Curse Propagation

"Impossible... How could this happen..."

Li Xing was completely stunned by the scene before him. A chill shot from the soles of his feet straight into his brain, and he stumbled backward onto the floor.

His arm was raised high, aimed at the staff member just one step away, who was about to snap his own head off!

"How could they all be dead?! How could six people die one after another at the same time?!"

Li Xing roared out the question, but Ji Li was pondering the same thing internally.

The lingering light from outside the window fell across his shoulders, yet his entire demeanor seemed to have melted into the darkness.

Everything happening before him, beyond his power to stop, cruelly played out a desperate and absurd horror.

Ji Li could not understand what could have caused every staff member to be struck at the same time!

He suddenly turned to look at the other corpse beside him. Text Message Man had been the source of everything...

With his death, all the staff Ji Li had brought along seemed to have been caught by a spreading curse. Not one had escaped disaster!

He stared blankly at his hands. The strange stiffness in his palms had vanished, but they were still bluish-black.

"The curse... is spreading..."

Those words began circling through Ji Li's mind. Judging from the current situation,

Isolation Theory was utter nonsense. No one had died on the first floor for the moment only because they had been lucky.

Since the ghost's killing pattern was not isolation, but a form of spreading curse,

then what was the source of the curse?

Ji Li slowly raised his head, his lifeless eyes fixed on the starry sky outside the window.

The rain there showed signs of easing, but the conflict inside the building had only just reached its fiercest point.

"Did they witness possessions that led to suicide?"

Second Personality had not spoken for a long time. When he spoke now, his voice carried some fatigue.

"Doesn't seem like it. At the start, it wasn't just us. Many people on the first floor saw Xiao Liu from the first stairwell commit suicide, yet they're still fine."

Third Personality softly refuted him, then offered a more likely conjecture.

"Perhaps... we are the source of the curse..."

Ji Li fell into thought upon hearing that, but did not speak.

Third Personality continued:

"From the very beginning, we understood that whenever every victim died, or stood on the verge of death, a store clerk was present!

This was not difficult to guess. At the time, however, all of us focused on isolation and protecting them, overlooking this point.

Text Message Man's situation just now showed that once a ghost targeted someone, we had no ability to save them at all.

And before and after that, Ji Li, you experienced more than three possession-suicide incidents. The curse has further spread across your body.

It could even directly affect the five staff members you brought along.

No one could have imagined that the mission kept demanding that we protect the staff, while the true path to death was staying close to them!"

Ji Li remained silent, listening to Third Personality's analysis.

His speculation that the store clerks were the source of the curse was not impossible, but it was somewhat hasty.

"You're right. Some parts do line up.

But where is the ghost?"

That was the crucial question. Up to now, they had not seen even a trace of the ghost. Even after Text Message Man had just been killed, the five staff members had been struck.

Yet they still had not seen any trace of the ghost.

"If we are the source of the curse, perhaps the ghost is on us..."

Third Personality's tone was somewhat distant, as if he lacked confidence as well.

Ji Li did not truly agree with that conjecture. Could Third Personality's theory hold?

It could.

The ghost was on the store clerks, and through them it approached the staff members and spread the suicide curse.

That did indeed correspond with most of what had happened so far.

But there was one thing it could not explain.

Lao Xue's death, and Text Message Man's abnormal behavior!

Although Ji Li was not a coroner and did not know much about changes in corpses, having witnessed death time and again, he could roughly estimate Lao Xue's time of death.

He had definitely not died only when they arrived near the fifth floor!

Ji Li had not been on the fifth floor, yet Lao Xue had died in advance. That already contradicted Third Personality's theory that the ghost was attached to the store clerks.

Secondly, Text Message Man knew Ji Li, and had personally said, "There's a ghost in the building." Clearly, he knew about all the strange changes within the building.

Yet during the first search, no one had discovered any trace of him.

That meant he had always maintained an absolutely safe distance from the store clerks. According to Third Personality's theory, he should not have known of the ghost's existence.

Even if he had seen corpses that committed suicide after being possessed, he would not have immediately connected it to a ghost killing people!

Those two enormous doubts could actually be considered one mystery.

Lao Xue, Text Message Man, and perhaps Xiao Qi, whose whereabouts they had never been able to find,

the three of them had discovered some immense secret concerning this mission!

Only by uncovering that secret could they truly find the ghost's killing pattern, and even the path to survival!

In the corridor of the Eighteenth Floor, only Ji Li and Li Xing remained alive. He gradually turned his gaze toward the man who had already been scared speechless.

Aside from using him as a scapegoat, Ji Li had another reason for keeping him around: he suspected him.

During missions, unusual individuals always became breakthroughs.

For example, during the last Peeping Ghost mission, Raincoat Man had been the path to survival.

And why had Li Xing entered the hotel three minutes later than Tong Guan and the other man?

Ji Li had never mentioned it, but he had always kept it in mind. Although Li Xing's performance so far could be described as utterly ordinary,

out of caution, Ji Li still kept him by his side.

Ji Li lit a cigarette and slowly rose to his feet. Just as he was about to call out to the stunned Li Xing, he suddenly heard a faint creaking sound.

He frowned and looked up. At the same time, the fluorescent tubes above the staircase lit up one after another.

The darkness vanished in the blink of an eye, but the entire building was now covered in glaring cold light.

Under the fluorescent lights, Ji Li's face looked even paler, radiating a deathly aura similar to that of the six stiff corpses standing around him.

"The lights..."

Li Xing suddenly shuddered. After taking a moment to react, he sprang up from the floor.

"Manager! The power's back!"

Light always gave people some courage to face their fear, and Li Xing was especially excited by it.

Ji Li felt the same sense of relief.

But what he was thinking was that the Monitoring Room could finally be used!

This had been the fallback he had considered from the start, yet only now, when nearly half the mission had passed, did he have the chance to use it.

Life returned to Ji Li's face. Holding his cigarette between his fingers as he walked forward, he said to Third Personality in his mind:

"Although I don't agree with your conjecture, now that we have the convenience of the Monitoring Room, we can give it a try for the time being."