Lakeside Ghost Story 19

The two exorcists ran until they were gasping for breath. Only when the footsteps behind them had faded away did they dare stop to rest.

"We lost him, right?" The tall one clutched his chest, wishing he could just collapse on the ground. "Zhou Wu was right, actually. That Crocodile Man isn't all that fast. He lost us in the end."

The leering, short exorcist nodded vigorously. "As long as we keep our distance..."

[Actor Wang Jiawei has died. Cause of death: suicide.]

"Second!" the tall one cried. "Didn't Second use a first-aid spray? How could this happen?!"

"Fuck, it was that Zhuo Yu!"

Hatred welled up in both their hearts. Soul Hunt Guild had sent four people in total, and in less than half an hour, two of them had already fallen to Zhuo Yu. Even their Captain...

"Once I get out of this movie, I'll make him beg for death! Even if I have to spend every last Flame Point applying to return to the mortal world, I'll kill every one of his friends and family, then throw their heads at his feet!"

The tall man clenched his fists, already seeming to picture Zhuo Yu sobbing in despair.

For once, however, the leering little man didn't join in. Instead, he tugged at the tall man's clothes and said shakily, "Third, tell me I'm seeing things... Those bushes over there..."

The tall man followed his pointing finger and peered into the darkness. Sure enough, beneath the dim moonlight, he saw a single deep blue eye.

The boss stood silently five meters away. There was no telling how long he had been watching them.

Cold sweat burst from their skin along with a wave of goosebumps, and the two men turned and ran. What they didn't know was that the boss had heard every word they had just said. And so, he had no intention of granting them a quick death.

The crocodile head opened its enormous jaws. Nestled among the rows of sinister teeth was what appeared to be a small spiral-shell whistle.

As sharp, uncanny whistles pierced the air, the waters of Golden Lake ceased to be still.

Within seconds, the lake churned like boiling water, frothing with white foam and spray. Equally white limbs surged up from the bottom. The drowned revenants had heard the guardian's summons. Though afraid, they still obeyed the laws of Golden Lake, racing one another to the surface and crawling ashore in twisted postures.

Clouds of silt roiled upward. The crystal-clear lake turned impossibly murky, riddled with countless undertows and whirlpools.

Under the moonlight, thousands upon thousands of corpses clambered onto shore. They sniffed the air, their dead-fish eyes brimming with ravenous hunger for blood. Even the tips of their nail-less fingers trembled with excitement.

It wasn't long before they caught the scent of the living.

The drowned revenants surged toward the exorcists with piercing shrieks. This time, the church's holy water finally proved useful.

The tall man wielded a holy-water gun, spraying the revenants without pause. The moment that sacred liquid touched them, thick smoke billowed from their bodies as though they had been doused in concentrated sulfuric acid. Even their shrieks changed pitch, becoming cries of unbearable pain and terror at the edge of death.

But there were simply too many drowned revenants. The number of monsters here far exceeded anything they had imagined, and their supplies were nowhere near enough.

Experienced as they were, even these two were nearly scared witless by the hordes of revenants, which were more disgusting than zombies. The short one had resorted to hurling whole bottles of holy water at them, but their reserves were already scraping bottom. With no other options, the two men were forced to play their final trump card.

The tall man curled his empty hands around invisible grips, and two exquisitely crafted M1911 pistols materialized out of thin air. Their sleek frames gleamed with mechanical beauty. Gunfire cracked, and the drowned revenants around him dropped one after another, smoke pouring from their bullet wounds exactly as it had when they were struck by holy water.

He had exchanged one thousand Flame Points for these weapons. Their bullets dealt spiritual damage, but they were genuinely expensive. Every round he fired cost him another ten hard-earned Flame Points.

Once his Flame Points reached zero, the guns would be out of ammunition.

Under cover of the barrage, the two men fled desperately toward the edge of the dense forest. The woods were thick with branches and foliage, and loose stones lay hidden underfoot, making the terrain extremely difficult to cross. But none of that posed a problem to the drowned revenants. The tall man therefore planned to reach the open lakeshore and lure them into the holy-water minefield they had set up earlier.

The shrill whistles continued without pause. Like a war horn, the shell whistle drove the drowned revenants onward. Under the power of its sound, the flailing corpses seemed to enter a frenzy, their speed and strength climbing to another level.

Soon, the tall man's priestly robes had been torn to shreds, and countless bleeding wounds covered both men. The tall man fired his spiritual bullets faster and faster, his expression on the verge of cracking.

His Flame Points... The Flame Points he had worked so hard to save!

The two men staked everything on one last charge and burst out of the forest, practically tumbling onto the lakeshore. One holy-water trap after another exploded with a sharp series of cracks. Between the traps and the relentless gunfire, the horde finally began to falter and could no longer encircle them.

"Hahahaha! Come on, you monsters! Come and get me if you've got the guts!" The tall exorcist was delirious with joy, his face twisting into a savage grin once more.

But the towering man in the crocodile head seemed to have been waiting there all along. He had calculated their escape route and destination with perfect accuracy. Between them, he was the one who seemed more like a hunter.

The exorcist's grin froze on his face. He hurriedly raised his guns and opened fire on the boss without a second thought.

Though the bullets carried spiritual power, they still packed the force of ordinary ammunition. Bullet holes appeared across the boss's body. His heart, limbs, and abdomen were all riddled with wounds. An ordinary man would have been torn apart by now.

But the boss seemed not to feel a thing. He dug the bullets from his wounds and toyed with them in front of the exorcist for a moment, then pinched one between his fingertips like a marble.

With a sharp whistle, the bullet shot from his fingers under tremendous force. It streaked back toward its owner like a flash of light and buried itself deep in the exorcist's eye socket.

The exorcist failed to dodge. With a casual flick, the boss destroyed one of his eyes.

"Aaaahhh! My eye! My eye!"

He screamed and clutched his left eye as blood streamed between his fingers. Reflex tears poured from his right eye as well. Unable to see anything, he sprayed bullets wildly in every direction. Even his teammate took several stray shots and fled back into the woods with his arms over his head.

But the tall exorcist had already lost his mind. He didn't care about anything else. He just kept pulling the triggers.

Click...

He was out of ammunition.

The boss took one step forward.

At the sound of that footstep, the exorcist startled like a hunted animal. Covering his eye, he scrambled blindly away, only to trip over a rock behind his heel and tumble backward in a miserable heap. Directly behind him lay the embankment of Golden Lake.

The exorcist plunged into the water with a splash. He thrashed desperately as blood seeped into the lake, driving the surrounding drowned revenants into a frenzy. One after another, they dove back in after him.

It wasn't long before a revenant seized his arm and dragged him toward the center of the lake.

A massive whirlpool churned there, surrounded by countless drowned revenants as though they were waiting for some ritual to begin.

"Gurgle... It hurts! It hurts!" He choked on lake water, unable to keep from crying out. But the pain wasn't coming from his eye. It came from his exposed skin.

Inside the vortex, sand and silt laced with broken shells scoured his body, slicing countless tiny wounds into his flesh. The scent of blood spread through the water. Hundreds upon thousands of drowned revenants swam around the vortex, screeching as though intent on making it even larger.

And that was exactly what they did.

The whirlpool grew and grew until it resembled the gaping maw of Golden Lake itself, with sand, stones, and broken shells for teeth. The water became murkier by the second, shot through with great clouds of crimson. The exorcist's flesh was shaved away layer by layer, as though he had been fed alive into a meat grinder.

Moments later, the lake abruptly became calm again. When the vortex dispersed, a stark-white skeleton floated to the surface.

[Actor Guan Zhi has died. Cause of death: flayed alive.]

The audience members who had witnessed it all fell silent.

[I think I'm gonna puke. Did you see his flesh getting stripped away bit by bit until his bones showed? Even the other film, Wrong Turn, wasn't this bad, was it?]

[Hell yeah! Gore fans finally get our moment!]

[I seriously threw up. Holy shit.]

[Give me a second. Don't you guys think Zhuo Yu is terrifying too?]

[Yeah... He's an actor, but he carries himself like a boss. He soloed two exorcists. Nothing he did was even bloody, but it still sent chills down my spine.]

[Nightmares tonight, guys.]

[My god, these guys are from Soul Hunt Guild, and they're already on the verge of a total wipe.]

[Good riddance to Ma Yuan'an. I've watched him screw over countless newbies. This is karma.]

[But Zhuo Yu's made an enemy of their guild now.]

[You think Zhuo Yu is scared of Soul Hunt...? He wants to start a guild too!]

[Fuck, if I'd been picked as an actor, I'd actually want to give it a shot.]

[Are you insane?!]

Staring at the dim glow of the screen, Luo Musheng had only just managed to suppress the urge to vomit. As an analyst, he had forced himself to watch every second of the carnage. Now he went back and forth, revising his notes on both the boss and Zhuo Yu.

Zhuo Yu was a madman through and through, and the more rational and composed a madman was, the more terrifying he became.

He truly wasn't afraid of retaliation from Soul Hunt. Judging by his expression, he was even looking forward to it.

Luo Musheng now suspected that Zhuo Yu was taking whatever he wanted to do, whatever thrills he wanted to experience, and writing them into horror stories. The man was enjoying every minute of this!

"He's definitely going to become a star of the Studios." Luo Musheng opened a private chat.

[Sis, your brother's coming out of retirement next round.]

[You're going to play with Zhuo Yu~?]

[I knew you'd guess it right away. I can't miss my chance to become a founding member of his guild.]

[You'll die if you hang around a madman.]

[What's so scary about dying? It's not like I haven't done it before.]

As a veteran actor who had returned to the Flame Source and been tempered in its fires, Luo Musheng pushed his glasses up his nose. "What's more frightening than death is ignorance."

He firmly believed that by following Zhuo Yu, he would discover the truth of Infinite Studios.

It wasn't intuition. It was certainty.

On the screen, Zhuo Yu was admiring the moon. No moon in the real world was this enormous or this round. If there were one, it probably would have triggered catastrophic tides and tsunamis long ago.

The exorcists were no longer a problem. All that remained was the Church of the Fountain of Youth in Springwater Town.

It was time for Mayor Marcus to atone for his sins.

Smiling, he turned to the short exorcist, who was trembling uncontrollably in Asha's grasp. "You must have a pager, don't you? I'm sure Mayor Marcus asked you to tell him the good news as soon as possible."

The exorcist nodded in terror.

"You have eradicated the evil in Golden Lake." Zhuo Yu patted the exorcist on the shoulder. "It's time to invite everyone here to celebrate. Wouldn't you agree, Father?"

Marcus. The families of the four students. Everyone who had taken part in the Golden Lake incident.

He would spare none of them.