Chapter 389: How to own five buildings

Bai Liu pushes open the door of the dilapidated security room and enters the cemetery.

The cemetery is the usual cemetery scene, with rows of marble headstones in front of a plinth about 1*2 metres wide, on which are written the date of birth, the date of death and the cause of death of the person who died.

Muke scans the plinths from side to side, his gaze straightening as if he is collecting information from them for a comprehensive analysis, and he looks up at Bai Liu: "More than 80 per cent of the people here died before the age of 60, with an average life expectancy of around 52 years, usually from various organ diseases and work-related injuries caused by sensory conditions. "

"It's not just that." Liu Jiayi stops at a gravestone, "The later the date of birth, the earlier the date of death."

She says calmly, "Their average life expectancy is still shortening, and there are more sudden deaths among the causes of death."

Muke follows Liu Jiayi's line of sight to the woman who died suddenly in front of her computer chair at the age of 32: "Judging from the data on the headstones here, the average age of death in Sunnyside has dropped to around 30 for women and 35 for men in recent times."

"It happens to be a man and a woman just past the optimum age for childbearing." Muke looks to Bai Liu.

Bai Liu walked forward with a light gaze, "Sudden death as soon as you can't have children, the real estate developers here in Sunnyside are clearly regulating the average life expectancy of everyone to an age where you can work just enough to have high energy for the rest of your life and have a decline in productivity after you have children."

"This squeezes the maximum value out of everyone."

Mu Sicheng looks around, looks down at the grass, looks up at Bai Liu with a frown: "There are all normal headstones here, I don't see the entrance to the 18-storey underground cemetery building, and I don't see any floor numbers."

Tang Erda looked down at the property in her hand, "The number is unit 0812."

Bai Liu's footsteps stopped, and he looked up at the headstone: "Twelfth in the eighth row, this must be it."

Tang Erda looks over at the spot where Bai Liu has stopped, and her eyes lurch.

There was only a headstone and no other buildings around it, so if Bai Liu says this is the cemetery building, then there is only one possibility.

"Lift the pedestal." Bai Liu instructed calmly, "The entrance is inside the tomb."

Mu Sicheng asked in astonishment, "Inside the tomb? That means our floor is already the ground floor of the cemetery building?"

"But if the first level is the entrance and you have to lift it to get in ......" Mu Sicheng looks at the young man who died at 26 on the headstone, "then where are the graves of these people? "

Tang Erda also frowned: "These people died too early and don't look like they could afford to buy the first tomb of a rich man."

Bai Liu stares blandly and levelly at the young man's posthumous photograph on the tombstone: "This is not the first level."

"According to the normal structure of the building, the tomb here would be called the basement or garage, the cheapest location in the whole building."

"So the people buried here would have been low-class citizens of Sunnyside who couldn't even afford an 18-storey cemetery building."

When the thick plinth was lifted up by Tang Erda and Mu Sicheng, Mu Sicheng couldn't help but let out a cold breath when the plinth was turned over to see what was inside, and even Muke and Tang Erda turned pale.

After lifting the plinth, there was a dark staircase beneath, so narrow that only one person could pass through it. This was not a shocking sight, what was shocking was that the lifted plinth had a transparent plastic coffin with a living person curled up inside!

The boy, so young that he seemed to be in his teens, clutched himself around the shoulders, huddled in a position as if he were in the womb in a coffin only two-thirds the size of his body, clutching his body tightly, breathing slightly, the mist of his breath hitting the next door of the coffin reflecting a ring of mist, looking tense and pained as if he was about to die from asphyxiation.

Tang Erda immediately lifted the lid of the coffin and pulled the boy out of the coffin, slapping him hard on the face, "Wake up!"

The boy choked and coughed twice, woke up in a daze, saw someone in front of him, rubbed his eyes and asked, "Are you the new residents of the 0812 Cemetery building? I'm sorry I fell asleep just now, but now I'll get up and let you in."

Mu Sicheng reacted for a moment, then he looked incredulously at the boy who naturally got up and made way for them, "Did you just sleep here at ......?"

The boy didn't seem to think there was anything strange about it and nodded, "Yeah, this is my house, I sleep here at night."

Muke looks at the transparent coffin, less than 1.5 square metres, which the boys call "home", with an ineffable gaze.

"If you are the occupant of the ground floor of this cemetery building." Liu Jiayi stared at him and inquired, "Then who is the man on the tombstone outside who is inscribed as dead at the age of 26?"

The boy scratched his head, "That's me, only I'm not dead yet."

Mu Sicheng looked up at the posthumous photo on the tombstone and solemnly compared it repeatedly with the boy's face before finally nodding affirmatively, "Yes, although the photo is a bit blurry, it should be a person."

Bai Liu gazed calmly at the boy and asked softly, "You look like you're only in your teens, why did you put a 26-year-old tombstone on yourself?"

"I'm 17." The boy explained, "When I took out a loan to buy a cemetery house here at the cemetery in E when I started working at 16, the agent developer said he could give me a headstone, and I thought to myself that I didn't want to have kids and had no other wishes, so I could pretty much live until I was 26 and die, so I told the agent developer to just put the date of death on the headstone until I was 26. "

"That's how this tombstone came to be." The boys didn't feel like saying anything strange at all and smiled at Bai Liu and the others.

Tang Erda had mixed feelings: "You're 17 years old, where are your parents?"

"They're all dead." The boy said in a natural tone, "What they were doing on the building site, they usually died early, and then not long after they died, the house we had taken out a loan for was repossessed at the end of twenty years."

"Even though the house is gone, there is still some money left over from the house, and I still have to pay back the loan for over 10 years with that money, so I can't save anything, so I have to come and buy a cemetery house."

Muke's eyes moved down to see the boy's bloodstained hands, typical of those used to haul ropes and do heavy work on construction sites, and he paused to ask, "So where are you working now?"

"The new building in C district, ah, it just opened there, it's recruiting, I got lucky and got in, the salary offered is okay, I've been getting quite a lot of money lately."

The boy finished in a rather good mood and crawled into the coffin in a self-conscious huddle, tilting his head up and smiling kindly as he waved his hand at Bai Liu and the others, "You have to work tomorrow, so get inside and get some rest, it's not very safe in this building late."

The attitude was normal as if he was not in a cemetery but in a normal flat greeting the new neighbours who had just moved in next door.

"I'm going to rest too." The boy yawned and lay down in the coffin, he pressed a button next to him and the pedestal closed upright like a lift door that opened and closed automatically.

The stench of decay in the air intensified as the group marched in silence through the darkened hallways of the building.

"The boy, he's only seventeen and not yet an adult." Tang Erda spoke up abruptly, his voice a little muffled, "What kind of place is it that allows a seventeen year old to take it all in already and lie asleep in his own 26 year old grave."

Bai Liu's voice is calm: "I don't think there's such a thing as adulthood here, they use the criterion of whether people are capable of working or not, so it seems the base age is 16."

Tang Erda falls silent again.

The footsteps of the five men made their way downwards to the new floor, and when they reached the ground floor, a faint, eerie blue building light came on, through which it was possible to see that there were five households on the ground floor of the narrow, low, narrow cemetery building, each doorway designed not as the open kind of guys, but as one of those narrow, push-in doors, with rusty iron chains hanging from the bolts.

Each one is lined up from top to bottom with three sliding doors, a narrow layout, strong in this dark blue light, the smell of decay, the dense sliding doors, so that looking at the place it looks like a -

Muke says softly, "- it's more like an incinerator than a cemetery building."

As everyone stopped to observe their surroundings, the footsteps stopped and the building light went out again.

There were a few clicks in the darkness, the muffled sound of a sliding door being pushed from the inside, metal chains jiggling and clashing back and forth, the scraping of clothes and the sticky tearing of flesh coming through, the stench of rot in the air becoming much more acrid and thick all of a sudden.

Bai Liu pulled out a long whip from behind him without a word and threw it to the ground with a crisp "snap".

The sound-activated lights in the building came on again with the sound.

In the dim flickering eerie blue light, the sliding doors of all the portals slid outwards, and above each sliding compartment sat a man with his body bowed forward, dressed in ragged, greasy clothes, his hair dirty, his head hanging, his arms resting motionlessly on the tops of his straightened feet.

Flies buzzed back and forth around them, and a pus-yellow liquid dripped from the edges of the pushpit as if it had been liquefied by fat rot, forming small puddles on the floor from which the sour smell wafted.

The metal chain hanging from the bolt of the door swings back and forth, casting uneasy shadows on the floor.

Everyone had their skillful weapons out, alertly forming a circle with their backs to Bai Liu.

Bai Liu looked around the circle, calmly ordered: "This time we do not explore the monster weaknesses, directly search their cemetery property card, if you get it, run on the next floor, if there are living people, take them with you, no special circumstances do not hurt the low class citizens and housing npc here, because there is no housing, they are most likely to wander to follow the type of monsters, hurt to follow the map, understand? "

All in unison, "Yes!"

The lights in the building flickered twice more and went dark, and there was the eerie sound of breathing in the darkness, as if a group of people were forcing themselves to simulate the process of gasping for air with their decaying, hollowed-out lungs, and a harsh whip landed on the floor and the lights came on again.

With maggots in both eyes and a rotting jaw, the corpse's head is askew as it rushes hideously towards Bai Liu's face!