"——Ghost Marriage?"
"You mean… I've been chosen?"
Jiang City. Inside a shabby rented room.
Yun Zhenyue took off her white Xiaomi wireless earbuds and stared blankly at the chat, which was exploding with comments.
About to graduate from university, she was studying for this year's provincial civil service exam and had started a study-stream to stay focusing.
Since she was known as the Jiang University Beauty, she was often harassed and hated showing her face. Her stream usually had fewer than ten viewers.
Just a moment ago, she had inexplicably heard a mechanical voice in her head talking about some "Ghost Marriage."
Yun Zhenyue thought she had studied herself into a daze and was hearing things. But when she mumbled a few words about it, the viewers in her stream suddenly went crazy, spamming the chat.
In the blink of an eye, tens of thousands of people had flooded in!
[Nooo, why did they have to choose Ditzy Yue?]
[Sigh... She was doing just fine, and now we have to say goodbye in the blink of an eye.]
[I really don't want Xiaoyue to become a ghost's wife.]
[I'm crying my eyes out! No one who gets chosen ever has a good ending. The survival rate for the Ghost Marriage is still zero!]
Her original viewers were in despair.
But the newly arrived viewers were extremely curious.
[So this is our Dragon Country's new player?]
[Hope she lasts a little longer. Don't be like the last poor sap who got killed the moment he went in.]
[Why isn't the streamer showing her face? I want to see if you have any potential.]
[Someone go notify the research department! She should at least take some ghost coins in with her!]
Staring at the endless stream of comments and the viewer count that was rapidly approaching one hundred thousand, Yun Zhenyue just felt dizzy.
She was naturally a bit ditsy, and on top of that, she had been skipping meals and sleep to study.
The term "Ghost Marriage" was completely foreign to her.
Fortunately, Yun Zhenyue quickly did an AI search and got the gist of it.
Ten years ago, ghosts began to awaken, randomly selecting people from all over the country to enter the Ghost World.
But ghosts were far too dangerous for humans. Even the weakest ghost could easily tear an adult man to shreds, and conventional weapons were completely ineffective against them.
Over the years, the human population had plummeted, and the entire world was shrouded in the shadow of the ghosts.
Yun Zhenyue knew all this.
But what about the Ghost Marriage?
It was a new, unknown phenomenon that had only recently appeared.
Perhaps the heavens could not bear to watch any longer and had specially created it.
The system would select "lucky" individuals from countries around the world, one representative per nation, to be randomly married to a ghost, with the entire process being live-streamed.
Players had to cultivate a relationship with their ghost partner through daily life. Each time they increased the ghost's affection level, they would receive a gift from them.
Once they reached the maximum affection level of 100, they could marry the ghost and unlock that ghost's instance dungeon.
But to this day, the success rate for the Ghost Marriage was still zero.
In the past, the Ghost Marriage had always chosen human men to be paired with female ghosts.
However, since women tend to be more emotional, and many female ghosts harbored an extreme hatred for men, a large number of male players were killed by their partners upon their very first meeting.
Faced with this incredibly high death rate, the marriage system had no choice but to make a change and start selecting human women for the pairings.
As the saying goes, "a woman's pursuit of a man is like piercing through gauze." After this change, the death rate for first encounters did drop significantly, but still, no player had successfully won over a ghost.
Countries all over the world were pouring their efforts into the Ghost Marriage.
"So that's how it is..."
Yun Zhenyue murmured, looking at the system panel in front of her.
She now had to choose her 'preferred partner'.
This round of the Ghost Marriage involved ten countries, with a total of ten female players participating.
Before the pairing, they could each choose a preferred partner.
If multiple players chose the same partner, the marriage system would assign one randomly.
[Marriage Candidate #1]
[Blood Feast Count Dracula]
...
[Marriage Candidate #2]
[Ghost Water Tiger·Amamiya Ten]
...
[Marriage Candidate #3]
[Midnight Butcher Piao Dagen]
...
Information on a total of ten male ghosts was displayed before Yun Zhenyue.
The names of those already chosen as preferred partners were marked in red.
Those not yet chosen were in white.
There were also photos of these ghosts.
Some were side profiles, others were just shots of their backs.
None of the ghosts had a full-body picture, and their faces were impossible to make out clearly.
It was like opening a blind box.
Yun Zhenyue was dazzled and had no idea who to choose.
She never paid attention to this stuff, so all the ghosts were complete strangers to her.
The viewers in the stream, however, were utterly shocked.
[Holy crap, the candidates are all so high-tier this time?]
[It looks like they're almost all Fierce Ghosts.]
[Especially Count Dracula! Even a Crimson-robed Ghost showed up!]
[Too bad, it looks like all these ghosts have been chosen already. The streamer's too late!]
Because the Ghost Marriage concerned the fate of the nation, most people had watched every single installment without fail.
Moreover, since it had been ten years since the ghosts awakened, information on nearly all the powerful ghosts had been made public.
For example, Dragon Country had published the *Compendium of Ghost Strengths and Personalities*, which detailed information on major instance dungeons and ghosts.
At this moment, Yun Zhenyue was still hesitating, unable to decide. They all looked terrifying to her.
Until her gaze fell upon the last ghost on the list.
[Marriage Candidate #10]
[Gu Yuan]
This ghost had no title.
And his photo was different from the others, too.
The other ghosts were either menacing in appearance or dripping with blood and gore.
His photo, on the other hand, was a bust shot, showing part of his neck and chin.
In any case, it looked pretty clean and neat.
"This ghost..."
Yun Zhenyue pursed her thin lips. The more she looked, the more she felt a sense of connection, as if she'd seen him somewhere before. But she'd never been in a relationship in her life and didn't even have the contact information for any man other than her father.
Besides, the photo wasn't even of his full face.
'Why does he look so familiar? Come to think of it, he was probably rejected by the others. The other nine ghosts had all been chosen, leaving only Gu Yuan with no one to pick him. It's a little pitiful. He also looks kind of poor. The other ghosts were either in mansions or holding sharp weapons in their backgrounds, but he had nothing. A ghost like that probably gets bullied by the others, right?'
[You have selected Marriage Candidate #10 as your preferred partner]
[Are you sure?]
Without a moment's hesitation, Yun Zhenyue chose Gu Yuan.
The Dragon Country viewers who saw this were dumbfounded.
No one expected Yun Zhenyue to choose an unknown ghost.
[Who's that? Never even heard of him!]
[Don't just pick randomly! This is important!]
[Gu Yuan? He's not in the Ghost Compendium. He's probably some weakling ghost, right?]
[Well, based on his chin, he's probably pretty handsome.]
[What the hell is the use of being handsome? Can you eat handsome?]
[Forget it, forget it. She's already chosen. We can only pray he has a good personality.]
[Yeah, even if he's the weakest, it'll be fine as long as his personality is good.]
The viewers sighed collectively.
The ghosts in the marriage pool varied in strength.
But the difficulty of winning them over wasn't directly correlated with their power.
Some ghosts were weak, but their ability to torture people was second to none.
Generally speaking, it was always better to choose a more powerful partner.
That way, the nation would also reap greater benefits.
...
[All preferred partners have been selected!]
[The Ghost Marriage will officially begin in 3 minutes!]
Yun Zhenyue realized she was almost out of time.
Thinking that her marriage partner might be poor, she immediately looked around her room.
'Since this is our first meeting, I can't show up empty-handed, right?'
But it was too late to go buy a gift now.
Yun Zhenyue began to rummage through her small rented room.
Her computer, rice cooker, mini-fridge, teacups, game console...
Yun Zhenyue packed everything she could carry, filling two large bags to the brim.
She even brought the discounted Want Want milk she'd bought that was about to expire.
"Whew~"
"Finally done packing..."
Yun Zhenyue wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead.
She had packed up all of her worldly belongings.
'For the sake of all this stuff, my ghost husband probably won't be too mean to me, right?'