Zhan Rong loved adventures and visiting tourist spots. She loved capturing beautiful sceneries using her camera, or if the latter was not available, then her brain too would do. For beautiful places, she didn"t mind traveling for miles and traversing ragged or complicated paths. But like any normal person in this world, she hated journeying to bothersome or unworthwhile places and could find thousands of reasons to avoid making the trip. Like on the day she returned from the supposed mountain climbing and her driver suggested she visit her father. Since she knew the trip would only result in her blood pressure rising due to the annoying faces of her father, stepmother, and half-brother, she did not hesitate to dismiss the invitation. Otherwise, she would have gone there even if she was badly in need of rest and sleep.
Right now, the thing that suddenly bound itself to her wanted her to explore locations rich in paranormal stories, places that belonged to what she didn"t want to waste energy on.
However, as someone who already got a taste of what supernatural beings could do, would she dare brave failing the mission to see whether the mentioned consequences would be imposed on her or not?
That was a question that took quite a lot of time for her to consider.
"Maybe I should be glad that at least it"s not strictly specified for me to visit haunted places at night or wee hours?" she asked herself, a bitter smile hung on her lips.
At first, Zhan Rong tried to ignore the panel that would appear whenever the keyword crossed her mind. She acted like it didn"t exist. But knowing and not knowing could make a lot of difference. Because at the back of her mind, she knew that thing exists, and knew there was a task she must complete, she became restless. Her lovely but icy figure could be seen frequently staring at the void. In the end, to free herself from that feeling, she began to collect information about haunted places on the internet.
The next day, Zhan Rong left her house and went to some of the nearer haunted places. Without knowledge of how to collect that so-called Yin energy, she chose a spot near the exit and sat down. She stayed at every place for an hour.
Then reality hit her hard when she summoned the "system" and no progress showed on the screen. It made her face pale.
So she has to do this at night? At a time when the presence of dirty things would be running rampant?
Zhan Rong took a deep breath and almost considered dragging Fan Zheng and the rest with her so she could at least share the suffering with them. Didn"t they say friends.h.i.+p should be tested through fire? For a while, she pondered whether to bluff them that the haunting was still not over, her receiving a mission was a possibility that on the next mission, all of them would resume being haunted by that ghost, Li.
She had some blackmail materials for those seven people, no? And Fan Zheng should be willing to come with her since ghosts that he could exorcise might pop up in those locations.
A while later, Zhan Rong came back to her senses. Her rational told her that no matter how hopeless she felt, it would be wrong to drag innocent people into something that could be dangerous and life-threatening. She was not yet at the point of no return to stoop that low.
Days pa.s.sed.
Left with no choice, she spent the rest of the nights sneaking into eerie locations at night regardless of the odd gazes from the people from her house who were weirded out of her frequent night trips. She had not much communication with her friends too, either preoccupied with the mission or sleeping at daytime, dreaming of ghosts and scary stuff.
In just three days, she developed eyebags that worried many of her acquaintances.
"The one yesterday should be the tenth haunted spot..." Her eyes reddened, in anger and hopeless.
Glancing at the less than fifty percent progress on the floating panel, she knew she had been pitted. The top ten haunted places on the internet and records might be different from the ones the system was making her look for.
Once again, she found herself sighing.
If there was something good her current circ.u.mstances brought to her, it was that she started to fear ghosts less after discovering they couldn"t harm her, most likely due to the talisman given by Fan Zheng. She was reminded that she already experienced the worst, so there was no need to be that afraid. At least not to the point that she would immediately scurry out of the neighborhood upon catching glimpse of something floating. A ghost or two showing before her was way less scary than a battalion ambus.h.i.+ng her on all sides.
Though when thought in another angle, growing less scared... Did that make her situation less sh*ttier?
Anyways, Zhan Rong did not change her modus. Every night she went to haunted places. Abandoned schools, hospitals featured on urban stories, apartment buildings popular to spirit hunters…
She was so busy and focused on looking for ghosts that she didn"t know, the worried housekeepers, told Fan Zheng about her suspicious behaviors. The young man then tried to tail her, although, in the end, the two did not meet.
This happened on the fifth day when Zhan Rong visited an abandoned ancient-style mansion near a railway station. Fan Zheng lost her because he was targeted by a fairly strong spirit.
Done running from the first floor to the third, he encountered Zhao Ai who was actually staying in that house! Yes, that pretty girl from the village, the female lead!
"Wow, the plot sure knows how to create coincidences for these two." If Jiang Li was here, he would have sneered and said this.
In any case, the female lead who had just entered the real society with no whatsoever plan for her life nor clue on how hard for an innocent jobless minor to survive the city ended up taking refuge in that ownerless mansion. Before she met Fan Zheng, she did not even know that she had been cohabiting with ghosts for days, only that she was sharing living s.p.a.ces with c.o.c.kroaches and rats.
One could imagine Zhao Ai"s surprise upon locking eyes with the male lead there.
On why she didn"t use her money to rent a beds.p.a.ce or a small room, well... who knows? Perhaps she thought she had so little in her pocket so she rather used the money for food in order to not starve while looking for a job?