Seeing that everyone remained dismissive, Wang Yan's brows furrowed deeply. He knew perfectly well that anyone who had experienced Chen Ge's haunted house scenes would never utter such "naive" words.
"Are you all visiting this haunted house for the first time?" A very bad feeling was settling in Wang Yan's gut.
"I just returned to the country with Teacher Kurosaki. He's planning to transition to a completely new manga genre, which is why we came to the haunted house for inspiration," the female assistant said in a small voice. She was timid, and they hadn't even entered a scene yet before her speech started to tremble. "We saw online that this haunted house had an exceptionally high rating, so we came straight here after getting off the plane. Do domestic haunted houses require some kind of formalities before you can visit?"
"Don't listen to his nonsense. This haunted house's high rating is entirely because a bunch of ignorant laypeople are making a fuss over nothing. The online buzz only shows that the haunted house owner knows how to market himself." The man who'd come in with the effeminate one spoke up. "Compared to haunted house creators like us — people who wholeheartedly build scenes, carefully refine scripts, and design all sorts of mechanisms — this Chen fellow is nothing but a businessman."
"Businessman?" Wang Yan was so angry he almost laughed. He wanted to clap a hand over that man's mouth — if Chen Ge heard those words, the difficulty might get bumped straight to the level where no one walks out alive.
"He just tricks students like you. We've been making haunted houses for years — we know the whole process inside and out."
The man was about to say more, but the effeminate man cut him off: "Cut the chatter. If the actors inside hear us, it'll reflect poorly. They might think we came here specifically to cause trouble."
Though Kurosaki had a temper, his age showed — he immediately sensed something was off: "You run haunted houses too?"
He had no goodwill toward these line-cutters and quickly realized this was malicious competition between industry peers.
"The three of us are employees of Xinhai's largest haunted house — Nightmare Academy. We've been doing physical haunted houses for seven years. We were among the very first in the market to create physical haunted houses."
The three gave brief introductions. The most arrogant man was Wei Jinyuan, Nightmare Academy's youngest script designer, primarily responsible for crafting corresponding plots and mechanisms based on horror scenes.
The shortest one — about Kurosaki's height — was named Li Xu. He looked frail but was in charge of small prop construction at Nightmare Academy, his hands extraordinarily deft with every kind of tool.
The last one, the man with the effeminate features, was named Li Changyin, nicknamed "Cold Man." He rarely spoke, but he was the highest-rated actor at Nightmare Academy and one of the haunted house's core staff members.
He was young, but he had the most seniority among the three.
"Aren't you four together?" Wang Yan noticed another person still crowded in with the three Nightmare Academy employees and assumed he was one of theirs as well.
"He's one of Xinhai's big streamers — very famous online. His popularity far exceeds this haunted house owner's. Or rather, they're not even in the same league."
Wei Jinyuan wanted to continue the introductions, but the streamer frowned: "You lot keep dawdling here then. I'm going in first."
With that, the male streamer shouldered his bag and walked straight into the haunted house alone. His nerve seemed tremendous.
"Hey!" Wang Yan saw the streamer plowing ahead and rushed after him. "Don't act alone! And I'm not joking — do NOT livestream inside this haunted house. It'll bring everyone down with you!"
The streamer completely ignored Wang Yan, his eyes gleaming as he looked around, already apparently fantasizing about how many viewers he'd pull by streaming from here.
He knew full well the online buzz around Chen Ge's haunted house. Streaming live inside it — and during a new scene's inaugural run, no less — the viewership would be explosive. As for whether it might expose the haunted house's interior scenes, or affect Chen Ge's business, those were simply not concerns within his consideration.
After grasping the streamer's attitude, Wang Yan truly felt his scalp go numb. What kind of teammates had he ended up with this time?
It would be one thing if they were all newcomers, but the real problem was that they refused to follow any instructions — doing the exact opposite of what was safe, treating their own lives as utterly worthless.
"Go get yourselves killed if you want. I'm done playing with you." With that, Wang Yan grabbed his girlfriend's hand and started heading back.
"Wang Yan! What are you doing?!" His girlfriend thought he was being completely unreasonable. "Let go!"
"There's no problem with visiting the new scene, but going in with them is just asking for trouble. I'm withdrawing." Wang Yan had come to the haunted house for two reasons — to blow off some steam and to make that male classmate lose face. But the situation had completely changed. Ahead lay a bottomless abyss, and once you fell in, there was no climbing back out.
"You med students are really that timid?" The jock spoke up to mock him. "I figured since you're always around cadavers, you'd have slightly more nerve than the average person. Guess I was overthinking it."