Chapter 219: Ghost Core and Surging Malice
The circus performance mirrored yesterday's macabre routine, save for one glaring, horrifying exception—the performers' physical appearances were deteriorating at an alarming rate.
On the first day, they could at least pass for grotesquely deformed humans. By the second day, their limbs and torsos had twisted into sickening, unnatural angles. Now, on the third day, every single entertainer on stage, save for the enigmatic Troupe Leader, had completely shed their mortal disguises. They were nothing more than malevolent ghosts, parading around with hideous, rotting visages that dripped with dark energy.
Alongside their monstrous transformations, the performers' appetite for audience participation had skyrocketed. The circus freaks dragged significantly more players onto the stage to "cooperate" in their deadly acts. The show hadn't even reached its halfway mark, yet the number of players who had met a gruesome end under the spotlight had already surpassed yesterday's total death toll.
Because two performers had violently perished midway through the lineup, the schedule was cut short. Just over two-thirds of the way into the agonizing event, only the grand finale remained: the Clown's juggling act.
Since yesterday's show had abruptly ended early, effectively skipping the Clown's segment, no one in the audience had a clue what his twisted game entailed or what lethal traps awaited. A suffocating tension gripped the bleachers. Everyone held their breath.
The Clown vaulted onto the stage with an unnatural, spring-loaded leap. He kicked off his segment with a solo slapstick routine, contorting his painted face into wildly exaggerated expressions and throwing his limbs around in spastic, jerky movements. At one point, he gleefully tossed a handful of brightly colored juggling balls toward the front row. Mid-air, the balls burst open, sprouting writhing, fleshy meat worms that lunged at the terrified players. It wasn't remotely funny. It was pure nightmare fuel. Yet, bound by the ironclad rules of the circus, the surviving players forced themselves to clap and bark out hollow, hysterical laughter.
Roughly ten minutes into this psychological torture, the Clown paused. He adjusted his crooked, blood-stained pointed hat, reached behind his back, and produced a massive wooden sign out of thin air, hoisting it high above his head.
[One person urgently needed for the performance]
The entire big top plunged into a dead, chilling silence.
Nobody wanted to be the volunteer. While waiting for the final, inevitable chaos of the circus might only offer a razor-thin chance of survival, those odds were still vastly superior to surviving whatever sick game the Clown had planned on that stage.
Met with absolute stillness, the Clown's painted smile inverted into a grotesquely exaggerated frown. He dramatically wiped away non-existent tears from the corners of his eyes, playing the part of a heartbroken entertainer. Then, he slowly raised a white-gloved hand. His index finger swept across the trembling audience like the scythe of the grim reaper, finally locking onto a specific section of the bleachers.
It pointed straight toward Haruto.
Haruto's eyelid gave a violent twitch. Surely he isn't picking me again?
Fortunately, the Clown's finger drifted just a fraction of an inch to the side, settling squarely on a man wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses seated right next to Lin Que.
The bespectacled man's expression froze for a split second, though his face remained remarkably stoic.
Seeing the target shift, Haruto let out a quiet breath, flashed a thumbs-up, and casually patted Lin Que on the shoulder. "Not bad at all. Is your teammate always this confident? He doesn't look scared in the slightest."
Lin Que fell completely silent. She stared at her teammate, who was now stiffly rising from his seat and walking toward the stage. His face was a blank slate, but his legs were visibly trembling. She turned to Haruto and replied weakly, "Actually... he has facial paralysis."
Haruto's lips twitched. "Well then... he really is screwed."
The Clown's entire routine heavily revolved around imitation, exaggerated expressions, and forcing players to laugh. Yet, out of a sea of terrified faces, the monster had miraculously selected the one guy physically incapable of making an expression. This Clown really knew how to pick his victims. The poor guy was unlucky enough as it was; his mind had probably flatlined the moment that white-gloved finger pointed at him.
"Although I know it's a huge favor to ask..." Lin Que suddenly leaned closer to Haruto, lowering her voice to a desperate whisper. "Could you please help my teammate survive this? I'm willing to offer a ghost artifact as a reward."
"Sure, what are you offering?" Haruto had already been debating whether or not to intervene just to keep things interesting. Hearing there was actual loot involved, he agreed without a second thought. While the vast majority of ghost artifacts in these instances were practically useless trash to him, he treated them like trading cards—you could never have too many. Even if he never used them, tossing them into his Gap for storage cost him absolutely nothing.
"We've almost entirely exhausted the ghost artifacts we brought into this instance. Right now, the only thing of value I have left is a ghost core. If you trust me, I can write up a list of better items for you to choose from once we clear this place."
"A ghost core? Let me see it."
Haruto recalled seeing passing mentions of such items on the player forums. Rumor had it they were the condensed fruits of Ghost Trees, bizarre flora that only grew in environments saturated with suffocating Yin energy. Carrying one was basically a death sentence for a normal player, as the concentrated malice within would constantly erode their sanity and life force.
Despite her confusion as to why a powerhouse like Haruto would take an interest in something as detrimental as a ghost core, Lin Que reached into her jacket. She carefully extracted a dark brown, walnut-sized pit. Its uneven surface was tightly bound by a faded yellow sealing talisman.
Haruto accepted the object, turning it over in his palm with genuine curiosity. "I thought these things were supposed to be fruits? Why is it just a dried-up pit?"
"This is the core," Lin Que explained, keeping a wary distance from his hand. "The fruit you read about is just its initial, freshly harvested form. Over time, the flesh rots and shrivels away, leaving only this condensed center behind. This specific ghost core was excavated from the heart of a massive mass grave. Its malice is exceptionally heavy—so heavy, in fact, that it has even developed a faint hint of rudimentary intelligence. That talisman wrapped around it is the only thing suppressing the evil inside. Whatever you do, do not tear it off."
"Understood," Haruto replied casually.
He was just about to hand it back when he suddenly paused, his eyes narrowing slightly as if sensing an invisible frequency. He withdrew his extended hand. Then, under Lin Que's utterly stunned gaze, he casually pinched the edge of the yellow paper with two fingers—
"Don't!"
Lin Que lunged forward to stop him, but she was a second too late.
Riiiip.
The talisman fluttered away. Even without making physical contact with the exposed ghost core, Lin Que could instantly feel a massive, twisted wave of pure malice crashing over her senses.
As for Haruto, he felt something cold, vile, and indescribable surge out of the tiny brown pit. The dark energy drilled straight into his flesh, attempting to infect his bloodline and corrupt his very soul. Along with the invasion came a shrill, echoing voice screaming inside his mind.
At first, the voice was twisted, arrogant, and frenzied with bloodlust. But the moment it actually touched the depths of Haruto's existence—the unfathomable, eldritch void of a Boundary Youkai—the screaming abruptly changed. The frenzy shattered into absolute confusion, then devolved into sheer, paralyzing terror, and finally... it just whimpered and dissipated into nothingness.
"Are you okay?! Do you feel anything wrong?" Lin Que hovered around him, her voice tight with extreme panic.
She knew full well that Haruto was the anchor keeping their entire survival plan afloat. If he lost his mind to the core's corruption, the rest of them wouldn't even know how to die properly. If her entire team got wiped out because she handed him a cursed item, she would never forgive herself.
"I'm perfectly fine," Haruto said, shaking his head with a mild, almost disappointed sigh.
Lin Que exhaled a shaky breath, the tension leaving her shoulders, but she couldn't stop herself from pressing the issue. "Did that malice... not attack you? Did it shrink back into the core to hide?"
She had accidentally held that exact ghost core barehanded once before. If her teammates hadn't noticed her slipping into a violent trance and knocked it away in time, she didn't know if she would still be human today.
"Malice? You mean this stuff?" Haruto casually clenched his fist.
Instantly, a wave of dark energy—infinitely more intense, concentrated, and ferocious than what the core had just emitted—radiated outward from his knuckles.
"You... you can actually control it?" Lin Que's eyes widened to the size of saucers, her entire body trembling slightly under the oppressive aura.
Standing near him felt like a normal civilian suddenly locked in a phone booth with a desperate, blood-soaked outlaw, or a grinning madman determined to carve them to pieces. It was raw, naked, suffocating malice.
"It's not exactly control," Haruto replied, his tone as flat and unbothered as if discussing the weather. "The malice inside this ghost core had indeed developed a tiny spark of intelligence. It just tried to forcefully seize my body."
He paused, a dry, amused smirk tugging at his lips. "However, it might have... peeked at something it really shouldn't have seen. It suffered a mental collapse, died of fright on its own, and then I just absorbed the leftover energy."
"It died on its own? And... you absorbed it?"
Hearing this absurd explanation, Lin Que's brain short-circuited. She didn't know how to process the information. If literally anyone else in the survival game had said those words, she would have scoffed in their face. Malice committing suicide out of fear and then being digested? It sounded like the delusional ravings of a madman.
But the lazy youth standing in front of her was an undisputed monster, a powerhouse vastly superior to anyone she had ever encountered. And she had just witnessed the impossible with her own eyes.
"Impressive," Lin Que finally managed to squeeze out after a long, suffocating silence.
"Do you happen to have any more of these ghost cores?" Haruto asked, his eyes gleaming with renewed interest. "I want all of them. I can pay you in ghost coins."
"I don't have any more on me, but I can definitely go to the player market and buy some for you. There's no need for money," Lin Que replied, her expression turning slightly strange. "Although these things are technically rare, they are basically cursed garbage to normal players. Because they're completely useless to us, the market price is incredibly low—even cheaper than the most ordinary, low-tier ghost artifacts."
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