Chapter 13: The small town of Siren

The keeper stood in the doorway silently watching them go, behind them a myriad of vague wax silhouettes, slowly poking their marble, expressionless faces out into the darkness, like fish poking out of the sea.

[Main Quest: Explore Siren Wax Museum to complete - 50 bonus points]

[Current point balance is 81, do you want to buy props?

81 Ah ...... Bai Liu stroked his chin and inquired, [Is there any high concentration of alcohol?

[Open shop - there are 218 different types of special quality alcohols, 18 of which you can buy from this copy]

[How much is the cheapest?]

[9 points 25L, warm reminder, the alcohol in the game and the real alcohol is not the same nature substance, after the system transformation, the efficacy may be higher or lower, before buying it, we suggest players read through the instructions].

[System Suggestions: Detected that the player has enough points, we suggest that the player buy the flaming torch prop in this copy, the efficacy is better and safer~]

Bai Liu is thoughtful: [reads alcohol prop instructions]

The system panel instantly popped open a whole bunch of panels with a dozen pages of densely packed instructions, the ant-sized handwriting hurting one's eyes to scan more than twice.

Bai Liu opens a page of the manual and reads it slowly and deliberately.

The more inexpensive the item, the longer the page of instructions. Instead, the instructions for popular items placed on the sales bar are simple, straightforward and seductive, stating the effects straight away, making players desperate to live want to buy them at first glance.

As a social animal with very little money, Bai Liu is all too familiar with the formula of finding the most practical and cheapest items from the overwhelming marketing of e-commerce every shopping season.

The cheaper and better something is, the more hindrances you will have to purchase it.

One of them is to set up a lot of explanatory text for cheap items so that people don't know what the item can do at first glance and then jump over and buy something else.

So few people have ever bought these cheap things, so sales are extremely low, some even in single figures, and presumably few people have read the instructions for using them carefully.

Bai Liu's eyes narrowed as he looked at the words behind [Flaming Torch] and [3D Projector] on the menu bar - [There has been a price change for the items].

[Flaming Fire lowers the price of Siren Smallville to 17 points]

[3D Projector "Siren Small Town" is back to original price, 6 points a piece]

Both of these props, which he had noticed before, have had price changes.

[Strong Flashlight] and [Flaming Torch], props that sound more common and effective to use in horror games, seem to be more expensive.

But it seems that the price of these props changed somewhat after Bai Liu used certain props, and he was aware that he was in a live system...

Bai Liu speculated that the number of players buying these items had changed during his time in the game, which caused the price of the items to change.

He read through the instructions for all the alcohols without slowing down and finally selected the cheapest one.

Bai Liu is very generous: [I'll take them all]

[9 bottles of high strength alcohol in player Bai Liu's shopping bag, welcome to our next visit]

Wang Shun, who was in front of the small TV, slapped his thigh in anxiety when he saw Bai Liu like this, "Ehhhh! What's this new guy doing?"

"Are you going to use alcohol to burn the wax figures? These wax figures are photophobic but not afraid of fire, the monsters inside will come out after burning the wax on the outside! How can you spend all your points at once, silly!"

There were also whispers from players nearby that

"What's with this new guy?81 points all for the cheapest alcohol, is this guy an alcoholic? No player has even bought this stuff, right?"

"Take it for granted, thinking that if a mermaid wax figure is afraid of light, it's afraid of fire. A newcomer has made this mistake before, taking a torch to burn instead of shining it on a mermaid wax figure, and ended up dead when the light from the torch dimmed."

"It's over, I thought it was a big deal, but it turned out to be a lucky break..."

"Central screen gold is getting lower and lower, this kind of newcomer can be on, before God Mu that batch is really hanging ...."

.....

[Added 0 people liked Bai Liu's TV, added 2 people liked Bai Liu's TV, added 166 people stepped on Bai Liu's TV, nobody charged Bai Liu's TV].

[1,447 new people are watching Bai Liu's mini-TV, more than half of them stepped on Bai Liu's mini-TV, player Bai Liu has been awarded the title of Not Worthy of the Name, playing really badly, everyone wants you to die soon~]

[Player Bai Liu's centre screen edge spot promotion expires]

[The stomp total is rising too fast and player Bai Liu enters the (Death Comedy) section screen to entertain the crowd with your comical deaths and game skills!

Wang Shun watched as the small screen on the edge of the central zone flickered and Bai Liu's small TV went dark.

He pushed up his glasses, thinking of the godly wandering NPC information he hadn't finished collecting, and hesitated, but got up and went over to the Death Comedy partition screen amidst a bunch of lamentations and jeers for Bai Liu, the newcomer.

......

In-game.

Night falls.

The driver drove the van through the darkened streets, lit by flickering streetlights on either side, with fishermen dragging their nets and machetes along, watching the van passing them with an almost dumbfounded gaze.

These are the fishermen who will be taking part in the mermaid fishery tonight.

The men's obscure street lights showed those marble-like green and black lines interacting densely on their faces, and some drips of mucus sliding off them.

The townspeople were even more ghastly than they looked in the daytime, their eyes glowing a dull green in the dark.

The driver warned again, "These townspeople are dangerous, they haven't had an income for a long time, you can just watch the mermaid fishing from your designated boat later, don't touch them, you look like outsiders at first glance and can easily be robbed."

The driver spoke as he took a big bite out of the sandwich in his hand.

The man also ate a sandwich for dinner, and the minced meat of the fish steak fell from his mouth, and Bai Liu smelt the putrid fish smell that made him want to vomit, but no one else in the car seemed to find the smell unpleasant except for him, and Andre kept swallowing as he watched the driver's sandwich dinner, and anxiously kept buttoning himself behind the ear.

Lucy couldn't resist saying the same thing: "This sandwich smells so good."

Andre was grumpy as hell: "What did we have for dinner! I'm starving!" He said and looked behind him with a disgusted look at Bai Liu.

They ate at the Wax Museum in the evening. Bai Liu ordered the cheapest all-vegetarian dinner and didn't want any fish, which not only made Andre angry, but even Lucy was shocked, but Bai Liu paid the biggest bill, saying he didn't want to eat fish so everyone had to accompany him.

Andre cursed, "Don't come out to play grown-up games if you can't afford it, go back to eating your mother's whole vegan milk!"

Bai Liu just smiled slightly at the time, "In that case, Andre, order your own meat if you want."

He withdrew Andre's all-vegetarian package, and all the packages at the wax museum were so expensive that Andre simply couldn't afford them, but Bai Liu said he wouldn't give them to him unless he did.

Andre didn't dare bother Bai Liu, after all Bai Liu had to pay his hotel bill for the night and he didn't want to sleep rough in a town like this.

But Jeff didn't care, so Jeff was robbed of his all-vegetarian meal by Andre and punched by Andre, who cowered in the corner, covering his stomach and keeping quiet.

Smelling the sandwich now, Jeff also kept sliding the knot of his throat up and down, a look of suppressed longing in his eyes, and then looking at Andre with eyes so red they were dripping blood.

[Jeff's Bloody Plot - 30% Progress on Branch]

Bai Liu shot a look at Jeff, who had his head down.

Andre was driven to irritation by hunger and the aroma of food, and he couldn't help but snap hard behind his itching ears.

Bai Liu noticed that the patch of skin behind Andre's ear, which he had snapped red, suddenly opened and closed in several curved folds, like the gills of a fish breathing in and out, but only for a moment, and then the patch of skin soon fitted back in.

The skin seemed to be alive, bulging in small increments.

It puffs slightly like the closed gills of a fish on the shore.

Bai Liu swept Andre with a coin.

[NPC Name: Andre (highly alienated)

Coming out of the wax museum, Andre, alienation has increased. ....

Bai Liu raised his eyebrows slightly, " Andre, did you touch those mermaid wax figures in the wax museum?"

"So what if I touched it?" Andre turned his head and said in a vicious voice, " Bai Liu, tonight we'll see who's the one who should go home and drink milk!"

In this moment, Andre's growled low in anger, his gills flaring open on either side of him in the dimly lit compartment, and Bai Liu could clearly see the fin-like things behind Andre's ears shaking violently.

The driver suddenly scolded in a low voice, "Hey boys, don't duel in our car!"

Andre retracted his gills momentarily, but his eyes still fell viciously on Bai Liu.

Driver: "I have found you a duel, or rather a place for your bet, as you requested, a remote beach and two wooden boats tonight, take care of yourselves, I am not responsible if you drown."

After a while, the driver seemed to chuckle lowly to himself, "But you've been here so long, you shouldn't be drowning either .... Should all know how to swim by now."

Bai Liu's face was still, he couldn't swim.

The inhabitants of this town are all these fish-like things, including their party, who have only been here for just a day, and are gradually becoming like fish, with a taste for strange fish meat and a subtle fishy smell ....

Fish are born to swim, so of course they won't drown.

Except for Bai Liu.

He was different from the others in that he neither ate the bizarre fish meats nor let any of the mermaid wax figures near him at night.

Bai Liu speculates that these two things caused the others to evolve into fish, but Bai Liu was not assimilated into the evolution, and when Bai Liu went to Shanghai for the bet, his danger level must have doubled.

Who knows what's in the sea, and who knows if Andre will turn into a monster and overturn his ship later?