Chapter 68: Midnight Ticket Booth
After returning from West City Private School last night, Chen Ge had already looked over today's three daily tasks. The simple task was to inspect for safety hazards, the normal difficulty task was to find a suitable location to expand the haunted house, and the final nightmare-level task was to find the other person living in the room.
Flipping through the black phone, if he wanted to maximize benefits, he'd definitely choose the nightmare-level task. But based on his previous two experiences, nightmare tasks had specific time requirements, usually around midnight. Once that time passed, the task would most likely be considered an automatic failure.
"No need to gamble. Better to play it safe." Chen Ge tapped the screen to claim the normal difficulty daily task.
"Normal difficulty task: You have obtained the opportunity to expand your haunted house. Please find a suitable location for expansion as soon as possible!"
This was the first time Chen Ge's horror house was being expanded. He didn't know how to go about it, and asking the black phone yielded no hints.
"Not even a beginner's tutorial. I'll have to figure it out myself." Chen Ge re-examined the haunted house panel. Two things caught his attention.
The ghost team member slot remained empty, indicating that Zhang Ya and Yin Xiaoxiao hadn't become members of the horror house yet.
As for Yin Xiaoxiao, it might be due to insufficient affinity. As for Zhang Ya, Chen Ge didn't dare hope for her to join the horror house—he'd be satisfied if she just stopped thinking about killing him every day.
The second thing that drew Chen Ge's attention was the haunted house expansion conditions column. The originally gray text had turned red. When he touched it, a line of text appeared on the phone screen: "Please select the location of the door."
"Turning red means it can be activated. As for selecting the door's location..."
Chen Ge had leased the entire underground parking lot, which was very spacious. But the downside was that the parking lot entrance was outside the amusement park, making it inconvenient to go back and forth. So he planned to dig a passage from the haunted house straight down to the underground.
In the amusement park, underground structures weren't allowed near large rides like roller coasters and Ferris wheels. But since the haunted house was in a remote location, it wasn't subject to this restriction. The area beneath Chen Ge's building was the parking lot.
Holding the black phone, Chen Ge went to the entrance of the first-floor Zombie Resurrection Night. After acquiring the one-star horror scenes "The Butcher" and "Midnight Escape," Zombie Resurrection Night was rarely used anymore.
"I'll put the door right next to Zombie Resurrection Night. If I run out of space later, I can replace that scene." Chen Ge thought it through carefully. He used a marker pen to outline an area on the floor beside Zombie Resurrection Night. Only after finishing did he suddenly realize he had no way to communicate with the black phone. Ever since he got it, he'd been passively receiving tasks and rewards.
"Did I miss something?" Chen Ge flipped through the pages again. When he tried double-tapping the phone's home screen, the haunted house image that served as the background slowly enlarged. Its structure was identical to his own horror house, including the internal horror scenes and room layouts.
"Could it be that I make the selection here?"
Chen Ge found the Zombie Resurrection Night scene on the home screen and tapped the ground next to it. A message instantly popped up on the phone screen: "Are you sure you want to set the door's location?"
"Confirm."
"Please select the expansion direction."
"Downward."
After making his choice, the home screen returned to normal, and Chen Ge received several more notifications.
"Keep expanding, and your horror house will be able to shelter more homeless souls and harvest more screams. Congratulations on completing the normal difficulty daily task. You have received the task reward—one free horror roulette spin!"
"Site selected, first expansion successful. Congratulations on obtaining the special building—Midnight Ticket Booth (Incomplete)!"
"Midnight Ticket Booth (Incomplete): There is a one-in-a-thousand chance of attracting special 'visitors.' They are different from the rest and may become your allies."
Chen Ge read every message on the black phone carefully. The daily task had rewarded him with one roulette spin. The uncertainty of this reward was too great—collecting a hundred screams was needed to exchange for one spin. Based on the black phone's principle of equivalent exchange, there had to be good stuff in the roulette.
But the key issue was that his luck in certain areas scared even himself. What if he ended up drawing another love letter?
If two female ghosts fought over him, they might actually split him in half—not in the sense of spending certain days with one and other days with the other, but by cutting his body neatly and symmetrically into two halves.
Chen Ge could already picture it: two female ghosts holding bloodstained knives, arguing fiercely over the ownership of his head and torso.
"Can't afford that. Can't afford that."
Putting the roulette aside for now, Chen Ge turned his attention to the other reward—the incomplete Midnight Ticket Booth.
His haunted house had never had a dedicated ticket booth. After all, before he got the black phone, the horror house had at most a dozen or so visitors a week. There was no need to build one.
"The black phone solved that problem for me. But what does 'one-in-a-thousand chance of attracting special visitors' mean? Does 'special visitors' refer to ghosts?"
Chen Ge went to the haunted house entrance to take a look. The area near the guardrail was still the same as before, with nothing unusual. "Probably like when I unlocked the Midnight Escape scene last time—it'll only appear after midnight."
With the task completed and the rewards received, Chen Ge stopped worrying about it.
He cleaned up while waiting for midnight to arrive. Although the mirror monster had been dealt with, that didn't mean the gradually decreasing numbers in the mirror had disappeared.
Wielding a rag, Chen Ge rolled up his sleeves and roughly cleaned the fake blood off the bathroom walls.
He was in a hurry to clean up the blood because of a small incident that afternoon. A visitor had an urgent need to use the restroom. Chen Ge led him to the bathroom, but when he opened the door, the guy saw the blood-covered walls and refused to go in. He held it in and ran out of the haunted house, his face turning green from the effort.
Scare people where you're supposed to scare them, but provide good service where you're not supposed to scare them. That was something Chen Ge's father had once said to him, and he always kept it in mind.
Around 11 p.m., Chen Ge finished cleaning up all the blood and fixed the bathroom door. After that, he stood in front of the mirror, phone in hand.
He casually scrolled through his personal page on the short video platform. His follower count was steadily increasing. The short videos he'd posted were being widely shared, and advertisers had even started reaching out to him.
"Short videos and live streaming are worth putting effort into. They're my main form of promotion."
Watching the time, when it reached 11:59 p.m., Chen Ge put away his phone and stood in front of the mirror. Just like when he'd first taken on a nightmare task, he locked the door and turned off all the lights in the room.