Chapter 311

Under the audience seats, the vast majority were theater's resident staff such as male waiters, maids, cooks, and cleaners. They didn't know what had happened in the theater, just followed the boss's instructions to put down their work and come here to gather. A few guests with displeased expressions were talking to Fursoles in the front row, trying to ask for the reason why he closed the opera house.

Several young girls wearing white dresses sat in front of the audience seats, either with fear, or with dull eyes, and more were lowering their heads and weeping silently. They were not humans with complete citizenship, but were gathered and placed here as exquisite items of great value.

"Nianjun?" Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe called out softly, his gaze sweeping over the bustling audience seats and the empty dance floor, but he didn't get a response.

That crimson figure that had been entangled around him like a ghost since leaving He Family Village had indeed disappeared, nowhere to be found, and no traces could be found.

Was He Nianjun also chosen by the ghost as a target? If so, why?

All along, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe didn't treat that girl figure wearing a wedding dress as a "person." He felt that He Nianjun's form of existence was closer to some kind of extended projection of the Serpent God's rules, just like those moving stone statues in Zanjue Town, just like the ghosts wandering everywhere in Vanessa Fortress, and so on.

And now, He Nianjun, who was holding the almanac, was chosen by the ghost as a target, just like a mentally deranged murderer stabbing a knife into a mirror to kill himself, with fragments scattered all over the ground.

"You, you are..."

On the sofa, driver Bayer looked at Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's back and suddenly felt an inexplicable familiarity. The identity Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe used when buying his life just now was a stranger he had never met before, and now he had changed back to Fan Daike's appearance.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe turned around, changed back to his previous appearance, and came to Bayer. Now his switching between different identities was even smoother than Sichuan opera, without the slightest sense of stagnation like flowing water.

"Sir?" Bayer felt something was wrong. The gentleman in front of him seemed to have changed into another person again.

"Give me a hand, we have to tie him up." Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe said in Chinese.

Bayer was confused upon hearing this, and his heart was even more panicked. Just as he was about to get up and run away, he looked up and saw the muzzle of a gun pointed at his forehead, and he didn't dare to move instantly.

Xia Yubing fished out two pairs of handcuffs from her bosom, cuffed Bayer's hands and feet behind his back, and then used two thin leather straps to tie his forearms and calves tightly and reinforce them. Finally, she rolled a handkerchief into a ball, stuffed it into his mouth, put on a gag, and tied it tightly to prevent him from making sounds and attracting other people's attention.

After doing all this, Xia Yubing threw Bayer, who was tied up like a zongzi, behind the sofa. Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe handed the revolver back to her and asked: "Where did you get so many strange things, and you even carry them with you."

"... Don't worry about girls' business."

"Alright."

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe was too lazy to ask more and went straight back to viewing box No. 6 where Diesel's corpse was. The male waiter who stayed here had already brought up the surveillance in the corridor. Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe leaned over to take a look but didn't find any useful new information.

From the perspective of the surveillance camera, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe witnessed the scene of Bayer disappearing into thin air by the corridor wall and reappearing ten-plus seconds later once again.

According to Bayer's own description, in these ten-plus seconds of "disappearance," he encountered the ghost and was killed by it after making physical contact with the ghost.

Now He Nianjun has also disappeared, and along with her disappeared the almanac carrying the Zhaoyou rule. Does this mean that at this very moment, the ghost in the theater is making contact with "Zhaoyou"?

Will the Serpent God be killed by it? Or in the judgment of that ghost, does He Nianjun count as an independent individual?

Xia Yubing stood beside Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe, lowered her head to look at the surveillance playback on the screen, and then looked up at the calm expression on Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's face. Suddenly, she saw his expression change slightly, with a bit more astonishment and relief in his eyes.

"What's wrong?" Xia Yubing asked.

"Nothing." Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe shook his head. In the very center of his vision, a crimson color appeared silently across the table. It was He Nianjun, who had been missing for a long time.

Still wearing a red wedding dress embroidered with gold thread, still a blank face without facial features, her skin color was as pale as paper, and her hands were still as delicate and slender as green onions, only the old almanac was missing from her hands.

The almanac disappeared. "What's going on?" Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe frowned slightly.

He had clearly prepared himself to be killed by the ghost here.

In the final analysis, He Nianjun was just a phantom left over after the destruction of He Family Village. Like the almanac in her hand, she was a product of the Serpent God Zhaoyou's rules. It seemed that it was He Nianjun who disappeared, but in fact, the one chosen by the ghost as a target should be the Serpent God.

Chosen, disappeared, died.

This is a complete process.

From the drunkard's corpse found at the restroom door to Diesel and Bayer who died one after another in the opera house, all known victims so far should follow this process, and the Serpent God is no exception.

After all—rules are absolute.

But the Serpent God named "Zhaoyou" had long been branded with the thought steel seal of "I am Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe." If the Serpent God is killed by the ghost, then following Taiyi's rules, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe will pay the price of death on behalf of the Serpent God. He has already prepared for this.

However, the actual situation is not like this. The Serpent God was not killed, and He Nianjun appeared in Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's vision again, only losing the almanac in her hand.

"Why? Where did something go wrong?"

"According to the rules summarized before, the person chosen by the ghost will see the ghost, then make some kind of contact with the ghost, and finally die... but why was He Nianjun not killed like others after being chosen by the ghost, but instead lost the almanac?"

Not a single mistake in the content, read it all!

Could it be that being chosen by the ghost doesn't necessarily mean death, but could also be "losing" something?

Or to understand it from another angle, can "death" also be understood as "losing life"?

—For example, "Wealth Wu Tong," known as the God of Wealth, actually doesn't have a direct instant-death rule for killing people; it's just forced buying and selling. Anyone who meets the God of Wealth will be forced to do business with Him, either buy or sell, with no third choice.

People with money can spend money to buy their lives and send the God of Wealth away, while people without money can only sell their own lives in exchange for copper coins and die on the spot, looking as if they were killed by the God of Wealth.

So...

The God of Wealth didn't kill anyone; He just forced the client to sell their "life."

The ghost in the theater might not have killed anyone either; it's just that being chosen by it means you are about to "lose" something.

Diesel and other dead people lost their lives, and He Nianjun lost the almanac.

"There must be some connection in this..."

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's eyes became subtle, and he thought: "Both are 'chosen by the ghost,' why did Diesel and Bayer lose their lives, while He Nianjun lost the almanac carrying the Zhaoyou rule? What caused these two different results?"

Suddenly, a burst of noisy human voices came from the direction of the audience seats, interrupting his thoughts. Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe hurriedly came to the edge of the railing with Xia Yubing and looked down, only to see that several rows of audience seats that were originally full of people were suddenly empty in one block.

"1, 2... 5?"

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe counted again to confirm that he hadn't misread, but that it was a fact that had already happened—just now, 5 people disappeared at the same time.

(End of this chapter)