They all call me an Outer God.

Chapter 99: A Plan to Make Money Through Acting
Relying on the audience's preferences to perform, and giving different performances to different audiences, Lia believes that to do something well, you can never be sloppy and everything needs to be perfectly prepared.

He took off his hat and placed it in front of him, showing that it was empty inside.

Unsurprisingly, the cats weren't interested in the hat, but the next second, they saw Ria pull a mouse as long as an arm out of the hat, and all the cats' eyes turned green.

They stared intently at the mouse, and one of the cats even crept closer. Suddenly, Ria reached out and pulled the mouse closer to it, and the mouse instantly transformed into a large bouquet of bright red roses.

"Shh-"

"Meow!"

The wildcat was startled, staring in astonishment at the blood-red flowers before it, about to react, when Ria threw the bouquet of roses to the ground. Instantly, each flower turned into a mouse and scurried away.

In an instant, all the cats erupted in excitement.

They chased the mice like madmen, carrying the caught mice in their mouths, ready to feast. Lia watched as the little guys got their food and showed a satisfied expression.

Flesh and brain matter burst from the rats' bodies as they tore at them, and the scarlet liquid and the mixture of yellow, white and red were swallowed along with their gray fur.

Some of the stuff stuck to the creature’s fur and whiskers, while a small portion fell to the ground and was crushed into a mixture of dust and oil seeping from the surrounding garbage by a paw, leaving a muddy footprint.

"Meow!" They licked their mouths, clearly enjoying Ria's "little magic trick."

Ria reached out and stroked the nape of the stray cat beside her a few times: "I'm glad you like it."

"But in this world, everything has a price, and not a single bite of rat meat will be a free meal for you—"

In return, you will become my first employees.

He decided to lay the groundwork for future performances. Since this meme is called "The Magician," the magician must need a magic partner to work with him to complete the performance.

But this is his secondary meme. If we include his primary meme, he should let a few cats handle the cash register. Animals are always much more effective at collecting money than humans. Many people might even give them a little extra money to buy dried fish just because they are cats.

From this perspective, employing cats as staff is quite effective.

As for the magician's assistant... of course, it has to be Little Swartz.

Lia is currently in the rehearsal stage and will not use any supernatural means to perform, but once he begins a formal performance, he will definitely use supernatural abilities to make everyone experience the feeling of having their wallets emptied just by watching a show.

“Hmm… this should be dark enough.” Ria clapped his hands. Attracting well-fed animals to watch the show wasn’t easy, but he had his ways.

After performing magic tricks for the cats for several hours, Lia finally let them go play elsewhere, since they were already full and even a little stuffed.

Then, seeing that no one was around, he walked to the pile of garbage and used his tentacles to rummage through it, picking out several unwanted cardboard boxes and water bottles, and even a half-new kettle.

"What a waste! People these days just throw everything away."

Ria despised wasteful behavior. In his eyes, these things could be exchanged for money. So he had Little Swarth collect them and found an abandoned house on the outskirts of the city where he dumped them, along with the scrap he had collected earlier, into it.

After doing all this, Liya went to hire a professional waste recycler and sold all the waste to him.

Today, Ria earned 328 swarths by selling scrap metal, which shows that collecting things can indeed save up a lot of money.

Looking at the abandoned house, Ria asked the scrap collector, "Does the house support recycling?"

"Stop joking, buddy. You'd have to ask a real estate developer for a price for that kind of thing. Besides, a house like yours, which looks like a haunted house, is probably hard to sell." The man left. Logically, this house didn't belong to Ria, so he couldn't just resell it. But he still wandered around the abandoned house and found a photo of the owner.

A couple and a pair of twin siblings standing together should have been a picture of happiness, if one ignored the fact that the photo had been slashed more than a dozen times with a knife.

"Was it done by one of the people inside, or by someone else you know?"

The house was completely abandoned, and the owner was presumably dead. Ria felt it was necessary to find the murderer, or at least the deceased.

This is of great significance to him.

Because if Ria wanted to take possession of the house and then sell it using supernatural means, she needed the original owners' consent. In any case, it didn't matter that they had been murdered, as long as there were bodies, Ria could ask the Radiant Sun for their souls' opinions.

Such an idea would probably shock others, but Lia believes that leaving abandoned houses unattended is a pure encroachment on land and a waste of resources, adhering to the principles of resource conservation and combating shady dealings—

He needs to earn money for himself now.

Then, after a long absence, Ria took out the Batantusa coin and began to ask if the victim's body was still in the house.

The answer is "yes".

"This is really serious."

Lia covered his right cheek. As the price for using the mysterious item, the eye on his facial muscle had been removed. When he lowered his hand, a pit the size of a knuckle, filled with tiny eyes, had appeared there.

Next, Ria let little Swarth sniff the bed. Although she hadn't really relied on its sense of smell, it might make finding the body easier that way.

It flapped its wings and emerged from Ria's flesh, looked back at the wounds that the host was repairing with the tentacles, and flew directly to the bed and ripped at the sheets a few times.

Little Swarth closed its eyes, and its body transformed completely into tentacles that extended to all parts of the house. A dozen minutes later, it returned to its original form and flew out of the room.

Ria followed it downstairs, all the way to the first floor, but this was not the end.

Little Swarth used his tentacles to lift the living room floor, revealing a staircase underneath.

"There's a basement?"

Hiding the body in the basement was indeed a good idea. Ria lit a kerosene lamp and followed the mythical creature down the stairs, looking at the dusty surroundings.

The basement was cluttered with miscellaneous items, and there seemed to be nowhere to hide a body, but Ria felt that something was wrong.

He lifted his foot and saw a black pattern on the ground.

This appears to be dried blood.

The surrounding debris covered the bloodstains completely, and Little Swarth swallowed them directly, storing them temporarily in his body.

The things on the ground finally revealed their true form—

Several rings encircled a mosquito coil-like pattern, from which twenty-four rays of light extended beyond the rings, and several mysterious runes were inscribed on the edge of the rings.

(End of this chapter)