This actor is full of tricks.

When Lin Jue arrived at the table with the outsiders, several people were talking about something. When they noticed him, they immediately stopped talking. One of them, a middle-aged man in a black jacket, stood up and took the initiative to greet Lin Jue: "Hello, are you from outside too?"

"Yes, I am a backpacker. Older people can call me Xiao Zhao, and younger people can just call me Lao Zhao." Lin Jue put his backpack on the ground and kept glancing at the driver.

He remembered that the driver was always talkative, but today he was particularly silent. He lowered his head and fiddled with a few melon seeds in front of him. Even when he came, he didn't even look up.

Thinking about the pale look of the old master before, Lin Jue concluded that this kind-hearted man must have encountered something.

It's not a weird incident that I imagined, but it might have really happened.

"Wow! A backpacker!" A girl who looked like she was still in college said with her eyes shining. "Then you must have been to many places, right?"

Young people always yearn for freedom and distant places.

"I've only been to a few nearby cities." Lin Jue grabbed a handful of sunflower seeds from the plate on the table and asked curiously, "What were you talking about just now?"

"We're talking about why we came to this village," the man in the jacket replied, and at the same time asked, "Xiao Zhao, why did you come to this village?"

Lin Jue cracked a melon seed and said, "I also heard about this village from others. You know, people like me who travel on foot often encounter various dangers, so I wanted to ask for a talisman to ensure safety."

After saying that, he complained again: "This place feels very weird to me. It doesn't seem like a blessed place at all, and it's a real rip-off."

"You're wrong. I think this is excellent value for money." The man in the jacket disagreed. "I had a colleague whose home was haunted. He'd always feel something crawling under his blanket in the middle of the night. He came here and got a talisman to put under his pillow, and the strange things haven't happened since."

"I have a good relationship with that colleague. He had no reason to lie to me. In this strange world of resurrection, sometimes you still need to believe in some metaphysical things."

The man in the jacket looked like he had been through a lot.

"What about you, brother? Why did you come to this village?" Lin Jue asked the question following the other party's words.

"Me?" The man in the jacket was stunned, then shook his head. "My boss asked me to come here. He said I had to ask for a house-protecting talisman after the grand ceremony."

"Who are you? Why does your boss need you to come when he asks for a talisman?" Another young man was quite dissatisfied. He had dark eye sockets and thin hair. It was obvious that he had been working overtime and was being exploited by capital.

"Xiao Jia, you don't understand. Running a hotel isn't easy right now. My hotel closed down once before, and if it can't reopen this time, it might go bankrupt completely." The man in the jacket sighed. "You said you were praying for the boss, but you were actually praying for yourself. If the hotel goes bankrupt, where would I find a job at forty?"

"Did something happen in the hotel?" Lin Jue asked. The others also looked at the man in the jacket curiously, with a look of curiosity on their faces.

The man in the jacket seemed a little embarrassed. After thinking for a moment, he said, "It's fate that we can all come together in this village. I have nothing to hide. I wonder if you have heard of the Golden Rose Hotel?"

Judging from the tone of the man in the jacket, the Golden Rose Hotel seemed to be very famous, but Lin Jue had never heard of such a hotel in Sanjiang City.

This hotel should be in another city.

"I know!" The female college student raised her hand: "This hotel is not far from my school. It is said to be the most luxurious hotel in Jiuyuan in the last century, but it seems to have closed recently." A hotel in Jiuyuan City?

Lin Jue's heart moved. When he was working on the Liar script, those ghost hunters gathered together to tell ghost stories. One of them, Yaoyao, said that when she was on a business trip to Jiuyuan, she went to an old hotel and had a creepy experience in that hotel.

And that hotel later closed down.

So, is the hotel that Yaoyao was talking about the Golden Rose Hotel?

"It seems that I misunderstood Yaoyao. The story she told should not be made up. Even if it is not her personal experience, she probably heard it from someone who has experienced it personally."

Lin Jue thought to himself, grabbed another handful of melon seeds, and waited for the next words from the man in the jacket.

The man in the jacket nodded. "That's right. Our Golden Rose Hotel is the first five-star hotel in Jiuyuan. Although business has been bad since then, a lean camel is still bigger than a horse. We still make money from the number of people we receive every month."

"But then some strange things happened. As you know, hotels are often haunted places. Many ghost stories are set in hotels."

"And the Golden Rose Hotel is truly haunted. There's something strange going on inside."

For this kind of commercial place, being naughty is tantamount to being sentenced to death.

"I was the hotel's housekeeping manager at the time, responsible for the VIP guests on floors 15-18. Before the fog descended, everything was normal, but after the fog appeared, strange things kept happening."

The man in the jacket began to recall: "First, a customer complained that the hotel shower kept spraying black water, and then the cleaning staff said they kept hearing footsteps in the empty room."

"There were reports of bleeding figures standing on balconies, mysterious stains on unused bath towels, and even reports of guests seeing a pair of crimson eyes between the elevator and the floor as they exited the elevator. Strange incidents like these kept happening."

"Among them, the seventeenth floor was the worst site for the most horrific incidents. Someone was even killed. I remember a large company came to our hotel to hold its annual meeting, which lasted until late in the evening. Many people were drunk, so the company's president generously opened a dozen rooms on the seventeenth floor to accommodate the drunken employees."

A look of fear crossed the man in the jacket's face, as if he had recalled something extremely frightening. After drinking a glass of warm water, he continued, "But that night, all the employees living on the 17th floor jumped off the building."

"At that time, there were only employees of those companies on the 17th floor. In other words, everyone on the 17th floor committed suicide."

All the employees on one floor jumped off the building?
When everyone at the table heard this, their expressions changed. This was an extremely serious and strange incident.

"The most important thing is that those who committed suicide by jumping off buildings all had smiles on their faces, as if they had encountered something very happy before their death."

The man in the jacket shuddered as he said this: "Every time I recall that scene, I have a nightmare. In my dream, those people who jumped from the building are standing in hell with smiles on their faces, waving at me, wanting to take me down with them."

Everyone on the 17th floor died, and they were still smiling when they died?

Lin Jue speculated that the seventeenth floor might be hiding a strange creature that could create a spiritual illusion, and through contamination, it could create a happy and joyful illusion before people die, so that people would have a smile on their faces after death. (End of this chapter)