Transformed into a heartthrob's simp, every day is a battleground.

Chapter 287 Opportunity for Fame

The man with the buzz cut jogged all the way to Du Yun's house.

At this moment, Du Yun was playing a game. The crew-cut man thought to himself, "What time is it? How can he still be in the mood to play games?"

But then he remembered that he could only stay at Du Yun's house temporarily, so he could only put on a flattering attitude and ask, "What game are you playing? It looks so interesting!"

"It's the game I didn't finish playing during the previous livestream." Du Yun didn't mention that he was going to look for clues in the game, but instead turned around while sitting in his gaming chair. "Why aren't you at home? What brings you here?"

“I just remembered something,” the crew-cut man said. “We’ve met before in school.”

“Of course we’ve met since we’re on the same campus.” Du Yun gave him a look that said, “You’ve come all this way just to talk about this? I didn’t think it was anything special.”

"We've not only met, but we also live in the same dormitory building."

"Yes... a building."

The man with the buzz cut repeated unconsciously as he looked at Du Yun, "What's your relationship with Zhugan, no, Xie Qingdu?"

"Not bad?" Du Yun said, looking the buzz-cut man up and down. "Are you thinking about our school days?"

"Just a little bit, just a little bit." The man with the buzz cut gestured. "That's all."

He looked at Du Yun and asked, "You go first, what's your relationship with Xie Qingdu like?"

"Didn't you also remember that you and Bamboo Pole knew each other before?"

"How did you come up with that idea?" the crew-cut man suddenly asked, realizing what was happening.

“I found my campus card at home and also watched clips of my old live streams,” Du Yun said. “I discovered that we knew each other before, and he often helped me with errands.”

Du Yun felt there was no need to hide this information.

His peripheral vision was fixed on the minimized voice chat window in the corner of the screen. He had already dialed Yan Xun's number before the crew cut guy arrived, and Yan Xun was quietly listening to his conversation with the crew cut guy on the other end.

"I often run errands..." the man with the buzz cut repeated, "What else do you know?"

"Why are you always the one asking me questions?" Du Yun's tone was a little displeased. "I've already told you all this information, aren't you going to tell me what you've discovered?"

The man with the buzz cut wiped his face. "I don't know how I ended up with this kind of persona."

He told Du Yun, "I realized that when I was in school, I always disliked Xie Qingdu and bullied him quite a bit."

"He's done a lot of things, like deliberately locking him out," the crew-cut man said. "Damn, my character is really not human."

"And then? You came to me to repent?" Du Yun asked. "I'm not Xie Qingdu. You should go to him to repent."

"Do you think I'm bullying Xie Qingdu because he's poor and has no one to back him up after his parents died, that's why I'm so arrogant?"

"Isn't that right?" Du Yun asked. "Anyway, in my memory, you were fearless."

“No,” the crew-cut man immediately retorted.

“If you look at the messages in the group, you should be able to tell that the master Fang Shuo mentioned is my relative.”

The man with the buzz cut was probably completely flustered and just wanted to talk to someone. At this moment, he didn't care whether Du Yun knew about his family's secret. He just nervously wrung his hands and said, "I have a good relationship with this relative of mine."

"He has no children and is said to have a congenital disability, so he is very good to me."

"He also brought me to school that day."

"When he got to the dormitory and saw Xie Qingdu, his expression was a little off." The crew-cut man recalled the images that came to mind. "When we were having lunch in the private room, I asked him what was wrong."

He told me not to worry about the kids too much.

"But before he left, he still told me to be wary of Xie Qingdu."

"When I asked him why, he told me not to ask."

“When I first heard him say that, I thought Xie Qingdu had some kind of background. But when I found out that he was an orphan and his family didn’t have much money, and that he had to apply for poverty assistance, I stopped taking him seriously.”

Du Yun, "So you bullied Xie Qingdu?"

"You don't know!" the crew-cut man's voice rose, "He always looks at us with that sinister look."

"And he's usually silent in the dorm, like a ghost." Perhaps influenced by his memories, the man with the buzz cut became quite emotional. After a long while, he suddenly realized, "...Why am I so agitated?"

"This isn't my memory." He wondered why he had been so agitated just now, scratching his head. "Could it be that I was influenced by my memory?"

"That's roughly how it happened," the crew-cut man said to Du Yun. "Afterwards, I went to ask my master relative, and he told me that he had taken over a business deal before."

"That business involves helping people steal their luck and change their names."

"But this business is not just any kind of evil business. First, you need to find young people with strong yang energy and take some of their luck from them. But you can't go too far. If you go too far, the rules will notice and it will damage your own cultivation. It's not good for either the one casting the spell or the one who is the client."

"So he came up with an idea: under the pretense of sponsoring impoverished students, he would send lucky charms to the students he was sponsoring."

"At the same time, if you want to completely change your destiny, you also need to find someone with a lot of evil energy. The birth year and month of this person are important. Once they die a violent death, they will become an evil spirit."

"You can't suppress it without some skill."

"But as long as the spell is successful, the malevolent energy on this person can be instantly transformed into vital energy, nourishing the employer's destiny."

Du Yun nodded repeatedly as he listened, until he heard the part about "reversing the evil energy," at which point he realized something was wrong.

"No, wait a minute." Du Yun gestured for him to stop. "According to what you're saying, this person with such strong malevolent energy was transformed into a human-shaped power bank by that master..."

"Can he still live?" Du Yun asked.

The man with the buzz cut didn't say anything.

Du Yun understood what he meant.

That's true. If someone gets a complete reversal of fortune, it's no wonder they can't survive.

"So your uncle did such a despicable thing?" Du Yun quickly realized who the crew-cut man was talking about.

"The one with the most menacing aura is Xie Qingdu."

"Is the distant relative trying to use the evil energy on him to perform a ritual to change their own fate?"

Du Yun paused, then asked, "No, you know this person has a lot of menacing aura, so why would you provoke him instead of avoiding him?"

“I’m not him, how would I know?” the crew-cut man said, unable to contain himself. “But I think this character is an idiot, probably trying to force Xie Qingdu out of the dormitory in this way.”

Du Yun: "..."

"You said he's broke, so where else can he stay if he doesn't live in the dorms?"

The crew-cut man sighed, "If everyone in this instance thought the same way, there wouldn't be so much trouble."

"One more thing, I'm certain that the person who performed the fate-altering spell wasn't my relative."

"It's someone else."

"According to my relative, that guy is a veteran, and he's planning to retire after this job..."

Du Yun: "..."

"Isn't this setting a flag for myself?"

"So was the conversion ultimately successful?" Du Yun asked again.

The man with the buzz cut shook his head. "I don't know either."

“But there’s one thing my relative told me,” the crew-cut man said, looking at Du Yun, “to prevent this person’s malevolent energy from being too strong and directly backfiring on the person casting the spell and the employer.”

"Once the spell begins, you must not let him come into contact with those special industries."

Du Yun gave him a confused look.

“It’s the funeral industry,” the crew-cut man said. “Those who deal with the underworld in funerals will not only aggravate the evil aura on him, but will also backfire on the person who wants to drain his luck.”

"Can this be controlled?" Du Yun didn't believe it. "I think he was so poor that he almost sold his blood. If someone offered him a high-paying job, wouldn't he take it?"

“My relative said that the employer has a way,” said the man with the crew cut. “My relative was probably worried that I would be scared, so he told me that I didn’t need to be particularly afraid of Xie Qingdu.”

"This person has always been self-controlled from childhood to university and would never harm others."

……

Yan Xun overheard the entire conversation between the crew-cut man and Du Yun from the other side.

He probably felt he had said enough, because no matter how much Du Yun asked, the crew-cut man just said he didn't know.

Yan Xun hung up the voice call first, and then sent Du Yun an OK emoji.

“I reckon that’s more than just what the crew-cut guy remembered,” Yan Xun said. “He specifically mentioned the funeral industry…” He glanced at Lou Yanchuan, thinking that this was something the crew-cut guy had said, and continued, “He must have remembered something from the villa.”

Otherwise, he wouldn't have needed to specifically mention such trivial details.

It was because he remembered why he had killed Xie Qingdu in the villa that he subconsciously revealed this point that concerned him.

—He killed Xie Qingdu in a moment of desperation because Xie Qingdu had come into contact with the funeral industry and the evil energy was about to backfire.

This was not his intention.

Even if the man with the buzz cut is a player, and the above behaviors are all part of the dungeon's setting, under the influence of his memories, he still instinctively chose to make excuses for himself.

"He cares too much, which is why he mentioned to people who don't know the situation that Xie Qingdu shouldn't be involved in the funeral business." Lou Yanchuan understood Yan Xun's meaning.

"The key to triggering the buzz cut's memory was that he and the master were both in the lakeside villa area that day, and Fang Shuo was also there."

"Since the memories he and Du Yun described are all related to the master, then he probably also remembered..."

Yan Xun paused for a moment, then continued, "The scene shows the scene where the master came to the villa room that day and they worked together to dispose of Xie Qingdu's body."

Otherwise, even if the crew-cut guy was a novice player, he wouldn't have panicked and fled to other players overnight after discovering that he had actually killed his roommate.

Perhaps because the scenes of dealing with Xie Qingdu in his memory were too realistic, he was afraid that Xie Qingdu would come after him after finding his memories, so he fled in a hurry.

Fang Shuo was also in that villa area when that incident happened.

Was that villa complex put into use at that time?

Yan Xun thought about it and searched for the name of the lakeside villa, but unexpectedly the first thing that came up was the rumor that the villa was haunted.

It is said that a security guard in the villa area once saw a slender figure lingering by the lake late at night, but when he shone a flashlight over it, he found nothing there.

The security guard suspected it was a thief, so he decided to take another closer look.

He took a few steps with the flashlight, but soon heard his colleagues shouting.

When someone rushed over and pulled him up, the security guard realized that he had unknowingly walked towards the center of the lake. By the time his colleagues pulled him up, the water was already above his waist.

Afterwards, all the security guards from that day developed high fevers.

Then there are the people who come here for vacation, who say that every time they stay in a villa, they have auditory hallucinations, as if someone is talking in their ears.

Sometimes they whispered among themselves, and other times they plotted how to kill them.

As these rumors grew, the lakeside villas gradually fell into disrepair.

Of course, the most fundamental reason was that the developer suddenly died at home, and afterwards, a lot of scandals arose due to the fight for his family property, which even led to a murder case. After that, he went bankrupt and no one took over the villa area, so it could only slowly fall into disrepair and become a famous unfinished building complex in that area.

As Yan Xun looked at the news online, he naturally saw the deserted "service center".

The service center is a striking white building, about 7-8% similar to the white houses in their neighborhood.

But that's all; those villas bear no resemblance whatsoever to the other houses of various colors in their community.

According to information found online, the lakeside villa area was abandoned at least 5 years ago, from the time it was handed over to its current state.

The crew-cut guy and the others went to the lakeside villas before the villa area was handed over to residents.

According to the timeline, everyone's memory stops a little over a year after Zhugan successfully graduated.

At this time, Yan Xun was a junior in college, while Xie Qingdu and others had graduated a little over a year ago and were looking for jobs.

Yan Xun searched for Fang Shuo's pen name online. Just as Fang Shuo had said, all he could find were his early works. After graduation, Fang Shuo's creative career had been unsuccessful. On the contrary, Lin Wen had won many awards and become famous.

In a magazine interview, Lin Wen mentioned that she had a boyfriend she had been with since school. He was passionate about literary creation, and she was very supportive of him.

During the interview, someone asked curiously what works Lin Wen's boyfriend had done.

Someone replied—

[You used to write okay, but now it's so boring it makes you want to doze off. It's really bad.]

[The funniest thing is his blog, where he whines and talks nonsense all day long. Recently, he said he found a master who said he would definitely become famous before he turned 30, no less than Lin Wen.]

[He's quite ridiculous. Lin Wen has already won international awards, how can he compare? Or is he aiming for the Nobel Prize? With his boring novel?]

Some busybodies asked about Lin Wen's boyfriend's blog.

The other party quickly replied with the address and instructed the person to look at it secretly, saying that the great artist hated being disturbed.

When Yan Xun clicked on that blog, the first post was—

I hate this era of fragmented entertainment.

[The editor actually wanted me to do more marketing, saying I'm old-fashioned, not only don't have social media accounts, but I'm still writing these long blogs that nobody reads. He said I should start a short video account and come up with a more sensational title...]

For example, how did a once-prodigy end up living off his girlfriend?

Disgusting, scum, ridiculous! I just lack an opportunity to become famous; I don't want to be this kind of attention-seeking clown.

However, I recently heard that voice telling me, "Now is your time to become famous."