Chapter 100: Iron-Boned Fei Youliang
*Slap!*
The phone slipped from his fingers and hit the floor, the voice from the other end still faintly audible.
"Youliang's phone isn't going through. What did you run into in there?"
"Xiao Zhu? Can you hear me?"
"Zhu Jianing? Are you okay? Say something!"
Zhu Jianing could hear him, of course, but at that moment, he couldn't speak.
His eyes rolled back, and he slammed against the partition with a thud, his body twitching slightly, unable to stand no matter how hard he tried.
"I warned you not to take photos or videos in the haunted house, but you wouldn't listen." Chen Ge took off his mask and stuffed it into his pocket, looking down at Zhu Jianing sprawled on the floor. He felt that the liability waiver was truly a great invention.
His method of scaring people was different from other haunted houses. In a normal one, actors dressed as ghosts would hide in blind spots, suddenly jumping out with a shriek to startle visitors.
But Chen Ge's approach was unique. He built up the atmosphere to its peak, then waited for the visitors to seek out the scares themselves. The entire process was silent and impossible to guard against.
Being scared even with a psychological expectation left people like Zhu Jianing unable to release their fear—it was like having a chunk of ice stuck in their throat, unable to breathe, cold to the bone.
Chen Ge stepped out of the third stall, turned off the phone on the floor, and slipped it into Zhu Jianing's pocket. Then he dragged him out of the restroom and dumped him in the hallway.
"Still twitching? He's breathing, so he should be fine." Chen Ge pinched Zhu Jianing's philtrum, waiting until his eyes returned to normal before stopping. "Can you hear me? Where did the guy who came in with you go?"
After a long silence with no response, Chen Ge decided to leave him there for now. "Don't wander off, or you might run into a real ghost."
Afraid that scaring the other person might cause problems too, he took off the Skull Crusher doctor's coat and held it in his hand.
"This guy ran out of the girls' dormitory, so his companion should be in that direction too." Chen Ge ran toward one fork of the path, but after searching every room, he couldn't find Fei Youliang anywhere.
"Where did he go?" He stopped in the room with the Ouija board, where the pen wrapped in transparent tape had snapped again and fallen to the floor.
"There's no sign of a struggle in here. Where could that guy with glasses have gone?" Chen Ge left the girls' dormitory and stood at the center of the fork. "Could he have gone that way?"
The other fork led to the deep well and the school office area. The ground was uneven, and after passing a few office cubicles, Chen Ge finally found Fei Youliang.
This guy was in worse shape than Zhu Jianing. There was foam at the corners of his mouth, his glasses were shattered, and eerily, he had collapsed very close to the deep well at the end of the hallway, one hand resting on the well's edge as if he was about to be dragged in.
"What happened to this guy? It looks like he didn't just mess with the Ouija board!" There were no surveillance cameras in the haunted house, so Chen Ge had no idea what had happened to Fei Youliang.
Seeing his pitiful state, Chen Ge compassionately performed CPR on him.
"This guy's symptoms are similar to He Shan's from before. Let's get him out first."
With great effort, Chen Ge dragged both of them to the exit.
Lifting the wooden board, he had just pulled them to the first floor of the haunted house when he heard arguing outside. It seemed like people from the Qinguang Studio were about to force their way in.
"What a hassle." Chen Ge dragged both visitors out of the haunted house, one in each hand.
The sunlight hit him as he tossed Fei Youliang and Zhu Jianing in front of the remaining Qinguang Studio members, glancing at them. "What's all the noise about?"
Two lively people had gone in, and now they came out half-dead, one with foam at the mouth—was he scared into vomiting?
The surrounding tourists collectively stepped back, clearing a space.
"Xiao Zhu! Youliang!" The Qinguang Studio members rushed over to help the two young men up.
Zhu Jianing was better off; he had come to his senses, though his legs were still a bit weak.
Fei Youliang was in serious condition. He wasn't exactly unconscious—his eyes were open—but he wasn't fully awake either. He didn't respond when called, his expression was blank, and foam still lingered at the corner of his mouth.
"What did you do to them!" The short, middle-aged man demanded angrily, confronting Chen Ge.
"You're asking me? Who am I supposed to ask?" Chen Ge genuinely didn't know. By the time he got there, both of them were already too scared to tell north from south.
"We talked on the phone. Xiao Zhu said your employee stepped on Youliang's shoulder! How dare you attack visitors in the haunted house? Do you have any professional ethics!"
"Which eye of yours saw my employee attack him?" Chen Ge glanced at the two people sprawled on the ground. "You can go to the police station for fingerprint verification. I guarantee no one touched any part of those visitors except their hands."
"Stop arguing. I'll call the park doctor. Saving them is the priority." Xu Shu's head was spinning as he called the park's medical staff.
"They're in this state, and you still won't admit it? Good thing we came prepared!" The short, middle-aged man opened Fei Youliang's backpack, took out the laptop inside, and removed the wireless camera from Fei Youliang's chest and the pickup mic attached to the backpack strap.
"You've got quite a bit of gear." Chen Ge had spotted the camera while dragging the "bodies" inside, and he had a rough idea of what these people were up to, but he didn't take it to heart. Other haunted houses banned filming to prevent leaks of scene designs—creating a complete, large-scale horror set was extremely expensive, and the internal layout was a trade secret. But that didn't matter to Chen Ge. He just needed to complete trial tasks to unlock even more terrifying scenes. In terms of scene update speed, no haunted house could match him.
In his view, these people spreading videos of the haunted house was a form of alternative publicity, since his place was sorely lacking in exposure right now.
"You won't be laughing in a bit. I'll keep the video of your employee assaulting a visitor. This isn't over!" The short, middle-aged man's voice was loud, as if deliberately trying to attract the attention of the surrounding tourists.
"We're professionals. There's absolutely no such thing as assaulting visitors." Chen Ge walked over to the computer. He was actually curious about what Fei Youliang had encountered in the haunted house and why he ended up collapsed by the deep well.
The short, middle-aged man set up the computer and started playing the video they had just recorded.
The screen was pitch black, but a buzzing static could be heard.
At this point, Fei Youliang hadn't entered the haunted house yet. The pickup mic had been attached in advance, but the camera hadn't been taken out, so only the static was audible, with no visuals.
After a few seconds, Chen Ge's voice came through the computer.
"Don't say I didn't warn you. The last person who said that walked in and was carried out."
Then Fei Youliang's dismissive laughter followed: "With that said, I want to try it even more."
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