Chapter 18: Mutual Generation and Restraint
“…Let me try to translate what this side quest actually means,” Su Qiong said numbly, staring up at the enormous slime. “The instance boss is actively being murdered. If we want clues, we have to save him. But Mr. S is a suicidal maniac. If we free him, he’s going to slaughter everyone in this hospital—including us.”
“Mm.” A’s handsome face was totally speechless.
Su Qiong fell silent. He already knew the game system was a bastard, but he hadn’t expected it to be this cruel. It left them with absolutely no path to survival. They had two choices, and both ended in certain death.
“A, what do you think we should do?” Su Qiong asked.
“Save him,” A replied instantly, without a second of hesitation.
If they were going to die either way, saving Mr. S might at least give them a clue. Doing nothing just meant sitting around waiting for death.
“Alright. But now we have a new problem.” Su Qiong stared at the massive slime. It was filling the entire room, expanding right before their eyes. He looked down at his own squishy, useless body, and then at A. A was incredibly powerful, but the daytime rules strictly forbade him from using weapons or abilities.
How on earth were they supposed to save the boss?
Even if A could fight, his 400,000 points put him around Level 23 or 24. IF had ruthless leveling standards. The higher you got, the harder it was to level up, and a single level created a massive gap in combat power. A was seven full levels below the boss. And since NPCs had even harsher leveling rules than players, Mr. S was terrifyingly strong.
Yet, this slime had nearly killed the boss. If the two of them just blindly rushed in to drag Mr. S out, they would probably get swallowed too.
“How do we beat it?” Su Qiong asked.
A frowned, his mind racing. In the world of IF, game levels and magical abilities mattered way more than physical fitness. No matter how elite A’s hand-to-hand combat skills were, he couldn’t punch his way across a seven-level gap.
“The stats you just scanned belong to Mr. S, not the slime,” Su Qiong analyzed, tapping into his system knowledge. “There are two reasons why a scan would fail on the slime. First, its level is so much higher than yours that it can hide its data from a Level 23 player.”
Before A could worry, Su Qiong shook his head. “But that’s impossible. A monster needs to be twenty levels above you to hide its stats. Inside any level, the instance boss is the absolute ceiling for combat power. Since Mr. S is Level 30, the slime mathematically cannot reach Level 43 here.”
“What’s the second possibility?” A asked.
“The slime isn’t an NPC at all. It’s just a regular physical object in the environment—like a wall, a window, or a bed.” Su Qiong carefully stretched out a bandage arm and poked the slime’s surface, snatching his hand back before it could grab him. “I think it really is just a giant puddle of slime.”
Following Su Qiong’s logic, A muttered, “Slime. A semi-liquid substance made mostly of water.”
“Water… water should be weak to fire.” A rubbed his temples in frustration. “But there’s no fire in this entire hospital. Only endless amounts of water.”
The hospital worshipped water like it was life itself, which was exactly why this water-based slime had grown into such an unstoppable monster. A had been here for four days and hadn’t seen a single open flame.
“Are you sure fire will work?” Su Qiong checked his internal database, and a crazy idea sparked in his code. “Humans have a philosophy that elements constantly create and destroy each other. Water and fire are opposites. They restrain each other, which means they can also trigger each other.”
Su Qiong looked out the hallway window. It was nearly noon, and the glaring sun was beating down on the earth. He peeked into the neighboring patient rooms. After finishing their morning appointments, the patients had returned to their beds for an afternoon nap. Before falling asleep, every single one of them tightly hugged a clear glass thermos filled to the brim with water.
“I have a plan,” Su Qiong said. “It might work, but you’ll have to hold that monster back for a little bit.” Su Qiong glanced nervously at the trapped boss.
A studied the little marshmallow and quickly figured out what he was plotting. Calmly, he rolled up his sleeves. “Is half an hour enough?”
“More than enough!”
Leaving the battlefield to the living weapon, Su Qiong quietly floated into the neighboring rooms. He moved quickly, grabbing random items roughly the same size as the water bottles. He tore scraps off his gray Mimicry Cloak and wrapped the junk up, disguising the items to look exactly like the thermoses.
While the brainless NPCs snored, Su Qiong carefully swapped the fake bottles for the real, water-filled thermoses. The Mimicry Cloak could easily trick players and monsters, but it couldn’t fool basic physics. Knowing how massive the slime was, Su Qiong didn’t hold back—he stole every single clear glass cup on the entire floor.
Within minutes, the brand-new cloak Yu Qimiao had bought him was reduced to ragged tatters.
When Su Qiong shredded his first cloak, he hadn’t cared at all. But this time, a strange, unexplainable pang of sadness tugged at his code. Pushing those weird human emotions aside, he laboriously hauled dozens of heavy glass thermoses back to A’s doorway.
A had literally ripped the heavy wooden door off the neighboring room with his bare hands. He was using it like a massive shield to barricade his own doorway, trapping the slime inside.
But the monster was fluid. It could squeeze through any gap, just like Su Qiong. Thick, toxic sludge was oozing through the cracks, wrapping violently around A’s hands, ankles, and neck.
More and more of the viscous slime poured out, desperate to swallow A alive. God only knew what toxic chemicals had been mixed into the creature when it was formed. Whenever the sludge touched A’s bare skin, it burned like acid, causing a searing, stabbing agony. The skin it touched blistered instantly, rotting into a bruised blue-black color. It dissolved his blood vessels, yet no blood spilled out.
Instead, the ravenous slime drank the blood directly from his veins, absorbing it to grow even larger.
Seeing A covered in horrific chemical burns, Su Qiong panicked. “You’re in terrible shape! Let me take over—”
“It’s too heavy. You can’t hold it,” A grunted, shoving his bleeding shoulder against the wooden door to keep it shut. “Hurry. I’m not going to last half an hour.”
Hearing that, Su Qiong shut his mouth. Using every ounce of his marshmallow strength, he threw the hallway window wide open, letting a brilliant beam of sunlight flood the corridor. He held up a squishy finger to calculate the sun’s exact angle. Then, using his bandages to tie them together, he stacked the stolen thermoses into a very specific geometric pattern.
The clear, water-filled glass acted like a perfect lens.
Running the math through his system, Su Qiong shifted each thermos into the optimal position. The blazing sunlight passed through dozens of glass cups, magnifying and refracting until it converged into a single, blinding focal point directly on the wooden door A was holding.
“Mm,” A let out a muffled groan of pain. The slime was growing too fast. The acid had already eaten straight through his hospital gown and was burning dangerously close to his vital organs.
“The beam isn’t hot enough yet! Hold on for two more minutes!” Su Qiong yelled, looking out the window in a panic.
But at the absolute worst possible moment, a thick cloud drifted past, blocking the sun and plunging the hallway into shadow.
Su Qiong clenched his bandage fists. For the first time in his short, digital life, he genuinely wished he were powerful. If he were a high-ranking boss from inside the Circle, he could literally control the weather. Forget a stupid cloud—he could drag the sun out of the sky to start this fire!
Wait. If he was that strong, he wouldn’t need to build a giant magnifying glass to fight a puddle of slime.
“Get out of the way!” Su Qiong screamed at the sky. Watching the acid swallow A alive pushed the little marshmallow over the edge. Furious, he practically puffed up into an exploding ball of anger.
Miraculously, the moment he yelled, the cloud seemed to listen. It quickly drifted away, and brilliant sunlight flooded the hallway once more.
Su Qiong desperately focused the concentrated beam, trying to set the heavy wooden door on fire. But solid wood didn’t catch easily. After thirty agonizing seconds of intense heat, he had only managed to scorch a dark, smoking black circle onto the surface.
A was now more than half-swallowed by the corrosive sludge. He looked like he was standing in the middle of a meat grinder, yet he somehow looked totally relaxed. He even found the energy to tease the little NPC.
“You’ve never started a fire in your life, have you? You need something highly flammable for tinder.”
“Why didn’t you say that earlier?!” Su Qiong panicked. “Where am I supposed to find tinder right now?!”
Su Qiong had zero survival skills. If he let go of the delicate glass structure now to search for paper, the focal point would shift, and all their hard work would be ruined.
“There’s a perfectly good piece of tinder right in front of you,” A said. His handsome face was literally melting away, yet he didn’t even flinch. Instead, he smiled at Su Qiong. Unfortunately, the horrific chemical burns made the smile look a little gruesome. “Aim the beam at my clothes,” A ordered. “I’ll be the tinder.”
“Your clothes?!”
Right. Su Qiong had almost forgotten! There was something incredibly flammable right there!
Five seconds later, Su Qiong unraveled a long strip of his own white bandage and shoved it directly into the blinding focal point. His code-generated body was made of a highly unusual, ultra-flammable fabric. The bandage caught fire instantly, bursting into a bright flame that he immediately pressed against the smoking wood.
The door erupted into a roaring blaze.
The moment the slime felt the intense heat, it shrieked and immediately released A, slithering rapidly back into the hospital room to escape the fire.
But A was faster. The second he was free, he kicked the blazing wooden barricade directly into the center of the room. Moving like a blur, he ripped three more heavy doors and window frames right off their hinges and hurled them into the raging bonfire.
Hearing the loud, satisfying hiss of evaporating sludge, Su Qiong finally let out a massive sigh of relief. He flailed his arm wildly, shaking out the fire burning at the tip of his bandage.
“I lost a huge chunk of my arm,” Su Qiong pouted, looking at his charred stub. “This is definitely going to shorten my lifespan.”
A dragged himself over to the hallway wall. Covered in horrific acid burns, he slumped against the tiles and slowly slid down to a sitting position. Exhausted, he closed his eyes and asked softly, “Can your bandages be repaired?”
“Yes. I can buy a repair kit from the system shop.” Su Qiong tapped his black bracelet, staring miserably at the screen. A basic repair kit cost exactly 100 KPI.
Only after leaving the Gangan Village level did Su Qiong finally experience true poverty for himself.
“Oh,” A said. Being a top-tier player, he knew exactly how guide NPCs earned their points. Calmly, the bleeding weapon tilted his head back. “Come on then. I’ll let you kill me.”
