The closer they got to the magic circle, the scarier their surroundings became. This was no longer an indirect influence from the atmosphere but a direct hit from the five senses. Between the trees, dead carcasses in various stages of decay appeared repeatedly around the players. Most of them had bones poking out of their skin and missing limbs. In conclusion, they had a horrible death.
This place was some kind of death museum. There were carcasses that hung from the trees, half of his face melted off, burnt into a charred object, disemboweled with entrails dangling… Basically, any death you could think of, they were all there. Combined with an authentic smell of decay, this was the goriest scene that Feng Bujue had experienced since he started playing Thriller Paradise.
Seeing the decaying carcasses, smelling the stench, hearing the groans that seemed to be there and not there at the same time… Other than Feng Bujue, whose Terror Points remained the same, the other five’s Terror Points moved slightly.
“Even though I know these are illusions, this kind of scenario might possess a hidden threat,” Ye Zhi said. “What if a real monster is hidden among them? We…”
“We won’t be able to recognize them?” Feng Bujue continued and smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m sure the two with the sleuthing expertise will be able to tell the difference between a real monster and an illusion.”
He turned toward Galileo at the front with a wicked smile. “Right?”
“Er… Sure.” Galileo’s heart kept saying that this player called Feng Bujue was trying to set them up.
Ye Zhi’s look toward Feng Bujue and the two GMs deepened with curiosity. She walked to the back and whispered to Zen Dream, “Leader… Don’t you think, these three… are a bit weird?”
Zen Dream downed a mouthful of beer and replied with a burp.
Ye Zhi glared at him, shook her head, and sighed, thinking, I need to ask the superiors to change my team…
Actually, it might not look like it, but Zen Dream’s mind was incredibly sharp. However, he could not pinpoint what was so strange about these three players that were not part of his guild. If there was something strange, it was that Feng Bujue’s power of analysis and the other two’s sleuthing ability were surprisingly strong, so strong that it felt like they were cheating, but that was baseless speculation. Without any actual support, Zen Dream did not plan to voice anything.
“Something’s coming,” Copernicus suddenly said in a low growl. He kept his eyes ahead and held a long blade in his hand. Even though the light from the flashlight could not reach too far, he knew very well that two mini bosses had been created and were moving fast toward them.
Galileo took out his weapon at the same time and planned to start killing. Seeing that, Feng Bujue naturally followed suit and prepared to face the enemy.
At the magic circle outside of the mountains, the reason Feng Bujue had employed Death Poker directly was because he had speculated from the plot cinematic that most of the enemies in this scenario would be ghosts, and cold steel might not be that effective. But at that moment, from the way the illusions were formed and the monster that had appeared before, he thought that the magic circles were more western in basis and could be dealt with using normal weapons.
This would be an opportune moment to talk about Feng Bujue’s personal conception of ghosts, and they were mainly delineated into the strong and weak kind…
As a man who had seen many flicks, and please understand that the ’flicks’ here refers to horror flicks… he believed that eastern ghosts were stronger and more dangerous than western ghosts.
Following the setting of a normal horror story, for a normal person, a ghost with eastern flavor would be harder to deal with. Those without magical powers would not be able to touch the ghost’s body even if they were being strangled alive, and the ghosts in the horror movies often relied on other tools to kill like a fast-falling elevator, iron beams hanging from the rafter, a bathtub that can suck people into the nether world… Those souls could do anything—teleportation, possession, creating illusion, telekinesis—and the main characters of the horror movies almost always died.
Sadako, Kayako, Beauty Chu… and even the ghost couple from Out of the Dark would bring a strong sense of horror and despair.
The supernatural horror in the western setting came from a more physical damage. Everyone knew about things like vampires and werewolves. In the twenty-first century, they were attached to rich, tall, handsome, white, rich, pretty, petite, and love triangle tropes to fulfil many youngsters’ dreams of an inter-species romance. Their blood-drinking and howling to the moon somehow became adopted into a romantic idea.
Other than that, the spirits, demons, mummies, and cannibals were among the more common tropes. Speaking of western spirits, the first thing that popped into Feng Bujue’s mind was Casper, and the famous line that was repeated many times, ’I wish to be your friend.’ This thing really had a hard time being tied to danger and fear. Of course, there were also strong spirits like Freddy Krueger, but anyone who had seen the third movie in the series would know that this monster could be defeated in both the dream and real world, and it was not even that difficult to do. That was why in the series, all the victims were brainless kids, and only the main character had a relatively normal intellect and a slight ability to fight. If the film had an action-film main character, Freddy, this pedophile, would have been treated like those who bent over in prison to pick up the soap.
If one talked about cannibals, Feng Bujue was reminded of a unit type in Heroes of Might and Magic, a graceful and cruel murderer with high intelligence, and an ugly thing that appeared in many B movies with many human meat shields.
Mummies could refer to the dry carcass wrapped in bandages shown at the museum or a bald handsome man who had an affinity for sand magic.
Demons sounded like a powerful fighting race, and in terms of design, they were closest to eastern ghosts because they could inflict damage on a non-physical level, but their killing motive and method had a large difference from wronged spirits. Demons with some degree of power either transformed into middle-aged handsome men or beautiful women and ran circles around people’s lives for the sake of completing some kind of ’trade’. The final goal was of course to push the person to their death, and the lower grade demons were no different from normal serial killers, minus the fear of the law.
In any case, one could definitely say that Feng Bujue had a prejudice toward western ghosts. Even before he lost his sense of fear, he felt like, should he run into one, there would only be two options. If he could not win in a fight, he would be killed, or he would cut his enemy down with a saw. It was never a possibility in his mind that he would be cornered by a western ghost.
“I’ll take the one on the left,” Copernicus said as he morphed into a flash and charged forward.
Galileo did not say anything. He arched his legs and bounced five meters ahead. He leaped by kicking his feet against the surface of the tree. He flitted through the forest so fast that one would have a hard time catching his movement.
When the three from Regulation saw this, they were shocked, not from fear but from surprise. These two could be said to rival the best fighters from Regulations. A player that focused on sleuthing could move with such speed and expertise at level eighteen? It was more believable to say that they were smurf accounts of players with high fighting mastery.
They are indeed powerful… Feng Bujue thought to himself, and he followed in a hurry. By then, he had ninety percent confidence that these two were GMs. He ran ahead, wishing to take a closer look at just how powerful they were.