Autophagy

After Song Lei finished appreciating his idea of getting a new fridge, he started getting ready for the next thing he had to do.

'Floor cleansing...'

After he had found the gold mine of a floor that was floor 16, the Hammer Branch had an influx of blood beads. With a meeting, they had decided that they would spend these blood beads on building a new floor.

For them to do this, Song Lei had to clear this floor from ghosts and monsters. And to do that, he had to go into other rooms and exorcise or eliminate whatever threats there were.

"Huh... But it will be really hard..." He muttered to himself while thinking about what he would exactly do. For now, he had two tasks that he had assigned himself. One of them was the floor cleansing job. He didn't know how he would approach this problem. He could try to feed all the ghosts to the quake demon just like what he did to Yao Ai. Or he could just barge right in and start murdering the monsters.

Although Song Lei didn't like it, he would probably have to go with the second choice. In the end, it would be too hard, almost impossible for him to lure all of the ghosts into his room. Now that he had become much stronger, he could probably defeat them easily.

Although Song Lei didn't want to murder possibly innocent ghosts, he had no other choice than to do so. He would have to steel his nerves and not think about the fact that some of those ghosts were innocent and some even outright harmless.

The other task he had was clearing higher floors. Amongst the remaining members of the branch, Song Lei was probably the strongest one. Although Old Wolf was stronger than him at handling ghosts, he still had to take care of the branch. Especially now that a proper connection line would be set between the alliance HQ and the hammer branch, Old Wolf would have to deal with a lot of things. 

This made Song Lei the only and best choice in the Hammer Branch to send on expeditions. There were a few reasons why Song Lei wanted to go on another expedition.

The first reason was that they gave a really good amount of Exp and good quality skills. The time Song Lei had spent inside Isabel's dream space had been really helpful in his development.

The other reason was that he wanted to acquire blood beads so that he could use the system shop to his heart's content. The shop was truly miraculous, containing almost everything that the human mind could imagine. Acquiring one or two things that would help him survive, and even go back to his sister would be tremendously helpful for him. To do this, he had to clear more floors and raise his passive income of blood beads.

Another reason was the fact that Xu Chang and the others had disappeared. Considering the places they could've gone to, the most plausible guess was that they had been brought up to the upper floors. If Song Lei could manage to clear the whole apartment, he felt like he could find his friends.

The last reason why he wanted to clear the floors was the tingling sensation that something big would happen to his system if he managed to conquer the whole apartment. Not to mention the fact that they would be relatively safe from internal attacks.

After the Wei brothers left the apartment, Old Wolf told them to rest for a week. Song Lei, too, was intending on doing that. He would spend most of the time he had laying around and messing with his system. It had been a long time since he had relaxed properly last time.

While doing so, he would also start clearing the rooms on this floor one by one. At the moment, there were 14 rooms on this floor. Three of those rooms, which are the 1401st, 1407th, and 1408th. Leaving those behind, Song Lei had to clear 11 rooms to properly clean this floor up.

Song Lei threw himself onto his bed and started contemplating. His initial trial on clearing up the floor had resulted in him feeding Yao Ai to the quake demon. After realizing that it was too dangerous for his current self, Song Lei had decided to postpone clearing this floor. Now, however, he had reached the strength level he would need to clear the floor.

After deciding on his course of action, Song Lei lazed around inside his bed, sleeping for a few more hours. When he got back up, he felt that he was relatively refreshed. There had been this feeling of tiredness since he had entered the New World. No matter how much he raised his stats, this feeling wouldn't go away. Song Lei was assuming that this was because of the lack of clean air and sun.

Now, however, that feeling had lessened a little bit. Yawning on his bed, Song Lei left his room to start his job.

Going to room 1410, which was just next to room 1408, Song Lei knocked on the door while hiding the sword that was in his hands.

"Hello. Delivery," Song Lei said nonchalantly. He honestly didn't want to think about what he would say, as he felt like the door would be opened no matter what.

Soon, just like he had thought, the door was opened. Song Lei went into alert mode and raised his senses to the utmost to protect himself from any unexpected assaults.

Weirdly, that assault never came, the door was slightly opened and that was it. Raising one of his brows, Song Lei slowly pulled the door handle towards himself. The door creaked open, revealing a relatively clean room behind it. Honestly, the room wasn't that much different from Song Lei's, with a minimal amount of furniture and damp, humid air. The insides of the room were relatively dark. Fortunately, Song Lei could still somewhat see around him.

He wanted to enter the room, however, he was worried that the door would instantly close on him as soon as he did so, trapping him with the ghost inside. After thinking for a second, a brilliant idea appeared inside Song Lei's head. He held the door tightly and pulled it towards himself.

*Crack

With just a minimal amount of noise, the door came off with its hinges unharmed. Such was the strength and control of Song Lei. He was really satisfied with his job as doing it this cleanly would help him when he had to repair it.

Song Lei took a step inside and started carefully walking into the room.

'Uhh...'

As the humid room was revealed in his eyes, Song Lei was dumbfounded. There was a square ground table right in the middle of the room. Of course, the thing that surprised Song Lei wasn't the table, but the person that was sitting next to it while sipping something from a ceremonial teacup that had golden dragon engravings on it.

This person was a male. His young face implied that he was at most at the same age as Song Lei. There wasn't anything too out of ordinary with this person, however, Song Lei knew for a fact that this person was a ghost. He could feel that this person wasn't a human, and he knew that his hand would pass through him if he tried to touch him.

The thing that would separate this ghost from any other normal person of their age would be his white hair and his red eyes. The deadpan expression on his face was slightly disturbing. He didn't seem like he cared about Song Lei being there.

"So..?" Suddenly the ghost opened its mouth. Song Lei was puzzled, So he raised one of his brows. "You don't seem like you have anything to deliver," the ghost said calmly. He sipped a little bit of liquid out of the cup he was holding in his hands.

Hearing his words, Song Lei was embarrassed a little bit. He was expecting the ghosts to be in a crazed state like Yao Ai was, however, this ghost seemed pretty sane. He couldn't just go ahead and say something like 'I'm here to deliver death!' So he decided to talk things out first.

Thinking about what he would say for a second, Song Lei smiled widely and said, "I'm really sorry for lying, sir. As the new apartment committee, we need you to move out."

"Ah, is that so...." The ghost said with a displeased expression on his face. "But I don't have anywhere else to go... Could you guys at least help me find a new place?"

"Huh..." Song Lei tapped his chin. He was truly surprised that the ghost had just instantly agreed. 'This is becoming more and more troublesome.'

"Please come and sit. Would you like something to drink?" The ghost asked. "I'm Song Ming by the way..."

"I'm Lu Peng," Song Lei said. Obviously, he didn't want to reveal his real name. "There's no need to... I'm about to leave anyway."

While he kept thinking about it, an idea flashed inside Song Lei's mind.

"I might be able to help you find a new place...."