By the time the landlady finished speaking, Qing Huan was already on the verge of losing it.
Gu Mian saw that his hair was standing on end and his face was pale.
When they left the landlady's place, his steps were still unsteady, and he nearly fell. Luckily, Gu Mian reacted quickly and caught him.
"If you're this scared, why even enter a dungeon?" Gu Mian looked down at him.
The first time they entered a dungeon, it had been forced on them. But players entering dungeons now should all be doing so willingly. It wasn't as if someone had pointed a gun at him and made him go in.
Qing Huan's face was pale. "I have to make a living. So I don't starve... So I can survive..."
He stammered, "You don't know? Things outside the dungeons have already gotten chaotic near my home. People are even bold enough to break into houses and rob them..."
"You might think that sounds exaggerated, but that's how it is. Groups of people wander the streets, robbing everyone they see."
"There's no signal anymore, and we can't contact the police. The country's so big, and the different regions can't communicate with each other. There's no way to issue orders. Even if the government wants to intervene, it's hard."
"And even though I wasn't a great student, I did pay attention in history class. Doctor, don't you think this game is like human evolution?"
"Since ancient times, it's always been survival of the fittest. Throughout history, how many weak nations have been invaded by stronger ones? People from less advanced civilizations have been sold as slaves."
"Things are so similar now. Humanity around the world is starting to evolve. If we don't grow stronger, we'll be the weak ones, reduced to sacrifices."
"The Evolution Game has only just begun. A lot of people might not realize it yet, but I believe that when the gap between the strong and the weak grows wider, history will repeat itself."
This wasn't an apocalypse filled with zombies like in horror movies, but it was another kind of apocalypse.
It forced everyone to become stronger, or face a terrible fate.
Qing Huan looked at Gu Mian. "Doctor, since the Evolution Game began, haven't you ever run into anyone with bad intentions toward you?"
Bad intentions? The way he put it made it sound like they were trying to rob him of his virtue.
Gu Mian rubbed his chin. "Of course I have. It was a group of people trying to steal something."
"And then?" Qing Huan looked curious.
"And then?" Gu Mian lowered his hand. "Then I nearly sawed their heads off."
Qing Huan: "..."
By the time they arrived at the restaurant where everyone was meeting, it was past four.
But no one else complained. They waited there with distant expressions, lost in thought.
Only after Gu Mian took the chainsaw off his back did they seem to snap out of it.
"What's going on with you?" Gu Mian looked at Yuwen Hao.
Yuwen Hao swallowed before speaking. "I was thinking about what we investigated today... We started by going to Huang Yu's place..."
"Huang Yu got a scary phone call, so naturally we started by looking into the phone. We asked the landlady whether anyone had died in the house, or whether the dead person had any connection to the phone."
"But the landlady said no one had ever died there, and nobody had ever experienced anything supernatural."
"We didn't believe her at first, so we asked Huang Yu's neighbors and the people living nearby. They all said the same thing: they'd never heard of anything supernatural happening."
"It was strange. Just when we were at a loss, Huang Yu's landlady suddenly came looking for us again and said she'd remembered something..."
"She said the phone number for the house Huang Yu rented had only recently been changed. The old number was a bit unlucky, and the landlady believed in that sort of thing, so she'd specifically gotten a new number."
"She said what happened to us might be connected to the new phone number."
"So we wrote down the number and went to the phone company's service center to look it up. Sure enough, there was a problem with it!"
"The previous owner of the number was called Zhou Guanglei. It was canceled because he died. As it happened, he lived in this town too."
At this point, Yuwen Hao picked up his cup and took a sip of water.
The three of them had had a lot of work to do, investigating the house and looking into the previous owner of the phone number.
"Following that lead, we found Zhou Guanglei's parents' phone number and work address. But he was from out of town, and his parents didn't live here. When we called them, they didn't know anything."
"There was nothing else we could do, so we went to his workplace. Luckily, it hadn't gone out of business."
At this point, Gu Mian suddenly asked, "What kind of place did Zhou Guanglei work at?"
Yuwen Hao paused slightly. "A plastic factory called Mingliang Plastic Factory."
Just as he'd thought...
It was also where Zhao Wen, the man killed by the Knocking Ghost, had worked.
At this, Qing Huan opened his mouth, seeming to want to say something, but Gu Mian stopped him. "Let Yuwen Hao finish first."
Yuwen Hao gave the two of them a puzzled look but didn't ask anything. He continued, "When we investigated the plastic factory, we found out that more than one person had died there!"
"Someone had been burned to death several years ago. Then two more people died, one of whom was Zhou Guanglei."
"One of Zhou Guanglei's old coworkers still worked there, so we asked him about what had happened before Zhou Guanglei died. He actually knew quite a lot."
"He told us that before Zhou Guanglei died, he'd been acting strangely. He kept saying someone was knocking on his door, but nobody else could hear the knocking..."
At this point, Yuwen Hao glanced at Gu Mian.
He'd originally thought the knocking Gu Mian mentioned had nothing to do with ghosts, but it seemed that wasn't the case.
Could this doctor really have carried a chair outside, stuck his head out, and cursed the ghost out?
He shook his head at the thought, then pulled himself back on track. "Zhou Guanglei was all right at first, just a little paranoid, but he got worse and worse."
"He kept muttering things like, 'It's closer,' and 'It's getting closer.' In the end, he hid at home, stopped going to work, and wouldn't show his face."
"That went on for about a week. Then Zhou Guanglei's coworkers started getting calls from him one after another..."
"They weren't normal calls... Zhou Guanglei seemed like he'd lost his mind by then. He kept calling people in the middle of the night... And what he said was..."
"...a little scary."
"People who got his calls in the middle of the night back then said Zhou Guohai would say things like this to them—"
"You've been to my house, haven't you?"
"Stop knocking on the door!"
"Are you sick or something?"
"Later, the calls changed... He started saying things like..."
"Where do you live?"
"Are you home alone?"
"I'm outside your door."
Before you continue