Chapter 1 "They Die in the Garden and Become Staff?"

"Tsk, tsk, they die in the garden and become staff?" Zhi Sha Palace Master nestled in Zhang Yuanqing's arms, tilting her head. "With my qualifications, I could definitely be a staff member. If I can retain my self-awareness, it wouldn't be too bad."

*Very* bad, okay? This is just becoming a puppet of the zoo… Zhang Yuanqing mentally retorted loudly, but verbally agreed softly, "That's a unique perspective. Sister is a remarkable woman. Hmm, Sister, turn the page. Let's look at the rules…"

When facing a lunatic, you can only coax them.

"Okay!" Zhi Sha Palace Master seemed very easily coaxed, turning past the foreword. The first page of the employee handbook appeared in their view.

One: When you see visitors in the outer areas of the zoo, please politely approach and ask if they need help. Fulfill all their needs. If you can help the same person twice, then congratulations, they will take your place and stay to work at the zoo, and you will get their body.

Two: When you see colleagues wearing black employee uniforms in the outer areas of the zoo, do not pay attention to them, do not talk to them, and remember, do not talk to them.

Three: Every night, you must patrol according to the prescribed route and report any problems to the zoo management.

Four: If you encounter colleagues in black uniforms while patrolling the core area, shout loudly to attract the managers or other colleagues to take them out of the core area. If the managers and colleagues do not respond, you can ask the pandas or white lions for help.

Five: If you encounter thick fog, please stay where you are, do not move, do not speak, and wait for the fog to dissipate.

Six: When passing through the Cuscuta Garden, try to pass through quickly. If you see someone calling out, do not turn your head.

Seven: There are no cats in the zoo. If you see a cat, immediately end your patrol and report it to the manager or the white lions.

Eight: Please remember that pandas are soft, cute, and simple animals. If they are not, loudly recite your name to your employee badge.

Nine: Pandas are animals worthy of respect and must be bowed to. Remember, do not mention the three words "Shi Tie Shou" (iron-eating beast) in front of them.

Ten: The monkeys in the zoo cannot speak.

Eleven: There is only one patrolman on each route. If you see a colleague in a blue uniform on your patrol route, pay attention to their employee badge. If the badge is still there, call out their name. If their badge is gone, run immediately…

Twelve: Each patrol must be completed within half an hour. If it takes more than half an hour, pay attention to the color of your uniform and run back at all costs.

Thirteen: When you do not have a patrol task, please stay in the employee dormitory. Do not go out. If you hear any unusual movements, please lie in bed, pretend to be asleep, do not pay attention, and do not leave the bed.

The first page ended here, but there was a line of handwritten content at the bottom: Game "New rule supplement: If your surname is Zhang, please cross out your surname on your employee badge. Please do not call out the name with the surname Zhang. Once it is called out, whether it is the person calling or the person being called, it will be noticed by *it*."

Zhang Yuanqing immediately remembered the employee badge with the surname crossed out. He'd found the reason.

These new rules are clearly targeted at me, no, they're targeted at my dad… He looked at Zhi Sha Palace Master, and found she was looking up at him, meeting his gaze.

"New rules aren't rules," she said.

"What do you mean?" Zhang Yuanqing listened attentively.

The Palace Master giggled, "If you put your arm around my waist, I'll tell you."

Yin Yao, the County Princess, who was rummaging through boxes and cabinets on the side, couldn't help but look up. Her scarlet pupils revealed solemnity.

This is a terrible fox spirit. Compared to her, Guan Ya, the Queen, and Xie Lingxi are not cunning enough.

Sooner or later, this woman will overpower Yuan Shi Tianzun's group of confidantes, and poison them one by one.

Yin Yao felt a chill in her heart.

Being in a dangerous situation, it really wasn't the time to adhere to male morality. Zhang Yuanqing half-pushed, half-accepted, putting his arm around the Palace Master's slender waist. The feeling was surprisingly good.

It had the unique softness and slenderness of a woman, making him linger.

"The rules of rule-type items are unchanging. I've never heard of them being able to be modified at will. The supplements in the employee handbook are more like a taboo than a rule," she said.

"I understand. Mentioning 'heartless man' will anger it." Zhang Yuanqing frowned. "In that case, if I announce my family, I'll be digging my own grave?"

Originally, he had some illusions in his heart. If the spirit of the zoo knew that he was Zhang Zizhen's son, it would make an exception and show mercy, or even defect.

"It's good that you know. Besides, your little plan was wrong from the beginning. The rules of rule-type items cannot even be changed by the items themselves. Otherwise, how could they be called rules?" the Palace Master said.

"How did you know what I was planning? Do you understand me so well?" Zhang Yuanqing scrutinized the Palace Master.

"... Stop talking nonsense. We haven't finished reading the handbook yet." The Palace Master turned to the next page, but found that the content on the following pages had been torn off.

"It's gone," she said charmingly.

"At this time, your tone should be more solemn."

"But I'm happy when you hold me."

Yin Yao County Princess immediately turned solemn.

Zhang Yuanqing sighed, "I knew it wouldn't be that simple. How could they tell you all the precautions in one go? If they did, rule-type items would be too easy to crack."

"No, even if they told you, it doesn't mean you can crack them." Zhi Sha Palace Master shook her head slightly. "For example, rule eight, monkeys can't talk, but what if they do? The handbook doesn't say. Many of these are precautions, but they don't mention solutions."

"If you can't solve it, you'll probably die," Zhang Yuanqing sighed.

He immediately understood the horror of a dominator-level rule-type item.

Red Shoes was also a rule-type item, but it only had one rule, while the zoo was full of rules. Once you triggered one of them, you could very well return to the Lingjing Xingzhe on the spot.

Even if he now possessed various trump cards and items, it would be difficult to survive.

Not only him, but even Sister Palace Master would probably be in danger if she violated the rules.

The reason was simple: Palace Master was a level 7 dominator, Dog Elder was level 8, and the level 8 Dog Elder hadn't fully controlled the zoo yet.

Dominator-level rule-type items basically had origins, but the zoo was too avant-garde, like a rule-type item that appeared after the birth of the Lingjing Xingzhe…

While he was thinking, he saw Yin Yao County Princess lift up a dusty pillow and hold up a small loudspeaker as if to claim credit, "There's a new clue!"

Zhang Yuanqing and Zhi Sha Palace Master immediately walked over.

In Yin Yao County Princess's hand was a small notepad with a few lines written on it: "Another colleague 'died', they had their lives taken away for the second time. Ever since that guy had an accident, people have been dying in the dormitory every day. I can't stay here anymore. Fortunately, the administrator promised to build us a new dormitory."

Flipping through the pages, the rest of the notepad was blank and unused.

The content on the notepad made Zhang Yuanqing and the other two understand the reason for the abandonment of the dormitory. A guy had an accident, and from then on, the staff in the dormitory began to die one after another.

And the zoo's management was actually incapable of handling the matter and chose to change the dormitory.

Dog Elder is a bit of a letdown… Well, it should be Dog Elder, right? It can't be something left behind by my dad back then… Zhang Yuanqing's attention didn't linger on the notepad for too long. He said, "Look for the employee handbook again. See if there's a complete one." Saying that, he threw the employee handbook to the County Princess.

The three of them continued to search, but to no avail.

Fortunately, there were many rooms here, with thirteen more rooms waiting to be searched.

They searched the rooms one by one, turning over the entire first floor, but still couldn't find a second employee handbook.

So they began searching the second floor.

Finally, they pushed open the rightmost room on the second floor, which was also the last room.

Different from the other rooms, the door of this room was locked, hanging with a u-shaped lock.

The person who locked the door seemed to be afraid that something would come out, so they locked the door, and even after moving out of here, they didn't unlock the lock.

This room was a bit strange. To be safe, black energy surged in Zhang Yuanqing's eye sockets, staring at the tightly closed door.

There were no traces of Yin creatures' activities… He deactivated "Soul Devour," took out the ghost mirror, and opened his Star Eyes. In terms of face reading, the blood light between his eyes swirled, but did not change.

At this time, the limitations of astrology became apparent.

He couldn't judge whether the blood light disaster was related to entering the room or not.

"There are no signs of life inside," Palace Master, as a Sīmìng (controller of fate), gave an authoritative conclusion.

"There's no Yin creature's aura either," Zhang Yuanqing said.

After obtaining the Palace Master's consent, he took a few steps forward, grabbed the u-shaped lock, and exerted force silently with his palm.

The lock tongue "clicked" and was forcibly pulled open by him.

The door opened, and a musty smell rushed into his nostrils.

Zhang Yuanqing's eyes warily swept across the room: empty bunk beds, an empty long table, and… dust covering every corner.

Nothing special seemed to be here, even cleaner than the previous rooms.

Yin Yao County Princess leaned over to take a look under the bed, "It's cleaned very well, there's nothing left behind."

Weirdly clean!

Zhang Yuanqing and Zhi Sha Palace Master, as usual, walked to the storage cabinet by the window. Four cabinet doors, three open, one locked. The three storage cabinets that were open were empty, and everything had been cleared out.

"Strange, the person living in this room seems to have moved out, while the people in the other rooms seem to have… fled in a hurry, without even packing their daily necessities," Zhang Yuanqing said in a low voice.

Zhi Sha Palace Master remained silent, came to the only locked storage cabinet, and two red threads crawled out of her sleeves, wrapped around the copper lock, and twisted violently.

With a slight "bang," the copper lock cracked.

The two red threads hooked the lock ring and pulled it outward, and the door of the storage cabinet opened.

Inside the storage cabinet was a blue uniform, a bedroll, some daily necessities, an employee badge, and a notebook.

Zhang Yuanqing happily picked up the notebook, only to find that it was a notebook, not an employee handbook.

"It's not an employee handbook. There's only one employee handbook in the entire dormitory building," Zhang Yuanqing sighed. This meant that they couldn't complete the zoo's rules.

"Wang Mingming," Zhi Sha Palace Master picked up the employee badge, glanced at it, and put it back. "See what's written in the notebook." While she was speaking, Zhang Yuanqing had already opened the notebook: "My name is Wang Mingming, and I'm a zoo employee. The employee handbook says that I died in the zoo, but I can't remember anything about the past. The only thing I can be sure of is that to survive, I have to work hard. From today on, I am an employee in the park, responsible for the night patrol."

"The manager told us to read the employee handbook carefully and strictly follow the rules of the handbook. There are nine routes in the core area of the zoo, and I am responsible for the second route. This is my first day of patrol, I hope everything goes smoothly."

"Nothing happened tonight, I'm lucky. I don't have to work tomorrow, I can rest in the dormitory all day…."

"Last night, I heard someone knocking on the glass outside the window. I didn't dare to look in that direction. According to the rules of the employee handbook, I lay in bed and pretended to be asleep, not daring to move, but I heard Li Ang next door whispering to me: the shadow outside the window is two meters tall, it's a monster."

"I didn't dare to answer him…."

"When I woke up this morning, Li Ang was gone!!"

"The administrator said that this kind of thing happens often, and this is the fate of people who don't follow the rules."

"Tonight's patrol went smoothly, and I didn't encounter any accidents."

"Last night, I heard the knocking on the glass again… This morning, someone else disappeared from the dormitory!"

"Tonight's patrol went smoothly."

"Another person disappeared… I'm the only one left in the entire dormitory."

"Tonight's patrol went smoothly."

"People have disappeared from other dormitories too…."

"Tonight's patrol went smoothly."

"Last night, someone disappeared again. Ever since Li Ang disappeared, colleagues in the dormitory building have been disappearing one after another. Everyone said that there is a monster knocking on the glass outside the window every night, but it hasn't knocked on the glass of my dormitory again…."

"Tonight's patro

l went smoothly."

"Last night, someone disappeared again…."

Zhang Yuanqing flipped through the pages one by one. This was a strange notebook, mentioning patrols and employee disappearances, but not elaborating too much, just mentioning them in a few strokes.

The cause of the matter was that after a certain glass-knocking incident, Li Ang, who shared a dormitory with Wang Mingming, disappeared, and then it was as if Pandora's box had been opened, and the staff in the dormitory building disappeared one after another.

This notebook simply restored the process of the dormitory building being abandoned.

"Is 'that guy' mentioned in the notepad Li Ang?" Yin Yao County Princess secretly leaned over to take a peek while the Palace Master was frowning and thinking.

Just as Zhang Yuanqing was about to speak, he heard Zhi Sha Palace Master's breath quicken, and she said in a low voice, "That's not right!"

"That guy refers to Wang Mingming, not Li Ang."

Zhang Yuanqing's pupils shrank slightly.

"Why?" Yin Yao County Princess blurted out. After asking, she probably knew that this woman who didn't follow the rules wouldn't answer her.

She consciously turned the small loudspeaker to Zhang Yuanqing and said, "Why? It was Li Ang who disappeared."

She had just finished reading the contents of the notebook and hadn't had time to think.

Zhang Yuanqing's face turned ugly. "Look carefully at Wang Mingming's patrol experience."

"Patrol experience…" Yin Yao County Princess glanced at the notebook a few times, her tone suddenly becoming solemn, "Smooth, every day is smooth!!"

"Yes, every day is smooth, but that's impossible. If every day is smooth, why are there so many rules and so many precautions in the handbook?" Zhang Yuanqing said with a serious face, "There's only one explanation: something went wrong with Wang Mingming, but he didn't realize it himself. Perhaps, the one who 'disappeared' that night wasn't Li Ang at all, but Wang Mingming."

Although Yin Yao County Princess was a Yin corpse, after thinking about it carefully, she also felt a little horrified.

Zhi Sha Palace Master suddenly said, "There is another possibility: Wang Mingming didn't have an accident when the monster knocked on the window, but earlier, when he patrolled for the first time."

"But he didn't realize that something was wrong with himself, so he returned to the dormitory… The monster knocking on the door in the notebook is Wang Mingming himself."

"He killed one colleague after another, which also conforms to the information left by the notepad."

Yin Yao County Princess said while holding up the small loudspeaker, "Then why is this room locked?"

Zhang Yuanqing's face changed, "Wang Mingming wants to return to the dormitory, he has to return to the dormitory every night. The staff wanted to stop this behavior, so they locked his dormitory door. Wang Mingming, who couldn't return to his dormitory, returned to the dormitories of other employees, so people die every day…"

Just then, stiff footsteps came from the corridor outside the door.