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Chapter 140 Humans Know the Terror of Ghosts

"Beidou, my name is Chen Beidou—"

Accompanying the man's voice was a strange, somewhat noisy electrical sound.

Chu Changge put the phone on speakerphone, so that the fat man in the phone booth could also hear the voice on the other end of the phone.

"I'm a taxi driver. This is the fourth person I've killed. He's a man, and according to his ID card, his name is Miao Qingxi."

"He was a young man who had graduated some time ago, and he was unemployed. That's what he told me before he died."

"Actually, I have no ill intentions towards unemployed people. In fact, quite a few unemployed people have taken my taxi, and they have all arrived at their destinations safely."

"I'm a somewhat abnormal person. Sometimes I feel inexplicably uncomfortable, a kind of discomfort that's hard to describe. It's like the sky would fall if I didn't kill someone to vent my anger. Doctors call this a mental illness."

"But I'm not stupid enough to walk into a hospital myself. In fact, I chose to be a taxi driver so I could better find my prey."

"I only kill people I want to kill. The feeling of killing prey that I've set my sights on is unimaginably exhilarating."

“I admit that when I choose my prey, I only look at whether I find them pleasing to the eye, and this man’s words and actions just happened to make me feel uncomfortable, so I wanted to make him face reality.”

"When he got on the bus, I asked him if he was anxious about his current situation. He had graduated almost a year ago and still hadn't found a suitable job."

"I asked him about his work and learned that this young man had actually had quite a few jobs, more than you could count on one hand."

"No weekends off," "low-quality colleagues," "overly strict boss," and "overtime" were all reasons he resigned; of course, recent graduates are always incredibly pampered, and I have no problem with that."

"The problem is that I tried to reason with him, telling him that finding his ideal job wasn't easy, and that he should first settle down and adapt to his new environment."

But he refuted me.

"I'm sure I can find something better; I just had bad luck when I was looking for a job before," I remember him saying, his voice full of confidence, like a spirited rooster.

"I expressed my opposing viewpoint again, but it was refuted point by point. This young man is pretentious and arrogant; he can't see reality at all, and he won't listen to other people's advice."

"I'm getting annoyed. I don't like people who always contradict me, and I especially dislike people who hold different views from me."

"By the way, what I love most is seeing those who hold the opposite view of me trembling and staring at me, no longer daring to refute a single word I say. So I deviated from my route, took the passenger to the place I liked, and then stuffed him into four plastic bags."

"His expression before he died was one of utter terror, which was my favorite expression to see. Whenever I see that expression, I feel incredibly comfortable."

"Everyone I kill has this incredibly comforting expression on their face before they die. I crave to see this expression on more people's faces, so I want to kill more people."

"But sometimes these little creatures I kill come out and hinder my hunt. They desperately try to drive their prey away from my hunting grounds. Are they ghosts? But I don't care anymore, because no one can hurt me."

"My name is Chen Beidou. This is the fourth person I've killed, so I buried him at the location of the fifth star." "As long as I kill two more people, my name will appear on the map of this city."

After the last sentence was spoken, a "beep beep" sound came from the microphone, and the recording ended there.

The fat man was silent for a while before speaking: "'If I kill two more people, my name will appear on the map of this city.' What does that mean?"

Chu Changge pushed up his glasses: "His name is Chen Beidou, the Beidou of the Big Dipper."

The fat man was fairly quick-witted. He paused slightly and said, "Could it be that this murderer buried the victims' bodies according to the distribution of the Big Dipper? But that doesn't make sense. Even if he killed two more, there would only be six people and six bodies to bury. But the Big Dipper has seven stars."

"Did you notice his 'favorite place'?" Chu Changge asked. "He took the passenger to his favorite place and killed him. I guess this 'favorite place' is one of the seven locations, or even his short-term residence."

"That's right!" the fat man exclaimed, suddenly realizing, "Kill six people, then add yourself in, and you'll have seven spots..."

"But what's the point of us analyzing all this, Brother Chu?" the fat man asked curiously. "Our mission is to take a taxi home after midnight, right? We're not here to help the police find the murderer."

Chu Changge crumpled the flyer in his hand: "I've analyzed it, and the danger in this instance doesn't come from these victims..."

"I understand the logic, but why are they looking so scary?" The fat man glanced at the driver outside the phone booth and swallowed.

"It's a trick of the game, making you think these drivers are dangerous, then you panic and get out of the car, only to encounter real danger in the end," Chu Changge paused here:
“Normal players would definitely think this is a dungeon that relies on luck. They might think that most of the taxi drivers in this dungeon are ghosts, and going in is a dead end, while the only way to survive is to get into a taxi driven by a living person.”

"So once players realize something is wrong with the driver, they will desperately get out of the car and switch to another car; until finally they switch to a taxi driver who looks perfectly normal, like a living person. Of course, the driver is indeed a living person, but the player may not be far from death."

The fat man was taken aback: "So the danger in this instance actually only comes from one person? One living person?"

Getting into that murderer's taxi basically meant certain death.

Chu Changge nodded.

"Human nature is truly treacherous! I never expected this instance to be the opposite of what we imagined. Players are desperately trying to get on the living person's vehicle, unaware that the living person's vehicle is actually the most dangerous. The ghost driver is afraid that someone will repeat the same mistake, so he is desperately trying to send people to a safe place." The fat man sighed, "By the way, what's that saying again? What's the most terrifying thing about ghosts? What's the most venomous thing about human nature?"

Chu Changge folded the advertising paper again: "Humans know how terrifying ghosts are, but ghosts know how venomous people are."

"I remember this line coming from some supernatural novel, but I think that novel was censored later." The fat man thought seriously. "But Brother Chu, I still stand by what I said. Now that we know these ghost drivers are safe, why don't we just get in the car and leave? What's the point of analyzing this?"

Chu Changge pushed up his glasses: "Do you think Gu Mian has any luck..."

Upon hearing this, the fat man's scalp tingled: "They've probably already gotten on the bus with the living..."

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(End of this chapter)