Chapter 39 Who Am I? 38

The hands were small and light. Lin Xiangjun tugged them downwards, catching them firmly in her hand. Bringing them before her eyes, she saw they were indeed a pair of children's arms.

They had been ripped off from the shoulders; the edges were rough, and the overall texture was cold, soft, and sticky. It looked like they had been torn off for a long time and were not far from rotting.

Lin Xiangjun sighed, took off her sports jacket, wrapped the pair of arms in it, and put them into her pocket.

The clothes had already been torn. During the fight just now, they had been stained with dust and the splashing flesh and blood of the Security Ghost, and now they were sticky with the stench of a rotting corpse; they were truly filthy.

Fortunately, she had plenty of these sports jackets. When she was tricking sacrifices, she had bought a whole truckload of clothes wholesale, with an average price of less than fifty cents per set, so she didn't feel bad about discarding them now.

After the Cleaner finished cleaning up, he turned to leave, but was stopped by Lin Xiangjun. As she packed up the corpse, she smiled kindly: "Could you give me the things in that dustpan?"

The Cleaner looked at the Security Ghost's corpse fluid in his trash can and revealed a puzzled expression: "This stuff is useless to you."

"It's useless to me, but it's useful to my employee. He put in a lot of effort just now, so I was thinking of getting him some snacks, you know?"

The Cleaner's gaze stiffly turned, landing on Patrick Star, who was slumped on the ground.

Generally speaking, the ghosts in an instance cannot devour each other to enhance themselves; they can only enhance themselves slowly by devouring players and underworld currency, under conditions permitted by the rules.

Therefore, the Security Ghost's corpse fluid was of little use to the Cleaner, and he couldn't eat it even if he took it back, which is why Lin Xiangjun thought about asking for it.

Of course, she wasn't an unreasonable person.

Lin Xiangjun generously pulled out five hundred underworld currency and handed it to the Cleaner.

The Cleaner, whose eyes had been void of any emotion while looking at the corpse fluid, suddenly lit up the moment he saw the underworld currency. As if afraid that Lin Xiangjun might change her mind, he hurriedly reached into the dustpan.

"Of course. We bottom-tier employees are most afraid of thankless work. We work so hard, but the boss never sees it! Never mind giving us snacks or a raise like you do, it's a blessing if they don't dock our wages!"

Saying this, the Cleaner sighed deeply and looked enviously at Patrick Star, whose half-arm was dangling in the air.

This ghost was in such a state; who knew how much underworld currency it would take to nurse it back to health. A normal boss would just offer a few perfunctory words of comfort and make it continue working while injured, until it sacrificed itself on the job without a whole corpse, and without a single cent of compensation.

Yet this boss not only had no intention of giving up on it, but even spent five hundred just to buy some small snacks to comfort her employee...

Five hundred... The Cleaner felt a pang of silent jealousy; he didn't know how many instances he would have to work to earn that much money.

It was the first time Lin Xiangjun realized that this ghost, who had always kept a cold, expressionless face, actually had such a vivid and lively side.

This also made Lin Xiangjun understand more clearly the temptation that underworld currency held for ghosts.

Perhaps she could try using underworld currency to pave the way more often in the future? It felt like underworld currency was very effective on ghosts.

While Lin Xiangjun was still thinking, the Cleaner over there had already grabbed the Security Ghost's corpse fluid.

That limp, paralyzed liquid was like slime in his hands; he squeezed it into a handful and held it up in front of Lin Xiangjun.

"Thank you. Please hand it directly to my employee; it's inconvenient for me to hold this."

Lin Xiangjun didn't reach out to take it. After all, she was still an ordinary human, and she didn't have any protective items on her right now; she was worried that she would be contaminated if she came into direct contact with the ghost.

The Cleaner was, after all, doing his job for money, so he had no objections. He followed Lin Xiangjun's request and fed the Security Ghost's corpse fluid to Patrick Star.

Perhaps because this stuff was liquid, this time Patrick Star didn't split open a large gash from the top of his head like last time. Instead, he opened a small mouth roughly where his mouth should be, just enough to toss the Security Ghost's corpse fluid inside.

The Cleaner received the five hundred underworld currency and left happily; Lin Xiangjun felt that even his retreating figure seemed to carry a sense of cheerfulness.

Patrick Star ate the ghost and once again fell into the same motionless state as last time.

Wang Min checked his condition and said to Lin Xiangjun: "This Security Ghost is of a higher level than the Refrigerator Ghost. Given Patrick Star's current physical condition, it will probably take a day to digest."

It was now the third day of the instance; including the half day from yesterday, there was only a day and a half left.

Lin Xiangjun opened the advanced paper doll collection album to store Patrick Star. For the remaining day and a half of this instance, she didn't intend to summon him out again.

"Master, should we go to the Garden or the Cleaner's house next?" Wang Min asked.

The basement of the Cleaner's house and his broom each contained a clue, and the soil in the Garden and the cat's body each contained a clue.

However, one difficulty was the Cleaner, and the other was that weird cat. It was hard to say who was more dangerous right now, so the order didn't matter.

Lin Xiangjun, however, shook her head; her gaze landed on the Security Room.

"Do you think there might be some good things in the Security Room?"

If she viewed the Security Ghost as a black trash can, then she had already obtained the clue, but if she viewed the Security Ghost as a guardian of treasure... then the Security Room was well worth searching.

The Security Room was better than Lin Xiangjun had imagined; surprisingly, it didn't smell of rot or blood, only a faint musty odor from poor ventilation, which disappeared completely after Lin Xiangjun put on her mask.

In the back of the Security Room, there was a bed. The bed sheets and quilt cover hadn't been washed for a long time; there was a faint human-shaped pattern on them, and the pillowcase was also black.

Near the window, there was a table and a chair. On the floor sat an electric kettle and a space heater. On the table was the personnel entry/exit logbook, cluttered with pens, tea leaves, and the like, though the tea leaves had clumped together and molded, and there wasn't a drop of water in the tea mug.

Lin Xiangjun first checked the personnel entry/exit logbook and discovered that there were records of ghosts entering and leaving the residential complex even after the day the players entered the instance.

Underneath the residential complex personnel entry/exit logbook, there was another notebook. Lin Xiangjun flipped through it roughly and frowned in confusion.

"Strange..."

Wang Min was rummaging through the wardrobe nearby. Since the Security Ghost was gone anyway, she didn't hold back in her search; she threw aside anything she found that had no value, and now a pile of miscellaneous items surrounded her.

Hearing Lin Xiangjun's voice, Wang Min jumped out of the pile of clothes and leaned in to look at the notebook in her hand: "What's wrong, Master?"

Lin Xiangjun placed the notebook between herself and Wang Min: "This should be the residential complex tenant registration log, right? The information about our unit on these two pages is fine, but why is the text everywhere else distorted?"

The only parts of this logbook that Lin Xiangjun could understand were the parts about her unit, which were in normal, proper Chinese. The rest was distorted; it was hard to tell if it looked like earthworms or whirlpools, only that looking at it for too long made her feel dizzy.

Wang Min flipped through it back and forth and said with some confusion: "But the text in this logbook is all the same; it's all ghost script."

Lin Xiangjun was a little surprised. She looked at Wang Min's expression, which was sincere and didn't seem fake, and then stared at the two pages written in Chinese, lost in thought for a moment, before suddenly realizing.

"Because these two pages are content that the system has determined might be useful for us to clear the instance, it automatically translated them. As for the other parts, the system determined they were useless to us, so they remained as ghost script."

A very clever approach: it didn't interfere with the players completing the instance, it completed all the work with the minimum amount of effort, and it even conveniently highlighted the key points—three birds with one stone.

It just gave off the feeling of a melancholy handsome guy taking off his beanie to reveal a bald spot.

Very eerie, very jarring.

Lin Xiangjun turned the logbook to the two pages about the unit building where she lived.

The content in the logbook was very detailed: how many people lived in each apartment, how long each person had lived there, their identities, and their jobs. In addition, there were ID photos.

Lin Xiangjun first checked the 504 unit where she lived and was surprised to find that she wasn't a family of three, but a family of four.

Name: Zhou Shu (Owner of Unit 504)

Former textile worker at the Hope Factory, later retired to live at home. In Year X, Month X, she fell in the bathroom, fractured her lower leg, and was hospitalized.

Name: Wang Shufa (Owner's son)

Water delivery worker. He has a red tricycle parked in the complex's garage; license plate number XXXXX.

Name: Huang Yue (Owner's daughter-in-law)

English teacher at a tutoring agency.

The real owner, who was Lin Xiangjun's grandmother in the instance, had fallen and fractured her leg in the bathroom three days before the instance started, which was why she hadn't appeared at home.

The Eerie Parents hadn't mentioned it voluntarily; if it weren't for this logbook, Lin Xiangjun wouldn't even have known about the grandmother's existence.

However, let's not even get into the question of why a ghost would fall and break a bone.

Since the family members they knew about in the instance might not be the entire family, what role would the family members who hadn't appeared but were determined by the system to be related to the mission play in the instance?

Lin Xiangjun carefully compared the information and discovered that, besides her grandmother, Aunt Wang who lived in 304, and Sun Tao who lived in 104, all had family members who were not at home for various reasons.

Aunt Wang in 304 had an aunt who worked at a bank and couldn't return home within a month due to work reasons.

And Sun Tao in 104...

Lin Xiangjun's eyes flickered.

There were really a lot of clues at Sun Tao's place.

She had previously only known that Sun Tao's father was the Cleaner in the complex, but now she knew that Sun Tao also had an older sister who worked as a preschool teacher, only his sister usually lived at the kindergarten and didn't come back.