The two sat in a corner of the internet café, deeply inhaling their cig@rettes.
Who would have thought that fate could be so cruel? One was about to run out of money for rent, while the other had already run out.
“What happened to you? How did you end up like this?” Zuo Si asked, somewhat surprised. Lu Taoming clearly had a stable job, so there was no reason he couldn’t pay his rent.
“Sigh!” Lu Tao let out a heavy sigh, his gaze somewhat cloudy. “Something happened at home last month. I’m trying to save as much as I can to send back home.”
Zuo Si nodded. Every family had its own struggles. For people like them, scraping by at the bottom of society, any disaster could lead to irreparable consequences.
“I’m sorry, brother. I can’t help you…” Zuo Si murmured.
“What are you saying? Just hearing that from you is enough!” Lu Tao smiled, regaining his spirits. “By the way, weren’t you going to start a livestream? How’s that going?”
Zuo Si shook his head with a smile, exhaling a puff of smoke. “Not great.”
He had planned to make a final push with his livestream at You Ren Hospital. If it took off, he would continue; if not, he would just go back to working honestly.
But unexpectedly, he encountered this situation, leaving him quite confused about his future.
“It’s okay. Even if you fail, it’s not a big deal. You’re young; just try more things. Don’t wait until you’re old to regret it,” Lu Tao said, extinguishing his cig@rette. “Come on, let’s play a game together.”
“You go ahead; I’ll look up some stuff,” Zuo Si said, putting out his cigarette and turning to the computer screen.
He searched for all the haunted houses in Qingshui City.
There were very few for direct sale; most were for rent.
Moreover, the prices were extremely high, far beyond what he could afford.
With housing prices so steep now, and haunted houses being so large, even in remote areas, you wouldn’t get one without hundreds of thousands.
“The rewards for mandatory tasks are too low. Even if I could borrow hundreds of thousands, I wouldn’t be able to pay it back…”
Zuo Si browsed with a frown.
Fortunately, he could use the internet to check these things; otherwise, he wouldn’t know how long it would take to find them.
After searching for a while, Zuo Si realized that whether he liked the place or not, he couldn’t afford any of them.
He got lazy and simply sorted by price to find the cheapest one.
As long as he owned a haunted house, he would complete the task, and there were no other requirements. He needed to find a way to finish the task to save his life.
Coincidentally, Zuo Si found that the lowest-priced haunted house was listed at exactly one hundred thousand.
It was several times cheaper than the others.
“This haunted house has been on the market for over a year. With such a low price, how could no one have bought it?”
Zuo Si looked at the address of the haunted house, and it turned out to be near the southern suburbs.
“What a coincidence! Could it be… the Black Mobile Phone wants me to buy this haunted house, so it deliberately set a reward of one hundred thousand?”
He noted down the haunted house’s address and the owner’s phone number, planning to check it out tomorrow. There were still two days until the task deadline, and he had to act quickly.
“But where can I get the money?”
“It’s too late to think about it now; I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
The more he thought about it, the more his head hurt, so Zuo Si decided to stop thinking about it.
By some strange twist of fate, he searched for the name Meng Miaoxue.
A series of news articles appeared on the webpage, all about the case from fifteen years ago.
Most headlines read: “Female Star Dies from Cosmetic Surgery Accident.”
“I didn’t expect Meng Miaoxue to be a star.”
Zuo Si looked at several pieces of information about Meng Miaoxue and found that she wasn’t popular at all.
She couldn’t even be considered a third-tier star.
However, the news had a high level of engagement, with thousands of comments under almost every article.
Fifteen years ago, it was definitely headline news.
“Back then, cosmetic surgery wasn’t as common as it is now, and cases of death from surgery were almost nonexistent. Meng Miaoxue was riding the star hype; this news was bound to go viral.”
Buzz! Buzz!
His phone vibrated, and Zuo Si realized it was the Black Mobile Phone.
He pulled it out to see a Mission Reminder.
“Dear soul keeper, find the newspaper from when Meng Miaoxue was murdered and bring it to her. This can increase her favorability towards you.”
After reading this message, Zuo Si couldn’t help but frown.
Show Meng Miaoxue the news of her murder? Gain her favor?
How could that be possible?
Zuo Si found it hard to understand, but the hint from the Black Mobile Phone should be correct.
“No, I shouldn’t think about this from my own perspective; I should consider it from Meng Miaoxue’s point of view.”
“As a star, what she desires most is fame. She underwent surgery to become beautiful just to be famous, right?”
“The news of Meng Miaoxue’s death from cosmetic surgery made her a headline back then, so in a way, she did achieve her greatest wish…”
That was the only explanation.
Zuo Si tried searching again, curious about what Meng Miaoxue looked like.
After a quick search, he found plenty of photos.
Meng Miaoxue was a star back in the day, so it wasn’t surprising to find her pictures.
She looked pretty decent, a sweet girl who appeared to be around twenty, with a bit of baby fat that made her cute.
But in Zuo Si’s eyes, she was definitely not perfect.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; maybe that creep Lu Liangyuan likes this type, sigh!”
Thinking of a beautiful girl being brutally murdered by Lu Liangyuan at such a young age made Zuo Si feel uncomfortable.
“Enough thinking; I need to relax a bit myself.”
Zuo Si stretched and saw that Lu Tao was about to finish his second game.
He opened the game too, ready to team up with Lu Tao.
Their skills were as clean as their wallets, and when the two of them teamed up, the outcome was predictable.
Yet, they kept cursing their teammates for being useless, venting their frustrations in this way.
Buzz! Buzz!
Zuo Si’s phone rang again. He instinctively thought it was the Black Mobile Phone, getting startled and shivering as he quickly checked.
But upon closer inspection, he realized it was his own phone.
At that moment, they were in a team fight, and Zuo Si thought it was a sales call, so he ignored it.
However, after a while, while he was still in the team fight, the call came in again from the same number.
“This jerk really knows how to pick his moments!”
Zuo Si was furious, wedging his phone between his head and shoulder, he grumbled, “Who is it? Are you crazy? Why are you calling so late at night?”
“Where are you?” The voice was a woman, quite pleasant to hear, and Zuo Si felt it sounded somewhat familiar.
But he was in the middle of a team fight, so he didn’t have the mood to deal with this. He lazily stated his address.
Just after hanging up, he got killed.
Zuo Si was furious; they could have won this round!
*****
An hour later, a girl in a light blue jumpsuit walked into the internet café.
She had a hot and sexy figure, smoky makeup, and held a lady’s cigarette. Not only was she beautiful, but she also had a unique alluring charm.
From the moment she entered, she attracted many gazes.
As for the internet café manager, he stood there dumbfounded.