"No idea. First time I've heard of it too." Bai Qiulin looked at Old Zhou. "Old Zhou, you know the most about things — do you know what a 'notebook' is?"
Old Zhou shook his head, stroking his chin in thought. "Could be some kind of emerging genre. When we get the chance, let's ask Boss Chen."
"That works. If Boss Chen finds out Danian's work was praised by a master, he'll definitely be thrilled." Duan Yue dragged Kurosaki out of the room. Old Zhou and Bai Qiulin followed behind with Xiaoxia slung over their shoulders, and the group quickly left the residential area.
A few minutes after they departed, footsteps echoed through the corridor.
"Jin Yuan? Wei Jinyuan?" A somewhat shrill voice came from the doorway. The door was pushed open, and Li Changyin peered into the living room. "The tape on the door has been torn off. They were definitely here."
Li Changyin had been exploring the adjacent building unit. It wasn't until he reached the third basement level that he discovered all the sub-scenarios were interconnected — like a vast underground labyrinth.
What they had seen before was merely the tip of the iceberg. The truly terrifying things were buried deep underground.
In a normal haunted house exploration, only three to five people would go in at a time, with a time limit of twenty minutes.
A haunted house like Chen Ge's — letting in ten people at once with a forty-minute time limit — was actually extremely rare.
Li Changyin hadn't understood why at first. It wasn't until he saw the underground scenarios that he realized this place could handle twenty visitors at a time without much trouble.
When Wei Jinyuan had screamed, Li Changyin had already ventured far underground.
He heard the scream and rushed frantically toward its source, but unfortunately he was a step too late.
Moving through corridors that all looked nearly identical, Li Changyin worried about getting lost. In the end, he decided to retrace his steps and investigate what had happened to Wei Jinyuan.
"This room is empty too. I've been in here for over twenty minutes now and haven't encountered a single thing. Is this scenario not fully set up yet?"
The larger the scenario's floor plan, the more actors it required. Li Changyin felt he'd been terribly unlucky — he hadn't run into a single one.
"Can't even find someone to ask." Li Changyin stood in the middle of the corridor, his expression dark. "The visit is already more than half over. Looks like I'll have to go find those actors myself."
He had never been particularly sensitive to fear. When he was young, his parents had taken him to see a doctor. After the examination, the doctor found that his brain was different from the average person's.
The dorsolateral frontal lobe was highly developed, while the limbic cortex and prefrontal cortex were underdeveloped. Though he looked completely normal on the outside, his perception of things and his way of doing things were entirely different from everyone else.
He tried hard to appear normal, but the moment he let his guard down even slightly, the cracks showed.
He had tried many jobs before, but had been fired from each for one reason or another, until he finally joined the Xinhai Nightmare Academy haunted house.
Hiding in the eerie, dark haunted house, he could finally tear off the mask and be his true self.
Scratching his neck, Li Changyin walked out of the residential area. His expressionless gaze swept across the surroundings. "That Chen guy gave us four clues, but forget the clues — I can't even contact the other visitors. What exactly happened to them while I was underground?"
"Wei Jinyuan isn't exactly cowardly, and he's worked in haunted houses for years. Scaring him like that is far from normal. Could those rumors about this haunted house being actually haunted be true?"
Li Changyin frowned in thought, unaware that the bushes beside the residential area had rustled slightly. A figure in a trench coat, carrying a pair of scissors, had followed them.