3: Chapter 3 Pale Ghost

At night, Chen Mu found his first prey.

It was a white man in his forties, leaning against an abandoned van with two empty wine bottles tossed beside him.

Seeing that he was drunk, Chen Mu plucked up the courage to squat in front of him, turned on the flashlight, and shone it upwards from under his chin.

"Hey!"

As Chen Mu let out a strange cry, the white man's eyes opened dizzily, and he cursed angrily, "What the fuck, what the hell is wrong with you?!"

Seeing this, Chen Mu immediately took off running, with the sounds of cursing and breaking bottles trailing behind him.

After that, he ran past three blocks, ducked into an alley, and crouched behind a dumpster, panting for a full five minutes before recovering.

[Current fear value: 0]

"Fuck!"

Seeing that the system hadn't reacted at all, Chen Mu couldn't help but punch the dumpster hard.

Then, leaning against the dumpster, he waited for his breathing to settle and began to review his actions despite the pain in his hand.

His current behavior was like a crude Halloween prank; if he wanted to scare someone, the person being scared probably wouldn't be anyone normal.

So, where in the USA could he find abnormal people?

The next day, Chen Mu spent the day asking around and found that three blocks east of the Brooklyn Bridge, there was a row of abandoned street-front shops, one of which was a gathering spot for the homeless and junkies.

No one was there during the day, but at night, people would sell drugs there.

At night, he crouched in the shadows of the street opposite and observed for an hour.

A total of four groups of people went in and out. One of them, a tall, thin white youth, walked normally before entering, but when he came out, his pupils were dilated to the point of almost filling his irises. He giggled at a streetlamp for five minutes before slumping against the base of a wall.

Chen Mu waited for an hour until the guy was completely in a half-dreaming, half-awake state. Then he circled to the side, turned off his flashlight, and approached in the dark.

He repeated his old trick, the dim yellow light of the flashlight hollowing out his eye sockets into two black holes.

"Oooooh!"

Seeing this eerie scene, the tall, thin white man's pupils suddenly contracted, and he shouted in panic, "Ah! A ghost! It wasn't me, don't come for me!"

The tall, thin white man was so scared he was incoherent, his fingers clawing at the ground, his whole body slumped over as if he were about to go into shock.

[fear value +1]

Chen Mu stared at that line of numbers, trembling, almost unable to hold back his tears.

It worked. Although it was only one point, it was the transition from zero to one.

He stood up, turned off the flashlight, and step by step, retreated into the darkness, returning to the bridge tunnel from before.

That night, he had his first peaceful sleep since transmigrating.

In the days that followed, Chen Mu lived like a fixed routine.

In the mornings, he went to St. Joseph's Church to line up for relief meals, and after eating, he would stay at the public library.

Because libraries in the USA have heating and restrooms, and the librarians don't kick out the homeless as long as you don't snore on the tables.

In the library, he used the free computers to look up the areas in New York most affected by the drug epidemic and logged onto forums to check various news in the USA.

In the afternoons, he would sleep by the subway vents because heating pipes ran underneath, making the water and even the mud warm.

At night, he would begin his hunt.

He became increasingly skilled, specifically targeting lone drug addicts. Their brains were already muddled by drugs, and with Chen Mu's scaring, they often began to see hallucinations.

They were scared into howling like ghosts and wailing like wolves; there was even one who lost control of their bowels and bladder.

His fear value slowly rose. During this process, he also discovered a pattern: scaring one person would only produce one point of fear value.

While repeated scaring worked, it seemed that due to numbness or adaptation, the fear value would stop increasing after scaring someone with the same effect more than three times.

Over the next few days, his fear value began to rise from single digits to double digits, but it never exceeded triple digits.

Although he didn't lack targets to scare—according to reports he read in the library, over forty percent of the homeless in New York were drug addicts.

But Chen Mu still felt that gaining fear value this way was too inefficient. At this rate, when on earth would he ever escape this damn Execution Line?

Just as he was at his wit's end, on the fifteenth day, his fear value suddenly began to grow for no apparent reason.

At first, it was bit by bit, but then it started rising by tens, leaving Chen Mu confused for a moment.

It wasn't until the next day, when he went to the church as usual to collect a relief meal and heard a homeless man spreading the legend of the Pale Ghostly Shadow, that he understood the source of those fear values.

At first, almost no one believed the legend, dismissing it as a drug-induced hallucination; anyone who believed it was a fool.

Then a second homeless person saw it, then a third, then a fourth.

Their descriptions began to converge.

"I'm telling you, that ghost's face is deathly pale and has no features, and it comes with terrifying screeches!"

"You're wrong, this ghost floats and has no physical form. I once tried to punch it, but I didn't hit anything!"

The human brain automatically fills in details; everyone who claimed to have seen the white-faced ghost would add something of their own to the legend.

Over time, in the mouths of these homeless people, Chen Mu had become a super vengeful spirit who came and went like the wind, taking lives with a wave of his hand.

Chen Mu continued his daily routine as usual. When his fear value finally broke one thousand, he didn't exchange it immediately.

After all, the effect of a Wandering Soul might not even be as useful as Chen Mu personally playing a ghost, so he decided to save up more fear value to go for something big.

By the twenty-seventh day, the legend of the Pale Ghostly Shadow had even spread to Manhattan.

Because of this, a street artist even painted a graffiti of him on a pier of the Brooklyn Bridge. It only featured a deathly pale face without any features, but anyone who had seen it knew what it depicted.

On the night of the thirtieth day, Chen Mu was on his routine hunt when he unexpectedly saw Old Jim squatting under a bridge pier.

Old Jim was also one of the homeless people who received relief meals at the church.

Chen Mu knew him; at the church, he always squatted in the corner, tearing his sandwich in half, stuffing one half into his mouth and wrapping the other half in a crumpled napkin to tuck into his coat lining, as if hiding something valuable.

Chen Mu was about to go over and say hello when he saw a used syringe lying by Old Jim's hand, and his lips were moving as if he were talking to someone who wasn't there.

There was no time like the present; there was no reason for Chen Mu to refuse fear value delivered to his doorstep. He took out his flashlight again and began to make strange noises.

Unusually, when Old Jim saw this, he wasn't afraid like the other addicts. Instead, he pointed his finger at the empty space behind Chen Mu's shoulder and shouted with a pious expression, "Mama! I'm sorry!"

Then his hand dropped, and he collapsed to the ground.

Seeing this, Chen Mu immediately reached out to check his breathing.

He was dead!!!