When the Night Watch received the "House of Salmon" incident report, they offered a reward of 3,600 Coins.
The reason for the slightly lower remuneration and its not being commensurate with the danger of the incident was that all the investigative work that could be done in the early stages had already been diligently performed by the night watchmen.
Although the case was not solved, the Night Watch at least found a clue to the solution: the dire condition of Salmon House was related to the curse of a mysterious sect.
It was related to a sect but not classified as a red cover. The reason was that after several years of thorough investigation, the Night Watch had ruled out any clues that the Salmon family was related to the cult; the more likely possibility was that someone in this family had accidentally come into contact with curse runes spread by followers of a false god sect using books, old furniture, antiques, jewelry, or even the lining of clothes, and activated the rune effects intentionally or unintentionally.
This kind of thing... was very common.
Disguising cursed runes or sacrificial circles as "harmless" prayer symbols that could bless love, grant luck, or even bring good health, and secretly spreading them to the general public who knew nothing about the occult was what all cultists who tried to obtain cheap sacrifices would try to do. No matter which church it was, they would conduct strict inspections of publications, antiques, old jewelry, and gorgeous old dresses within the parish to prevent this kind of thing.
In this world, old objects with a long history and that had been passed on to many people were usually taken to the local church by the owner for purification. The clergy, who were usually very stingy with holy water for exorcisms, often provided free baptisms just to prevent this from happening.
Of course, only nobles could afford antiques, so it was easy to understand why the church was so generous...
Thomas Salmon was just an upper-middle-class man with an annual income of around 180 to 200 gold coins. This income allowed the Salmon family to live a comfortable life in the city of Indhal, but it was not enough to be considered a proper noble, and he could not afford real antiques - an antique over 300 years old, even the least valuable old furniture made of good wood, would have been worth more than a hundred gold coins.
As for imitation antiques, such as the historical vases, pipes, old books, etc., that most middle-class people liked to pursue, most of them were safe.
In other words... the misfortune of the Salmon family was not an accident. Someone must have deliberately given a family member of the Salmon family a terrible gift with strong malice, which led to the tragedy.
The inferences drawn from these investigations, as well as the suspicious clues found by the night watchmen, were all neatly organized in the archives of "Salmon House," and the content was very complete.
But... the people including Lahong who took away the files did not even read the texts which they thought were long-winded and useless.
Except for some newbies or plot-lovers who still had awe for the game, more than 90% of players did not read the task text when doing a task. They usually just rushed in when they knew where the task was.
People who made a living as game planners were also aware of this problem of players. Most of the tasks were designed to be very simple and could be completed by just rushing in... Automatic pathfinding and automatic monster killing were routine operations, and they never deliberately set traps for players to fall into. Were they not scolded enough or what?
Even for the mission "Mist Shadow Forest," if Qin Guan and his gang had not searched the entire Mist Shadow Forest for a long time without finding the BOSS, and if Entropy hadn't been smart, they would probably have rushed all the way...
Brother Lahong's luck was a little better than Qin Guan's. He picked a mission with the highest reward and led a large group to the location. As soon as they entered the Salmon house, the identification spell scanned out a string of red-named ghosts.
If a normal native from another world discovered this situation, he would have turned around and left immediately - it was obvious that an ordinary house in the city having such a dense concentration of ghosts was not normal.
The players' reactions were very different. Brother Lahong shouted in surprise, "Damn, there are so many monsters!" and then led his men to rush in fiercely.
In less than ten minutes, this group of players was wiped out.
And then... these guys who were wiped out were not discouraged at all. They started to discuss enthusiastically in the offline chat group on how to conquer this quest point where the monsters were denser than those in the Scholomance Academy in World of Warcraft.
Phantom and Shenmi Xuexi on Lahong's side had participated in the ghost clearing activity in the sewers, and they knew how to fight these "special monsters" that could not be hit by knives: you had to find more wizards to cast dark blessings on the monsters that could not be hit, and send dark energy to the ghosts. When the ghosts were semi-materialized, you could start to fight them.
Brother Lahong listened to his friend's advice and immediately made a lot of phone calls, calling all the mages in the Blood Alliance...
Half an hour later, the death penalty time for Lahongge and others ended. Next to the teleportation point of Indhal City Hall, there were already many wizard players waiting for them.
The group of players expanded to 40 people and ran to the Salmon House with full confidence.
Having learned the lesson of being mowed down by super-flexible "special monsters" with AOE (area damage) after entering the house because of insufficient space, this group of players did not enter the house, but formed a formation in the yard, with only the well-equipped knights entering the house to "lure the monsters".
The knight players lured the monsters out, and the mage players quickly cast dark blessings on the monsters to make them material.
The monster then had a physical body, and the players rushed forward and hacked it to death...
"80 territory reputation points for killing just one?!"
"Can I gain reputation by completing exorcist missions?"
"Awesome!!""
The white-letter materials and magic residues that ghost monsters droped were nothing. Reputation was the source of dopamine that excited people.
Later, Brother Lahong even threw the mission to the back of his mind, and only treated the Salmon House as the exclusive monster spawning point of their blood alliance, organizing players to work hard to spawn monsters; if someone had to go offline to eat/go shopping with friends/go to work or school, he arranged for other people in the blood alliance to take over…
Players who were waiting for the territory's reputation to get the second transfer were also trying every means to make friends and wait for the successive position in the queue, and even paid money to buy it. The average potential value of the majority of players had reached the level of 120~140, but the reputation of most people was still stuck at friendly and they could not receive the second transfer tasks.
While these guys were "killing monsters," citizens occasionally passed by and found the undead cheering and hacking at horrible monsters that were N times scarier than the undead in the yard of the long-abandoned Salmon House. Upon seeing this scene they mostly ran away screaming… The players skipped over the reactions of these "NPCs" as a part of the game content settings.
That's right, the monsters that "refreshed" in the big house were pretty ugly, the kind of ugly that could make you lose weight if you looked at them too much. But compared to the mentor's inner demon monsters in the weekend activity quests and the monster battlefield open during peak hours every night, these monsters were nothing!
This group started working at 10:00 am, Earth time, and did so until 4:30 pm. They welcomed and sent off more than a hundred people. More than 60 players from the Blood Alliance had gathered enough reputation for the second level. Brother Lahong almost laughed his skull off…
The monsters no longer continued to be "refreshed," and the players felt a little regretful, so they packed up and went into the house to search.
In the wine cellar of Salmon's house, the players discovered that the wall behind the wine cabinet was cracked, with the wall paint and dust falling to the ground, revealing a strange-looking ghost painting.
If players saw it normally, they would think it was just graffiti drawn by someone, but… when players discovered this weird scribble, it was still smoking.
Not only was there smoke, but there were also signs of burning on the ghostly painting, like an electrical wire that had been overloaded and burned; those pitch-black lines were gradually falling off and turning into black dust.
At this moment, Brother Lahong no longer cared much about the mission reward. After all, the benefits they got were enough to offset the reward. So he just wrote a case closing report of a few hundred words and casually added the ghostly scribbles that had not completely fallen off to the report.
Captain Clark saw the broken runes drawn by the undead in the extremely brief case report.
Captain Clark fell silent again.
Even though it was incomplete, he could tell that it was definitely a cursed sacrificial rune from an evil sect.
This weird thing was not a foreign object, but was hidden in the wall of the underground wine cellar of Salmon's house. Obviously, this was a trap left by the previous owner. The night watchman had been investigating the people related to Salmon's family for so many years, but had been going in the wrong direction.
Captain Clark felt like a mouthful of blood was stuck in his throat, neither going up nor down.
So, they should have hired two black magicians and brought a full force to the Salmon House to continue exorcising the demons, destroying the curse rune that sacrificed the Salmon family, right?
"Captain?" The fat official noticed that Clark was not in good condition and called out cautiously.
"…It's okay." Clark swallowed the blood in his throat, suppressing his frustration. "The undead did solve the Salmon House incident. We were investigating in the wrong direction. The curse was left by the previous owner."
The fat official blinked a few times, and after a long while he uttered "Ah" slowly, his face full of horror.
The Night Watch was different from the City Hall. Officials in the organization had to have some ability and be willing to work hard to keep their position. The fat official thought hard, he could remember the information about the previous owner of the Salmon House. If he didn't know anything about the backlog of unresolved cases in his own department, he should have been kicked out of the organization long ago.
At first glance, the previous owner of the Salmon House seemed to be an ordinary middle-class family. There was nothing suspicious about them. But when you find out that this family actually left a curse before the house was sold, you can see problems everywhere!
The previous owner's parents, wife, two children, and even the housekeeper and maid they hired, all died due to some accident!
When the previous owner sold the big house to Thomas Salmon, he was already a lonely man!
"I'll go find this family's information." The fat official stood up and ran towards the city hall, sweating profusely.
The Salmon family had lived there for several years before the accident happened. The night watchman never thought it had anything to do with the previous owner and didn't even save any information.
Captain Clark looked at Morton who was delivering the black leather books, and ordered with mixed feelings. "I will arrange for someone to inspect and inspect them, and then send the commissions of the undead over… You go back to the Xinfeng District and keep an eye on it first."
To be honest, Captain Clark did not expect that the hall in Xinfeng District that only faced the undead would be of much use at first… For Captain Clark, it was already very good to find something for these Tarantan undead to do and to prevent these guys from causing trouble for the locals in the city all day long.
He lived in the Midtown area, and during this period of time he had witnessed with his own eyes how these undead souls had desecrated the inner walls of the Midtown area day by day, making it unsightly - especially those realistic paintings (graffitis) that looked just like the real objects!
Four days ago, when he was entering and leaving the central city at dusk, he was almost suffocated by the bizarre painting - on the snow-white wall behind the Commerce Department, there was actually a huge demonized rat with red eyes glaring at him!
The demonized rat was painted so realistically that it looked as if it was about to jump down from the wall and destroy the building of the Commerce Bureau. Not to mention ordinary people, even he was so frightened that he lost his breath for a minute.
But the dead were still very proud of their "artworks." A bunch of skeletons with painted bones stood on the roofs and on the streets, waving their arms and cheering…
This was not the end yet, the undead were still continuing to "extend their creations" onto the inner city walls, including super weird suspicious people wearing leather suits (adventurers), particularly incomprehensible mechanical life forms (Transformers), and a lot of messy and ridiculous graffiti (various emoticons)!
Anyone else who dared do this to desecrate the inner city wall that symbolized the dignity of the Central City would definitely be dragged away by the city police and hanged on the outer city wall.
But now all the city police chiefs had become prisoners. In the past few days, they had been driven by Rex's men with whips to dig out gutters and clean sewers. The National Guard, which had already surrendered to Rex, turned a blind eye to the behavior of the undead… So this matter was destined to be left unattended.
Morton knew very well that he was just a marginal figure, so he said nothing, bowed silently and left.
Captain Clark had dozens of night watchmen under his command, but he didn't have the energy to take care of the mood of every night watchman. He forced himself to arrange people to inspect the results of the exorcisms.
He had just sent out two groups of people to inspect the site, and before he had time to have breakfast, Morton came again.
This time, this eccentric weirdo still said nothing and silently handed a black leather notebook to Clark.
Lynch Clark took a slight breath…
Qin Guan and La Hongge were not the only ones who could organize a large group of players. Entropy, who started the freelance group back in the day, was absorbed by Qin Guan's Blood Alliance. Among the individual players who did not like to join alliances, a new group leader would naturally emerge to call on individual players to unite and play together…
While Captain Clark was questioning his life because of the undead's amazing exorcism efficiency, a group of new businesses in the bar district of St. Joseph Street, which had become deserted after a large-scale closure, were preparing to open after several days of intensive training and preparation.
In the middle of the bar area, the doors of several large bars that had been closed for many days were opened one after another. Several strong women wearing aprons and sleeves moved the tables and chairs in the bars to the door to wash and dry them.
While these working women, who were the family members of Weisshem citizens were busy, Ms. Shirley came from the temporary resettlement point in the Xinfeng District with a large group of women wearing sportswear (that is students uniform…ahem).
These women who were placed in the Xinfeng District were the fallen women who were "rescued" from various places during the large-scale crackdown on prostitution.
Ji Tang and Zhao Zhenzhen, who still had families in the local area and were willing to return home, were sent back.
Those who no longer had families or were unwilling to return home were all accepted and placed to new locations and tasks in a centralized manner.
Unlike the victims in Weisshem who were forced to take fattening drugs, the women here at least had their bodies not completely ruined and were still able to do normal labor.
The families of Weisshem's staff had worked with Weisshem's reformed clerks for many days and did not discriminate against those who had worked in dishonorable industries. They warmly greeted the timid women and took them in.
Mrs. Hank noticed that the ladies who used to work on this street were not used to this, so she smiled and said to them, "This street will become very lively in the future. It will be a clean and prosperous place!"