Chapter 57: Resentment of the Death Curse (Part Seven)

The talismans on the surface of the brass knuckle-dusters slowly burned, rising into faint flames that wrapped around the fist.

Under the influence of the fire, every punch Li Sheng landed on the flat human shadow stirred up black smoke. As he struck, he chanted incantations.

"Sichun Fist, thoughts gushing like a spring!"

His fist landed squarely in the center of the shadow's chest, smashing it into the faux-wood flooring as concrete fragments scattered with a crisp sound.

The flat figure struggled desperately, sliding like an eel against the floor and wriggling toward the television cabinet.

"Nianchun Sword, memories that linger forever!"

Li Sheng thrust both arms out, punching straight through the television and piercing the shadow's chest. Its body shattered, breaking free from the brass knuckle-dusters embedded in its chest as it darted toward the shoe cabinet.

"Haochun Palm, generation after generation!"

Li Sheng stamped on the ground in hot pursuit, transforming his fist into a palm and shattering the wooden shoe cabinet with a single blow.

"My shoes—" Looking at the designer shoes she had saved years of hard work to buy—some of which she hadn't even worn a few times—completely ruined, Yuko Suzuki couldn't help but feel a wave of sorrow rise within her, a sadness that even temporarily overrode her fear.

After several rounds of pursuit, the entire room was left in a dilapidated state, as if it had been demolished. And that flat human shadow was finally grabbed by the neck by Li Sheng.

"What on earth are you?" Li Sheng narrowed his eyes to scrutinize his opponent. The shadow remained expressionless, staring straight at him as it allowed the talisman flames to burn it into ashes.

The flying ash drifted away with the wind, disappearing into nothingness. The chilly atmosphere that had shrouded the room from the beginning also dissipated along with it.

"..." Li Sheng frowned slightly, looking thoughtfully at the spot where the flat human shadow had vanished.

Could a so-called ghost really lower the room's temperature? That being said, wouldn't keeping a ghost at home mean no need to turn on the air conditioner in the summer? And no need to plug in the refrigerator either?

If the cooling ability of vengeful ghosts could be stacked, would it be possible to bind a group of ghosts together to create low-temperature superconducting materials? Making these ghosts contribute to human civilization in fields such as energy, electricity, medical care, and transportation—after laboring like this for a few years, the accumulated merit could even allow them to be reincarnated as human beings. What boundless merit...

"Excuse me,"

Kazuya Suzuki's anxious and terrified voice interrupted Li Sheng's train of thought. Standing in front of his wife, he asked cautiously, "Who on earth are you..."

"Me? Just a passing Fire Fist Ace."

The time period of this script world was the early 2000s, and *One Piece* had been serialized for some time. Li Sheng casually unstrapped the nearly burned-out talisman knuckle-dusters from his hand and stored them into his inventory slot.

This item was a cheap, disposable piece of equipment purchased on the black market, costing 20 game coins. Its effect was the ability to touch intangible spirits, with its duration inversely proportional to the strength of the encountered evil entity.

Glancing out the window, the rain of the plum rain season stopped as abruptly as it had started, and Li Sheng strode out of the room. "Both of you have been entangled by a curse. If you don't want to die, follow me."

————

Time: Night.

Location: Inside an unfinished, skeletal building.

Except for Li Sheng, the other three players gathered together to discuss the mission. On the other side of the room were Kazuya Suzuki, Yuko Suzuki, Yoshimi Sakai, and Yoshimi Sakai's classmate, Saiki Miyazaki.

These four ordinary people had truly witnessed a supernatural existence today and had walked a circle around the gates of hell.

Therefore, unlike the brain-dead supporting characters in certain horror movies, they didn't scream things like, "These are all fakes, special effects! I'm going to call the police." Instead, they sat on temporary mats, either dazed or weeping.

As for Kenichi Ishikawa, the drone he had sent out failed to find any trace of him, and there were no thermal signals in that house in 3-chome either.

"...So, this is the information we currently have."

Stack Recon sighed. His clothes had several holes torn in them, likely from encountering quite a bit of trouble at the police station.

"Attacked by the curse whenever it rains. Plum rain season, so that's what it meant."

Vernal Equinox pushed the bridge of his glasses with his index finger and asked, "What is the weather like tomorrow? Can we accurately predict every rain cycle?"

"Based on the weather forecast data of this world, optimized by the meteorological data analysis program I brought along, it can be roughly deduced that Shuijing City will experience two bouts of rain in the next eighteen hours."

Stack Recon said, "The first rain is from eleven in the evening to six the next morning, and the second rain is from eight to seventeen in the afternoon. In other words, if we don't want to operate in the rain, there are only two idle windows.

Namely, from now until eleven o'clock, and tomorrow from six to eight."

The Killing Ground is truly malicious, isn't it? If it were the kind of survival mission that required one to keep their nerves constantly strained, that would be one thing, but it just had to give you two awkward, half-baked safe periods.

"Umm..."

Little Red Riding Hood raised her hand weakly and whispered, "Can we artificially shorten the rainy period through cloud seeding?"

Seeing her two companions turn to look at her, Little Red Riding Hood felt inexplicably nervous and quickly waved her hands, saying, "I don't really know much about it, I was just casually saying..."

"That's a great suggestion, but its feasibility is a bit lacking."

Vernal Equinox said, "So-called cloud seeding basically boils down to three methods. First, before the rain clouds reach the local area, use artificial precipitation methods to make it rain earlier. But now the rain clouds are already hovering over Shuijing City, so that's impossible.

Second, over-disperse condensation nuclei—meaning silver iodide or diatomaceous earth—so that water vapor turns into small raindrops as much as possible rather than allowing small raindrops to grow, creating a competitive mechanism to inhibit precipitation.

However, Shuijing City is located in a hilly region with abundant water vapor transport, and excessive condensation nuclei would instead turn the competitive mechanism into a driving force promoting precipitation.

As for the third method, it is dynamic subsidence: conducting ultra-large-scale cloud seeding in the upstream areas of the precipitation cloud system to dissipate the energy of the weather system. To achieve this effect in a short time, you would have to dispatch the stationed US military to do it.

However, doing so would lead to even more severe consequences."

Little Red Riding Hood blinked blankly. "Even more severe... consequences?"

Wait, you don't even know about this?

Stack Recon couldn't help giving Little Red Riding Hood an extra glance and explained, "That is, the plot going off the rails.

There was a precedent before, where a group of players executed a team script mission in the context of the Cold War of the 1960s, which required hunting down an ancient vampire hidden in the city.

Originally, the mission wasn't too difficult, but a clever-by-half novice player, seeing several teammates die, took the initiative to contact a television station and wildly flaunted his so-called 'superpower' of storing and retrieving items using the inventory slot on a TV show. He even accurately predicted future lottery numbers, football match results, global scientific breakthroughs, and so on.

He wanted to use this to attract the attention of the national government and get the higher-ups to dispatch forces to help him hunt down that vampire.

The result was that the plot went completely off the rails. Both the Soviet Union and the United States poured their entire national strengths into hunting down these players, even using nuclear bombs for this purpose."

"Ah?" Little Red Riding Hood hung her mouth open, not knowing what to say. "What about in the end?"

"In the end, none of these players survived. We only found out through their radiation-filled corpses sent back to the real Earth, discovered their diaries, and deduced the ending."

Stack Recon shrugged and said, "The Killing Ground allows players to clear levels using multiple methods, but this mission has already narrowed down the scope and doesn't allow us to leave Shuijing City. It's better not to think about those crooked paths."

Woo-woo—

Police sirens wailed in the distance, and police lights flashing blue and red cut through the street, looking exceptionally busy.

At the police station today, a forensic pathologist had truly died, and the two police officers who narrowly survived were frightened half out of their wits, casting yet another layer of shadow over this small town.

Tap, tap, tap.

Footsteps walked up the stairs to the floor, and Li Sheng's figure appeared at the top of the stairs, his player ID actively glowing above his head to show that he was not disguised as a ghost.

Stack Recon breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing this, put down his phone, and asked, "Why so late?"

After bringing the Suzuki couple to the assembly point, Li Sheng had simply made up an excuse—"I met a terminally ill friend online and wanted to see the sakura in her hometown on her behalf"—and split from the group to wander around the city, promising to return before it started raining.

"I just understood the city a bit better."

Li Sheng sat down with a smile, took a document out of his inventory slot, and placed it on the ground.

"What is this?" Stack Recon glanced at the text on the paper. "Respected Chief Judge, Judges, Prosecutors, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to read the confession I wrote. I, a humble ant, am writing this confession in the detention center with a deeply remorseful heart, deeply reflecting on my criminal behavior..."

"Sorry, I took out the wrong one."

Li Sheng quickly took back the paper.

From a player's perspective, the Special Affairs Bureau and the official institutions of certain countries are actually much more lenient and relaxed compared to others. At least they won't secretly kidnap players for assassination and transfer their qualifications to internal members.

However, this leniency also has its bottom line.

According to the laws published by the Special Affairs Bureau, if an individual player is aware of a certain supernatural power they possess that could cause significant harm to the country or society and fails to report it, it is also considered a criminal act.

As both a Zerg Lord infected host and a player, Li Sheng had not reported to the Special Affairs Bureau, which to some extent constituted a criminal fact. This confession was precisely something he had taken the time to write in advance.

There were also several other versions, all placed in a folder named *PAW Patrol: Sheng-sheng Team Goes to Prison*.

He gave a light cough to cover up his embarrassment and took out another document.

"???"

Stack Recon was full of question marks.

Fortunately, after a series of tempering during the day, he had already adapted to Li Sheng's jumping train of thought. He just treated this guy as someone coming from a maniacal comedy troupe, figuring that any unhinged action was just a gag, and didn't pay too much mind to it. He picked up the new document and began to read.

"This is the roster of students at Shuijing City Elementary School from twenty-five years ago?"

"That's right. These things aren't online, so I scaled the wall and went straight into the elementary school's archive room to find them."

Li Sheng pointed to one of the lines. "Pay attention here. Noriko Fujita, Year 3, Class 1. In the same class as her were also Yoshihara Sakai and Kenichi Ishikawa."

Stack Recon said in surprise, "The dead Yoshihara Sakai and Noriko Fujita, who went missing twenty-five years ago, were elementary school classmates? And what about Kenichi Ishikawa? Doesn't the data show he's from the neighboring city?"

Li Sheng tapped the archives with his finger. "According to the home addresses registered on the student roster and the old map of Shuijing City, Kenichi Ishikawa's hometown is on the back mountain of 3-chome in Shuijing City. There is a reservoir and the old city police station there.

Later, when the reservoir was expanded, his house was demolished, and he himself left the city after the third grade of elementary school. That happened to coincide with the time of the Fujita family massacre.

Considering that Kenichi Ishikawa said he bore unshakable responsibility for the Curse of Grudge, all of this suddenly becomes quite intriguing."

"Um... are you guys talking about my brother?"

Since Li Sheng hadn't deliberately lowered his voice, Yoshimi Sakai on the other side of the room heard their conversation and raised her hand cautiously to ask.

She had a large age gap with her brother and usually lived with him and her sister-in-law in the house left behind by their parents.

On the night her brother, who worked as a real estate agent, returned after visiting that house in 3-chome, he had mentioned something concerning childhood memories of Noriko Fujita.

"According to my brother, Noriko Fujita was very thin and short when she was little, wearing long sleeves all day and looking very gloomy. Except for Ishikawa, no one wanted to be friends with her. But during a sports day, she directly suffered incontinence in full view of everyone. Everyone jeered, which made Ishikawa say, 'Someone like her is no friend of mine.' As a result, that tragic incident happened the very next day..."

The four players looked at each other, weighing things in their minds. It seemed that finding that Kenichi Ishikawa was a must.