Ghosts Blocking the Way? No, This Is a Designer's Art

Walking into the first-floor lobby of Building Three, Su Bai swept his flashlight beam across the cavernous, unfinished interior.

Discarded cement bags and rusty steel pipes lay scattered throughout the lobby.

The walls were covered in demands for repayment and curses, all written in red spray paint.

"Give me back my hard-earned money!"

"May the blackhearted boss die a horrible death!"

"No money today, and your whole family dies tomorrow!"

In the flashlight's beam, the red writing looked as though it were dripping blood, giving off a dense aura of resentment.

Su Bai took out the Low-Level Resentment Collector, which looked like a vacuum cleaner, and flipped the switch.

Hummm-

The machine immediately whirred to life, meticulously sucking in every trace of the faint resentment emanating from the walls.

[Resentment +0.5]

[Resentment +0.8]

"Even a mosquito's leg has meat on it." Su Bai continued collecting as he made his way up the stairs.

According to Bai Lan's intelligence, the operatives had lost contact around the tenth floor.

Su Bai climbed the concrete stairs, which had no handrails, one floor at a time.

First floor, safe.

Second floor, safe.

Third floor... Su Bai stopped in his tracks.

Standing at the third-floor landing, he shone his flashlight up the steps leading to the fourth floor.

The staircases in an unfinished building should all have had the same layout.

But Su Bai noticed that the flight before him seemed much longer than the ones he had just climbed.

What was more, a layer of gray-black mist hung at the top of the stairs, and the flashlight beam couldn't penetrate it at all.

"Finally, something interesting."

Instead of backing down, Su Bai quickened his pace and walked straight into the gray mist.

The moment he entered it, Su Bai felt the world spin around him.

It was a strange sensation, like someone stirring a stick inside his brain, reducing his sense of direction to zero in an instant.

By the time Su Bai regained his footing, the gray mist before him had dispersed.

He looked around.

The familiar unfinished interior, the familiar red spray-painted words.

"Give me back my hard-earned money!"

Su Bai froze for a moment, then turned toward a corner.

A battered hard hat lay there, with a hole in it.

Wasn't this the damn first-floor lobby?!

Su Bai rubbed his chin. "I definitely climbed to the third floor, but as soon as I entered the mist, I ended up back on the first floor?"

"Could this be the legendary 'ghosts blocking the way'?"

To test his theory, Su Bai tried climbing again.

This time, he moved faster.

But the result was the same.

Every time he reached the landing between the third and fourth floors and passed through the gray mist, he instantly returned to the first-floor lobby.

After trying three times, Su Bai simply sat down on the first-floor steps.

He pulled out his little notebook and began scribbling furiously.

"Spatial loop mechanism confirmed."

"Trigger condition: passing through an area of contaminated mist at a specific concentration."

"Effect: seamlessly connects the starting point and the endpoint, forming a closed loop."

"Assessment: this Anomaly is a genius! If I use this endless-loop design in my divine kingdom, then no matter who comes to invade in the future, I'll make them climb stairs for ten days and ten nights first, and deal with them once they've exhausted all their strength!"

The more Su Bai wrote, the more excited he became. He looked at the unfinished building as though he were gazing at a priceless work of art.

When other people encountered ghosts blocking the way, they wet their pants in fright.

When Su Bai encountered ghosts blocking the way, all he could think about was how to steal the "technology" for his own renovations.

Just as Su Bai was absorbed in his research, something happened.

A muffled sound of crying suddenly came from the quiet stairwell.

The sound was faint and intermittent, as though someone were holding a hand over their mouth in utter terror.

Su Bai put away his notebook, immediately got to his feet, and followed the sound with light steps.

It came from a room without a door, deep down the first-floor corridor.

Su Bai switched off his flashlight, pressed himself against the wall, and quietly peeked around the edge, exposing only half his head.

By the faint moonlight outside the window, Su Bai could make out the scene inside the room.

There were three operatives wearing the black uniforms of the City Appearance Bureau!

Two men and one woman.

Their current condition, however, could only be described as terrible.

Their uniforms had been slashed to tatters, and they were covered in blood and dust.

They huddled back-to-back in a corner of the room, gripping standard-issue psionic short blades tightly in their hands, their whole bodies shaking like sieves.

One of the younger male operatives was sobbing quietly, clearly on the verge of a breakdown.

"Captain... we can't get out... we've been going around in circles here for three days..." the young operative said, his voice thick with tears. "No matter whether we go up or down, we always end up back on this first floor... my divine power is exhausted, and my dependents are too badly injured to summon..."

The man they called captain was a middle-aged man with a full beard.

He had a wound on his left arm so deep the bone was visible, and black blood was seeping from it.

"Shut up! Xiao Li, keep your head!" the bearded captain said through gritted teeth, fighting back the excruciating pain. "Deputy Captain Bai Lan must have realized we've lost contact. Rescue is definitely on the way! We just have to hold out a little longer..."

"Hold out for what, Captain?!" the other operative, a woman, cried, tugging at her hair in despair. "This isn't an ordinary maze at all! The space here is alive! Haven't you noticed? That thing is playing with us!"

"It's deliberately keeping us alive so it can watch us wear ourselves out in fear, and then eat us!"

Listening to the three operatives' conversation, Su Bai nodded to himself outside the door.

That's a thorough analysis.

What rule-bound Anomalies like this most enjoyed feeding on was not flesh and blood, but the extreme terror humans produced in despair.

These three operatives had been trapped in the unfinished building for three days, going through cycles of hope and despair every day. Their fear levels had probably already gone off the charts.

They were like a prime steak that had been marinated for three days and nights, just waiting for the Anomaly to come and feast.

"Scrape, scrape, scrape..."

Just then, a strange scraping sound suddenly rang out in the corridor.

It sounded as though someone were dragging something heavy while walking slowly across the concrete floor.

The moment the three operatives in the room heard it, their faces turned deathly pale, and even their breathing stopped.

"It's here... that thing's back..." Operative Xiao Li was so frightened he could barely hold on to his blade.

The bearded captain struggled to his feet, gripped his short blade tightly in his uninjured right hand, and positioned himself in front of his two teammates.

"Prepare to fight! Even if we die, we can't let this beast have its way so easily!"

Outside the door, Su Bai narrowed his eyes and looked toward the end of the corridor.

Accompanied by the scraping sound, a nauseating figure slowly emerged from the shadows.

It was a monster nearly two meters tall.

It had a human torso, but crawled along the ground on its limbs like a spider.

Most bizarre of all was its head. It wasn't a human head at all, but an enormous yellow hard hat covered in blood!

Beneath the hard hat were no facial features, only a gaping, abyssal maw filled with rows of fine, serrated teeth!

It was dragging a rust-covered steel reinforcing bar in one hand. The bar scraped across the floor, throwing sparks and making a piercing grating sound.

What the hell is that?

Su Bai asked the system in his mind.

[Ding! Second-tier Anomaly derivative detected: Resentment Contractor.]

[It is a thug spawned by the core rules of this unfinished building, responsible for eliminating outsiders. It has no independent rules, possessing only tremendous physical destructive power and corrosive contamination.]

So it's just a minor monster.

Su Bai was somewhat disappointed.

He had thought he had run into the one behind it all, but it turned out to be a hired hand.

By now, the Resentment Contractor had crawled to the doorway.

It seemed to smell the thick scent of fear in the room, and its featureless face let out a strange, cackling laugh.

"Die... all must die... no money... then pay with your lives..."

The monster let out a slurred roar, raised the heavily contaminated steel bar in its hand, and smashed it down at the bearded captain!

The blow came with tremendous force and a howling rush of wind. If it landed, it would surely crush the operative and his blade into pulp.

"Captain!"

The two teammates screamed in despair and shut their eyes, unable to bear watching the grisly scene that would follow.

The bearded captain also knew he couldn't dodge the blow.

He gave a bitter smile and prepared to meet his death.

However.

Just as the steel bar came within five centimeters of his head-

Bang!

A foot clad in a cheap Warrior sneaker suddenly kicked in from outside the doorway, striking the monster squarely in the side of its waist!

That seemingly light kick contained an extraordinarily overbearing force.

The two-meter-tall monster was sent flying sideways as though it had been hit by a truck. Its massive body slammed into the corridor wall, leaving a large crater.

The bearded captain froze.

He slowly opened his eyes and saw a young man in a black tracksuit and a baseball cap standing in the doorway.

The young man was holding a half-eaten roujiamo. Chewing as he spoke, he said indistinctly, "Why all the racket in the middle of the night? Are you going to let me stock up in peace or not?"

All three operatives were dumbfounded.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go!

At a desperate moment like this, shouldn't a large force of fully armed City Appearance Bureau elites have stormed in to save them?

Where had this kid, who was holding a roujiamo and looked like a high school student, come from?!