Fresh blood dripped onto the floor, the dust wrapping the blood into crystal bead shapes.
Ji Yan covered his nose and mouth, but he simply could not stop it as fresh blood continuously dripped from between his fingers.
He looked at the black blood on his own hands...
Doesn't black blood isolate curses?
Why...
Ji Yan abruptly turned his head to look at those imprisoned ghost residents.
They were also looking at Ji Yan in shock, seemingly unclear about what had happened either.
Ji Yan's eyes and ears were also bleeding, his body losing strength and staggering.
Immediately after, as if snapping to his senses, he turned his head to look at Long Yuan, who was likewise sealing a coffin aside.
He saw that at some unknown point, Long Yuan had wiped away the applied black blood, indulging the curse to erode his hands.
Long Yuan looked at his blackened hands and at Ji Yan's constricted pupils, squeezing out a smile. "It seems I still overestimated you."
"You aren't as tricky as I thought. I'm even curious, how did you find this basement?"
Ji Yan coughed up viscous blood, looking with a cold gaze at Long Yuan's mocking smile. "Your talent is not some Nirvana Rebirth at all..."
"I just made that up off the top of my head. You didn't actually believe it, did you?"
Long Yuan's expression was indifferent. "As for something like a cake, I, Long Yuan, have never had the habit of sharing it with others."
"Consider it the final parting words I send you down the line for this dungeon. The most terrifying thing in the Eerie Game is never ghosts; it is always the human heart."
As Long Yuan's voice fell, Ji Yan spewed a large amount of blood from his mouth and collapsed onto the floor, blood endlessly flowing from his seven orifices until his life force drained away completely...
"A greenhorn who hasn't even survived ten days, you still wanted to outplay me?"
Watching the thoroughly dead Ji Yan, Long Yuan snatched the two coffin-nail pins from his hand. Holding all four coffin-nail pins in his grip, a chilling smile appeared on his face.
The ghost residents in the rear saw this and could not help speaking up. "What time is it, and you two are still killing each other?"
"The greed of human nature is just like this, forever unable to withstand the temptation of benefits. No matter how high-sounding the words spoken on the surface are, given the chance, they will kill the other party without the slightest hesitation!"
Long Yuan ignored those words and returned to the front of the black coffin.
"On the last main quest, I fell into a ditch, but this time I won't make the same mistake again."
He held the four coffin nails in his hand and began to nail them shut one by one on the coffin lid.
Three nails were hammered down tight, and it was time for the final one.
When Long Yuan aligned the coffin nail with the last hole, the next moment, he suddenly felt a chill assail him from behind.
He whirled around sharply, and what met his eyes was Ji Yan's terrifying visage with blood flowing from his seven orifices.
Long Yuan's expression changed drastically, clearly giving a huge start. In this flash of lightning, a paper cutout darted out from Ji Yan's body and attached itself to the former's back of the neck.
The moment the paper cutout adhered, the character "Curse" materialized on it.
Warning! You have suffered the curse erosion of the eerie item Three-Character Paper Cutout—"Sin". Curse effect: Within 20 minutes, you will fall into absolute silence, lose all game actions, become unable to walk or move, be unable to open the tool bar, and be unable to use any equipment as well as talents.
A curse?!
Long Yuan's expression changed drastically.
Wait, why didn't he die?
His body felt as though it had been poured with lead. Long Yuan collapsed to the ground, his body losing all movement. Just as the warning panel stated, he could not open the tool bar or use equipment to save himself.
He could only simply speak and shift his line of sight!
"You... you clearly fell under the curse of the black coffin..."
Long Yuan stared with wide eyes at Ji Yan, who was bounding around alive once more.
Ji Yan wiped the blood from his eyes and gave his shoulder a shake, a second paper cutout leaping out from his shoulder.
The character "Aversion" was written on the paper cutout.
The paper cutout burned, transforming into a few wisps of ash.
The effect of the Disaster Aversion Paper Cutout—when the host suffers a fatal injury, they can transfer the bloody disaster and ward off a mortal calamity once.
Seeing these two paper cutouts, the corners of Long Yuan's eyes twitched. "Three-Character Paper Cutout!"
"This is that legendary-quality eerie item in Room 801. Why is it on you?"
Ji Yan brushed the dust off the back of his hand, his eyebrows twitching. "I didn't expect you to actually recognize it?"
Long Yuan's expression was as unsightly as if he had swallowed a fly.
How could he not recognize it?
Miss Xu—Xu Xin from Room 801—had always been the girl he was determined to woo, and he had merely set his sights on the Three-Character Paper Cutout in her hands.
Alas, whether through interaction or completing various daily tasks for her, he had never gotten his hands on this eerie item.
Now seeing this set of legendary-quality eerie items fall into Ji Yan's hands, a sense of humiliation welled up: it felt as though the slow-to-warm-up goddess he had cared for with warm inquiries and pursued for ages had been taken down by someone else in a few days in the blink of an eye!
Humiliation, incomprehension, and vexation—all sorts of emotions surged spontaneously.
"I never stored this paper cutout in the tool bar, just waiting for you to stab me in the back so that the paper cutout would trigger automatically."
Long Yuan's gaze was as cold and gloomy as stagnant water. "You knew what I was going to do from the very beginning?"
Ji Yan's expression was indifferent, but the corners of his mouth curled into a smile. "Let me tell you a secret you'll find even harder to accept."
"Not only did I know what you were going to do, I also knew your true talent."
"Plum Metaphor for Peach, an S-class talent. The trigger method is by touching another player to turn them into a 'scapegoat', after which, if you suffer any damage within 10 minutes, it can be transferred to the scapegoat, though you can only transfer to a maximum of two targets. Once the talent ends, the cooldown time is 60 minutes."
"Am I right?"
When Ji Yan recited his talent word for word without a single omission, Long Yuan's mind went blank.
Following closely after was...
Terror, panic!
Why could he articulate his talent?
His S-class talent had always been the secret Long Yuan buried deep down, and he had never revealed a single word of it with his mouth.
"You... what is your talent?!" Long Yuan connected it to something.
Ji Yan smiled. "Care to guess?"
The reason he was able to analyze Long Yuan's talent was also because Long Yuan had given him this opportunity.
When Long Yuan handed the coffin nail to him, he performed the action of clasping his hand.
Even though Long Yuan appeared extremely natural and reasonable,
still, in Ji Yan's eyes, this action was still far too deliberate!
Then, his Omniscient Understanding triggered just like that in all its lively glory, analyzing Long Yuan's talent word for word without a single omission.
Long Yuan deliberately shook hands precisely to trigger his own talent, making Ji Yan his second scapegoat.
Yet he would never have thought
that the death-trap he set up to make Ji Yan certain to die would instead turn into a trap that ruined himself.
What he would think even less was
that the talent on Ji Yan's person was an even more heaven-defying bug of an F-tier than his S-class talent!
"Miss Xu's Three-Character Paper Cutout is certainly worthy of the legendary quality in terms of its gold content."
Ji Yan brushed the dust off his body.
He was very satisfied with his feigned-death performance, seeing as he had managed to fool an old fox like Long Yuan completely silly.
In the rear, those ghost residents who had watched a drama of reversals upon reversals could no longer sit still and urged him continuously.
"There really isn't much time left!"
"How much longer are you two going to scheme against each other?"
"If you don't seal the coffin any longer, this apartment is truly going to collapse completely!"
Facing the ghost residents' urging, Ji Yan nodded and replied, "Indeed, there isn't much time left."
As he spoke, he took out the spike hammer, picked up the final coffin nail on the ground, and walked toward that black coffin.
Long Yuan could only watch with his own eyes, roaring with resentment and fury, "Ji Yan!!"
Then, under numerous gazes, Ji Yan raised the spike hammer in his hand.
Yet the next moment, both the man and the ghosts were dumbfounded.
Ji Yan was not sealing the coffin at all, but rather prying out the coffin nails anew...
He was opening the coffin!
Before you continue