Inside the pitch-black courtyard house, a red lantern floated over, glowing crimson. Strangely, its light seemed sealed within the frame, failing completely to illuminate its surroundings. The lantern floated to the doorway and halted before Zhang Yuanqing. Between him and the red lantern lay only a single threshold.
Zhang Yuanqing could clearly sense that beyond the threshold was a ghost—a chilling, sinister ghost. Yet no matter how hard he peered into the dark, he could not make out its form.
He silently channeled his Lunar force, ready to activate Spirit Devouring at a moment's notice.
Night Wanderers inherently suppressed spirit bodies, provided the spirit body's level did not exceed their own.
From the darkness, a hand reached out. In the faint red glow, Zhang Yuanqing could see it was bruised, blue-black flesh tipped with pitch-black fingernails.
This ghostly hand held a stack of red-covered cards, seemingly waiting for Zhang Yuanqing to accept them.
When Zhang Yuanqing did not take them, the ghostly hand simply remained extended. The two sides hung in a stalemate, locked in a contest of wills.
After a long silence, Xi Shi whispered in a trembling voice, "Wang Tai?"
Seeing him standing stiff and motionless, she was terrified he had inadvertently triggered some lethal hazard and already departed this mortal coil.
*Sigh, whether I stick my neck out or pull it back, the blade still falls.* Resigned, Zhang Yuanqing took the cards. The blue-black ghostly hand immediately retracted, and the red lantern drifted away, wafting back into the depths of the compound.
Zhang Yuanqing stepped down from the threshold, returned to his teammates, and held up the cards in his hand.
"Five in total. Looks like they're for us."
He distributed them to his teammates one by one. Unfolding them, they saw black characters on a red background displaying the bride's name and eight characters of birth, while the groom's side was blank.
The bride's name was "Bai Lan."
A dungeon notification chimed in everyone's ears:
[Ding! You have received the Ghost Bride's wedding invitation. Please fill in your name. The Ghost Bride will choose her groom in one hour.]
Fill in a name, and she would choose a groom in an hour?
What would happen if the Ghost Bride picked someone? Clutching the wedding invitations, their thoughts raced chaotically.
Because Zhang Yuanqing hadn't been honest during introductions and had used Wang Tai's name, he was feeling conflicted: should he write Yuanshi Tianzun, or Wang Tai?
He couldn't tell whether using an alias would trigger a penalty.
As he pondered what name to write, an idea struck him, and he turned to his companions. "Do you remember the amusement park's introductory description? An indescribable entity arrived here and asked the spirits in the park to help search for a certain young man whose name had four characters."
Xi Shi and the others naturally remembered, but they didn't understand why he was bringing it up now.
Xie Lingxi's mind was the quickest. She glanced at the wedding invitation in her hands. "You mean... there might be a connection between the two?"
Following that train of thought, the girl's face shifted slightly. "The indescribable entity asked the Ghost Bride to find a young man, and now she's asking us to write our names? Does that mean the young man the Haunted House bride is looking for is a Spirit Realm walker?"
"How is that possible?" Xi Shi looked stunned.
They had all survived multiple dungeons. Generally speaking, a Spirit Realm introduction was just background lore, explaining what kind of place this was and what events had transpired, allowing Spirit Realm walkers to get up to speed quickly—nothing more.
Before this, they had assumed the young man sought by that indescribable entity was some character within the Spirit Realm, perhaps even a monster.
It had nothing to do with the "players."
How could a mere Spirit Realm walker possess the ability to alter the very nature of a Spirit Realm?
"It's probably just a coincidence. Since it's a ghost wedding, of course names need to be written," Great Sage Equal to Heaven said, frowning.
*No, it's not a coincidence. The older walkthroughs never mentioned wedding invitations. This only appeared after the Spirit Realm mutated. Combined with the introduction, I refuse to believe there's no connection...* Zhang Yuanqing was secretly on high alert.
Whether it was just his imagination or not, he couldn't shake a strong sense of déjà vu about the information in the introduction.
*Static... On that day, she arrived at Jinshui Amusement Park...*
Suddenly, the Cat King Speaker in Zhang Yuanqing's pocket crackled to life.
Everyone instantly turned their eyes to his pocket, but the Cat King Speaker fell silent once more.
*Why did it stop? This speaker is weird...* Zhang Yuanqing waited a few more seconds, and seeing it remain quiet, he let it go and said, "Let's fill in our names first."
Unfolding the invitation, he tried using his finger as a pen and wrote "Wang Tai" in the name slot.
His reasoning was that since the spirit in the Haunted House required them to write their names, "she" couldn't see the Spirit Realm walkers' true IDs. Otherwise, the invitations would be completely superfluous.
Therefore, there was good reason to deduce that the dungeon permitted walkers to disguise their IDs; it simply hadn't stated so outright, leaving it to their own deduction and intuition.
*Actually, writing Yuanshi Tianzun wouldn't be an issue either, except it might trigger a crisis of trust among teammates,* Zhang Yuanqing thought. Then, he watched the strokes traced by his finger condense into black script:
Wang Tai.
Next, he casually fabricated an eight-character birth chart and a gender—well, he didn't fabricate the gender.
The four teammates followed suit, tracing with their fingers.
Xie Lingxi stood on tiptoe, timidly peeking at Zhang Yuanqing's invitation before writing down her own name. In the gender column, she hesitated briefly, then filled in "Male."
Having completed his invitation, Zhang Yuanqing slipped it into his pocket and was the first to step over the threshold, saying, "Let's head inside. You'd better stay behind me."
Seeing his teammates' tense expressions, he cracked a joke to lighten the mood: "My birth chart has been rock-hard since childhood. If a female ghost meets me, she'll have to consider taking maternity leave."
Everyone: "..."
Cracking a joke like that at a time like this—was he truly fearless, or did he just have a death wish? There was an actual female ghost waiting to be wed in there!
*Was that joke not funny enough?* Zhang Yuanqing glanced across their faces, said nothing further, and silently stepped into the compound.
Beyond the threshold lay an outer courtyard of considerable size, with a paved stone path down the middle and covered walkways running along the outer walls on either side.
As they crossed the threshold, red lanterns hanging beneath the eaves of the walkways lit up in eerie unison, casting a deep crimson tint over the pitch-black night. The lanterns looked like blood-red eyeballs silently watching the living trespassers enter the courtyard.
At the end of the stone path stood a main hall with upturned eaves. Its latticed doors were firmly shut, dim yellow light seeping through them.
"Huh?" Just after crossing the threshold, Zhang Yuanqing's eyes brightened slightly. "Check your skills and inventory to see if they're sealed."
Huo Mo and the others were taken aback. Testing their skills or checking their inventories, they were pleasantly surprised to find that this mission had not sealed their abilities or items.
For a moment, joy mingled with dread. The joy was that they finally had something to rely on when facing danger. The dread was that unlocking items and skills meant the Haunted House's danger level was astronomically high.
Led by Zhang Yuanqing, the group walked slowly forward. In the silent night, only the sound of their footsteps echoed.
"Ahhh—!"
Lost in concentration, everyone jumped at the sudden scream.
Huo Mo whirled around furiously, glaring at Xi Shi. "What the hell are you screaming for?!"
Xi Shi's face was pale. Pointing a trembling finger toward the walkway a dozen or so meters away, she stammered, "Th-There... under the lantern... there's a woman..."
Everyone jerked their heads over. They saw only high-hung lanterns in utter silence. Where was there any ghostly figure?
With this scare, the already anxious four grew even more uneasy.
Zhang Yuanqing, on the other hand, was relatively composed. Having experienced a supernatural dungeon before and being a Night Wanderer himself, he no longer harbored that visceral terror toward ghosts.
In his eyes, ghosts and Autobots weren't really any different.
*The ghostly aura here is thick, and yin energy permeates everywhere, which actually numbs my perception. I can't sense spirit bodies that are too weak or too far away. Still, I can use the Demon-Subduing Pestle now, so even if the Ghost Bride comes, I won't have to fear...* Zhang Yuanqing comforted everyone while leading them onward.
"Did you notice? The dungeon prompt only gave the notice that the Ghost Bride will choose a groom in one hour."
Blind terror was pointless, so he used information to distract his teammates and soothe their nerves. "My thought is that over the next hour, our behavior and conduct will serve as the criteria for the Ghost Bride to select her groom.
"The only question is whether becoming the groom means survival or death... Besides, the yin energy here is very heavy, harboring many hidden dangers. We might get wiped out before that hour is even up."
*I wonder if the Ghost Bride is obsessed with looks. If so, as the handsomest guy on this team, the pressure on me is immense...*
Soon, they arrived at the main hall. Zhang Yuanqing stepped forward and pushed open the tightly shut latticed doors.
*Creeeak—*
A spine-tingling screech echoed through the night.
Inside the hall, candlelight flickered high, a red carpet covered the floor, and red fabric draped from the pillars. At the far end of the carpet sat two grand armchair thrones, an offering table laden with candles, melons, and fruits, and a bright red "Double Happiness" character on the wall.
On either side of the red carpet stood seven or eight paper figures dressed as ancient servants, their facial features rendered lifelike, with lips curled into slight, crimson smirks.
Most chilling of all, the heads of these paper figures were twisted at unnatural angles, their hollow eyes staring toward the doorway—staring directly at the party who had just pushed open the doors.
*Thump, thump, thump.* Xie Lingxi took several panicked steps back, clapping a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.
At this moment, Zhang Yuanqing felt his scalp prickle.
Not from fear, but because... these paper figures were all ghosts!
After sensing them carefully, he let out a sigh of relief. They were all just minor ghosts.
*I might not have a way to deal with the Ghost Bride, but you little punks dare act arrogant in front of your grandpa? That crosses the line!* Zhang Yuanqing channeled his Lunar force, gathering darkness in his eyes. Sinking his breath into his dantian, he bellowed:
"Scram!"
Paper figures collapsed across the hall floor as gusts of sinister wind whipped up, accompanied by faint, chaotic wails of ghosts scrambling over one another to flee in all directions.
Behind him, Xi Shi, Xie Lingxi, Huo Mo, and Great Sage Equal to Heaven stood dumbfounded at the sight.
Chapter 56