"The scenes behind the doors are woven from the memories of the person who pushed the door open. You can think of them as the nightmares that person could never escape from."
"During the Underground Corpse Storage mission, Dr. Gao bore all the despair and negative emotions in the scene by herself alone. In the end, that caused the Underground Corpse Storage scene to collapse."
"After the Corpse Storage scene collapsed, I saw the world outside the scene—a blood-red city."
"If a single building represents one person's nightmare, then an entire blood-red city is very likely an aggregate formed by countless nightmares piled together."
"Quantitative change leads to qualitative change. Countless nightmares accumulate and slowly ferment—what kind of ghost would be born from that deep-ocean-like negative emotion?"
Chen Ge stood in the hallway, more clear-headed than he had ever been. "In one-star trial missions, my main opponents were living people. The strongest entities in two-star trial missions were half-body Red-coats, like the middle-aged woman trafficking children on the hearse, and Wenwen's sister in the Water Ghost mission. Three-star trial missions are a threshold—every three-star mission contains one or more Red-coats, and more importantly, every three-star mission venue includes a door! Whether it was the Third Ward, Living Coffin Village, or the Underground Corpse Storage. The existence of 'the door' is the hallmark of three-star trial missions."
"Following that logic, what would a four-star trial mission—harder than a three-star—look like? Multiple doors in a single scene? Or could the venue behind the door be something other than an enclosed space, like a relatively open complex of buildings?"
Chen Ge felt the second possibility was more likely. "The Liwan Town trial mission was rated three-and-a-half stars. If the scene behind that door in Liwan Town really is what Xiaobu's game showed, that would serve as indirect proof of my theory. After a door loses control, the scene behind it is no longer confined to a single building but spreads outward. Left unchecked, it would probably become a four-star horror scene eventually."
The mastermind behind the Eastern Suburbs had been using the Route 104 hearse to continuously funnel negative emotions into Liwan Town, then scattering the already-despairing passengers out like seeds.
Chen Ge still remembered his conversations with those passengers on the hearse. Inside Liwan Town there was a Ghost Building—you had to give something up or bear certain burdens to fulfill your wishes.
The mastermind of the Eastern Suburbs had almost certainly been exploiting those people's obsessions, turning them into vessels of misfortune and fear, making them generate even more despair and lure in more passengers.
The core purpose behind all of this was probably to transform Liwan Town into a four-star horror scene.
"Using already-despairing people as chess pieces—that Eastern Suburbs monster is even more despicable than the Ghost Story Society." Chen Ge remained perfectly calm. "The Eastern Suburbs originally had a four-star trial mission—Dark Fetus. Could it be something from that scene pulling the strings behind the scenes?"
The more Chen Ge thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. Every time the Eastern Suburbs mastermind appeared, it took the form of a shadow, and what was even more terrifying was that a mere shadow could trade blows with Zhang Ya.
"There can't be ghosts like that in a three-star scene. Zhang Ya should already represent the pinnacle of three-star scenes. Thinking about it that way, that monster must be connected to a four-star scene. Its true body is very likely trapped somewhere—or its body can't leave freely—so it can only stir up trouble in the Eastern Suburbs this way."
Standing in the hallway, Chen Ge was deep in thought when the door of the rightmost apartment on the thirteenth floor suddenly swung open. A portly middle-aged man stood in the doorway holding his phone.
"What the hell are you screaming about?"
"Hmm?"
After that brief exchange, the middle-aged man's eyes met Chen Ge's.
Chen Ge saw that the water pipe inside the man's apartment hadn't been fully shut off, and strands of black hair were threading upstream through the water flow into the apartment.
The middle-aged man's gaze, meanwhile, landed on Chen Ge's hand, drawn to the ghastly hammer in his palm.
It was hard to imagine that in this day and age, in a modern city, one could still lay eyes on something so savage and bloody.
Blood grooves, barbs, a handle that resembled a spine—every detail of this massive hammer seemed to tell onlookers that it was fundamentally different from the pile-driving sledgehammers found on construction sites.
"You—" the man started.
"Get out of the way!"
Chen Ge was polite to the middle-aged man. Not harming innocents was his long-standing principle.
Dragging the Skull Crusher in one hand, Chen Ge charged into the apartment and brought the hammer crashing down on the water pipe in the bathroom!