Ever since joining the Folklore Club that day, Chen Miao had added another activity to his daily routine: putting in hours at the club.
The work was simple enough—collecting reports of Ghost Story incidents from across the Island Nation.
Collecting them did not mean simply recording every Ghost Story they came across.
The Folklore Club divided the Ghost Story collection process into several stages.
The first stage was discovery: learning about a Ghost Story someone had mentioned through a source such as an online forum.
The second stage was verification. Rather than checking it in person, they compared information from the comments under the post, looked for the same Ghost Story on other forums, and checked whether anyone had exposed the truth behind it.
There were plenty of things to compare, such as whether this was its first appearance and whether anyone else had investigated this Ghost Story.
These comparisons weeded out a batch of obviously fake Ghost Stories. After all, the Island Nation had far too many Ghost Stories. Without screening them, the Folklore Club would have an enormous workload.
Once a story passed this comparative verification, it would be added to the Folklore Club's Ghost Story files.
Chen Miao opened the Folklore Club's Ghost Story files and found that they had collected quite a lot!
Most concerned Ghost Stories from Kyoto Prefecture, but some came from other regions of the Island Nation. Relatively speaking, they had collected fewer stories from elsewhere than from Kyoto Prefecture.
Chen Miao noticed stamps on some of the documents in the files.
After asking about them, he learned that the Folklore Club used four kinds of stamps.
The first was a green stamp that left the words [In progress] on the paper.
This meant that the incident was currently being investigated in person.