CH 53.1

“Actually, we didn’t get a room to sleep.”

Bai Lixin stood at the doorway and said with embarrassment and, as if to make a confirmation, he asked emphatically, “Right?”

Dijia calmly entered the door, hooked his fingers on the door frame, and silently closed the door.

He inserted the card into the card slot next to him, and suddenly, the roof of the otherwise dimly lit room swirled with colorful hearts.

The hearts were projected onto the floor and everywhere else.

In addition to the hearts, the room was suddenly filled with soothing love-oriented music.

Bai Lixin, “……”

A laugh escaped from Dijia’s mouth, “Actually, there’s enough time for a nap.”

Bai Lixin slapped his face, “On second thought, my teammates are still suffering, so I don’t deserve to sleep without unraveling the truth of this world.”

Dijia, “……”

Bai Lixin circled around the room and was surprised to find that the room had windows.

He went to the window and glanced out.

It was all dark and foggy outside.

He opened the taskbar and the time in the top right corner said 11 p.m.

The layout of the room was very much like that of modern times. The hotel had a five-star standard with ensuites, a study and amenities like a gym.

At the end of the song, the music went back on a single loop.

Bai Lixin finished walking around the room and when he turned his head back, he found that Dijia had sat down on the sofa at some point.

He had casually crossed his legs, his head was gently tilted to the side, and his elbows were supported on the arms of the sofa. His hand propped his head and his mouth was hidden behind the palm of his hand.

The black aura that had been hovering around him had subsided, and his fierce, grim gaze was withdrawn as he turned to stare at Bai Lixin with a thoughtful expression.

There were alternating red and pink heart-shaped lights falling on him. The warm, soft light spilled down, shining on the man’s pale face and the dark pupils of his eyes, making his gaze look extremely ambiguous.

Seeing Bai Lixin look over, Dijia’s eyes calmly swept over the other man’s body, starting from head to toe and not sparing any corner.

When looking at Bai Lixin’s slender waist and legs, Bai Lixin could even feel the other party’s gaze moving at a deliberately slower pace.

S419M: [Lord Host.]

Bai Lixin secretly took a deep breath and turned his head away, but he could still feel the other party’s eyes wandering over his body.

Hearing s419m’s call, he coughed lightly: [What’s wrong?]

[Lord God’s eyes…] S419M paused, searching for an appropriate wording: [ Are you going to drive?]

Bai Lixin’s hand on the windowsill trembled slightly, and before he could say anything, he heard the escape system retort: [This is not a highway. What kind of car would they drive?]

S419M tsked: [Not on the highway, it is better than the highway. Do you think you can dare go on the highway with that look in your eyes?]

Bai Lixin: [……]

How about cutting the connection with S419M, this system has been ruined.

The room was large yet unusually narrow.

An inexplicable sense of oppression pressed in on him from all sides.

Bai Lixin even felt that the gaze was everywhere.

He was clearly wearing clothes, but he felt as though those things had been swept away in the other party’s gaze.

Bai Lixin tightened his waist and abdomen, and hurriedly walked to the desk.

The music kept playing, the temperature grew hotter and hotter, and Bai Lixin even felt one pink bubble after another appear before his eyes.

Dijia’s low husky chuckle rang out in the air.

Bai Lixin’s head was lowered as he raised his eyes to steal a glance at the man sitting on the sofa, only to find that the man had turned his head and his eyes were directed at him.

His breath hitched, and he quickly withdrew his gaze.

Where Bai Lixin could not see, Dijia’s black pupils slowly began to fill with blood.

His long legs stepped on the ground as he slowly walked towards Bai Lixin.

Bai Lixin heard the sound and raised his head to look over.

After Dijia had appeared in his ghost form, there was always a blurred black mist that surrounded his body.

Now that the black mist had faded away, Bai Lixin could see what the other party was wearing.

Dijia was dressed simply. He wore a white shirt inside and a neat black suit outside.

The white shirt was neatly buttoned up to the top, and he had on a royal blue tie.

As he walked towards Bai Lixin, Dijia grabbed the tie with one hand, tugged at it slightly, and untied it easily.

The man was like an ascetic male god.

Bai Lixin gulped.

Something was wrong.

Even if he knew the other party was Dijia, he shouldn’t feel this way no matter how seductive the other party was.

The music grew more and more euphonious, and an extremely faint sweet fragrance wafted into Bai Lixin’s nostrils.

Bai Lixin’s somewhat dazed expression suddenly became stunned as he looked at the flower petals on the bed.

Those flower petals seemed to have been mixed with something that would add to the fun.

Bai Lixin’s cheeks had already begun to burn a little, and he used the back of his hand to cool himself down. He pointed to those flower petals and said to Dijia, “Those flower petals have…..”

The hand was suddenly clenched.

The moment the fingers held his wrist, Bai Lixin was surprised to find that Dijia’s body, which should have been cold, was hot.

His body was tugged up by the man’s strength, and the scene before Bai Lixin’s eyes changed as he was immediately plunged into a fiery embrace.

Due to inertia, his body straddled the man’s thighs, and in the next second, he was completely wrapped in the man’s broad chest.

It was only then that Bai Lixin realized that Dijia’s current condition was very wrong. His eyes had turned blood red and a white mist came out of his mouth the moment he opened it.

Bai Lixin frowned, “What has happened to you?”

A hot hand slipped into his sweater, and the rough touch immediately made Bai Lixin shiver for a moment.

Bai Lixin struggled subconsciously, and Dijia held him tightly in his arms as he whispered soothingly, “Don’t move. The rose petals are laced with a charm that greatly affects ghosts. The more resistance, the harder the medicine kicks in.”

Dijia spoke as if he had used all his strength. His blood-red eyes stared at Bai Lixin, sitting on his lap, his expression a fractured plea.

Bai Lixin stopped moving.

The man continued, “Just let me hold you for a while, the effect will go quickly and it will be over in a moment.”

The hand moved up two inches.

Bai Lixin’s whole body was tense, and he dared not move. He buried his head in Dijia’s shoulder, praying that the effects of the medicine would pass quickly.

As time passed, the lights gradually stopped, and the music stopped playing at some point.

The lights went out, and the room, which had been full of pink hearts a moment ago, became pitch black, and all that could be heard was the sound of two slightly ragged breaths.

In the darkness, a husky magnetic voice rang out, “Time to add more ghost qi.”

Under Bai Lixin’s astonished gaze, a force helped up his chin and ghost Qi came in one after the other.

In the darkness of the room, a light of triumph flashed in Dijia’s eyes.

……

It was a long time before the lights in the room were switched on.

Dijia lay on the bed contentedly. The rose petals on the bed had been collected and flushed down the toilet by a puffed-up young man.

The young man’s lips were slightly swollen as he crossed his arms over his chest. He looked down at the innocent-looking ghost with a condescending expression, “You really got affected?”

Dijia was in a good mood, and he raised his eyebrows gently, “Or else? If you don’t believe me, you can ask the receptionist for more rose petals soaked in medicine, and we can try again.”

Bai Lixin’s heart skipped a beat.

Try again?

Try to die, maybe.

Bai Lixin couldn’t find any flaws with Dijia, so he went back to the desk and picked up a pamphlet.

Oddly enough, he could not recognize the words on the pamphlet at first.

But when he placed his hand on the pamphlet, the unfamiliar words were immediately transformed into words he knew.

Dijia leaned on the bed and explained, “After death, you appear in this hotel in the form of a soul, and there is no obstacle to communication between spirits. Even if one doesn’t have a mouth, you can still understand what they are trying to say.”

Bai Lixin looked at the words on the pamphlet. “Underworld Hotel Instructions.”

Without a mouth, you could still hear each other’s words.

So the three-eyed ghost had no mouth, yet he was able to hear the three-eyed ghost’s voice.

Bai Lixin sat down on a chair and opened the Underworld Hotel manual and read it.

The text was densely packed, and although he quickly flipped through it, he read it very carefully.

He then understood the general pattern of this hotel’s existence.

According to the contents of this manual, any being becomes a soul after death. The soul cannot stay in the world of the living and needs to enter the underworld where the undead live.

To enter the underworld, one needed to pass through a special passage.

This hotel was the passage for the living souls to go to the underworld after death. But it was not the only passage. There are many more such passages dotted around the world, some in the form of hotels, others in the form of cruise ships.

There were also planes, trains, cars, and so on and so forth.

The souls of the dead subconsciously gather at the call of these passages, and the passages do not open every day; every so often, they open and send these souls to the underworld where they are supposed to exist.

According to the description in this booklet, the passages will be open three days later.

Three days later?

Bai Lixin opened the task bar. Three days later, it was the time for the “Night Walk of a Hundred Ghosts” as mentioned in the mission.

If the time was right, then the “Night Walk of a Hundred Ghosts” mentioned in the task should be when the gate to the underworld was opened and ghosts scrambled through.

In that case, the distorted space that appeared at night was not a real ghost world, but a stagnant point in between the Yang and the Yin worlds where only the dead can enter.

In that case, why did the players enter here?

The butler who opened the gate to the hotel was no stranger to them, and they had come here yesterday as well.

Was it because of the call of the apple trees?

But the pamphlet made it clear that this distorted space was only open to the undead.

Was it because of some kind of energy field that made the hotel appear in the world of the living….

Or was it just the opposite, that the living had appeared in the world of the dead for some reason?

On the way to the apple orchard with Dijia, he had made a point of passing around the ground floor of the Red Apple House, but the priests and nun weren’t present.

The priest skillfully gave the players medicine and disappeared.

The priest was obviously aware of the existence of the hotel.

In addition, he didn’t see any priests or nuns among those picking apples.

So they knew how to evade this special summoning?

If the priests were really thinking of the players as they say, they should have given the players the method or location to avoid it instead of skillfully feeding them pills.

And what about the “luxurious guests” who showed up on the first day? What did they write down in the book?

Xia Chi said that the guests most likely left by boat, but it only took half an hour from the time the “guests” drove away to the time they finished eating and went upstairs.

So did the “guests” drive to the beach, leave by boat, and completely disappear from their view in the space of half an hour?

It was almost impossible, at least in theory.

So it was likely that those so-called “guests” did not leave the island.

But as far as they could see, the Red Apple House was the only house on the island, which meant that there were many unseen people hiding and lurking out of sight.

While they were exploring and having fun, those people might have been spying on them secretly.

Bai Lixin frowned at the thought that what he was doing could be seen 24/7.

This feeling of passivity was a little unpleasant. He felt like a guinea pig being observed by a tester.

And why were the ghosts at the Red Apple House trapped there?

Was the presence of this hotel in this exact location random, or was it deliberate?

If it was deliberate, did the hotel deliberately appear in the place of the Red Apple House, or did the Red Apple House deliberately replace the hotel?

Bai Lixin took out a piece of paper from the corner of the desk and slowly wrote these suspicions on the paper.

He held the pen in a beautiful position, his extremely long eyelashes slightly downcast, casting two small shadows beneath his eyes.

One question after another was listed on the paper. As Bai Lixin wrote, the process settled his heart and slowly got his thoughts sorted out.

“Why is this hotel here…..”

A voice rang out from behind Bai Lixin’s ears. He then realized that Dijia had left the bed at some point and walked up behind him.

Dijia’s suit jacket and tie had been thrown to the floor, and the buttons that were previously tied to the top were also undone, revealing a large area of white.

Long, slender arms were propped up on the desk from behind Bai Lixin. The man’s muscles looked strong and powerful underneath the bloodless skin from the stretching.

Normally, a pale white skin represented sickness and should have been permeated with a sense of fragmentation.

But the man’s powerful strength was impossible to ignore, and these two contradictory aesthetics together instantly reminded Bai Lixin of a statue of David.

Bai Lixin forced his thoughts back and heard Dijia continue, “In fact, the passage has a fixed point, but if a major change occurs, the passage can be partially shifted.”

Dijia’s chest moved closer, and his other hand took the pen out of Bai Lixin’s hand.

Dijia’s voice was close at hand. “Can you get me a piece of paper?”

Bai Lixin pursed his lips and silently got a piece of white paper, putting it over the one he had written on.

Knuckled fingers holding the pen appeared before his eyes, and the moment it landed on the paper, a few words immediately appeared on the paper.

War, plagues, Natural Disaster ……

Dijia manipulated the nib of the fountain pen and circled the words.

“Generally speaking, the passage is fixed for a certain period of time. However, a large number of undead will appear in a place because of something like war, plague, or natural disasters. The passage will feel the cries of the dead, and the passage closest to the location of the dead will begin to deviate towards it. This will allow the transmission of the dead to the underworld at the fastest speed possible, and the dead spirits won’t linger in the yang world for too long.”

Bai Lixin listened carefully to Dijia’s words.

The Red Apple House was full of dead spirits at night, so it was the Red Apple House that attracted the passage to the underworld?

By getting the fruit, they had the right to enter the hotel. Then those human-headed fruit trees may not be summoning the players, but the undead who have lost their way.

The sound draws the undead to them, allowing the undead to pick the fruit and head for the gathering point to which they are supposed to go.

The players were accidentally lured.

Or rather, the players were picking up those sounds for some special reason.

Was it the priests and nuns from the Red Apple House that made the players pick up those messages?

What was the purpose of those NPCs in making the players come here?

Was it simply to torment the players, or was there another purpose?

Just as he was thinking, a black shadow suddenly jumped onto the desk.

Dijia’s eyes turned cold. His hands immediately reached out to attack the black shadow, but Bai Lixin reacted quickly and grabbed Dijia’s hand back.

Bai Lixin, “Wait, don’t attack.”

Dijia looked over, and he saw a small, round head shrinking in a corner of the desk, its large eyes looking aggrievedly at Bai Lixin and Dijia, its eyes full of tears.

Bai Lixin, “……”

What’s this? What was this little head planning to do?

Then in the next second, he found out what the little head was up to.

The chubby doll-like head opened its little cherry mouth and shouted at the two of them, “Mom, Dad, I’m hungry.”

Bai Lixin’s whole body froze.