Chapter 362
Chapter 362
“Holy shit.”
Qin Nan cried out and instinctively started to duck behind Jian Fan. Then he seemed to remember something and forced himself to stop, standing beside him instead.
“Are you sure this is the clue we’re looking for, rather than something here to kill us?” he asked meekly.
Question: in a sealed mourning hall, with three people and one four-headed ghost, what would happen?
Wasn’t the answer obvious?
They did not even have anywhere to run.
As the ghost prepared to attack, Jian Fan remained perfectly calm. “We want to see Qi Xu,” he told the four-headed ghost.
At Qi Xu’s name, the ghost abruptly stiffened.
But only for an instant. Soon, he was drooling over the three of them again. “Looking for someone, are you? Once you’re dead, you’ll find him naturally.”
“That didn’t work,” Qin Nan said worriedly.
Jian Fan’s expression remained calm. Looking at the four-headed ghost, he spoke again. “Villains die because they talk too much. Understand?”
The four-headed ghost: “?”
Wasn’t he already dead?
While the four-headed ghost was puzzling over that, Jian Fan suddenly snatched the camera from Qin Nan’s hands and hurled it straight at him.
If he wanted to eat them, he should not have hesitated or wasted words. He should simply have eaten them. All that talking had given them time to stall, and with that, the four-headed ghost had doomed himself to being cannon fodder.
Qin Nan had yet to understand what Jian Fan was doing.
The four-headed ghost was a ghost. A camera could not hit him anyway.
To Qin Nan’s astonishment, however, the four-headed ghost’s expression changed dramatically at the sight of the camera hurtling toward him. He turned and fled.
The mourning hall’s doors were shut, but that made no difference to the ghost. Frightened, he went straight through them.
Qin Nan: “…”
That was a little ridiculous.
“He’s afraid of the camera?” Qin Nan was astonished.
Jian Fan said nothing. Instead, he looked down at the camera. Seeing this, Qin Nan and Mu Xin looked too.
What they saw left them dumbfounded again.
The camera had missed the four-headed ghost and landed on the floor.
Despite the fall, it was completely undamaged. Stranger still, occasional flickers of static now crossed its screen, accompanied by a crackling noise, as though it were displaying corrupted data. The sight was deeply unsettling.
“What exactly is wrong with this camera?” Mu Xin swallowed.
Anything that could frighten the four-headed ghost was no ordinary camera.
“It has something to do with Qi Xu,” Jian Fan said.
Qin Nan and Mu Xin immediately raised their heads to look at him, one on either side.
“How did you guess the four-headed ghost would be scared of the camera?” Qin Nan asked.
“I didn’t know,” Jian Fan replied.
Qin Nan and Mu Xin: “?”
He did not know, yet he had thrown the camera at the ghost?
“The camera is abnormal. It’s connected to Qi Xu. The four-headed ghost fears Qi Xu. And the camera is here. Those four things were enough for me to try,” Jian Fan said.
The camera had to be useful for something. He did not know what, but with the four-headed ghost about to attack, trying it had seemed a perfectly viable option.
“Weren’t you afraid you’d break it?” Qin Nan found this rather hard to believe.
Jian Fan raised an eyebrow. “An ordinary camera, perhaps. A supernatural one? How could it?”
Qin Nan: “?”
That did seem reasonable.
“It’s an item that carries information. It wouldn’t be damaged so easily,” Jian Fan said.
“What if it was?” Qin Nan asked.
Jian Fan fell silent for a moment. Finally, he answered, “Then it would be broken.”
Qin Nan: “…”
Just as with throwing it at the four-headed ghost: if the ghost was not afraid, he had lost nothing. So what if it did not scare him?
All right. A true Big Shot’s approach. He had no more questions.
No, wait. There was one more. The last one.
“What do we do now?” Qin Nan asked.
Jian Fan swept his gaze around their surroundings. In the end, he offered a single word. “Wait.”
Wait?
That did not sound like Jian Fan. Besides, they were in a mourning hall, surrounded by white funeral wreaths, with a bizarre camera lying on the floor. It… gave Qin Nan the creeps.
“Not everyone is here yet,” Jian Fan explained.
Mu Xin blinked. “Not everyone’s here, so the real show hasn’t started?”
Jian Fan gave a brief “Mm.”
Only then did Qin Nan remember that there should have been five of them. There were only three here. Where were Lu Jing and Qin Weiyi?
Those two had drawn staff roles, but there was no filming to do now. So what had happened to them?
Where were Lu Jing and Qin Weiyi?
When they entered the third episode, everything began exactly as before.
First, Lu Jing selected a Script.
But he had not chosen a funeral home.
For the third episode, he had chosen Escape the Ancient Castle.
Since he no longer needed to worry about Points, Lu Jing could not be bothered to think. He did not even provide a Script, simply letting things proceed as they were.
At present, he was watching the guests begin filming on his screen.
As the camera operator following the guests, Qin Weiyi could naturally see the footage too.
He soon noticed something wrong.
Jian Fan and the other two on the show did not quite resemble the people he knew.
Qin Nan really seemed to have become a man of few words. Jian Fan was much more lively and kept holding everyone back. As for Mu Xin… she had taken her cloying act to its absolute limit.
Those were their assigned personas, but… Qin Weiyi felt something was wrong.
What was it?
What?
Popularity!
Qin Weiyi suddenly snapped to attention.
They had not heard a single notification about Popularity changing since filming began.
Was it because no one had broken character, and nothing in the show stood out?
Qin Weiyi was more inclined to think that everything before him was an illusion.
What could he do to break through it? Where had Jian Fan and the other two gone? And Lu Jing… was he still the real Lu Jing?
Qin Weiyi obediently continued filming the guests while his thoughts raced.
They could not die in this world.
He soon arrived at an answer.
He changed the angle of the video camera in his hands.
He stopped following the guests.
Could a variety show still be called a variety show if the camera did not show the guests at all?
Qin Weiyi reasoned that a filming mishap like this was bound to affect their Popularity. At the very least, it should fall because he was failing at his job.
But nothing happened. Everything remained perfectly calm.
Or rather, not quite everything.
There was no Popularity notification, but once the seven guests were no longer being filmed, they suddenly changed.
They grew blank and listless, as though they did not know what they were supposed to do.
Their heads turned stiffly until their attention gradually settled on Qin Weiyi.
“Heh-heh.” An eerie laugh suddenly escaped all seven guests. Then they charged straight at him.
They were going to kill Qin Weiyi!