"It's exactly two o'clock in the morning. I still have forty-four minutes."
Trees on both sides of the road swayed back and forth, their leaves rustling in the wind. The white cat in his arms grew increasingly anxious, its tiny claws digging tightly into his clothes.
"Looks like the white cat has already picked up on something." Chen Ge gently rubbed the cat's head. "You used to be so fierce before. What happened? Now the moment there's the slightest bit of danger, you clam up like this."
The white cat gazed at Chen Ge with pitiful eyes. Its mood at that moment was probably quite complicated — not something a few words could sort out.
"A Nightmare-tier mission doesn't allow you to bring ghosts or haunted house props, but the white cat completely sidesteps those restrictions. It's not a specter, and when it gets worked up it'll chase a ghost down. Looks like I need to train it up properly in the future."
Chen Ge was already scheming about the white cat. "The blood threads from the Strange Talk Association were originally prepared for Red-dressed spirits, but after the cat ate them there's no visible change yet. Once I deal with the president, I'll take over the twenty-fourth floor of the Fanghua Yuan complex. Hopefully I'll find something useful there."
Holding the white cat, Chen Ge was glad he had saved it all that time ago. "I'll run into Nightmare missions again, and when that happens, the white cat will definitely come in handy."
The white cat clung desperately to his clothes. It was clear that it relied on Chen Ge deeply and had grown quite attached to him. "I guess good people do get rewarded."
One man and one cat walked along the abandoned road in the dead of night. From a distance, the sight was surprisingly warm and cozy.
The night wind stirred the treetops, and shadows swayed along both sides of the road. After another twenty-some minutes of walking, the temperature dropped sharply.
A howling wind reached his ears, and an unusual current of air surged from up ahead.
"I'm here."
Chen Ge slowly raised his head and stared at the tunnel dozens of meters away — a passage carved straight through the mountain. His pupils contracted.
Pitch-black and impossibly deep, it stretched on farther than the eye could see.
His coat hem whipped in the wind, and Chen Ge suddenly felt a bone-deep chill. It wasn't the kind of cold you felt on your skin — it was a frostiness seeping out from the depths of his mind, as though every single nerve in his body was trembling.
"I haven't felt anything like this in a long time."
He drew closer, step by step. Before the towering mouth of the tunnel — six meters high and over ten meters wide — he looked utterly small.
Peering inside, within the darkness it seemed something monstrous was staring back at him.
With no employees at his side, Chen Ge felt as though he had been thrown back to the very first Nightmare mission he had ever taken. He stood before the tunnel and drew a deep, slow breath.
"A Nightmare-tier mission really is a nightmare!"
The tunnel before him was absolutely longer than forty-four meters. Chen Ge took out his phone and shone its light inside.
The walls bore all manner of scratch marks, along with some strange, illegible characters. The road surface was relatively smooth, though animal carcasses lay scattered across it.
"There's still some time before the mission begins." Chen Ge stamped his tingling feet and lightly slapped his own cheeks. "Don't panic. Stay calm."
He opened the short-video platform on his phone, snapped a few photos, and posted a status update.
The gist of it was that he would be uploading a new short video tonight, and his viewers should stay tuned.
The flood of replies from his followers dispelled the fear lingering in Chen Ge's heart. He leaned against a rock beside the tunnel entrance, not missing the chance to play up his plight and drum up publicity for his haunted house.
A man posting updates at two in the morning right beside a haunted tunnel — that was rare even on the short-video platform.
The comment section heated up quickly, and before long the platform's moderators were messaging Chen Ge privately, begging him not to push his luck like this so often. They were genuinely worried about his safety.
Chen Ge threw back a few casual replies, but he didn't take their concerns to heart. He was here for one thing only — the mission.
At two forty-three in the morning, Chen Ge exited the short-video platform and stood once more at the mouth of the tunnel.