The authorities were fast, and Song Mo was no less efficient.
After all, she still had the carrot of "resurrection" dangling in front of her.
The old Song Mo: wrote simply out of sheer passion, loving the craft and writing as much as possible.
The current Song Mo, who discovered she had somehow run up a debt of tens of millions of Screenwriter Points without doing anything: Write, write, write, write, write, write. As long as she wasn't dead, she would write herself to death, and she would throw every single breathing thing into an Instance.
—The night she arrived in An Province, Song Mo rode the Bus Ghost to tour all the landmarks marked by the Map Ghost as potential Instance spawn points:
【Lizhiwan Plaza: Formerly an execution ground for shooting criminals and a massive mass grave. Whenever it rains or during thunderstorms, nearby residents can always hear faint, weeping sounds and the dragging of iron chains.
(Creating an Instance requires 500 Screenwriter Points. Instance Difficulty: High.)】
...
【Youyi People's Hospital: Originally an overseas Chinese hospital donated before the founding of the country. Later, during renovations, a large number of nameless coffins and bones were excavated. Doctors often see legless white shadows wearing old-style white lab coats wandering through the hospital in the middle of the night.
(Creating an Instance requires 1,000 Screenwriter Points. Instance Difficulty: High.)】
...
【Abandoned Aquarium: Originally a large marine amusement park built with tens of millions in investment. Legend has it that a stone pillar carved with a coiled dragon was excavated when laying the foundation, after which the project was halted indefinitely.
(Creating an Instance requires 1,500 Screenwriter Points. Instance Difficulty: Extremely High.)】
...
【Wenshan Village: Known as "Fenshan Village" (Grave Mountain Village) before the founding of the country. Surrounded by mountains on three sides, malevolent energy gathers here, and deathly energy accumulates without dispersing. Over time, many strange occurrences have taken place.
(Creating an Instance requires 100 Screenwriter Points. Instance Difficulty: High.)】
...
【Anju Jiayuan Unfinished Building: A luxury villa inside the residential area where the owner's entire family met a bizarre, sudden death on a rainy night, the cause of death unknown. Since then, no matter who moved in, they couldn't stay for more than a week, claiming they were paralyzed by ghosts in the middle of the night and saw the family sitting in the living room watching television.
(Creating an Instance requires 200 Screenwriter Points. Instance Difficulty: Medium.)】
...
...
“This place is quite suitable.”
Song Mo tapped her finger on the Map Ghost, which seemed to find it a bit ticklish and shuddered all over.
The Route 404 Bus was parked in front of an abandoned, desolate village, where wild grass half the height of a person almost swallowed the tires.
The Mouse Servant hunched its body, its long, pointed snout twitching, feeling inexplicably uneasy.
The fierce ghost, A'yan, floated in the darkness, staring at her newly acquired phone with absolute fascination—clearly, the allure of a smartphone to an ancient female ghost was undoubtedly lethal.
...
The entire Wenshan Village was abandoned.
Dozens of brick and tile houses were scattered across the mountain valley. Many of them had not been lived in for years and had already mostly collapsed.
The plaster peeled off, and the houses that were once filled with people now lacked any human presence, appearing exceptionally eerie and terrifying.
Abandoned vegetable gardens had become nests for wild weeds, and the fences had rotted away until only a few wooden posts remained. Occasionally, a snake would slither past quite openly.
Of course, the villagers who had lived here also left behind many "Shadows":
A man carrying a hoe to the fields, a woman carrying a shoulder pole.
An old person sewing shoe soles under a locust tree, and children chasing and playing with each other.
Men dressed in mourning hemp, women with grief reflected on their faces, and guests who seemed to be there to offer condolences standing on both sides with indifferent expressions.
Although there was no concrete scene, Song Mo could still flesh out the specific details in her mind, and she could even faintly smell the scent of burning joss paper.
These Shadows overlapped, scattered everywhere—inside the earthen walls, on the road, and even among the branches of the locust trees.
It was as if a drop of amber resin the size of the village had suddenly fallen from the sky, enveloping the entire village and perfectly preserving all traces of the lives lived there.
...
...
“If we capture all these Shadows, it should be enough to support a medium-sized Instance.”
Song Mo traced another shallow line along the Map Ghost with her fingertip.
“We can consider using this as the location for 《The Cat-Faced Old Lady》.”
Song Mo's reasons for choosing this place were also very solid.
First of all, although the Cat-Faced Old Lady was a classic urban legend that had circulated in the Northeast for nearly thirty years, it was also widely known in the Central Plains.
Once the Instance was established, players would naturally view the entire Instance through a horror filter, which would absolutely maximize their sense of immersion and terror.
Secondly, Wenshan Village was in a relatively remote location. Three years ago, the land here was returned to forest, and the entire village had relocated.
Although the people had moved, the buildings in the village were still intact, making it the perfect blueprint background for a new Instance.
Even if the authorities noticed something amiss and tracked it down... it would take at least a few days to mobilize personnel to search the mountains.
Sealing off the Instances, are we? Banning ordinary players from entering, are we?
“Even if the authorities actually find this place, they won't be able to completely seal off the Instance.”
Song Mo let out a sinister, cackling laugh, fully embodying the consciousness of a mastermind villain:
“I'm not so stupid as to make only one Instance entrance. Didn't expect that, did you? This time, I'm going online.”
—Screenwriter Points were precious, so she had to spend every single point where it mattered most, squeezing every bit of value out of each location.
Why not use an existing Instance map? Was she supposed to spend Screenwriter Points huffing and puffing to build a new scene from scratch?
She was a screenwriter, not a game designer.
Song Mo hadn't forgotten that she was currently a heavily indebted woman with tens of millions of Screenwriter Points in the red, so she had to save wherever she could.
Look, she was even sending the Mouse Servant and A'yan out to search for wild monsters and ghosts to see if they could capture them as Materials to work in the Instances.
The poor Screenwriter-sama pitifully clutched her heart.
...
...
Song Mo knew very well that the biggest bottleneck in gathering Screenwriter Points was the lack of a stable source of players.
Relying solely on random selection by the Instances or writing scripts herself made the player traffic completely uncontrollable.
Therefore, she planned to create an online Instance entrance.
“Online... Instance... entrance?”
A'yan's pitch-black eyes started spinning. She really couldn't understand what Song Mo was talking about.
On the other hand, the newly joined big mouse's eyes lit up, its mouth squeaking rapidly.
“Yes.”
Song Mo rubbed her hands together in excitement. She didn't care whether A'yan understood or not; she just wanted to vent her excitement:
“The script 《The Wishing Livestream Room》 can serve as an online entrance to the Instance, guiding players into the Wenshan Instance. If the test works, we can even link other Instances to it in the future.”
As she spoke, she walked westward along the village's main road, inspecting the houses one by one like a product manager conducting a site inspection.
There was an ancestral hall in the village, but it had long fallen into ruin, with the altar tables inside shattered all over the floor.
—This place could be designed as a safe house or a player spawn point, or she could use clay sculpting to create neutral NPCs to provide food or supplies to the players.
There was no food or water in the Instance.
If it were a short-term Instance, it would be fine. But if it were a long-term Instance lasting more than three days, her players would starve to death before they could even clear it.
The locust trees in the village could be arranged with Shadow NPCs to provide scattered clues.
“A'yan, take notes.”
Although she hadn't found any real-world ghosts, Song Mo was not discouraged. Instead, inspiration gushed like a tide:
“The local environment will provide the blueprint for the Instance, and the supernatural legend of the 'Cat-Faced Old Lady' will provide the core horror elements.”
“Instance background: Old Lady Huang of Wenshan Village was widowed at a young age and raised her four sons alone. In her later years, she became paralyzed, and her four sons shirked their duty to care for her, even coveting her homestead and retirement money. On the night of Old Lady Huang's eightieth birthday, a massive blizzard struck. The old lady was locked in a side room and died of cold and hunger on the brick bed, with half of her face eaten by a black cat that broke in. Fearing exposure, the sons lied to the outside world, claiming the old lady died peacefully at eighty, calling it a 'joyous funeral' and hosting a grand ceremony to cover up the truth. The villagers knew but didn't dare offend the four brothers, keeping a collective silence.”
“As for the appearance of the Instance Boss, we can use the familiar cat-face setting—that is, half a human face, and half covered in black cat fur.”
A'yan listened half-comprehendingly, the limbs of Liu Laosan's soul doll in her hands being repeatedly torn apart and sewn back together.
...
...
Song Mo didn't actually expect her to remember all this; she was just helping herself organize the logic of the script:
“The fun and playability of the script must come first, so the level of terror and task difficulty must progress gradually.”
“The behavior patterns of the ghosts must have fixed rules. They can't just chase and kill players constantly. Of course, the rules need to be figured out by the players themselves.”
The faster she spoke, the more perfectly the ink-wash text manifested before her. Large paragraphs of text gushed from Song Mo's fingertips, finally settling down:
【Draft 23: ...In the remote Wenshan Village, heavy snow seals the mountains. Old Lady Huang of the Huang family passes away, and a documentary film crew arrives here...
But after entering the village, they find something is wrong... The entire village is decorated with lanterns and streamers, red lanterns painted with the character for 'Death' hang everywhere, and every villager has a smile on their face...
On their first day in the village, the village chief, citing the 'old lady's dying wish,' requests the film crew to prepare the old lady's body for the shroud, getting ready for the birthday feast seven days later... Strange things begin to happen.】
...
As the speed of Song Mo's writing grew faster and faster, countless streams of light spread from her body to the surroundings, the power of the words flowing slowly.
It was a majestic power capable of penetrating the soul and altering everything.
A'yan and the Mouse Servant trembled uncontrollably, not daring to lift their heads, filled with immense dread.
For a brief moment, it seemed as if heaven and earth fell silent, and all things turned to black and white, leaving only Song Mo vibrant with life.
But she noticed nothing.
...
【Notification: The current single Instance capacity limit is 30 players. Unlocking Instance Mirroring function.】
【Function Description: Generates 3 parallel mirrored spaces sharing the same worldbuilding, rules, and monster configurations. Players are randomly distributed, and Instance progress does not interfere with one another. The total capacity limit for a single Instance run is increased to 30 players.】
【Consumption: 100 Screenwriter Points. Would you like to input Materials?】
Song Mo thought for a moment and threw in the Night-Weeping Mother, the Night-Weeping Son, and the Hanged Ghost she had obtained from the previous Instance.
In addition to the final mini-boss, she could also appropriately add some wandering ghosts to roam the Instance.
They would remain neutral under normal circumstances, but once a player triggered certain conditions, they would be hunted down by the ghosts.
【Instance: 《Old Lady Huang's Birthday Celebration》】
【Core Carrier: Old Shadows of Wenshan Village + Low-Grade Spirit Material * 200 + Cat-Faced Old Lady Legend】
【Instance Location: Old Wenshan Village Site (Real-world Mapping)】
【Instance Capacity: 30 players】
【Consuming 100 Screenwriter Points. Creating... Creation successful. Real-world rehearsal in progress. Rewards will be distributed after the first clear of the Instance—】
The Map Ghost slowly unfolded. Where there had previously been only two light spots representing the active Instances in Jiangcheng, another one had now appeared within the borders of An Province.
Third Instance had finally been successfully established.
Song Mo's gaze fell upon the shivering Mouse Servant.
In the next second, she grabbed the Mouse Servant and refined it in an instant... No, she put it into the script.
Establishing an Instance script and a supernatural script within half a day, Song Mo almost wanted to praise herself.
—Just a hardworking screenwriter, working overtime online.
【Instance 《Old Lady Huang's Birthday Celebration》 generation complete.】
【Script: 《The Wishing Livestream Room》 rehearsal successful.】
Rate on N.U.
