DNDAS

Chapter 55: Imagination Running Wild

The management bureau's communications team couldn't voice the bitterness in their hearts.

The moment dawn broke, the media started creating fanfare about pirates encountering a ghost ship, and how the sea pirates' ship had gone out of order, proactively delivering the pirates to a military vessel for capture. The marketing accounts of these media outlets made this claim with a lot of solemnity and sincerity – the vivid writing and precise depictions forcibly concocted a stimulating, supernatural story about how karma would always catch up.

A meddlesome reporter proposed an interview with the captured sea pirates, but was rejected by the police. Following that, the reporter weaved an even more bizarre story about how the ghosts had frightened the sea pirates till they were in delirium and thus unable to accept interviews with reporters.

Although many netizens felt that these reports were unreliable, glancing through suspenseful and stimulating news articles when bored at work or school could still lift everyone's spirits quite a bit.

Netizen A says: Sea ghosts are really law-abiding. They didn't scare these sea pirates to death or eat them. Instead, they let them bump into a military vessel. Aren't they just seeking out the military when in trouble?

Netizen B's reply: Ghosts were also once humans, maybe this ghost was a law-abiding human when alive?

Netizens had always had both cute and wild imaginations. After much discussion, there was actually still someone who developed sincere affection for this legendary ghost. This person drew the ghost a cute picture and composed a warm and adorable story. Perhaps the ghost was a soldier who died at sea in a war one hundred years ago. Even if his soul was adrift at sea, he still wanted to protect the civilians at sea. Perhaps he was a warrior who performed heroic acts when alive, and stuck to his roots even after death.

It didn't matter whether stories were true or not. What was important was whether it was capable of moving people.

An employee of the communications team finished reading the story about a soldier from a time hundreds of years ago turned heroic ghost, and how he protected travelers at sea. The employee was so touched that their eyes had turned red. Sneakily forwarding the story to the cultivators' forum, the employee took note of the author's name, and then tipped the author for their comic.

"Why are these netizens so good at composing stories?" The employee rubbed their red eyes before contacting the relevant department to look into the incident.

The answer the employee received was beyond his expectations. He had assumed that this was an ordinary system failure, but the sea pirates really had made a fuss about seeing ghosts. Moreover, it was reported that a professional had checked the instruments after the pirate ship was towed to shore and everything was normal.

Had they really encountered a phenomenon surpassing scientific knowledge?

Although the team's employees were very doubtful of this, they were extremely proficient at handling this sort of public opinion. First, they got a popular account that promoted science on the internet to compile several famous historical haunting incidents. Then, they posted the truth behind these incidents, thereby conducting a wave of scientific publicity.

Following that, they chose an account with high credibility to publicly state that something had gone wrong with the pirate ship. Coupled with the effects of the ocean currents, the ship drifted to the military vessel. As for why the sea pirates were making a fuss about having seen ghosts, there were two possibilities – one, they had been adrift at sea for too long and ate food that had gone bad, causing them to hallucinate; two, they were attempting to escape legal punishment by feigning madness.