ICSST CH45: The Birthday Banquet

Faced with Zhou Qi’an’s polite introduction, Mu Tianbai—who had previously attempted to collect protection fees—remained silent. Meanwhile, the College student, still reeling from the bone ash story, felt dizzy and had to steady himself against a nearby pillar just to stay upright.

He looked around for help, completely lost on what to do next.

Zhou Qi’an dismissed him perfunctorily: “Do whatever you want.”

After all, he was about to work overtime and rush through the project planning anyway.

The College student blurted out instinctively, “Forcing employees to work overtime during a company retreat is illegal.”

“…” Zhou Qi’an had no comment.

Silently, he took a step away from him.

A small piece of some unknown creature’s skin slid off their boss’s clothing.

The College student almost let out a shrill shriek: “!!”

Zhou Qi’an’s expression turned grim, his voice a thin whisper: “Do you think I work like a beast of burden at this company for no reason? Why do you think I haven’t quit for a better job?”

At that moment, the boss was more focused on Mu Tianbai. Even the motion of wiping his fingers slowed slightly.

He had noticed Mu Tianbai’s shadow—something about it was more tantalizing than any of the monsters inside the building. A scarlet tongue flicked across his lips, and an almost primal urge arose—the desire to butcher both the man and his shadow and feast upon them.

That strange mechanical voice echoed in his mind, confirming that they were inside a “game.”

And in this slaughterhouse of a game, killing people was probably not against the rules.

Zhou Qi’an was highly skilled at reading people—especially when it came to his superiors. He instantly sensed the chilling murderous intent in the air.

The initial flicker of surprise passed, and Mu Tianbai’s shadow began to stir, as if sensing fresh, fertile nourishment.

Tension was about to explode. Zhou Qi’an swallowed hard and continued the unfinished introduction.

Before, he had simply reiterated the boss’s and the College student’s identities. Now, it was time to introduce Mu Tianbai.

Taking a step forward, he solemnly announced, “Mu Tianbai—my boyfriend.”

Mu Tianbai’s face remained expressionless, but his shadow slowly curved into a question mark.

The College student, still recovering from shock, was temporarily beyond being surprised.

The boss stared at Zhou Qi’an, as if trying to determine whether he was telling the truth.

Zhou Qi’an kept his composure, his gaze steady, with just a hint of affectionate tenderness at the corners of his eyes. He knew exactly what connections his words would draw in the boss’s mind.

Currently, same-sex marriage had not yet been legalized. It had been expected to pass this year, but due to a series of unexpected incidents across the country, the proposal had been indefinitely postponed.

An unrecognized marriage = No legal protection = No honeymoon leave.
A boyfriend = No risk of pregnancy = No paid 15-day paternity leave.

A chain of deductions flashed through the boss’s mind. Gradually, his hostility toward Mu Tianbai lessened—at least, now he saw a reason to let him live.

“…Forget it,” he muttered to himself. Then, in a tone of utter condescension, he addressed Zhou Qi’an: “Hurry up and get back to work.”

If he had to die, he could at least hand in the project first.

Zhou Qi’an exhaled in relief, about to say something when another voice interrupted.

From a distance, the rice shop owner spotted them chatting, his deathly pale face full of displeasure. His morning had been particularly frustrating—despite usually having no customers, today, someone had actually come to buy rice, and he couldn’t convince them to leave.

He had taken out all his anger on his new assistant. Rolling up his sleeves, he marched over and barked at Zhou Qi’an, “Alright, I switched your shift during the day, but that wasn’t so you could stand around chatting here. Hurry up and collect the—”

The word “money” hadn’t even left his mouth when he suddenly felt an eerie chill surrounding him.

He glared at the unfamiliar man and snapped, “I’m disciplining my own employee. Got a problem with that?”

Jin Ji’s Rice Shop.

The boss glanced at the signboard. The poster downstairs had been designed for this very shop.

Zhou Qi’an quickly lowered his voice, playing the victim: “I was forced! If I don’t work, he beats me…”

As he spoke, he revealed the wounds on his back. His white dress shirt was stained with blood from the injuries on the upper layer of his skin.

However, the boss first glanced at his hands. His arms were unscathed—it wouldn’t affect his ability to write.

The next second, he took a long stride toward the rice shop owner, who had dared to snatch his labor force.

“You—who the hell are you? You—ugh…”

The rice shop owner’s neck was tightly strangled by a tie. With one brutal kick, the boss nearly crushed the man’s bone marrow.

Zhou Qi’an kept chanting Amitabha under his breath. Then, feeling a little nervous, he said, “Lend me some paper and a pen. I need to work.”

If he didn’t start working now, he’d be the next one getting beaten.

It wasn’t easy to grab supplies from the art room during the day. Since Mu Tianbai had once used a paper ball to transmit sound, he definitely had paper and a pen.

Mu Tianbai ignored the rice shop owner’s wretched screams. He wasn’t interested in the boss either—something neither human nor ghost in his eyes. Instead, he asked, “Why did you step in just now?”

If he had let him and his boss fight to the death, wouldn’t that have been much more beneficial?

Zhou Qi’an shot him a glance and replied indifferently, “Courtesy begets reciprocity.”

Mu Tianbai hadn’t wronged him, so why would he go out of his way to cause him trouble?

Just as Mu Tianbai was about to speak again, Zhou Qi’an impatiently interrupted, “Why do you talk so much?”

For the first time, someone found him too talkative. Mu Tianbai looked at the young man preparing to work, his blood-red pupils gleaming sharply. After a moment, he said coolly, “I don’t even know my ‘boyfriend’s’ name yet.”

“Zhou Qi’an,” Zhou Qi’an replied without lifting his head. “To pray for peace.”

—

The rice shop owner had been beaten to the brink of death. He desperately crawled back to his shop, leaving bright red streaks of blood on the floor.

As long as he made it inside, he would still have some strength left.

Having been drained of evil energy for years, he wasn’t even as strong as the creatures on the eighteenth floor. As he crawled, his crooked nose twitched as he begged the empty air for mercy.

The boss didn’t waste energy chasing him down. Instead, he unbuttoned his shirt and calmly treated the wounds left by the monsters upstairs. Clearly, he wasn’t invincible—the creatures had left their mark.

At that moment, the College student approached, eager yet cautious, and explained the game’s mechanics in detail. He particularly emphasized that players weren’t allowed to kill each other.

The boss remained indifferent. He could vaguely sense the rules imposed upon him.

After readjusting his tie, he asked about their current mission progress.

They had to leave this damned place soon. If three people suddenly went missing, the other employees would report it to the local police, making things far more complicated.

The College student rambled on.

The boss responded with a single sentence: “So, if we kill the female ghost and the building’s owner, it’ll all be over, right?”

The College student: “…”

The boss let out a cold laugh. Of course, by “kill,” he didn’t mean charging in recklessly. There were other players here—why should he do all the work for someone else’s success?

His plan aligned with Zhou Qi’an’s. Let the female ghost and the building owner fight first, let the other players weaken them further, and then swoop in to finish the job.

“I’m heading to the cafeteria. Are you coming?” Zhou Qi’an suddenly asked. He was a little hungry but said instead, “There are tables there. It’ll be easier for me to write.”

“You go ahead.”

For some reason, the boss didn’t immediately follow.

—

Eighth Floor, Cafeteria.

When Zhou Qi’an arrived, he was surprised to see that quite a few players were already there.

Did everyone really care this much about eating three meals a day?

Mu Tianbai sat not far away, leaving Zhou Qi’an enough space to work on his drawings. As if sensing Zhou Qi’an’s confusion, he said, “The elevator card before we entered the instance hinted that the elevator would eventually become an information point. Not long ago, the number on the eighth floor turned meat red.”

“It wasn’t like that before?”

“Before, it was begonia red.”

“……”

Damn, what kind of normal person would pay attention to something like that?

As it turned out, some players really had noticed—and quite a few of them at that. Even the Origami Boy was among them.

The cafeteria chef looked much thinner than before. He was busy stretching noodles over the cutting board, pulling the crimson strands long and smooth in the air.

The chef handled multiple tasks alone. After making noodles, he moved to one side to work on a cake. The thick white cream was sprinkled with unknown granules, and the cake base itself looked rock-hard—thick, heavy. The chef even had two players help carry it out before he started piping the frosting.

The floor was covered in white powder. A player who stepped in to help nearly slipped. As they steadied themselves, they suddenly noticed blood seeping from the cake base, and their expression changed.

Zhou Qi’an had been silently watching the chef the whole time, feeling a strange sense of familiarity.

He stood up and moved a little closer.

Separated by a single window, the chef continued working on the cake base, rough in his movements, flour flying everywhere.

When Zhou Qi’an caught sight of the writing on the flour bag, his pupils shrank: Jin Taotao’s Bone Rice Flour.

This flour—along with the small bags of starch on the table—was the same as those bone grains. They were all made from cremated remains.

In an instant, he recognized the identity of the new chef.

…It was Sterilization Suit. No wonder he looked so familiar.

Then where had the previous chef gone?

As Zhou Qi’an shifted his gaze toward the massive, blood-red cake base that the players had carried earlier, he found his answer.

He sat back down, pretending he had seen nothing, and began drafting his documents.

But before he could write more than a few words, the chef walked out.

“Tomorrow is the birthday of the girl I have a crush on,” the chef—played by Sterilization Suit—spoke in an eerie tone. The cafeteria fell silent, leaving only his voice. “I sincerely invite everyone to attend her birthday banquet at midnight.”

All the players in the cafeteria simultaneously received a notification:

[Special Mission: Bloody Birthday Banquet]

Mission Details: Players with an invitation may attend the midnight banquet. All guests must bring a gift. If your gift does not satisfy the host, she will demand something else.

As soon as the prompt ended, a gilded invitation appeared on everyone’s table.

What should have been a fiery, scorching red now emitted a chilling aura. The moment Zhou Qi’an touched it, a shiver ran down his spine.

He skimmed the message and quickly understood.

The invitation was essentially a faction allegiance token. Players could also hand it over to the building’s owner, which would inevitably put them on the opposite side of the ghost girl.

Different choices meant different missions ahead.

After distributing the invitations, Sterilization Suit personally placed bowls of noodles in front of the players.

When he reached Zhou Qi’an, his eyes carried a faint jealousy—perhaps because the ghost girl had spoken a few extra words to Zhou Qi’an before. The bowl of hot soup noodles before him had an exceptionally strong bloody stench.

Sterilization Suit stared at Zhou Qi’an, seemingly waiting for him to drink it right then and there.

Just as Zhou Qi’an was considering throwing it in the man’s face, his expression suddenly changed.

He lowered his head and continued writing, looking completely indifferent to his surroundings.

The elevator doors opened.

His boss stepped out, holding a severed claw. There wasn’t much flesh on it, just an enormous bone.

Zhou Qi’an had only glanced at it briefly, yet he couldn’t help but recall those massive hands on the eighteenth floor—the ones that had mangled his body into a bloody mess.

Casually retrieving a knife and fork from the utensil cabinet, the boss sat down elegantly. Then, using a napkin as a makeshift dining cloth, he began to eat the monster meat in a refined manner under the cafeteria’s distinct orange glow.

Zhou Qi’an remained expressionless as he pondered.

Monsters could devour both humans and their own kind to grow stronger. But the more they ate, did their minds also become more like monsters?

Fortunately, his “dear mother” preferred sneaky tricks over fighting or consuming creatures—those things seemed to hold little interest for her.

By the same logic, the cake Sterilization Suit made from corpses and ashes likely contained terrifying energy.

The cake was an offering to the ghost girl—a signal of the impending changes in the building.

As soon as his boss moved his knife and fork, he glanced at the nearby Sterilization Suit. “You need something?”

Perhaps sensing that the boss radiated an aura of danger, Sterilization Suit’s eyes flickered before turning to serve the next bowl of noodles.

Other players in the cafeteria secretly observed the new arrival, and from their body language, they could tell he knew Zhou Qi’an.

But what the hell was up with that monster claw?!

Zhou Qi’an glanced at the cake out of the corner of his eye, lost in thought.

His boss’s gaze was sharper than the knife he was using to cut the meat. “What are you spacing out for now?”

“Oh, I was just thinking through the game mission… so I could—”

His boss cut him off coldly: “What’s there to think about? Everyone knows you’re useless at this. You get tricked like an idiot all day long.”

“The fact that you’re still alive and haven’t been scammed to death yet is a miracle…”

Zhou Qi’an was good at his job, but in the company, he was the classic pushover. Even when another department stole credit for his work, he didn’t say a word. In the end, it was only because he didn’t want his own department’s year-end performance to suffer that he finally stepped in to resolve things.

The small cafeteria fell into a second wave of dead silence.

The Origami Boy, who had once been played like a fool, felt a lump in his throat.

The Red Cloak, who had nearly been tricked to death, quietly re-bandaged his wounds for the third time.

The few players who had personally witnessed bodies being transported in the freight elevator looked bewildered, their breathing slightly uneven.

Mu Tianbai, who believed it was a miracle if Zhou Qi’an went a day without screwing someone over, put down his chopsticks. “……”

He had lost his appetite.

His shadow curled into a question mark.

Even Sterilization Suit, who had just turned away, paused mid-step, spilling a few drops of soup.

A certain college student buried his head so low it looked like he was trying to dig it into the ground. Zhou Qi’an tugged at his collar. “Eat. What are you staring at the table for?”

“N-Nothing, Brother Zhou, I just… I just…” The college student’s face turned bright red, his ears practically burning. “I just feel a little secondhand embarrassment for you.”

“……”

After a few seconds of silence, Zhou Qi’an said coldly, “Haven’t you had enough of playing the scapegoat?”

The college student instinctively ran his fingers through his waist-length hair—identical to Hei Changzhi’s—and remembered that he was still on “death row reprieve”. He immediately wilted like a frostbitten eggplant.

Unlike the wontons from earlier, these noodles were likely made from bone ash as well. Zhou Qi’an pushed the bowl aside and focused on his work.

As long as there weren’t any difficult clients, he handled work effortlessly.

Mu Tianbai, at the neighboring table, casually glanced over. He saw Zhou Qi’an writing: “Use vintage-themed advertisements to evoke nostalgic memories in the public… The ads and all related campaigns should feature a unified red color scheme for a festive atmosphere.”

Mu Tianbai mentally translated it: Put up billboards, dig into NPCs’ minds, then end with a bloody carnival.

His conclusion? Zhou Qi’an was going for a total wipeout.

As if sensing someone watching him, Zhou Qi’an turned slightly. When their gazes met, he flashed an innocent, harmless smile.

“I probably won’t be able to join any activities this afternoon,” he twirled his pen and smirked slightly. “I’ve got work to do. Look, my plan’s already written.”

Mu Tianbai gave a slight nod.

On the other side, Sterilization Suit had finally finished making the cake. He pushed out a putrid green garbage bin, and the nearby players instinctively shifted away, desperate to avoid it.

As soon as he left, they immediately started discussing gifts for the birthday banquet.

Thinking about the mission he had just received, Zhou Qi’an couldn’t help but get distracted again, considering what kind of gift would be needed.

Suddenly, his boss nonchalantly raised a hand and knocked over the foul-smelling bowl of noodles in front of him.

Zhou Qi’an quickly lifted his half-written proposal to avoid the mess.

But soon, following his boss’s gaze, he picked up the bowl for a closer look.

The material of the bowl’s interior … looked disturbingly like a human skull. The faint cracks in the bone formed a pattern—subtly shaping the left and right hemispheres of a brain.

Most players hadn’t even touched their food at lunch, let alone looked at the bottom of their bowls.

Only one bold player had dared to take a sip of the soup. When they heard this, they immediately started dry-heaving.

The others gave them looks of sympathy.

Someone muttered, “The gift in the mission… it’s not talking about skulls, is it?”

Or was it referring to separately extracted left and right brains?

…Well, either way, those could come as a set from the same head.

The atmosphere in the cafeteria grew invisibly tense.

There were only three ways to obtain a human head: from the shopkeeper, from a customer, or… from one of their own.

While the others were still deep in thought, the boss had already finished his meal. As he got up, he said coldly, “Don’t just think about yourselves. Look after the newcomers.”

At the very least, the interns needed to learn not to leave work on time.

Zhou Qi’an cautiously asked, “Where are you going?”

His boss, as ruthless as ever, replied, “There’s an old hag. Kill her, and we’ll have two heads.”

He had seen the billboard downstairs earlier and tossed the old woman aside without finishing her off. Now, she could finally be put to use.

As he spoke, his gaze lingered on Zhou Qi’an—as if to say that if he didn’t see a satisfactory plan later, Zhou Qi’an’s skull would be the third one added to the pile.

Watching his boss’s retreating figure, the college student whispered, “Two heads… don’t tell me he means—”

That terrifying conjoined old woman?

Zhou Qi’an wiped away nonexistent tears. “Poor manager. Our foreman… looks like she’s about to bite the dust.”

---

Author’s note:

Zhou Qi’an: A competent corporate drone must learn to multitask—writing work proposals while simultaneously drafting mission plans.