A Didi Ride Straight to the Gates of Hell

At a crossroads in the eastern suburbs of Linhai City, a full two kilometers from the unfinished Sunshine Waterfront residential complex.

A yellow taxi slammed on its brakes, its tires screeching against the asphalt.

"Buddy, I really can't drive any farther! That's a restricted area up ahead, and there's something seriously creepy about it!"

The driver was a middle-aged man in his forties. Sweat covered his face as he gripped the steering wheel, refusing to drive another meter no matter what.

Su Bai sat in the passenger seat and leaned forward to look out the window.

In the distance, a faint layer of gray mist hung beneath the night sky.

It was no ordinary mist, but a miasma formed by leaking dark matter contamination.

"Come on, sir, it's only a couple of steps farther. Do me a favor, I'm in a hurry to do my social practice." Smiling, Su Bai pulled out a ten-yuan bill and waved it in front of the driver.

The driver looked at Su Bai as though he were crazy and shoved the ten yuan straight back at him.

"I wouldn't go even if you gave me a hundred! A few days ago, another driver picked up a passenger in the middle of the night and took him somewhere near there. Guess what happened?"

The driver lowered his voice and said mysteriously, "The next day, both he and his car were gone! Later, the City Appearance Bureau found him at the unfinished building site. He was alive, all right, but he'd lost his mind. He kept muttering things like 'I can't find the exit' and 'Why don't these stairs ever end?'"

"Buddy, take my advice. That place isn't clean. Whether you're doing social practice or going exploring, hurry home to your mother."

Seeing how firm the driver was, Su Bai stopped pressing him.

He opened the door, got out, and waved at the taxi as it sped away in a cloud of dust.

"Can't find the exit? Stairs that never end?"

Su Bai rubbed his chin, a glimmer of excitement flashing in his eyes.

What the driver had said confirmed Bai Lan's speculation.

A rule-type Anomaly related to a "spatial maze" had most likely been born inside the unfinished buildings.

Ordinary people who went in would be lambs waiting for slaughter.

But for Su Bai, a Ghost Story Creator who carried a "severely wasteland-contaminated divine kingdom" with him, this was practically a shopping trip to stock up!

Su Bai tightened his black tracksuit, pulled down the brim of his baseball cap, and strode toward the area shrouded in gray mist.

The closer he got to Sunshine Waterfront, the colder the surrounding air became.

The dim streetlights that had still lined the road earlier were all out here, and not even insects or birds could be heard.

Deathly silence and oppression filled the air, as though even the wind had stopped.

Beep, beep, beep-

The City Appearance Bureau temporary agent wristband on Su Bai's wrist suddenly vibrated urgently, and its screen lit up red.

"Warning! The surrounding environment's dark matter contamination index has reached 20%!"

"Warning! You have entered a moderately contaminated zone. Please put on a full hazmat suit and activate your spiritual power shield immediately!"

The wristband's mechanical female voice sounded especially piercing in the silent night.

Su Bai found it noisy and pressed the mute button.

A 20% contamination index?

That was it?

Su Bai took a deep breath. The air around him was a little pungent, but it had no effect on him whatsoever.

He strolled around his own divine kingdom, with its 99.5% contamination, every day. To him, this little bit of contamination didn't even count as secondhand smoke.

Before long, Su Bai reached the complex's main entrance.

The entrance, which should have been imposing, was now reduced to two bare concrete pillars.

Yellow-and-black warning tape had been strung around the entrance, and a City Appearance Bureau warning sign stood beside it.

Su Bai simply crouched and ducked under the tape.

The moment he stepped onto the complex's grounds, Su Bai felt a strange wave sweep over his body.

It was like passing through an invisible ripple of water.

Su Bai turned around and found that although he could still see the street behind him, the view had become somewhat distorted and blurry.

"Sure enough, there are signs of spatial folding."

Rather than panic, Su Bai pulled a small notebook and a ballpoint pen from his pocket with great interest.

"The palest ink is better than the best memory. I have to record how this wild rule-type Anomaly works. It'll come in handy when I decorate my divine kingdom later."

Muttering to himself, Su Bai wrote in his notebook: "Method of entry: passively triggered spatial isolation."

When he finished, he looked up and surveyed the enormous cluster of unfinished buildings before him.

More than a dozen drab, unfinished high-rises stood on the weed-choked construction site like giant tombstones.

Because the funding chain had broken, the buildings hadn't even had their exterior insulation installed. Exposed steel rebar made them look sinister and terrifying in the moonlight.

A heavy smell of moldy concrete permeated the air, along with the faintest trace of blood.

Rather than venture farther in rashly, Su Bai first closed his eyes and connected with the core of the divine kingdom within him.

Hum-

A spectral door wreathed in black mist faintly appeared behind him, visible only to him.

With a single thought, he could open the passage to his divine kingdom at any time.

"Hongdou, are you awake? Get ready to come out and receive a guest."

Su Bai called out in his mind.

In the divine kingdom's wasteland, the female ghost in red, who had been hanging from the roof of an abandoned classroom building in a daze, immediately raised her head. A bloodthirsty glint flashed in her pitch-black eyes.

Having confirmed that he could call for backup at any time, Su Bai felt reassured and started toward the tallest unfinished building in the center of the complex.

According to Bai Lan's information, the last distress signal from the three agents who had lost contact had come from Building No. 3, known as the "Building King."

The paths through the construction site were difficult to navigate, littered with loose bricks, rusty scaffolding, and tattered woven sacks.

Su Bai walked slowly.

It wasn't that he was afraid of danger. He was afraid that if he walked too fast, he'd miss the good stuff on the ground.

"Oh, this half-length of bloody rebar is nice. There's quite a bit of resentment on it. I'll take it."

"Tsk, tsk, tsk, there's actually a hole in this battered hard hat, and a clump of bloody hair inside? Good material, good material. I'll take it."

Like an old man collecting scrap, Su Bai picked things up as he went.

He opened a tiny gap in the passage to his divine kingdom and tossed in every piece of trash he saw that carried contamination and resentment.

He had plenty of space now anyway. Ten square kilometers was more than enough to hold some construction waste.

Just as Su Bai was getting into the swing of collecting things,

a grating crunching sound suddenly came from the grass ahead.

It sounded like something chewing on bones.

Su Bai stopped and shone his flashlight toward it.

A dark shape was crouched by the stairwell entrance of Building No. 3.

It was a stray dog, but it had grown as large as a calf.

Most of its fur had fallen out, exposing dark purple muscle tissue beneath. Bone spurs jutted backward from its spine, giving it an extremely grotesque appearance.

It was a mutated beast produced by severe dark matter contamination, and also the most common creature found alongside a nascent Anomaly.

The mutated stray was gnawing on a rotting corpse.

Judging by the tattered clothes on the corpse, it was probably a homeless man who had wandered in by mistake.

The bright flashlight beam irritated the mutated stray.

It jerked its head up, thick saliva dripping from its fang-filled mouth as its scarlet eyes locked onto Su Bai.

"Roar-!"

The mutated stray let out a low growl and kicked off the ground with its hind legs, launching itself at Su Bai like a cannonball!

It was so fast that it left an afterimage in the air!

A mutated beast of this level was certainly no weaker than a second-tier melee professional.

If an ordinary student had encountered it, they would probably have been frightened into summoning their dependents or scurrying away with their hands over their head by now.

But Su Bai stood where he was, without so much as batting an eyelid.

Not only did he not dodge, he even sighed.

"Ah, I didn't want to beat the grass and startle the snake, but you insisted on coming to me."

Su Bai watched the gaping, bloody maw draw closer, a cold smile curling at the corner of his lips.

"Hongdou, come out and have a snack."

Hum!

Just as the mutated stray came within half a meter of Su Bai, its foul breath already washing over his face,

a black spatial rift half a meter wide suddenly opened in front of him!

A hand shot out of the rift, white as paper and utterly bloodless.

The hand looked delicate, but in an instant, it clamped tightly around the mutated stray's neck!

The tremendous force of its charge struck the hand like a clay ox plunging into the sea, vanishing without a trace in an instant.

For the first time, an extraordinarily human fear appeared in the mutated stray's scarlet eyes.

It struggled desperately, trying to claw at the hand.

But then an ethereal, shrill whisper came from a woman inside the black rift.

"It hurts so much..."

Crack!

The crisp sound of breaking bone rang out in the silent night.

The deathly pale hand had forcibly twisted the mutated stray's neck into a knot.

It didn't even have time to yelp before its massive body went limp.

Then the hand dragged the mutated stray's corpse straight into the divine kingdom rift like a dead dog.

The rift closed in an instant, as though nothing had happened.

[Ding! Captured one second-tier contaminated mutated beast. It can be converted into ghost story material.]

The system notification sounded in Su Bai's mind.

"Nicely done." Su Bai clapped his hands in satisfaction.

What a joke. He was a man who carried a first-tier rule-type ghost story with him. A brainless mutated beast like that wasn't even worthy of making him sweat.

However, what had just happened made Su Bai even more certain of one thing.

The concentration of dark matter in these unfinished buildings far exceeded what people outside imagined.

"Mutated beasts have appeared. It looks like things aren't going too well for those three agents."

Su Bai put away his notebook, walked to the stairwell entrance of Building No. 3, and looked up at the pitch-black stairwell.

"One hundred thousand yuan, here I come."

Stepping over the rubble underfoot, Su Bai entered the unfinished building known as the "Building King."