Shen Hao received a notification from the game system:
Instance match successful. C-rank Instance: [Haunted Town] Opens in 23 hours and 59 minutes.
Shen Hao was astonished. "A C-rank Instance? Shouldn't it be a beginner Instance?"
According to Thriller Paradise's rules, beginners went through three beginner Instances before starting on regular Instances.
Regular Instances were divided into five difficulty ranks: D, C, B, A, and S.
Even if he had been matched with a regular Instance, it should have been a D-rank one. Starting him off with a C-rank Instance was far too challenging.
Rather than take on higher difficulties, he preferred stomping noobs, just as he preferred lower difficulty settings when he played games.
But on second thought, he was the boss in the game. The higher the Instance's difficulty, the stronger the boss would be, which should work more in his favor.
The only problem was that he knew nothing about this Instance. Only members of the Player Alliance could view guides for regular Instances, and he couldn't access them.
Besides, this was a C-rank Instance. None of the people who could enter it were beginners, and they certainly wouldn't be noobs.
Noobs couldn't make it this far in the first place.
Without a guide, even he felt uneasy.
All kinds of Instance guides circulated on the black market, but they were expensive, and there was no way to tell whether they were genuine.
After all, if someone bought a fake, they might not get a chance to complain to the seller, since there was a good chance they wouldn't make it out of the Instance.
Shen Hao thought of Xia Bing. Perhaps he could get an Instance guide through her, and a guide obtained that way would be more reliable.
He just didn't know whether the woman would be willing to help him. She was an ability user, and a powerful one at that. Would she really care about an ordinary person like him?
Shen Hao decided to give it a try and called Xia Bing. She picked up quickly.
"Hello, Miss Xia."
"Who is this?"
"My name is Shen Hao. We met on the bus the other day."
"I remember," Xia Bing said. "What is it?"
"Well, I'm entering an Instance tomorrow, and I need a guide for it, so I was hoping..."
Xia Bing immediately understood what he meant. "I see. You haven't joined the Alliance, so you can't view its Instance guides.
"We can give you a guide, but there's a condition."
He hadn't expected it to go so smoothly. "What condition?" Shen Hao asked.
"As long as you join the Alliance Guild, we'll provide most Instance guides free of charge."
"But the problem is, I'm entering the Instance tomorrow," Shen Hao said. "Even if I apply now, there won't be enough time to get through the process."
"I can give you a guide first. If you clear the Instance, you must join the Alliance Guild after you come out. Is that all right?"
"No problem. I was already thinking of joining the Player Alliance," Shen Hao agreed immediately.
"Good. Which Instance? Give me an email address, and I'll send it to you shortly."
"Haunted Town!"
Shen Hao gave her his email address, then added, "There's one more thing. Who exactly was the man I killed on the bus that day? I think his accomplices have their eyes on me. There was a string of bloody handprints in my home today."
"He belonged to a guild hostile to the Alliance, a criminal organization. You'll find out once you become an official member of the Alliance."
It seemed Xia Bing wasn't willing to reveal too much, but he wasn't in a hurry. He would be entering the Instance tomorrow, so those people probably wouldn't have a chance to make a move against him.
The Instance guide was the most pressing matter right now.
Only a few minutes after they hung up, Xia Bing sent him the guide. It had been much easier than he had imagined.
That was normal enough. Although the Alliance Guild was the largest guild in the game, its requirements for players were very low. Anyone willing to join and abide by the rules could get in without trouble.
What the authorities wanted most was for all players to join the Alliance Guild, because ability users were an unstable factor.
Putting them under the guild's management would restrain these ability users as much as possible. Ability users could also help the organization resolve some particularly thorny matters, so all the major factions were vying for them.
To bring more ability users under their control, the authorities offered extremely generous terms while keeping the entry requirements low. They had certainly put a great deal of thought into it.
Xia Bing's help had solved a major problem for him and saved him a large sum of money.
That money was still very important to him.
He was an orphan.
He had been separated from his parents as a child and ended up in an orphanage. When he was twelve, his birth parents found him and took him home, but the good times didn't last. When he was fifteen, his parents died in an accident, and this time he truly became an orphan.
His parents had left him some assets when they died. The money was enough to last him a few years and see him through college.
But if he spent tens of thousands of yuan on a guide to an Instance, that wouldn't be enough.
Xia Bing had saved his wallet.
Shen Hao began reading the guide.
"This is a deserted town. No one knows how its inhabitants disappeared, but people know they must never go near it, because no living person has ever walked out of there.
"If you accidentally enter the town, remember this: no matter what happens, never scream.
"Screaming won't help you. It will only cost you the ability to make a sound forever..."
Haunted Town's backstory was a somewhat clichéd horror story, rather like a combination of two horror movies he had seen, [Silent Hill] and [Dead Silence].
Long ago, a man skilled at making dolls lived in the town. His dolls were so lifelike that they looked almost like real people.
The dolls were very popular, and many people wanted to buy them, but the man refused them all because he regarded the dolls as his own children. He only brought them out to perform at the city's theater during holidays and festivals.
His performances were spectacular, and every show was packed. Many people even traveled vast distances just to see him perform.
The man lived in the town like this for many years. He remained alone, never marrying or having children, and rarely interacted with the townspeople, but they lived peacefully alongside one another.
Many years later, disappearances suddenly began occurring in the town. Children went missing from time to time, leaving everyone on edge.
Then, a rumor began spreading from who knew where: the missing children had all been killed by the man.
He had made the children's bodies into dolls and used them in his performances.
The parents who had lost children and people filled with a sense of justice were furious when they heard this. They could not accept such a thing, and the killer had to be punished.
They stormed into the man's home and killed him, and the dolls he had made were burned to ashes.
After that, no more children went missing, and peace returned to the town.
However, the peace did not last long. Strange incidents soon began occurring in the town one after another.
At night, people would see strange figures and sudden flashes of fire. Dolls also seemed to come to life, singing chilling nursery rhymes in the dark.
Many people vanished inexplicably, but no one knew where they had gone. Not a single body could be found, as though they had evaporated from the world.
Later, a great fire swept through the town, burning almost the entire place to ashes. Everyone disappeared.
Not only that, but everyone who entered the town was never heard from again.
When this Instance first appeared, it had indeed been terrifying. No one knew how many people had died there.
The evil spirit the man had become was the Instance's boss. It appeared and vanished unpredictably and had a host of dolls as its servants.
It wasn't until the Instance was cleared for the first time that players figured out how it worked. On top of that, almost all the dolls in the Instance had been burned up and hadn't respawned afterward, while the man's evil spirit had been badly injured and its power greatly diminished. As a result, the Instance's difficulty had dropped several levels.
Although Haunted Town was still a C-rank Instance, it was actually less difficult than the vast majority of D-rank Instances.
This Instance had another nickname: "Mercy Town."
It was called that because the Instance had set a record: no one had died there for two consecutive years.
In Thriller Paradise, an Instance like this could practically be called a freak.
After all, most Instances were still very difficult. Even with a guide, people still died, and entire parties could even be wiped out.
"Isn't this another freebie Instance?" Shen Hao was at a loss for words. He kept running into Instances like this.
He was different from other people. For him, a freebie Instance was a disaster.