Chapter 0001 – A Haunted House on the Verge of Closing Down
”It’s the first time I’ve seen such a non-scary haunted house.”
”The props are too fake, after strolling around, not only am I not scared, I even want to laugh a little.”
”Materialists are fearless!”
”I told you guys a long time ago that it’s not interesting, it’s better to play the game in the dormitory, my Kun is already level 80.”
At the entrance of the House of Horrors in the western suburb of Jiujiang City, a few students rode their shared bicycles and left without any attachment.
Seeing this scene, Chen Ge, who was holding the propaganda leaflet of the haunted house, was quite helpless.
Scaring people was a technical job, but modern people had been baptized by all kinds of thrillers, and their psychological quality was extremely strong, so going into a haunted house was just like being in one’s own backyard.
”Boss!”
A bright female voice came from behind, Chen Ge turned his head to look, only to see a “zombie” wearing a nurse’s uniform, with a petite figure and a proud upper circumference, angrily running out of the haunted house.
”What’s wrong, Xiao Wan.” The girl was called Xu Wan, one of the extras in the haunted house.
”Those little bastards just now, they tried to take advantage of me!” She clenched her tiger teeth and clenched her showy fists.
It turned out that they came to complain ……
”It’s too much, they didn’t even spare the zombies.” As the boss, Chen Ge would naturally help Xiaowan: “I’ll go find the park administrator to react to the situation and adjust the surveillance.”
”No need to be so troublesome, I preemptively beat up the other party when I sensed that he had this attempt.” Xu Wan shook the blood stains on the edge of her nurse’s uniform, “This is not makeup oh.”
”Eh, there’s nothing wrong with it, girls should learn to protect themselves.” Chen Ge wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and glanced at the setting sun, “Then this is it for today, I guess there aren’t any more tourists, notify the others and leave work early.”
After he finished speaking, the girl with zombie makeup in front of her did not move her feet.
”Is there anything else?”
”Boss ……” Xu Wan wanted to speak, slowly pan out a letter from his pocket, “This is Tao Ming and Wei’s resignation letter, you treat them well, they are too embarrassed to say it to you face to face, so they entrusted me to pass it on to you. ”
”They are leaving?” Chen Ge froze for a moment and accepted the envelope, “People have their own aspirations, you should also get off work early.”
”Enn, I’ll go remove my makeup.”
Seeing this cute little “zombie” off, Chen Ge silently lit a cigarette.
Half a year ago, his parents strangely disappeared, leaving behind only this horror house.
In order to keep thinking about it, Chen Ge quit his job and went all out to run the haunted house, wanting to do better.
Unfortunately, times are changing too fast, and the haunted house business, with its high competitive pressure and its own coldness, still has many limitations.
After seeing the same horror scene once, it becomes boring to see it again, and constant renovation requires a lot of money.
Since a few weeks ago, the haunted house operation has been struggling to make ends meet, and a day’s worth of admission money isn’t even enough to cover a fraction of the utility bills.
”I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.”
Extinguishing his cigarette, Chen Ge was about to go back to the haunted house when a middle-aged man wearing New Century Paradise overalls walked over.
Seeing him, Chen Ge was like a mouse seeing a cat and hurriedly quickened his pace.
”Pretending not to see?” The middle-aged man grabbed Chen Ge’s shoulder, “Let’s make things clear today, you’ve been in arrears for two months with your utility bills and arena rent. The top has been pushing, causing me to be under a lot of pressure right now!”
”Uncle Xu, it’s not that I won’t pay, it’s true that funds have been a bit difficult lately, so give me another month.”
”You said the same thing last month.”
”I promise you, this is definitely the last month!” Chen Ge patted his chest with a sincere face.
”The haunted house business is in a slump right now, it’s not attracting any tourists, so if you ask me, you shouldn’t stick around.” The middle-aged man called Uncle Xu looked at the envelope in Chen Ge’s hand and slowly reduced the force on his hand, “You’re so young, what’s wrong with doing something, why live such a tiring life?”
”Uncle Xu, I know you’re doing me a favor, but this House of Horrors has a different meaning to me, it’s kind of a reminiscence left to me by my parents.” Chen Ge’s voice was low, as if he didn’t want more people to hear it.
Chen Ge’s parents’ matter, the middle-aged man as the park administrator knew everything, he did not reply, after a few seconds, he sighed softly and softened his heart, “I can more or less understand what you’re thinking, okay, I’ll try to help you drag it out for a few more weeks.”
”Thank you Uncle Xu!”
”Don’t thank me, you’d better use your heart and sell more tickets for the haunted house.”
Sending off the park administrator, Chen Ge went straight back to the haunted house and started repeating his daily work, checking equipment wear and tear, maintaining props, and cleaning.
”The artificial plasma in the repair room is almost used up, I have to purchase another batch; this passageway is tilted inward a bit, maybe it can better jam the blind spots of the tourists’ viewpoints; the mannequins have made scratches, they need to be patched up; rub! Where’s the craft lamp I installed here? Someone stole it!”
In the eyes of outsiders, he is the owner of the horror house, but also a self-employed entrepreneurial youth, in fact, the heartache behind only he knows.
Haunted house is a kind of “horror” consumption, in the horror of the environment will be highly tense human muscles and spirit, once released as a massage, this way in a short period of time can let people produce a sense of satisfaction.
At the same time, haunted house is also a kind of one-time consumption, many haunted houses on the market are used in various cities in the way of mobility, constantly absorbing new visitors to visit. Haunted houses like Chen Ge’s that were fixed in a certain place wouldn’t last long unless they possessed a particularly large reputation that attracted people to them.
It was already hard for him to last this long on his own.
Dragging the scratched up dolls, Chen Ge entered the repair room, he studied toy design and manufacturing in college, and many of the dolls and mechanisms in the haunted house were designed by him.
The repair process was complicated and monotonous, requiring the doll’s epidermis to be sewn together, recolored and aged.
”Almost plasma, I remember stocking it in the attic.” The haunted house was divided into three floors, the first and second floors were used to set up the horror scenes, while the third floor was a utility room.
Pushing open the dusty wooden door, the attic was filled with all sorts of obsolete equipment, most of which were left over from when his parents ran the haunted house.
Witnessing things made Chen Ge seldom come here.
”A big half year has passed.”
Looking at all the familiar equipment, Chen Ge remembered his childhood.
At that time, they were still operating a mobile haunted house, and his parents took him everywhere in various cities, and sometimes when the two young couples were busy, they threw Chen Ge into the backstage by himself to keep company with various haunted props, which began to be cultivated from a young age, and which led to Chen Ge’s great boldness.
After all, when his peers were playing with alphabet puzzles, he had already started running around holding a model of a human head.
”It’s all memories.”
Unconsciously, Chen Ge walked back to the wooden crate where his parents’ relics were stored, which contained a crude ragdoll and a pitch-black cell phone.
The ragdoll was the first toy Chen Ge made when he was a child, and the cell phone he had no recollection of.
The two items were found by the police in an abandoned hospital in the suburbs, and no one knew why Chen Ge’s parents had traveled there in the dead of night.
”It’s been so long, where the hell are you guys?” Chen Ge picked up the Muppet, pinched its face, and sighed softly, “I’d better hurry up and look for artificial plasma, if I can’t make it through this off-season, the House of Horrors might really have to go out of business and transfer.”
Chen Ge was just muttering to himself, but when he talked about shutting down the business and transferring, the black cell phone in the wooden box that hadn’t been moving, suddenly the screen flashed and emitted a faint cold light.
”What the hell? Black technology? Psychic phenomenon?”
If a different person came might have a faster heartbeat, looking around, palms sweating, relatively speaking Chen Ge’s reaction was straightforward, he picked up the cell phone, put it in front of his eyes, and began to make a second confirmation.
”This cell phone I’ve tried a hundred times before without turning it on, why did it suddenly start on its own today? It was found from the place where my parents disappeared, could it be that they know that I’m having a hard time right now, so they’re taking the initiative to contact me?”
Holding down the excitement in his heart, Chen Ge slid the screen, and there was only one application on the pitch-black phone’s desktop, and it was using a haunted house as an icon.
”It’s not quite the same as expected, but the icon is a bit familiar, as if it’s the door to my own house of horrors!”
Chen Ge frowned and clicked on the app, and a line of bloody characters floated on the screen-Do you believe there are ghosts in this world?
Whether there were ghosts in the world was a surrealistic philosophical question with a high difficulty factor for a man of science and technology like Chen Ge.
”There should be. ……”
Chen Ge made his choice, and after a few seconds passed, new words surfaced on the cell phone screen.
”What is in your heart is both the answer. From this moment onwards, you will officially succeed me as the new owner of the House of Terror. Of course, this is not something to be celebrated, in the final stage of the newbie tutorial, I would like to give you a piece of advice, suicide is the most cowardly behavior, please try your best to live!”
”That’s a bit too much information! But this middle-of-the-road speaking tone of his, how come it’s a bit like my old man’s?”
Chen Ge tapped on the haunted house app again, and a brand new interface appeared:
Jiujiang Western Suburbs House of Horrors
Status: On the verge of closure
Favorable rating: none
Number of visitors today: four
Number of visitors this month: ten
My haunted team members: None
My Props Library: None
Unlocked Achievements: None
Existing Facility Scenarios: Night of the Resurrected Zombie (bad props, poor actors, no storytelling or logic to speak of, no scream index); Underworld Wedding (not a couple at birth, dead buried in the same hole, ghostly wives chasing after souls, half a star on the scream index)
Unlockable Horror Scenes: Midnight Escape (a dangerous psychopath has taken up residence in a dilapidated apartment building, armed with scissors and a hammer, and is prowling outside your room, one star on the scream index); The Third Ward (strange noises emanate from this abandoned hospital every late at night, and you, as a newspaper reporter, will be going in to find out what’s going on, three stars on the scream index); The Hearse of Extinction (a hearse carrying the dead is on its way, and if you If you can’t leave within one hour, you will be left in the car forever, two stars for the scream index)
Daily Quests: Completing the daily quests in the Haunted House will give appropriate rewards and unlock more scary scenes.
Haunted House Expansion Requirements: More than one hundred visitors for the month and a favorable rating of sixty percent or more (after three expansions, the House of Horrors will be upgraded to a Shivering Maze)
Terror Carousel (consume the scare value generated by the tourists in the haunted house to rotate the carousel): life and death have their own destiny, wealth and fortune are in the hands of God, there are fruits to increase life expectancy, and there are also ghosts full of hatred and grudges!
Other features: not unlocked.