"A w-woman's head?" The barber felt a cold wind shoot up his spine and straight into his brain. He looked to the side — a bleeding woman's head had appeared right next to him.
Her eyes were open, her crimson lips parting and closing, as though she was still smiling!
"Ahhh!"
The barber collapsed onto the dummy customer. The chair rolled backward and he crashed into the table.
The mounted equipment seemed to have been bumped, and the projection on the mirror vanished. The barber — whether from pain or sheer terror — actually passed out on the spot.
"His mental fortitude really does need work. Virtual Future Paradise relies far too heavily on technology and completely neglects employee training. These employees were probably all reassigned from other entertainment facilities at the last minute."
Being a haunted house actor wasn't something just anyone could pull off. The gap between a veteran and a rookie was enormous — for example, the ability to handle emergencies.
"There are footprints heading toward the main exit, and footprints heading into the women's bathhouse. Those two finally got clever? Started using tactics?"
Looking more closely, Chen Ge discerned something from the direction of the prints: "They went to the main exit first. Seems like they realized they couldn't get out that way, so they doubled back into the women's bathhouse."
"If the youngest guy is the cheater — the one holding the keys to every scenario — then why couldn't he get out?" Chen Ge recalled what the police officer had said earlier. The hotel scenario was the buffer zone. Clear the hotel, then clear one more scenario, and you could leave the haunted house.
"What the officer said was medium difficulty. What I'm tackling now is over forty hell-level scenarios fused together, which means the original exit is very likely no longer accessible!" Chen Ge had far too little information. He didn't know how the central computer controlled the operation, and he didn't know whether the lag caused by fusing over forty scenarios would affect anything.
"If there's no way out, that's even better." Chainsaw in hand, Chen Ge entered the women's bathhouse. Water stains and blood smeared the floor, and he could clearly make out the footprints of the bespectacled man and the other guy. "Where would they hide?"
The bathhouse was run-down. Every shower stall was partitioned off by dividers, creating a series of tiny cubicles.
He tried pushing open the door of one cubicle. On the grimy wall, someone had scrawled vicious words in blood.
He had no interest in that. He threw open every partition door nearby. When he reached the middle of the bathhouse, he suddenly heard the sound of running water — someone appeared to be taking a shower.
Not long after the water started, a woman's voice drifted from a corner cubicle enclosed by dividers.
"Is anyone there?"
The woman's voice was lovely, melodic, tinged with a hint of helplessness and fear. Just from the sound alone, the image of a delicate, pitiful figure would unconsciously rise in one's mind.
Dragging the chainsaw, Chen Ge opened one cubicle door after another. He didn't spot the bespectacled man or the other guy anywhere.
"Could you do me a favor?"
After opening several more, only four cubicles remained unopened. One of them was the one where the woman was.
"If the bespectacled man had been through here, they would have told the other employees about someone going crazy. The barber and the woman in this cubicle would've fled long ago — they wouldn't be stupid enough to stick around." Chen Ge was about to leave, but then he thought again: "You can't underestimate the evil in people. What if those two scumbags deliberately kept it from their colleagues, hoping to use them as a distraction to slow me down?"
Just to be safe, Chen Ge walked over to the cubicle.
Hearing the footsteps approach, the woman's voice came again.
"Could you lend me some shampoo? I think I forgot to bring mine."
Her voice was soft and pitiful, making it very hard to refuse.
"Lend something?" Chen Ge thought of a ghost story about a bathhouse. A woman had been murdered there, her body mutilated, and after that, whenever the bathhouse was about to close at night, you could always hear a woman's voice asking to borrow things. At first it was shampoo and towels. Later, it was the parts of her body she had lost.