Chapter 202 Exorcism Efficiency
For the "House of Salmon" incident, the Night's Watch offered a reward of 3,600 Death Coins.
The reason why the remuneration is slightly lower and not commensurate with the danger of the incident is that all the investigative work that could be done in the early stages has already been done diligently by the night watchmen.
Although the case was not solved, the Night Watch at least found a clue to the solution: the dire condition of Salmon House was related to the curse of a mysterious sect .
It is related to the sect but not classified as a red cover. The reason is that after several years of thorough investigation, the Night Watch has ruled out any clues that the Salmon family is related to the cult; the more likely possibility is that someone in this family accidentally came into contact with curse runes spread by followers of a false god sect using books, old furniture, antiques, jewelry, and even the lining of clothes, and activated the rune effects intentionally or unintentionally.
This kind of thing... is very common.
Disguising cursed runes or sacrificial circles as "harmless" prayer symbols that can bless love, grant luck, or even bring good health, and secretly spreading them to the general public who know nothing about the occult is what all cultists who try to obtain cheap sacrifices will try to do. No matter which church it is, they will conduct strict inspections of publications, antiques, old jewelry, and gorgeous old dresses within the parish to prevent this kind of thing.
In this world, old objects with a long history and that have been passed on to many people are usually taken to the local church by the owner for purification. The clergy who are usually very stingy with holy water often provide free baptisms just to prevent this from happening.
Of course, only nobles can afford antiques, so it is easy to understand why the church is so generous...
Thomas Salmon was just an upper-middle-class man with an annual income of around 180 to 200 gold coins. This income allowed the Salmon family to live a comfortable life in the city of Innadri, but it was not enough to be considered a proper noble, and he could not afford real antiques - an antique over 300 years old, even the least valuable old furniture made of good wood, would be worth more than a hundred gold coins.
As for imitation antiques, such as the historical vases, pipes, old books, etc. that most middle-class people like to pursue, most of them are safe.
In other words...the misfortune of the Salmon family was not an accident. Someone must have deliberately given a family member of the Salmon family a terrible gift with strong malice, which led to the tragedy of the Salmon family.
The inferences drawn from these investigations, as well as the suspicious clues found by the night watchmen, are all neatly organized in the archives of "Salmon House", and the content is very complete.
But... the people including Lahong who took away the files didn't even read the texts which they thought were long-winded and useless.
Except for some newbies or plot-lovers who still have awe for the game, more than 90% of players do not read the task text when doing a task. They usually just rush in when they know where the task is.
People who make a living as game planners are also aware of this problem of players. Most of the tasks are designed to be very (brain-) inhumane (cruel) and can be completed by just rushing in... Automatic pathfinding and automatic monster killing are routine operations, and they also deliberately set traps for players to fall into. Are they not scolded enough or what?
Even for the mission "Mist Shadow Forest", if Qin Guan and his gang hadn't searched the entire Mist Shadow Forest for a long time without finding the BOSS, and if entropy hadn't increased, they would probably have rushed all the way...
Brother Lahong's luck was a little better than Qin Guan's. He picked a mission with the highest reward and led a large group to the location. As soon as they entered the Salman house, the identification spell scanned out a string of red-named ghosts.
If a normal native from another world discovered this situation, he would turn around and leave immediately - it is obvious that an ordinary house in the city has such a dense concentration of ghosts that it is not normal.
The players' reactions were very different. Brother Lahong shouted in surprise, "Damn, there are so many monsters!" and then led his men to rush in fiercely.
In less than ten minutes, this group of players was wiped out.
And then...these guys who were wiped out were not discouraged at all. They started to discuss enthusiastically in the offline chat group how to conquer this quest point where the monsters were denser than those in the Scholomance Academy in World of Warcraft.
Phantom and Shenmi Xuexi on Lahong's side have participated in the ghost clearing activity in the sewers, and they know how to fight these "special monsters" that cannot be hit by knives: you have to find more wizards to cast dark blessings on the monsters that cannot be hit, and send dark energy to the ghosts. When the ghosts are semi-materialized, you can start to fight them.
Brother Lahong listened to his friend's advice and immediately made a lot of phone calls, calling all the mages in the Blood Alliance...
Half an hour later, the death penalty time for Lahongge and others ended. Next to the teleportation point of Inadli City Hall, there were already many wizard players waiting for them.
The group of players expanded to 40 people and ran to the Salman House with full confidence.
Having learned the lesson of being mowed down by super-flexible "special monsters" with AOE (area damage) after entering the house because of insufficient space, this group of players did not enter the house, but formed a formation in the yard, with only the well-equipped knights entering the house to "lure the monsters".
The knight players lure the monsters out, and the mage players quickly cast dark blessings on the monsters to "replenish their blood."
The monster has a physical body, and the players rush forward and hack it to death...
"Only 80 territory reputation points for killing one?!"
"Can I gain reputation by completing exorcist missions?"
“Awesome!!”
The white-letter materials and magic residues that ghost monsters must drop are nothing. Reputation is the source of dopamine that makes people excited.
Later, Brother Lahong even threw the mission to the back of his mind, and only treated the Salmon House as the exclusive monster spawning point of their blood alliance, organizing players to work hard to spawn monsters; if someone had to go offline to eat/go shopping with friends/go to work or school, he would arrange for other people in the blood alliance to take over...
Players who are waiting for the territory reputation to get the second transfer (the potential value is 100 and the territory reputation is close to get the second transfer) are also trying every means to make friends and wait for the succession position, and even pay money to buy the position. The average potential value of the majority of players has reached the level of 120~140, but the reputation of most people is still stuck at friendly and they cannot receive the second transfer tasks.
While these guys were "killing monsters", citizens occasionally passed by and found the undead cheering and hacking at horrible monsters that were N times scarier than the undead in the yard of the long-abandoned Salman House, and the undead were running away screaming and howling... The players skipped over the reactions of these "NPCs" as part of the game content settings.
That’s right, the monsters that “refresh” in the big house are pretty ugly, the kind that can make you lose weight if you look at them more. But compared to the mentor’s inner demon monsters in the weekend activity book and the monster battlefield open during peak hours every night, these monsters are nothing!
This group started at 10:00 am, Earth time, and lasted until 4:30 pm. They welcomed and sent off more than a hundred people. More than 60 players from the Blood Alliance had gathered enough reputation for the second level. Brother Lahong almost laughed his mouth off...
The monsters no longer continued to be "refreshed", and the players felt a little regretful, so they packed up and went into the house to search.
In the wine cellar of Salman's house, the players discovered that the wall behind the wine cabinet was cracked, with the wall paint and dust falling to the ground, revealing a strange-looking ghost painting.
If players saw it normally, they would think it was just graffiti drawn by someone, but... when players discovered this weird scribble, it was still smoking.
Not only was there smoke, but there were also signs of burning on the ghostly paintings, like an electrical wire that had been overloaded and burned; those pitch-black lines were gradually falling off and turning into dust in the smoke.
At this moment, Brother Lahong no longer cared much about the mission reward. After all, the benefits they got were enough to offset the reward. So he just wrote a case closing report of a few hundred words and casually added the ghostly scribbles that had not completely fallen off to the report.
Captain Clark saw the broken runes drawn by the undead in the extremely brief case report.
Captain Clark fell silent again.
Even though it was incomplete, he could tell that it was definitely a cursed sacrificial rune from an evil secret sect.
This weird thing was not a foreign object, but was hidden in the wall of the underground wine cellar of Salmon's house. Obviously, this was a trap left by the previous owner. The night watchman had been investigating the people related to Salmon's family for so many years, but he was going in the wrong direction.
Captain Clark felt like a mouthful of blood was stuck in his throat, neither going up nor down.
So, they should have hired two black magicians and brought a full force to the Salmon House to continue exorcising the demons, destroying the curse rune that sacrificed the Salmon family, right?
"Captain?" The fat official noticed that Clark was not in good condition and called out cautiously.
"…It's okay." Clark swallowed the blood in his throat, suppressing his frustration. "The undead did solve the Salmon House incident. We were investigating in the wrong direction. The curse was left by the previous owner."
The fat official blinked a few times, and after a long while he uttered "Ah" slowly, his face full of horror.
The Night Watch was different from the City Hall. Officials in the organization had to have some ability and be willing to work hard to keep their position. If the fat official thought hard, he could remember the information about the previous owner of the Salmon House. If he didn't know anything about the backlog of unresolved cases in his own department, he should have been kicked out of the organization long ago.
At first glance, the previous owner of the Salmon House seemed to be an ordinary middle-class family. There was nothing suspicious about them. But when you find out that this family actually left a curse before the house was sold, you can see problems everywhere!
The previous owner's parents, wife, two children, and even the housekeeper and maid they hired, all died due to some accident within ten years!
When the previous owner sold the big house to Thomas Salmon, he was already a lonely man!
"I'll go find this family's information." The fat official stood up and ran towards the city hall, sweating profusely.
The Salmon family had lived there for several years before the accident happened. The night watchman never thought it had anything to do with the previous owner and didn't even save any information.
Captain Clark looked at Morton who was delivering the black leather goods, and ordered with mixed feelings: "I will arrange for someone to inspect and inspect them, and then send the commissions of the undead over... You go back to the Xinfeng District and keep an eye on it first."
To be honest, Captain Clark did not expect that the hall in Xinfeng District that only faced the undead would be of much use at first... For Captain Clark, it was already very good to find something for these Tarantan undead to do and to prevent these guys from causing trouble for the locals in the city all day long.
He lived in the Midtown area, and during this period of time he had witnessed with his own eyes how these undead souls had destroyed the inner walls of the Midtown area day by day, making it unsightly - especially those realistic paintings (actually 3D paintings) that looked just like the real objects!
Four days ago, when he was entering and leaving the central city at dusk, he was almost suffocated by the bizarre simulation painting - on the snow-white wall behind the Commerce Department, there was actually a huge demonized rat with red eyes painted on it!
The demonized rat was painted so realistically that it looked as if it was about to jump down from the wall and destroy the building of the Commerce Bureau. Not to mention ordinary people, even he would be so frightened that his breath would be held in choke if he saw it unexpectedly.
But the dead were still very proud of their "artworks". A bunch of skeletons with painted bones stood on the roofs and on the streets, waving their arms and cheering...
This is not the end yet, the undead are still continuing to "extend their creations" onto the inner city walls, including super weird suspicious people wearing leather suits (actually Ultraman), particularly incomprehensible mechanical life forms (actually Transformers) , and a lot of messy and ridiculous graffiti (actually various emoticons)!
Anyone who dared to do this to destroy the inner city wall that symbolizes the dignity of the Central City would definitely be dragged away by the city police and hanged on the outer city wall.
But now all the city police chiefs have become prisoners. In the past few days, they have been driven by Rex's men with whips to dig out gutters and clean sewers. The National Guard, which has already surrendered to Rex, has turned a blind eye to the behavior of the undead... So this matter is destined to be left unattended.
Morton knew very well that he was just a marginal figure, so he said nothing, bowed silently and left.
Captain Clark has dozens of night watchmen under his command, but he doesn't have the energy to take care of the mood of every night watchman. He forces himself to arrange people to inspect the results of the exorcism of the undead.
I had just sent out two groups of people to inspect the site, and before I had time to have breakfast, Morton came again.
This time, this eccentric weirdo still said nothing and silently handed a black leather notebook to Clark.
Lynch Clark took a slight breath...
Qin Guan and La Hongge were not the only ones who could organize a large group of players. Entropy Buzeng, who started the wild group, was absorbed by Qin Guan's Blood Alliance. Among the individual players who did not like to join the Blood Alliance, a new group leader would naturally emerge to call on individual players to unite and play games...
While Captain Clark was questioning his life because of the undead's amazing exorcism efficiency, a group of new businesses in the bar district of St. Joseph Street, which had become deserted after a large-scale closure, were preparing to open for business after several days of intensive training and preparation.
In the middle of the bar area, the doors of several large bars that had been closed for many days were opened one after another. Several strong women wearing aprons and sleeves moved the tables and chairs in the bars to the door to wash and dry them.
While these working women, who were the family members of Operator Westram, were busy, Ms. Shirley came from the temporary resettlement point in the Xinfeng District with a large group of women wearing uniform sportswear (that is, student uniforms... ahem).
These women who were placed in the Xinfeng District were the fallen women who were "rescued" from various places during the large-scale crackdown on pornography and illegal publications. Ji Tang and Zhao Zhenzhen, who still had families in the local area and were willing to return home, were sent back. Those who no longer had families or were unwilling to return home were all accepted and placed in a centralized manner.
Unlike the victims in Westham who were forced to take fattening drugs, the women here at least had their bodies not completely ruined and were still able to do normal intensity labor.
The families of Westham's staff had worked with Westham's reformed clerks for many days and did not discriminate against those who had worked in dishonorable industries. They warmly greeted the timid women and took them to work together.
Mrs. Hank noticed that the ladies who used to work on this street were not used to this street that filled their memories with nightmares, so she smiled and said to them, "This street will become very lively in the future. It will be a clean and lively street!"
