setting, and emotion. A haunted house without a story has no soul. Flesh out the backstories for Zombie Revival Night and Ghost Marriage.
**Normal Difficulty:** Before midnight, repair every mannequin model inside the haunted house.
**Nightmare Difficulty:** Surely you're still wondering whether ghosts really exist. Come play a little game — the truth reveals itself the moment you open your eyes.
Daily missions refreshed at midnight each day. You could only claim one mission per day. Different difficulties came with different rewards.
**Warning! Certain missions are extremely dangerous. Choose wisely!** After reading through the daily missions, Chen Ge was somewhat astonished. "The missions in the game actually require you to complete them in real life? Is this indirectly suggesting that the game can affect reality?"
To verify the suspicion swirling in his mind, he decided to claim a mission and test it out.
The daily missions were ranked by difficulty, and you could only pick one per day. If he wanted to maximize his gains, he'd obviously go for the highest difficulty. But that warning — *certain missions are extremely dangerous* — gave Chen Ge pause.
"This is a tough call. The Nightmare difficulty mission's description is deliberately vague — it's clearly a trap. Maybe I should start with Normal difficulty. Repairing every mannequin before midnight is tight, but it's not impossible."
Chen Ge was a very decisive person. Once he made up his mind, he acted immediately. Without wasting a single second, he grabbed his toolbox and a sealed bucket of artificial blood plasma, then began inspecting every mannequin prop in the entire haunted house.
The night had grown deep. Chen Ge moved alone through the vast, sprawling haunted house. To save on electricity, he hadn't even turned on the hallway lights. He clamped a flashlight under his arm and dragged mannequins that needed maintenance back and forth across the floor.
If an outsider stumbled upon this scene without knowing the context, they'd probably be scared half to death and call the police on the spot.
"Exhausting... I didn't expect so many mannequins to be damaged. Looks like the maintenance around here has been seriously lacking!"