Chapter 1149 - Innocent Citizen, Mr. Chen 2 in 1 (1/2)

Chen Ge did not know where to put the eyeball given to him by Chang Wenyu. It did not feel like it was appropriate to keep it anywhere. After much deliberation, Chen Ge decided to hand the eyeball over to Men Nan. Of all the Red Specters, Men Nan had the highest IQ and EQ. In fact, Chen Ge would sometimes have him go off on some individual tasks. Therefore, he was not worried at all with Men Nan temporarily holding onto the eyeball.

“Now is the most vulnerable moment for Chang Wenyu. She does not dare stay too long around me, and she left the moment she found the opportunity to do so. Looks like she still has a problem trusting me. She is worried that I might really feed her to the other Red Specters.”

Rome was not built in a day; trust was the same. Chen Ge believed that with enough time, he would definitely be able to win Chang Wenyu’s trust. The sky was already slowly brightening, but Chen Ge did not hurry to leave. He continued to wander about inside the abandoned school. “The Red Specter at this abandoned school and the Red Specter at Cards Archway are so much more powerful than normal Red Specters, but neither of their hiding places have the presence of a ‘door’. Is it because their despair is not strong enough for a door to appear?”

There was no absolute connection between Red Specters and the doors. A door pusher would always be a Red Specter, but not every Red Specter would possess their own door. Chen Ge did not think too much about it initially, but now that he stopped to consider it, he suddenly realized things did not add up.

“Could the doors be unique to Jiujiang?”

Entering the classroom where the Red Specter at the abandoned school first showed up, Chen Ge found that familiar statement on the table occupied by the Red Specter.

‘This is a sickened world. Why have you not discovered that fact? I swear to cure you!’

The words were carved unevenly on the table. It was like a kind of psychological hint, and it kept appearing before Chen Ge’s eyes. Eventually, even without realizing it, Chen Ge had already memorized the statement in his mind.

“The sentence is always the same, but the handwriting’s completely different, so they were probably left behind by different people. But why would these people that seemingly had no connection with each other all write or carve down those same words?”

He really could not come up with a reasonable answer. Chen Ge summoned back all his haunted house employees, hailed a cab, and returned to Nightmare Academy.

“I will go for a nap. You guys find something to do. Be prepared for business.” Chen Ge greeted his employees before entering the headmaster’s office. Chi Ren had been staying inside the room and out of boredom. He was building a paper tower from a deck of cards. “In a few days, you will be safe.”

Chen Ge entered the inner room, hugged his backpack, and entered his dreams. Without the need to worry about the operation of the haunted house and the safety of the visitors, he had the first relaxing sleep in a very long time.

At twelve noon, Chen Ge woke up and went out to purchase food for himself and his living employees. After lunch, he left the haunted house again. Xin Hai was, to him, an unexplored treasure trove. How he wished he could capture all the baleful Specters and Red Specters at once. “After I deal with the cursed hospital, should I go on a train ride all over the country to spread this kindness to different cities?”

Of course, that was just a thought. Chen Ge used the daytime to arrange his clues and information while preparing to visit the different locations to conduct his investigation at night. Before he had a full-on conflict with the cursed hospital, he needed to do everything he could to increase his own power. At around 6 pm, the employees were still discussing the plan for the Nightmare Academy, but as the boss, Chen Ge had already escaped to Xin Hai’s countryside.

It was yet another sleepless night. Chen Ge’s plan was to feed all the Red Specters that he found to the red high heels to help her become a Demon God, but she rejected Chen Ge’s kindness. As a Top Red Specter who had a special talent in curses, consuming other Red Specters would not help her in her breakthrough to become a Demon God; only by consuming greater and more evil despair would her power improve. In other words, the red high heels herself knew very well that the key for her to become a Demon God would be at the cursed hospital. The red high heels did not need to consume Red Specters, so Chen Ge turned his attention to Xiao Bu.

Xiao Bu, who could unleash the power of a Top Red Specter, had a very powerful innate talent. She was the shadow selected by Chen Ge’s parents and was a door pusher valued by the ghost fetus. After consuming a Red Specter, Xiao Bu went into hibernation. With her ability, she would awaken after one night. When Xiao Bu was hibernating, Chen Ge pushed the rest of the Red Specters that he found to Xu Yin. Xu Yin was weaker than the spider in the tunnel, and he was not the strongest among Chen Ge’s Red Specters, but Xu Yin’s heart was very special.

Every time it beat, his heart would gain little more of the black pattern. That pattern appeared to be the branding of memories. It contained some kind of unspeakable power. The hearts of the other Red Specters were the source of their power, but Xu Yin’s heart was more like a germinating seed. After consuming one Red Specter, the black pattern on Xu Yin’s heart grew to his chest, but to Chen Ge’s surprise, even after Xu Yin had consumed a Red Specter almost as powerful as he was, he did not go into hibernation. Whenever Chen Ge pressed the play button on the recorder, Xu Yin still showed up.

“After Xiao Bu and Zhang Ya consumed Red Specters of the same level, they went into hibernation. How come it is so special when it comes to Xu Yin?” Chen Ge tried to ask the young man directly for the reason, but all he got in return was silence. It was as if Xu Yin himself did not know the reason.

By 3 am, Chen Ge had already investigated eleven ghost stories. He had collected the information in the day and come up with the best route to visit all of them. Just as he was about to go to visit the twelfth ghost story, the sky over the horizon of Xin Hai’s countryside was curiously dyed red as if a bloody hole had been torn open in the night sky. Initially, Chen Ge did not think much of this paranormal activity, but when he used the wedding ring on his ring and realized that Xiao Sun’s current location was right under that bloody tear, he started to get a little bit panicked. “Brother Sun has already made his move? I only sent him in there two days ago. Will he be exposed doing something so obvious?”

Xiao Sun was moving too fast. Chen Ge was still training and preparing, but something had already happened at the cursed hospital.

“There’s no use in me worrying about this. I’d better focus on the things that I have to do.” Xin Hai’s population was several times greater than Jiujiang’s, so there were a lot of ghost stories. But most of them were just smoke without fire; only a very small portion of them really had actual ghosts behind them. For a professional like Chen Ge, he could sometimes tell the authenticity of a ghost story just from the description, but even so, Chen Ge was still tricked multiple times.

In two nights, he had investigated twenty-five ghost stories in total, and among them, eight were fake. Of the remaining seventeen ghost stories, however, there were five Red Specters. This probability was rather scary. But the thing that worried Chen Ge the most was that all the Red Specters that he encountered were on the verge of a mental breakdown. Every single one of them had a curse on them, and the statement about the sickened world could be found without fail at the location that they haunted. Now, Chen Ge felt that perhaps the statement itself was a curse. Every Red Specter, normal Specter, and human being who was given the statement would eventually lose their mind. After working hard for two nights, Chen Ge was quite satisfied with his haul.

Of the five cursed maddened Red Specters, two were used to awaken Chang Wenyu, one was fed to Xiao Bu, and the last two were fed to Xu Yin. As he fed on more Red Specters, the changes to Xu Yin became more obvious. The black pattern growing from his heart stuck on his body like a second layer of skin; it gave him a very dangerous feeling.

Of all the employees, other than Xu Yin, there was another employee that underwent a huge change, and that was Zhang Yi. As a Specter that possessed a very unique power like him, if he became a Red Specter by consuming other Red Specters, it would seriously impact his natural talent. That would be more of a loss than a gain. Therefore, Chen Ge did not have Zhang Yi feed on any Red Specters but provided him with the Half Red Specters that they encountered.

Before consuming two Half Red Specters, Zhang Yi asked Chen Ge to call Fang Yu, and then he talked on the phone for a very long time with Fang Yu. This was the first time he had actively called Fang Yu. It was a call that traversed death and life, memory and the past. Chen Ge had no idea what the content of the conversation between Zhang Yi and Fang Yu was. He did, however, manage to see Zhang Yi’s body slowly becoming more transparent. Just as the man’s body was about to fade away, a drop of blood appeared at the middle of his heart. Zhang Yi’s power was deleting memories, but he could not recover deleted memories.