San Gou took a deep breath and nudged the second brother in the next bed with his toe.
Jiang Yue was extremely alert. He opened his eyes at once.
San Gou pursed his lips, signaling for him to look at the surveillance monitor on the TV screen.
Crack!
A blinding white light suddenly flashed across the monitor.
Then the screen turned into a field of static.
The surveillance camera had been wrecked again!
Jiang Yue's heart skipped a beat. It had only been a day, yet the vengeful spirit had evolved so quickly?
Yesterday, it had been clumsy even scratching at the door. Today, it could already manipulate electric currents, causing a sudden surge that burned out the lights in the hallway and the surveillance camera.
The two roosters they had left outside the door suddenly let out terrified cries.
Cluck...
Cluck...
It sounded as if the roosters were trying to muster all their strength, just as they did every morning when they crowed, and let out a full-throated, mighty cry.
But the sounds that came out were short, strained, and feeble, as if someone had a hand around their throats.
Just hearing those miserable, powerless cries was enough to make one's skin crawl.
They sounded like the dying whimpers of someone held in place, with a butcher's knife already at their throat, resigned to their fate.
Jiang Yue moved the peephole cover aside. Outside was pitch-black; he couldn't see a thing.
All he could hear were the two roosters' intermittent, miserable cries.
Woof! Woof! Woof!
The black mutt locked inside the room jolted awake and suddenly charged at the security door like a mad thing, scratching frantically at it with its paws.
Its claws scraped against the door with a grating squeal.
Its eyes were bloodshot, and it barked furiously.
The sheer frenzy of its barking was enough to make anyone's skin crawl in the middle of the night.
Even the deepest sleeper would have woken up.
Everyone in the room exchanged uneasy glances, their faces full of fear and tension.
No matter how strong someone's nerves were, claiming they wouldn't be afraid in a situation like this would be a lie.
Bzzzt...
The electricity in the room began fluctuating again, and all the appliances that were switched on flickered erratically.
They said that this pattern of lights dimming and brightening was the pulse of a ghost, a familiar sight in horror movies.
Whenever it happened, it meant danger was closing in.
Something terrifying could happen at any moment.
The black mutt continued barking without pause.
Then, all at once...
The dog's frenzied barking abruptly stopped.
Its tail tucked between its legs. Eyes wide with terror, it crept backward into the room.
Its throat seemed to be caught in an invisible hand. It let out low, whimpering growls, as if it had seen something horrifying and was desperately trying to make itself unnoticed.
At that very moment, everyone heard the lock turning!
Yes, the lock was turning!
They could see it moving with their own eyes, as if someone outside were unlocking the door with a key.
But all three deadbolts on the security door had been locked.
Even if someone outside had a key, there was no way they could get in!
And yet—
Things only grew stranger.
The safety latch on the inside popped open on its own, as if controlled by an invisible hand.
Jiang Yue signaled to everyone.
They had already assigned everyone a role, and each person had a batch of San Gou's virgin boy urine.
One person had a ladle ready, another had filled drink bottles, and someone else had a large bowl.
Xiao Yi had gone the farthest: she had even found a water gun and filled its entire chamber.
Jiang Yue was going all in this time. He held a large bag of white lime and stood beside the security door.
He was just waiting for the door to open and the ghost to enter.
The security door creaked and creaked, but in the end, it slowly swung open.
A distinctly chilly breeze poured in from the hallway.
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
As the cold wind blew inside, every light-producing appliance in the apartment seemed to have its power cut at once. They all burned out in an instant.
The room plunged into darkness.
"Little girl, could you tell me how to get to Building 8, Unit 2?"
A ghostly voice rang out, trembling and eerie.
"You didn't bring me to my destination, and you just went home on your own? That's not very nice, is it? Hee-hee-hee-hee..."
The voice seemed to come from hell, filling every corner of the room.
That sinister laughter in particular made their scalps prickle and their hair stand on end at such a critical moment.
Jiang Yue suddenly shouted, "Turn on your flashlights!"
Several flashlights and phone lights snapped on, all pointed at the doorway.
"Second brother, it's right on the doormat!"
Jiang Yue flung the bag of lime in his hand.
In an instant, white lime billowed through the air around the entryway.
A bizarre sight appeared.
In the empty space, where nothing had been visible before, a figure slowly appeared as if by magic, covered in white lime but uneven and incomplete.
The figure wasn't incomplete because its body was missing parts. Rather, the lime hadn't coated it evenly.
Some parts of the originally invisible ghost were exposed by the lime, while others remained transparent and unseen.
It was a strange sight, like an old wooden shack in the wilderness, battered by years of wind and rain, its corners full of holes. It looked thoroughly decrepit, yet its overall shape was still recognizable.
The eerie sight left everyone stunned.
Jiang Yue, however, didn't hesitate. He lunged forward, wrapping both arms around the ghost and clinging tightly to its half-transparent, half-visible form.
"Shoot me!"
Jiang Yue shouted with all his might!
At once, five streams of virgin boy urine shot toward him from different angles and in different shapes.
Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle!
It was like oil being poured into a sizzling pan.
Like sulfuric acid splashed across a person's body, the urine bubbled wherever it touched the ghost.
The virgin boy urine worked astonishingly well!
Aaaah!
The ghost in Jiang Yue's arms let out a bloodcurdling scream.
San Gou used his Yin Yang Eye to locate the ghost. Jiang Yue used the lime to reveal it. Everyone else attacked it with virgin boy urine.
This was the first battle plan Jiang Yue had carefully put together.
The ghost was in pain, and Jiang Yue had it pinned down so tightly that it couldn't escape.
It let out shrill cries again and again, writhing frantically in Jiang Yue's arms as it struggled to break free.
Jiang Yue was using every last bit of strength he had!
He used all four limbs, and was only short of bringing a fifth into it.
Like an octopus, he wrapped himself around the ghost and refused to give it even the slightest chance.
He knew this was a matter of life and death.
If he let it get away, then even if they survived the night, they would have made an enemy of a ghost this resentful. From then on, they'd never know peace.
So it had to be today.
The ghost had to die today.
There was only one thought in Jiang Yue's mind: hold on to it until it died!
"Keep going! Keep going! Fire at me!"
At that moment, Jiang Yue felt like a martyr carrying explosives toward a pillbox, fearlessly shouting for them to fire at him.
San Gou's daily output was limited, after all. It couldn't withstand this kind of relentless barrage.
After two rounds, everyone was out of ammunition.
Fortunately, the ghost in Jiang Yue's arms was visibly weakening.
Under Jiang Yue's Death Coil, its skin looked like steel burning in a furnace, red with black patches. A suffocating stench rose from it as bluish-black smoke poured out, and it disintegrated at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Thousands of years of folk wisdom had led people to a general consensus: ghosts were hard to kill with physical attacks.
But ghosts could still be destroyed.
All things had something that could counter them.
In truth, a ghost was a field of energy somewhere between spirit and substance.
At that moment, the structure of this ghost's energy field had clearly been destroyed!
They had actually—
Done it!
Boom!
After taking repeated, devastating blows, the vicious ghost was already on its last legs.
It let out one last desperate shriek, then completely dissolved in Jiang Yue's arms into a cloud of black smoke and vanished from the world.
Jiang Yue, who had inevitably been hit by some of the virgin boy urine, reeked of San Gou's piss. He slumped onto the floor.
The system's owner had suffered another humiliating disgrace.
Was this seriously something a person was supposed to do?
The last time he had wrestled with the Year Eater, that had already been humiliating enough.
This time was even more absurd. He had risked his life clinging to a ghost and gotten soaked in piss. He'd disgraced himself all the way into outer space.
He looked as miserable as it got.
But in that moment, no one had the mind to care.
Everyone had only one thought: They had actually killed the ghost?
San Gou was the first to react. He dashed to the doorway and swept his flashlight across the door, then exclaimed, "Second brother, we did it! The handprint is gone!"
Aunt Zhang didn't even bother to hold back. She hurriedly pulled Xiao Yi's shoulder aside to check.
Her shoulder was smooth and tender. The terrifying bluish-black handprint had completely disappeared, as if it had never been there!
They had done it!
Aunt Zhang hugged her daughter and wept, holding her head in her hands.
Uncle Ye also held his wife and child, wiping away tears nearby.
After rinsing himself in the bathroom for more than half an hour, Jiang Yue finally stopped smelling that reek of urine.
The others cleaned the living room, mopping and rinsing the floor.
After quite a while of cleaning up, things finally returned more or less to normal.
The ghost had manipulated the electricity, and many appliances had burned out.
Fortunately, they still had their phones and flashlights, which would be more than enough to get them through the night.
Uncle Ye's family thanked them profusely and insisted, no matter what Jiang Yue said, that they accept fifty thousand yuan.
Jiang Yue tried to decline a few times, but Uncle Ye and the others were dead set on it, so he had no choice but to accept.
The ghost was gone, so he didn't feel too bad about taking the money.
"I can't believe it evolved so quickly in just one night. Yesterday we could still see it with the naked eye, but today it's evolved to the point of being invisible in thin air. If it had been allowed to harm a few more people, just how terrifying would it have become? How many people would have had to die?"
Jiang Yue still felt a lingering fear.
None of the precautions he'd made had been tested. He'd drawn on folk remedies, sifted through them, and picked out the ones that seemed more reliable.
Things like virgin boy urine and white lime.
If those didn't work, they could slaughter the black mutt on the spot. That was the ultimate weapon.
If that still didn't work, Jiang Yue could only use the Hundred Evils Immunity Halo to drive the ghost away, like he had the day before.
It wasn't that Jiang Yue wanted to take risks. He simply didn't want to sit around waiting to die.
Every extra day they waited meant another increase in risk.
Today it might be Xiao Yi. Tomorrow it could be one of his own family.
The ghost's range of activity was clearly limited to this neighborhood. It probably couldn't go elsewhere to cause trouble for now.
But then, what had happened to the person who went to the morgue at Star City Second Hospital in the middle of the night yesterday, picked the lock, and turned over a corpse?
That ghost clearly couldn't travel that far, nor could it take on someone else's appearance.
Jiang Yue was exhausted. For the moment, he didn't have the energy to think it through.
Of course, he knew his plan had been risky and that no one else could copy it.
If anyone else had tried it, there was no doubt they would all have been wiped out.
The most critical part of the plan was that he had the Hundred Evils Immunity Halo.
Without its protection, how could he have held the ghost down?
Someone else might have managed to grab the ghost, but it could have killed them in mere minutes.
Although the ghost had been eliminated, the psychological scars on Uncle Ye's family hadn't faded.
Jiang Yue decided to see things through and stay with them for the rest of the night.
Having narrowly escaped disaster, the group naturally had plenty to talk about.
It wasn't until three or four in the morning that they finally drifted off to sleep, one by one.
Half asleep, Jiang Yue suddenly saw Spirit Intelligence's interface appear in his mind.
"Congratulations, host! You've completed the hidden mission to eliminate a D-rank vengeful spirit."
"Reward one: Obtain the first form of Divine Gang Exterminates Ghost Hand."
"Claim OR Abandon."
Bleary-eyed, Jiang Yue almost tapped "Abandon" by mistake.
What a lousy system. He really couldn't understand why it had to pull this prank and include an option to abandon the reward. What was the point? Did it really get such a kick out of messing with him?
"Reward two: Physical enhancement by 50%. Duration: Permanent."
"Claim OR Abandon."
"Reward three: Receive a bold confession from Ye Yi, the person you rescued, and take her first time tonight."
Jiang Yue nearly turned to stone!
You beast!
If he remembered correctly, Xiao Yi had only just celebrated her fourteenth birthday a little while ago, hadn't she?
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