“Why would the actor scream?” Chen Ge was a Haunted House operator himself, and he had heard multiple screams in his life, so he could be certain that actor was not acting. He had really run into something scary; that scream could not be faked. “This is getting interesting. Even the workers themselves are getting the scare of their lives.”


  The door that led out from theater was being knocked on, and the scream grew louder. Chen Ge wanted to open the door to take a look, but he realized that the door was locked. “Combining projection technology and actual actors is a good idea, but there’s bound to be some accidents.”


  The scream had not stopped, and the whistle from the other end of the corridor was getting close. The lights went out. With his Yin Yang Vision, Chen Ge saw a man wearing a chef’s outfit at the end of the corridor. He was fat, and the white outfit was stained with blood. The pocket around his stomach was even stuffed with half of a human head.

  A man-eating chef?

  The shoes worn by this actor were custom made and softened his footsteps. Now that the lights in the corridor were off, he was walking toward Chen Ge with his laughably huge cleaver. In a few seconds, when the chef was close to him, the lights would come on again to scare him.

  That’s not a bad idea, but I can see in the dark.

  The chef swiftly approached Chen Ge, and the latter started to run.

  No wonder the corridor is so clean; it’s to prevent the actors from tripping when they are chasing after the visitors. After all, there is no light.

  Chen Ge glanced at the wooden boards on the wall.

  Should I pull one off and place it on the ground? The chef won’t expect a surprise like that.

  Chen Ge quickly abandoned that thought. What if he injured the actor? Ten seconds later, the lights came on again. The chef waved his cleaver madly with a guffaw, but he soon realized that there was no one before him. Chen Ge had already run down the corridor.

  “Ah?” Catching his breath, he laughed like an idiot for so long before he realized he was laughing to air. When the chef saw that Chen Ge was looking at him from the other end, he had no choice but to continue that maddened laughter to keep up his character.

  “That is the Butcher from Hell! He will make stew out of his captives! I’ve seen him in a movie before!” the youngest man shouted as he ran.

  “He’s coming to get us!” A girl turned back and saw the chef, letting out a shrill scream. Probably due to the awkwardness from before, the chef waved his cleaver and ran faster toward the visitors.

  “This way!” As the distance was closing, at the last moment, the police officer found a door.

  “Wait! Don’t go in there!” The man with the glasses wanted to remind him of something, but it was too late. The police officer pushed the door open. The other visitors did not think too much as they followed him. Chen Ge was the last one to enter. By then, the chef was very close behind. After he got in, he closed the door.

  BANG!

  The wood chips flew over their heads. A large crack was chopped open by the cleaver at the top of the door. The wooden door shook; someone was crazily banging against the door!

  “This door won’t hold on much longer! We have to find another way to leave this room!” the police officer shouted. “When I visited this place last time, the difficulty was not this high. We only needed to find a mannequin that represented a dead person before the clock on the wall struck twelve! By the way, the mannequin was needed in a later scenario, so we should carry it with us!”


  “I have a question.” Chen Ge raised his arm. “Since you have already visited this place and knew what will happen in this room, how many pieces of the carcasses do we need to find to be considered successful?”


  “Pieces?” The police officer was startled. “Aren’t dead people normally counted in bodies?”


  “Look at the fruit plate on the table.” Chen Ge pointed at the exquisite china bowl on the coffee table. On it sat three plastic apples, a cluster of grapes, and five broken fingers. “Fingers should be a piece of the human body, right?”


  “This wasn’t here last time!” The police officer looked at the other visitors in shock. After a temporary exchange of glances, he rushed into the bedroom. “The last time I was here, we found the dead body under the bed!”


  Before the rest caught up to him, the police officer pulled back the bedsheets. He was shocked when he saw that the space was empty. “That’s impossible!”


  “How is that impossible? When the difficulty increases from medium to hellish, it’s normal that we need to search for more things.” The man with the glasses was calm. “My occupation is a detective, so when I entered this place, I got my first clue.”


  He looked at his band. “The skull is inside the freezer on top of the fridge.”


  Two of the girls immediately moved away from the fridge. Only the woman with the long hair did not mind it. She personally walked to open the fridge door.

  “Now I have good news and bad news. Which would you like to hear first?” The woman’s face was pale.

  “What’s the good news?”


  “Other than the head, there are the mannequin’s small arm and the other five fingers inside the fridge.”


  “Then what’s the bad news?”


  “The mannequin is chopped up even further than I expected.” The woman felt her stomach turning. No one had experienced the hellish version of the Reincarnation Haunted House; they would be the first batch. Even though they knew about the general plot, with the central computer controlling everything, the difficulty of the most basic mission had been increased to an impossible level.

  “We need to move faster; we still have four minutes.” Chen Ge looked at the clock on the wall. It was 11: 56. “The knocking is still going. The fat chef is outside the door. Other than that, listen up. The crying hasn’t stopped following us. It is merely covered up by the louder knocking.”


  Holding his breath, Chen Ge added, “By the way, the girl’s laughter hasn’t disappeared either. So, if we do not hurry, we will be cornered by a cruel chef and two ghosts.”


  “This is the hellish difficulty……” The police officer was nervous. “At the beginning, we’re ambushed by three ghosts, and we’re only at the second scenario.”


  “You are being too optimistic. Don’t forget, there might be a new ghost hiding in this new scenario. As time goes on, more ghosts will be following us. Even though most of them are actors and projections, there is a small chance that they are things that we cannot explain. After all, it is your designer who told me this Haunted House is filled with authentic haunted objects.”


  Chen Ge was still livestreaming. He cleverly let slip a few hints to build up for what he would do later. When he released his own employees, he could push all the blame to the futuristic theme park.

  Walking to the fridge to take out the head, Chen Ge realized that the mouth was puffy. There was something stuffed inside. He reached his hand into the mouth and soon found a ball of paper.

  “What are you doing?” The woman with the long hair saw what Chen Ge was doing and felt disgusted.

  Too lazy to explain, Chen Ge took out the ball of paper and read the message on it.

  ‘I realize I have sunk into a recurring nightmare. Every night at midnight, I am murdered in different ways, and just as I am about to die, I wake up from my dream. Most despairing of all, the time at which I wake up from the nightmare is always 11:56 pm.’