Chapter 56: The Wedding Invitation
Inside the pitch-black manor, a red lantern drifted toward them, radiating a scarlet glow. Strangely, the light seemed sealed within the lantern itself, utterly failing to illuminate the surroundings.
The lantern floated to the doorway and stopped right in front of Zhang Yuanqing. Between him and the red lantern stood only a single threshold.
He could clearly sense it. Beyond that threshold lurked a ghost, a shrill and sinister one, but no matter how hard he stared, he simply could not make out its form in the darkness.
He silently channeled the Power of the Dark Moon, ready to activate Soul Devouring at any moment.
The Nocturnal Specter was a natural suppressor of spiritual entities, provided those entities did not exceed his own level.
Something reached out from the darkness. Zhang Yuanqing squinted through the faint red glow and saw a hand with dark, bluish black skin and nails as black as coal.
The ghostly hand clutched a stack of red covered invitation cards and seemed to be waiting for him to accept them.
He didn't take them, but the ghost hand kept offering them regardless. The two sides remained locked in a standoff, as if neither was willing to back down.
After a long while, Xi Shi's trembling voice whispered timidly, "Wang Tai?"
She had noticed him standing frozen and feared he had unknowingly triggered some crisis and already departed from the land of the living.
Well, damned if I do and damned if I don't. Zhang Yuanqing sighed inwardly and reluctantly accepted the invitation cards.
The bluish black hand immediately retracted, and the red lantern bobbed away, drifting back into the depths of the manor.
He retreated down the steps and rejoined his teammates, holding up the cards for them to see.
"Five in total. Looks like they're meant for us."
He distributed the red invitation cards one by one. Everyone unfolded theirs to find black characters on one side, listing the bride's name and birth details, while the side where the groom's information should have been was left blank.
The bride's name was "Bai Lan."
A dungeon notification echoed in their ears.
【Ding! You have received the Ghost bride's wedding invitation. Please fill in your name. The Ghost bride will select a groom in one hour.】
Fill in their names, and the bride would choose a groom in one hour? What would happen if the Ghost bride chose them? Everyone clutched their invitations, minds racing with possibilities.
Zhang Yuanqing had been dishonest during the introductions and borrowed Wang Tai's name, so he found himself in a dilemma. Should he write Yuanshi Tianzun or Wang Tai?
He had no way of knowing whether using a fake name would invite punishment.
While he mulled over what to write, a thought struck him, and he looked up at his companions.
"Do you all remember the amusement park's introduction? An indescribable existence arrived here and asked the spirits of the amusement park to help find a certain young person. That young person's name was four characters long."
Xi Shi and the others remembered, of course, but couldn't understand why he was bringing it up now.
Xie Lingxi's mind worked the fastest. She glanced at the invitation in her hand. "Are you saying there might be a connection between the two?"
The girl followed this thread of reasoning, and her small face shifted slightly. "That indescribable existence asked the Ghost Bride to find a certain young person, and now she's having us fill in our names? Doesn't that mean the young person that this existence is looking for is a Spirit Realm Walker?"
Xi Shi looked stunned. "How is that possible?"
They were all Walkers who had been through multiple dungeons. Typically, the Spirit Realm's introductory lore served as background filler, telling participants what kind of place they were in and what had happened. It helped Spirit Realm Walkers get up to speed on the dungeon, and nothing more.
Before this, they had all assumed the young person that the indescribable existence had sought was some character within the Spirit Realm, perhaps even a monster. They did not believe it had anything to do with the "players."
How could a mere Spirit Realm Walker possibly alter the fundamental nature of a Spirit Realm?
"It's just a coincidence," Great Sage Equal to Heaven said with a frown. "Since it's a ghost marriage, of course we'd have to write our names."
No, it's not a coincidence, Zhang Yuanqing thought to himself. The old version of the walkthrough had no mention of wedding invitations at all. This only appeared after the Spirit Realm mutated. Combined with the introductory lore, anyone who said the two weren't connected was just fooling themselves.
He wasn't sure if it was just his imagination, but the information in the Spirit Realm's introduction gave him an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
Suddenly, the Cat King Speaker in Zhang Yuanqing's pocket emitted a sound.
"Bzzt bzzt... That day, she arrived at Jinshui Amusement Park..."
Everyone's eyes snapped to his pocket, but the speaker fell silent again.
Why did it stop? Zhang Yuanqing wondered. This speaker is so strange.
He waited a few more seconds, and when the device remained quiet, he let it go.
"Let's fill in our names first."
He unfolded his invitation and tried using his finger as a pen, writing "Wang Tai" in the name field.
His reasoning was simple. Since the spirit in the Haunted House had asked them to write their names, it meant "she" couldn't see the Spirit Realm Walkers' real IDs. Otherwise, the invitations would be redundant.
It stood to reason, then, that the dungeon allowed Walkers to disguise their identities. It just didn't spell it out. You had to figure it out on your own.
Writing Yuanshi Tianzun would probably have been fine too, but it might cause a trust crisis among his teammates. As these thoughts crossed his mind, he watched the strokes left by his finger solidify into black characters.
Wang Tai.
He then fabricated a birth date and filled in his gender. Well, the gender part wasn't fabricated.
His four teammates followed suit, using their fingers as pens.
Xie Lingxi rose on her tiptoes and snuck a timid peek at Zhang Yuanqing's invitation before writing down her own name. When she reached the gender field, she hesitated briefly, then wrote "Male."
With the invitations filled out, Zhang Yuanqing tucked his into his pocket and stepped over the threshold first.
"Let's go in. Best if you all stay behind me."
Seeing his teammates' tense faces, he cracked a joke to lighten the mood. "I've had a tough birth chart since I was a kid. Even female ghosts would have to start thinking about maternity leave when they see me."
His teammates were less than impressed, and their expressions said as much. Is this really the time for jokes? Are you genuinely fearless or just suicidal? There's an actual ghost bride waiting in there.
Was that joke really not funny? Zhang Yuanqing wondered as he took in their expressions.
He said nothing more, and quietly entered the manor.
***
Beyond the threshold lay a spacious outer courtyard. A flagstone path ran down the center, flanked by covered corridors that hugged the outer walls.
The moment they crossed the threshold, red lanterns beneath the corridor eaves ignited one by one in an eerie cascade, painting the pitch black night with strokes of deep crimson. Each lantern resembled a scarlet eyeball, silently watching the living souls who dared enter the compound.
At the end of the flagstone path stood a grand hall with upswept eaves. Its lattice doors were shut tight, and a dim, yellowish light seeped through from within.
As soon as he crossed the threshold, Zhang Yuanqing's eyes lit up. "Check your skills and Inventory. See if they've been sealed."
Fire Demon and the others froze for a moment, then reached for their abilities or opened their Inventory. To their delight, they discovered that their powers or items had not been sealed for this stage.
The revelation was bittersweet. The good news was that they finally had something to fall back on when facing danger. The bad news was that unsealed items and skills meant the danger posed by the Haunted House was far beyond ordinary.
The group advanced slowly, with Zhang Yuanqing in the lead. Only their footsteps echoed through the silent night.
"Aah!"
Their focus was jolted by a sudden shriek that sent shivers down their spines.
Fire Demon whipped around furiously and glared at Xi Shi. "What are you screaming about?"
Her face had gone pale. She pointed a trembling finger at the corridor more than a dozen meters away, her voice shaking.
"There, right there, under the lantern. There's a woman..."
Everyone snapped their heads around, but all they saw were lanterns hanging in silence. There was not a ghostly shadow in sight.
The episode only deepened the dread that already gripped the four of them.
Zhang Yuanqing was relatively unfazed. He had already been through one supernatural dungeon, and as a Nocturnal Specter, he no longer felt that primal, bone deep fear of ghosts. As far as he was concerned, ghosts and Transformers were basically the same thing.
This place is thick with ghostly presences. Yin energy inundates the place, which actually dulls my senses. I can't detect spirits that are too weak or too far away. But I can use the Demon-subduing Awl now, so even if the Ghost bride shows up, there's no need to be afraid.
Blind fear served no purpose. He tried to reassure his teammates as they moved forward by using information to distract them and ease their nerves.
"Have you noticed? The dungeon only gave us one hint: the Ghost Bride selects a groom in one hour. My theory is that over the next hour, our behavior will become the Ghost Bride's criteria for selecting a groom.
"The question is whether being chosen as the groom means survival or death. Also, the yin energy here is extremely dense, and there's danger lurking everywhere. We might not even last the full hour before we're all wiped out."
I wonder if the Ghost Bride judges by looks, he thought to himself. If she does, then as the most handsome person on this team, the pressure is really on me.
Before long, they reached the grand hall. Zhang Yuanqing stepped forward and pushed open the sealed lattice doors.
Creeeak.
The sharp sound, painful enough to make teeth clench, echoed through the night.
Inside the hall, candlelight blazed. A red carpet was laid out across the floor. Red cloth was draped from the pillars, and at the far end of the carpet stood two grand armchairs flanking an altar laden with candles and fruit. On the wall above hung a double happiness character in a vivid red.
On either side of the red carpet stood seven or eight paper effigies dressed in the garb of ancient servants. Their features were painted with lifelike precision, their scarlet lips curled into slight smiles.
The most unsettling detail was their heads, which were twisted at grotesque angles, their hollow eyes fixed on the doorway and the group stepping through it.
Xie Lingxi stumbled backward, her small hand clamped over her mouth to stifle the scream rising in her throat.
At that moment, Zhang Yuanqing felt his scalp tingle.
Not from fear, but because every single one of these paper figures was a ghost.
After probing carefully, he let out a breath of relief. They were all minor ghosts.
The Ghost Bride might be beyond me, but you bunch of small fry dare act tough in front of this lord? That's going too far!
He channeled the Power of the Dark Moon, letting darkness gather in both eyes. Then he drew a deep breath from his core and bellowed, "Scram!"
Every paper figure in the hall toppled to the ground. Gusts of yin wind swept through the hall and faint wails filled the air as the ghosts scrambled over each other to flee in every direction.
Behind him, Xi Shi, Xie Lingxi, Fire Demon, and Great Sage Equal to Heaven stood frozen in stunned silence.
