30: Chapter 30 The Horror Inside the Villa!

"Big brother's turn?"

A trace of bewilderment flashed through the little girl's pitch-black eyes.

And... fear!

She was used to running amok in this Domain of Ghosts, eating people, devouring souls, and gnawing on bones. It had always been her playing with others, and this was the first time she had ever heard someone say such a thing to her.

Besides, why was this guy's physical body so tough?

Was it her hallucination?

No, this was her home turf, hey!

"That's right." Lin Ye nodded earnestly, like a kindergarten teacher explaining the rules to children, "Our game is called... Catch the Staff!"

Flipping his right hand, the zhulong staff slid out of his cuff, growing larger against the wind.

The dark red staff was covered with fine dragon scale patterns, and dark golden light slowly surged within the patterns. The air at the tip of the staff distorted, emitting a low hum.

The little girl instantly lost her composure!

"The rules are simple,"

Lin Ye rested the staff on his shoulder, "If you catch it, you win, and Big Brother can grant you any request. But if you fail to catch it..."

He smiled.

"Then watch out in your next life..."

Before his voice faded, his right hand suddenly exerted force.

The dark red afterimage carved a semi-arc, the staff tip tearing through the air and pulling out a black fissure, with dark golden sparks splashing along the edges!

The little girl widened her eyes in terror, a single thought exploding in her mind... What the fuck do you call this a game?!

What kind of decent person plays this kind of game with a child?!!

She wanted to retreat, but her body was nailed to the spot.

That staff shadow kept enlarging on her face, and her expression froze for a split second.

Because this staff strike contained the might to crush space, no matter where she hid, how far she jumped, or even if she burrowed into the ground, she probably couldn't escape!

In her desperation,

the resentment on her body churned like boiling water, condensing a gray-white shield above her head.

At the same time, her skin tore, her muscles expanded, and her figure rapidly distorted into a deformed monster on all fours with bone spurs growing on its back!

She squeezed out all her accumulated resentment, soul fragments, and bone fragments, piling up a defense layer nearly twenty centimeters thick!

However, the zhulong staff was made of Denglin peach wood, which inherently possessed a devil-subduing effect.

Equivalent to a massive amount of magic penetration.

The staff fell...

The gray-white shield vaporized instantly like thin paper meeting red-hot iron!

The staff tip passed through the shield, through the soul fragments, and through the deformed body, smashing into the ground!

Boom!!!

The belated loud noise exploded, and the stone bricks burst and splattered with the landing point as the center, gravel and dust shooting into the sky!

A small mushroom cloud rose, cracks spread for dozens of meters along the mountain, and the entire mountainside shook!

When the smoke and dust cleared,

in front of Lin Ye, there was only a circular deep pit with a diameter of nearly five meters, and a dark green crystal the size of a fingernail lay in the pile of rubble right in the middle.

The Ghost Core!

He bent down and picked it up.

At the same time, an extremely subtle suction came from deep within his dantian.

The Taotie Origin Devouring Seal activated automatically.

The remaining wisps of resentment fragments and thin ghost qi in the air turned into gray threads and drilled into his palm, a weak warm current merging into his meridians and flowing through his limbs and bones.

The amount was very small, but it indeed increased his strength by a sliver. The Devouring Seal was exceptionally fond of Ghost Cores, absorbing them cleanly and thoroughly!

Lin Ye nodded with satisfaction and turned to face the dumbfounded others on the platform.

Of the team of more than a dozen people, the only ones who could still stand were Jiang Xiaohong, Wang Zheng, Zhou Peng, Shen Qinghan, Lu Wanqing, Su Tang, and two testers who had been slacking off all along.

Gao Yan had been swallowed by the door, Liu Chuang was twitching on the ground, He Li had turned into a pile of breathing flesh, and He Zhipeng was leaning against a tree trunk due to excessive blood loss, his life or death unknown.

The remaining people all stared blankly at Lin Ye, with varied expressions.

Su Tang was the first to snap back to her senses, hugging the Silver Moon Wolf's neck and widening her eyes: "Holy shit?! That strike from Lin Ye..."

She walked over and looked at the Ghost Core in Lin Ye's hand.

"Such great luck, it's of green quality! It can be used to reduce the cooldown time of the Dimensional Gate, or it can be sold by the gram. This single piece is probably worth tens of thousands."

Killing ghosts all had a chance to drop Ghost Cores, and the higher the level, the higher the drop rate.

Cores were generally divided into white, green, blue, purple, dark red, gold, dark gold, and mysterious gold.

The little girl looked to be in the late wandering ghost stage, and being able to drop green quality was already very good.

Lin Ye knew about reducing cooldowns, but selling by the gram could make tens of thousands?

Lin Ye really wasn't very clear about this.

Forget it, he would put it away first. Whether for reducing cooldowns or trading for money, he was quite lacking in both right now.

Jiang Xiaohong's face was ashen. He had scored eighty-one points in the first test of the Foul Curse Plane, could enter the top three of the school in past years, and had been called a genius since childhood.

In this trial, he had originally thought he would definitely be the main force, and when Fang Zhenyuan asked them to cooperate with Lin Ye, he still thought it was a joke.

But now...

"Brother Jiang..."

Zhou Peng leaned over and whispered, "That brat Lin Ye is full of surprises. That plan of ours from before... are we still going through with it?"

The plan they set last night.

After entering the Domain of Ghosts, Jiang Xiaohong would lead the battle, with the others assisting, striving to be the first to slay the female ghost and snatch the core.

Because they had long learned from gossip.

This year's first-place reward for the assessment, besides various support resources and cash, also included an A-rank quota reward!

That was being able to pick an A-rank item from the Testers Management General Bureau.

Ordinary testers might not even be able to get an A-rank item after struggling for ten years on their own!

"Go through with it."

Jiang Xiaohong squeezed a word out from between his teeth, "Later, you guys cooperate with me and give it your all!"

"Understood." A trace of ruthlessness flashed in the eyes of several people.

Before the trio here finished discussing, Lin Ye had already walked towards the front door of the villa.

Since the source of the Domain of Ghosts was that heart in the basement,

then find the basement entrance and blow up that heart!

this Domain of Ghosts could then be ended!

Su Tang held the Silver Moon Wolf on a leash, closely following one step behind.

The wolf cub ran very fast on its four paws, its vertical pupils filled with fanatical worship towards Lin Ye.

If it could speak, it would probably be shouting "Idol" right now.

Lin Ye walked to the front door of the villa. That gray and dilapidated heavy door was wide open, and inside it was pitch black, with nothing clearly visible.

Almost at the exact same instant everyone's footsteps landed...

Bang!

The door behind them was violently pushed by an invisible hand, closing heavily.

A fine gray smoke spewed from the crack of the door, and the withered vines on the door panel suddenly came alive, growing wildly and intertwining to seal the entire door tightly.

"The door... the door is closed!"

Zhao Juan, a bespectacled girl, screamed and rushed over to push the door desperately. Her personality was introverted, so she usually had little presence.

The door remained motionless.

The thorns on the vines pierced into her palm, and she shrank her hand back in pain, fine beads of blood already oozing from her palm.

"We can't get out."

Shen Qinghan said in a deep voice, tightening her grip on the hilt of her knife.

The moment the main door closed, the temperature inside the villa plummeted abruptly.

The wall lamps on both sides of the corridor automatically lit up one by one, their ghastly dark green glow looking incomparably gloomy and eerie.

The corridor was absurdly long. Viewed from the outside of the building, this villa was at most a hundred meters wide.

But the corridor in front of them extended at least twice as far into the darkness, with closed doors distributed on both sides, their number unreasonably high.

Lin Ye was stunned for a moment.

This was... a labyrinth set up to prevent them from finding the basement entrance?

It seemed that the core female ghost had already realized something was wrong and was trying to remedy something.

Lu Wanqing closed her eyes and released spiritual detection fluctuations once again.

A moment later, she opened her eyes, her expression even uglier than before.

"Space has been distorted. The internal space of this building has been stretched by at least dozens of times, and the positions of all the rooms are constantly changing. Are they planning to trap us?"

As soon as her voice fell, a sharp laughter came from the end of the corridor.

The laughter was sometimes near and sometimes far, sometimes sounding like it was coming down from the second floor, and sometimes like it was drilling up from beneath the floorboards.

At the same time, the doors on both sides began to automatically open, close, open, and close one after another...

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, the sounds merged into one, with no rules to speak of.

When a few doors opened, flashes of scenes inside the rooms could be seen.

Inside one of the doors, a little boy squatted in the corner with his back to the door, kowtowing one after another.

Inside another door, a woman with an exaggerated expression was hanging from the ceiling.

In yet another door, there was nothing, only an empty bed.

But a pale hand reached out from under the bed and waved towards the outside of the door.

"Is... is this a Domain of Ghosts or a haunted house?" Wang Zheng's voice trembled, "I've never had such an exciting experience playing escape rooms..."

"Find the stairs, go to the second floor first."

Jiang Xiaohong lowered his voice, his tone carrying his lingering desire to command, "The resentment fluctuation of the core is upstairs. We need to hurry to the core's location and not waste time on the ghosts on the first floor."

"No, in the basement."

Lin Ye retorted, "Find the basement entrance."

Being commanded around, Jiang Xiaohong couldn't save face again, "How do you know there's a basement?"

Lin Ye ignored him and had already walked forward.

Just at this moment, the door closest to the back of the team suddenly sprang open with a "bang"!

A white figure drifted out from the room.

That female corpse hanging from the ceiling didn't know when it had moved here from upstairs.

Her neck hung on a rusty iron chain, her face covered with long black hair, revealing only one bloodshot eye.

That eye was staring straight at Zhao Juan at the back of the team.

Zhao Juan screamed.

A strange power descended upon her, making her fly up, the feeling of weightlessness making her dizzy.

And in the vision of the others,

she was being grabbed by her ankles with hair by the female corpse, lifted upside down!

Zhao Juan struggled wildly, her hands grabbing randomly in the direction of the others, but the long hair was like a spider web, wrapping around from all directions, entangling her body layer by layer and dragging her towards the ceiling.

The plaster on the ceiling peeled off, revealing a layer of dark red flesh slowly writhing.

The surface of the flesh was densely covered with human mouths, all open at the moment, as if waiting to be fed.

Everyone's expression changed drastically, and they struck at the same time.

Shen Qinghan swung her knife to slash at the female corpse's hair. The moment the blade touched the hair strands, the patterns on the blade representing the special attack bonus against demons lit up, severing several strands of hair, and black pus seeped from the cut ends.

But more hair strands immediately filled in, wrapping tighter than before.

Jiang Xiaohong formed hand seals with both hands, and a spell power wave blasted onto the corpse's chest.

The female corpse was blasted and swayed a little. Her body was like it had no bones; the spell power wave passed through her chest cavity and blasted into the opposite wall, leaving a large hole in the wall, while her chest only had a bowl-sized penetrating wound left.

She swayed and continued dragging people upward.

The granulation tissue at the edge of the wound writhed slowly, healing itself.

Lu Wanqing condensed her mental power into a thorn, piercing into the female corpse's consciousness, and then she violently arched her body and spat out a mouthful of sour water.

"Her consciousness... is full of pain and hunger... It's too deep, I can't pierce through it..."

"Save... save..."

Zhao Juan's voice grew weaker and weaker.

On her face covered by hair, only a pair of pupils dilated to the limit were swaying in despair.

Just at this moment...

A staff flew over from the other end of the corridor!

The staff spun in the air with a sharp piercing sound, like a precision-guided missile, piercing straight into the female corpse's abdomen.

Puchi!

That muffled sound was just like a fork stabbing into a medium-rare steak.

The female corpse's movements stopped.

She lowered her head, looking at the bowl-sized hole that had appeared on her belly, a rare trace of confusion appearing in her bloodshot eyes.

Wha... what flew over?

Then, the staff exploded inside her belly!

To be precise, the fire-thunder energy erupting from the staff scattered inside her body!

Her body began to crack from the abdomen, the cracks spreading along her torso to her limbs, and then to the top of her head, dazzling golden firelight gushing out from the cracks.

That high temperature burned from the inside out, turning her entire person into a humanoid lantern, so bright that the dark green wall lamps in half the corridor were suppressed into white.

"No... no!!"

The female ghost's voice was hoarse and desperate.

Zhao Juan fell from the ceiling at the same time and was caught quick-eyed and fast-handed by Wang Zheng.

As for the female corpse, she let out an extremely sharp scream, her long hair dancing wildly in the air, and her entire body exploded with a "bang", turning into a ball of black flying ash!

Then, a dark green bead the size of a walnut dropped out.

Lin Ye's eyes lit up!

"Another green-quality core of an early-stage Resentful Spirit, not bad luck."

The Taotie Devouring Seal operated again, and a warm current entered Lin Ye's body. This time...

It seemed he felt his agility had gotten a bit faster...

Having survived a catastrophe, Zhao Juan groped the air on the ground: "My glasses... who saw my glasses..."

Wang Zheng picked up the glasses broken in half and handed them to her: "Don't wear them anymore, you won't see anything good even if you put them on."

She thought about it and felt it made sense, so she stuffed the two halves of the glasses into her pocket and followed along blindly.

Just walking a few steps,

Lin Ye suddenly stopped and tilted his head to look at the left side of the corridor.

There were three doors there, and black-red mist seeped out from the cracks of the doors at the same time.

The next second...

The three doors sprang open simultaneously, and three people walked out from inside!

A bride wearing a blood-red bridal gown.

A hunchbacked old hag whose whole body was bound with rusty iron chains.

A tall male corpse with no head on its shoulders, only a severed neck still bleeding!