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1116 You Sure You Want to Challenge the Most Difficult Scenario? 3 in 1

“I also do not understand why our comedy broke records for horror films, but I swear we meant to produce a comedy from the very beginning,” Chen Ge said with a bitter smile.As the saying goes, one aims for the goose but hits the gander.

The original author had died and become a ghost, but he was very satisfied with Chang Gu’s short and said that Chang Gu had captured the essence of his work. The original author was satisfied, the director was satisfied, the audience was satisfied, and the film and television company was satisfied; everyone was satisfied. As strange as Chen Ge felt this whole thing was, he had slowly learned to accept the truth. “Director Luo, the short that we uploaded is just a compressed concept short. If your friend wishes to cooperate with us further, we can sit down and talk about it.”

“I believe that is his intention. I will give you his contact information in a minute. You guys can discuss this among yourselves.”

“Thank you.”

“Make use of this opportunity. The popularity of a film will be very good advertisement for the theme park. If the ensuing web series can maintain this popularity, it will be far more effective than any conventional advertising method.” Director Luo ended the call. At that moment, the legend of this comedy-cum-horror flick was still spreading on the internet.

Initially, Chen Ge’s intention was to use the haunted house’s popularity to give the short some traction, trying to attract one or two investment companies, but to his shock and surprise, in just a few hours, the popularity of the short started to overwhelm the popularity of the haunted house. Many viewers who had never been interested in the haunted house and horror games became interested in it. After all, it was rare for a haunted house to have the ability to produce a comedy short.

A comedy produced by a haunted house even became a gag on the internet. The many ‘unintentional’ takes became instant classics and were soon included in the educational syllabus for horror movie production. This kind of accidental horror caused the viewers to have a hard time sleeping at night. The more they thought about it, the more uncomfortable they felt. As a result, more and more people started to discuss this ‘comedy’.

The source material was first a good one. The description of the clues and the psychological changes of the main characters were well done and to the point. Chang Gu’s direction and production were uniquely perfect as well, and the unilateral plotlines of both the real world and the nightmare world could elicit various symbolic readings of the analogies and metaphors. To conclude, this web short produced by Chen Ge’s haunted house exploded on the internet, and many users anticipated the sequel.

Even though he had not gotten a wink of sleep that night, Chen Ge was still quite energetic. He and Chang Gu rotated through the various platforms. The data for the short for all platforms was still continuing to rise. The employees at the haunted house were very excited as well. Even though they still did not quite understand how popular this short was, they were satisfied and very happy when they saw themselves appear on the screen. The employees chatted among themselves, citing each of their cameos. Chen Ge, who overheard them, almost had a heart attack. Many employees came to join the shoot during the recording process. They used multiple methods to enter the shot, methods that one could not imagine—for example, a floating head inside a glass of water, a small shadow under the table, a severed hand that floated behind the door, and so on.

One would miss these details unless one took a close look at the short. As the popularity on the internet continued to increase, to prevent an unnecessary exposure, Chen Ge decided to directly and openly admit that the haunted house had hidden one hundred easter eggs in the short and challenged the viewers to find them all. With the popularity at an all-time high, Chen Ge decided to stop ‘pretending’ and told the viewers directly that all the extremely scary details and frames that they saw were Easter Eggs that were purposely left in by the haunted house. That statement attracted yet another batch of fresh viewers.

“This has become viral too suddenly. I am totally not prepared for it.” Chen Ge saw his mailbox that was exploding with messages at the back end of the platform. Some people planned to group up and visit the set, and some planned to enter a haunted house for the first time tomorrow. The sole reason was to see the main male character in person. There was even a talent agency that dropped Chen Ge a message stating their intention of offering the Pen Spirit a contract. There were so many messages that Chen Ge could not run through all of them. He glanced at the sky that was getting bright, and he put the phone away. “Yet another sleepless night.”

He got a quick wink and hurried to get up from bed to prepare for work. Today, Xu Wan and Xiao Gu and the rest came early. Once they saw Chen Ge, they rushed over immediately. That was especially so for Xiao Gu; he was holding the phone and stammered nervously, “Boss! Did we really produce this video? When I saw the video on my recommended list last night, I was stunned beyond words.”

“Yes, it was indeed produced by our haunted house.”

“When did you have the time to do something like this? This is too impressive!”

“What do you think I was doing every night not sleeping for the past few days? To produce this film, I have exhausted so much stamina and a lot of time, but thankfully, from the result, the sacrifice was worth it.” Chen Ge stopped answering Xiao Gu’s questions because he did not know how to spin the story anymore. He ushered his workers into the dressing room to help them with the make-up and ordered them to prepare to welcome the day’s visitors.

At 9 am, New Century Park opened for business. The visitors rushed into the gates. When they were queuing up, the comedy made by the haunted house became the central topic. Two groups of people who did not know each other would be able to engage in titillating conversation because of it.

“The number of visitors today is even greater than the previous days. What is going on?” Uncle Xu was worried that there might be a problem, so he hurried to find Chen Ge.

“Uncle, you do not use the internet much, do you? We uploaded yet another advertisement last night. The effect is not bad.” Chen Ge was outside the haunted house helping with the ticket sales. Seeing the visitors coming to visit his haunted house, joy emerged sincerely from his heart. However, he made sure that he was not blinded by this joy. While he was selling the tickets, he was paying close attention to potential troublemakers among the crowd.

The number of visitors coming to challenge the four-star scenario, School of the Afterlife, had tripled or even quadrupled. The scenario could hold at most twenty people at the same time, and that day, almost every session was full. This had naturally attracted Chen Ge’s attention. The visitors who were there because of the internet short were mostly newcomers to the theme park, so they needed to start their challenge at one-star scenarios. Therefore, most of the visitors who could challenge the School of the Afterlife would be experienced visitors.

There was nothing wrong with this in itself, but Chen Ge noticed that there was a specific batch of people who kept repeating the process of buying the tickets to challenge the same four-star scenario, the School of the Afterlife. It appeared like they would not stop until they had cleared this scenario. After paying a heavy price of their sanity, money, and physique, this batch of people managed to explore about seventy percent of the scenario, but of course, they were still far away from clearing the actual scenario.

To protect the other innocent visitors, Chen Ge pulled the few most difficult missions out from the drawing box, missions like finding all thirteen oil paintings, searching for the club president of the Red Specter’s Club, exposing the secrets behind the old headmaster’s disappearance, and so on. These missions were specifically left for the troublemakers. Normal visitors would almost never have the chance to draw these certain-death mission.

These people got missions that ranged from simple to medium difficulty, but even so, their mental tenacity was still seriously tested. After the last of them fainted, there would be members among the visitor group who escorted them out. It was clear from Chen Ge’s perspective that this was a group of people who were attempting to tackle his haunted house, but they had seriously underestimated the difficulty of Chen Ge’s haunted house.

After this group of people who kept challenging the School of the Afterlife left, the same afternoon, they were replaced by another group of people. They appeared to be sharing the same information. The map and the location of the scare points that had been collected by the previous batch using their ‘lives’ provided a great amount of help to the latter group. This batch of strange visitors had attracted the attention of the employees as well. Ol’ Zhou even came over to Chen Ge to ask whether they should increase the difficulty of the scenario.

Chen Ge directly rejected Ol’ Zhou’s suggestion. He told Ol’ Zhou that only by dangling the possibility of clearing the scenario before the players would they continue to play the game. It was a simple theory of the donkey and the carrot. But that was just a front taken by Chen Ge. What he was really thinking was that he would let this group of people try the School of the Afterlife again and again until they let their guard down, and then he would surprise them with the announcement of the new scenario, the ghost fetus.

The haunted house began its operation at 9 am and closed for the day at 6 pm. Throughout this period, the scenario for the School of the Afterlife was never empty even for a minute. Even though the group of people had thrown their lives into challenging the scenario, they ultimately failed to clear it. But they appeared to have managed to compile the full map of the school’s eastern and western campus. With the map in mind and a clear marking of the various scare points’ locations, as long as they were not that unlucky to draw any mission related to the hidden scenario, clearing the scenario was only a matter of time. Dusk had already fallen. After the visitors left, Chen Ge sat on the steps of the haunted house alone.

“The popularity of the comedy produced by the haunted house is still climbing, and this is just a conceptual short. If we really manage to produce a sequential web series, not only the comedy itself, the film set at New Century Park will become famous through it as well. Perhaps Ma Feng has sensed fear from this, which is why he’s so desperate to clear my scenario, to stifle the haunted house’s wave of popularity.” Chen Ge studied the numbers on the income ledger, and the corner of his lips could not help but curve upward.

The School of the Afterlife could fit twenty people at the same time, and a session would take around forty minutes, but most of the time, rarely could the visitors hold on until the full forty minutes, so in reality, a real one session would last around thirty minutes. The ticket price per person was forty RMB, so one session could earn Chen Ge eight hundred RMB, and in that day alone, the scenario of the School of the Afterlife had been used twenty times. Normally, this kind of four-star scenario was rarely challenged. In fact, just finding people to fill up a group was hard enough. Most of the income normally came from the lower star scenarios, and these higher difficulty scenarios were prepared for the expert haunted house aficionados. Compared to using them as a money-making machine, they were more of a symbolic presence to Chen Ge’s haunted house.

“I sure hope this gang of people will return tomorrow.” After giving the place a quick clean, Chen Ge carried his backpack and arrived at the mannequin studio. He paid the boss and then directly chased the boss out of the place. He turned to lock the door and quickly summoned out his ghost employees and had them help him produce the mannequins of the monsters from the black fog. They worked until dawn. Chen Ge then called Tang Jun to drive Bus 104 over to transport all the manufactured black fog monsters back to the haunted house.

When Chen Ge returned to the haunted house, he was told that Chang Gu had been hit by new inspiration, and he was prepared to shoot a new short. That did not bother Chen Ge. The latter summoned some of the employees who were not involved in the shooting to help him decorate the ghost fetus’ scenario. After inspecting the scenario several times, Chen Ge finally left the scenario after making sure that there were no hidden threats lying around the scenario at around 4 am.

“Now that the ghost fetus’ scenario can open for visitation any time, I wonder which batch of visitor will be so lucky.” After three hours of sleep, Chen Ge was woken by the alarm that he had set. He sat and observed the rising sun and stretched lazily. “If only life could continue like this.”

After taking a cold shower, Chen Ge changed his clothes and opened the gates of the haunted house. The theme park opened punctually at 9 am. The visitors entered the park, and the place was instantly filled up by the noise and ruckus of the crowd. A long queue had already been formed at the haunted house. Some of the old players had run to the resting hall to occupy a seat and found their familiar buddies to start an intense discussion on the latest guide that they had come up with. Ever since Chen Ge obtained the black phone, the haunted house had accompanied these visitors for quite some time. More and more people had fallen in love with this place, and the haunted house had left lasting marks on their lives. Many of their bittersweet memories could be traced back to this theme park.

Most of people’s lives were flat and uninteresting, but at Chen Ge’s haunted house, they were given a glimpse into a different version of life. Group after group of visitors was welcomed into the haunted house, but to Chen Ge’s surprise, the batch of people who repeated the challenge of School of the Afterlife the day before did not show up again. Just as Chen Ge was wandering whether they had already given up, a shocked scream came from the resting hall.

“What is going on?” Chen Ge was quick to walk over. Many old visitors recognized him so when they saw the boss came over. They automatically opened a path for him to walk through.

“Boss Chen! Quick, you have to take a look at our haunted house’s app. Someone has started a thread saying that they want to challenge and clear our haunted House’s most difficult scenario. It is the thread with the most replies and views!” A student from Jiujiang Medical University ran over to Chen Ge, holding his phone out to show the thread. There was indeed a new thread that appeared inside the app. It was commented on by a fifty-cent army, and that made it so that the thread would always remain at the top of the posts.

The content of the thread itself was incredibly incendiary. First, they started with the admission that Chen Ge’s haunted house was scary, but it was not as scary as many people made it out to be. It was all an exaggeration. The thread stated that most of the visitors had been lied to and misdirected. That was a quintessential start for a drama post. In essence, it said that Chen Ge’s haunted house was scary, but it did not scare them. Even though they had not visited the place themselves, that was how they felt.

The thread gained support from many other haunted house owners in the business. They helped to analyze Chen Ge’s haunted house from many different angles, and they came up with the same conclusion. Chen Ge’s haunted house did not live up to its name; it only had twenty percent real ability and eighty percent hype and sensationalism.

The fact that Chen Ge’s haunted house enjoyed such high popularity was a disrespect to those who ran their business with heart and hard work. It was unfair to them, so they were going to join forces to expose Chen Ge and his haunted house to the public. The whole thread was written like a real call to arms, and it indeed had its effect of getting one’s blood boiling, but then if one just thought about it, most of those people had not even visited Chen Ge’s haunted house before, so how did they come to this absurd conclusion? Via their super powerful imagination?

The thread not only appeared on the haunted house app, but it had popped up at the same time on most other platforms. A fifty cent army had been hired to repeatedly comment and maintain the multiple threads’ popularity and relevance. Interestingly enough, the platforms where these threads mushroomed were exactly the platforms where Chen Ge’s haunted house’s fans were most active. Once the threads were posted, they garnered various sarcastic responses and caustic replies. After all, the last person who made this kind of claim was still lying in the hospital.

However, it was clear that whoever was behind this was well prepared. They did not respond to the fans’ mocking words. They seemed to be biding their time to prove the fans wrong. They had done all the preparation that they could, and that was the confidence behind their courage to dare to post inflammatory posts like these at platforms where Chen Ge’s haunted house’s fans were most active. Their aim was for those who supported Chen Ge’s haunted house to see their thread and then clear the haunted house’s most difficult scenario before these people’s eyes. That way, they would have won back their face, they would have proven themselves right, and they would have broken the legendary record of no one being able to clear Chen Ge’s haunted house.

When he saw all that set up, the name ‘Ma Feng’ instantly floated up in Chen Ge’s mind. This man’s method of doing things was definitely different from Jiang Jiu’s. He was swift, fast, accurate, and deadly. All the cards had been laid on the table, and when given an opening, he would strike for the jugular.

“He should have prepared for a long time.” Just as Chen Ge finished reading the thread, another problem started outside the haunted house. Nine visitors blocked the entrance of the door. They refused to queue up like the rest of the visitors and requested to see Chen Ge. Of the nine visitors, there were both males and females. They were dressed differently and had different accents. They appeared to come from different parts of the country, but Chen Ge did manage to recognize two of them.

One of them was called Shang Guan Qing Hong, the boss of the haunted house at Xin Hai; the other was Qin Guang, the streamer who was the first to compete with Chen Ge on the livestreaming platform. When he saw the two of them, Chen Ge felt quite happy to see their familiar faces. He walked out from the resting hall to welcome them. “Long time no see, guys. I am quite busy at theme park, so I did not have the time to go to the hospital to visit you. I am so sorry.”

Just the sound of Chen Ge’s voice was enough to make Qin Guang grit his teeth in anger. He was about to fire something back when he was held back by Shang Guan Qing Hong from the side.

“Boss Chen, you are being too kind. Today, we just wanted to visit your haunted house. There is no problem with that, right?” Shang Guan Qing Hong had once been a victim of Chen Ge’s sharp tongue, so he tried to not give Chen Ge any chance to speak to rope them into more traps. “I have the top designers and creators of many haunted houses from all over the country with me. We are all very curious about your haunted house. We wish to see what kind of haunted house is hailed as the scariest haunted house in the whole country.”

“I would not say my haunted house is the scariest in the country, but a mutual exchange within the industry is a good thing. We can always learn from each other.” Chen Ge was cautious with his words, using the term exchange. He had memorized the faces of these few visitors. “It is fine that you wish to challenge the scenario, but I have a rule at my haunted house. All visitors have to start their challenge from one-star scenario, and then after clearing that, you can only challenge the two-star scenario. If you wish to challenge the most difficult four-star scenario, you will have to clear the previous scenarios first.”

“Challenge? Where does your confidence come from? We already told you we are here to visit, not to challenge. We give an inch and you take a mile?” A young man who was fashionably dressed gave Chen Ge a side eye. “Unlike you, the rest of us do not have the time to play with you.”

“The rules that I have set are for the visitors’ own good. Only by slowly increasing the visitors’ threshold for fear can one prevent the occurrence of accidents to the maximum degree.” Chen Ge was trying hard to ‘persuade’ them, but this persuasion sounded like Chen Ge had no confidence in the group.

“That won’t be necessary. The reason we are here today is to visit the most difficult scenario that you have. We just want to see what is so special about this haunted house that is so popular on the internet.” This time, it was a man who was wearing a pair of sunglasses who spoke. More and more visitors started to gather at the entrance of the haunted house. Some of them even took out their phones to start recording.

Hearing what the man with the sunglasses had to say, Chen Ge uttered with plain difficulty on his face. “But that is against the rules...”

“Rules are manmade. We came from so far not to visit a one-star scenario. We are all experienced members of this industry. Don’t use the tricks that you apply on your visitors to trick us. We are not so easily fooled,” the man in the sunglasses groused with impatience. He appeared to be melting under the sun, and he shifted uncomfortably.

“Boss Chen, is it because you lack confidence that you have been trying to find excuse to deny us entry?” The man who was fashionably dressed smiled. “Do not worry, we will be sure to save some face for you.”

Since the exchange had reached this point, it was unsuitable for Chen Ge to continue to say no anymore. He looked around him, and he realized that many of visitors were armed with the camera phones and were recording their exchange. Some of them were innocent visitors who were attracted by this drama, but Chen Ge believed that part of them were people sent over by the futuristic theme park because Chen Ge realized that there was a live update of their exchange on the haunted house app and the many other platforms, and the comments were all extremely slanderous toward Chen Ge and his haunted house. It felt as if someone was purposely leading the wind of the conversation.

“Since you people insist on challenging my most difficult scenario, I have no choice.” Chen Ge turned to face the cameras. “I will need everyone here to be my witness. I have already tried to persuade them. They have insisted on challenging the most difficult scenario.”

“You sure know how to spin a yarn. Are you going to let us in or not? To visit your cr*ppy haunted house, we need to be subjected to a lecture from you, huh? This is unbelievable!” The person who spoke was a woman with an explosive temper. There was a tattoo of a black skull running down her arm. She looked like a person one would not wish to cross at any time.

“I am doing this for you own good.” Chen Ge stood before the nine people. “I need to check with all of you one last time—do you really insist on challenging the most difficult scenario at my haunted house?”

“Yes, we do! Stop wasting our time!” The nine visitors urged him on. They appeared to be more anxious than Chen Ge. It was like they could not wait to get this started.

“Okay!” Chen Ge nodded in agreement, and then his tone suddenly changed as he turned to all the phone cameras and said loudly. “Since we are all in the same haunted house industry, a pure visitation is so boring, right? So, how about we add a bet on top of it? If you successfully clear the most difficult scenario that I have at my haunted house, I will add a statement on all of my social accounts and even order a custom banner to hang over this haunted house’s entrance that my own haunted house is not as scary as the rest of yours, and I will admit that most of the popularity of my haunted house came from sensationalism and produced hype.”

Chen Ge’s haunted house was incredibly popular on the internet. If Chen Ge did something like that, it could really bring some serious income to the other business owners. This caused the other owners to be attracted by Chen Ge’s offer of a bet. Only Shang Guan Qing Hong felt that something was not right, but before he could say anything, the other eight had already agreed to take Chen Ge up on his challenge.

“Do not hurry to agree so soon. Because if you lose, you have to hang a banner of my haunted house’s name over the entrance of your own haunted house and admit that my haunted house does live up to its name on the internet.” Chen Ge looked at the gang of people with a smile on his face. The few communicated among themselves for a while. They had the map of the School of the Afterlife and all the scare points in their possession. Other than that, they had also spent the whole previous day looking over the videos that had been secretly taken in the scenario. They had gotten used to the scary atmosphere. From how they saw it, there was nothing stopping them from clearing this scenario.

“We agree. That is a very fair bet.”

“All of you are respected members of the industry from big cities. I believe you will not go back on your words, right?” The corners of Chen Ge’s lips curled up into a smile. He turned to face all the cameras and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Come on in then. Follow me. You are going to challenge the four-star scenario—ghost fetus! Inside the deepest part of the black fog, there are nine children waiting for you.”

“Ghost fetus?” Shang Guang Qing Hong and someone inside the group shared a look. They wanted to make sure that they had not heard wrong. That was indeed what Chen Ge had said, right?