Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite] – CH13

Chapter 13: Spook High (13)

Nan Zhu had anticipated that the campus convenience store might harbor entity traps, but she never imagined it would be an abyss this massive—wide enough to swallow every last one of their lives whole!

“This way! Run!” Grabbing the stumbling Zhao Jiayue by the arm, her expression taut with strain, Nan Zhu sprinted toward the teaching building with everything she had.

As for the others who had accompanied them, they had long since scattered in sheer panic during the chase. No one knew whether they were currently dead or alive.

The sprawling campus was deathly silent. Through the haze of exertion, Nan Zhu could hear only the ragged, violent scraping of her own breath. The bone-chilling winter wind poured down her throat, burning like swallowed razors and carving raw agony through her trachea and lungs.

“W-wait… please…” Zhao Jiayue suddenly began thrashing, trying to tear her hand out of Nan Zhu’s grip. Sucking in desperate, fractured gasps of air, she wept and shook her head. “I’m sorry… I, I can’t… I can’t run anymore…”

Nan Zhu’s frantic strides stumbled to a halt.

She whipped around to look at Zhao Jiayue’s tear-streaked face.

Zhao Jiayue was a pure rookie who had just landed in this realm. She possessed no items, no skills, and no baseline attribute buffs; she barely even grasped the underlying nature of this game.

She was simply an ordinary young woman who had stumbled into a nightmare.

And just like any ordinary person, when pitted against the entities lurking in this trial—or weighed against players who had already cleared two instances—she was far too frail. Timid and powerless, she radiated a desperate will to live, yet every fiber of her being screamed “dead weight” and “liability.”

From the moment they materialized that morning, Nan Zhu had extended a helping hand to her countless times. Even the quiet Chen Qi had wordlessly shielded her on multiple occasions.

Perhaps bonded by shared gender, Zhao Jiayue had grown exceptionally dependent on the two female players. Whenever peril flared, she instinctively reached for them; even while walking, she unconsciously leaned toward their sides, clutching at an emotional lifeline.

And so, this was the very first time Zhao Jiayue had actively pushed that helping hand away.

She wrenched her fingers free from Nan Zhu’s grasp. When Nan Zhu reached back out to haul her up, Zhao Jiayue didn’t take it; instead, she wept, shaking her head, and stumbled backward a few steps toward the oncoming horror.

“Just leave me behind…” Zhao Jiayue cried, thoroughly breaking down, yet her words rang clearer and more lucid than ever before. Aggressively wiping the tears from her cheeks, she sobbed, “I’m too weak. If you keep dragging me along, I’m only going to get you killed!”

She had lived a thoroughly plain and simple life. She had a mother who adored her, and a puppy that loved her unconditionally. In all her years, she had never raised a hand to hurt anyone, actively or passively; seeing her mother slaughter a chicken or clean a fish was enough to make her squeeze her eyes shut in fright.

Fumbling into this grotesque, horrifying nightmare of a game, she felt boundless gratitude toward Nan Zhu and the others for watching over her. And precisely because of that gratitude, she refused to let herself become the reason they died.

“My stamina is higher than yours! Get on your feet—I’m pulling you back to the classroom, we’re almost there!” Nan Zhu’s face darkened as she clamped a vice grip onto Zhao Jiayue’s slender arm, barking out a harsh reprimand: “If you truly don’t want to drag me down, then get your ass up and run with me! If I actually end up dead because of you, you’ll have plenty of time to cry about it then!”

Zhao Jiayue wanted to live. She missed her mother, and she missed the dog she had raised with all her heart. But the entity barreling after them moved with terrifying, ungodly speed. In that brief exchange alone, the pounding footfalls behind them had drawn dreadfully near.

Weeping, she pulled back from Nan Zhu’s outstretched arm. Catching the suffocating reek of copper and gore riding the wind, she shut her eyes in utter despair.

Heavy tears rolled down her cheeks. It turned out that right before dying, one’s life didn’t actually flash before their eyes like a cinematic reel. Her mind went completely blank; she couldn’t even summon the image of her mother’s face.

Yet the anticipated agony never descended.

Through her closed eyelids, the ambient light wasn’t swallowed by chaotic darkness, and the chill biting into her flesh remained nothing more than the winter air.

“…She’s crying her heart out. Are you really not going to wake her up?” Qin Fu’an asked, his hands casually pinning the convenience store clerk’s arms behind its back as he tilted his head toward the grim-faced Nan Zhu.

Nan Zhu stared down at Zhao Jiayue, who was still squeezed shut waiting for death, and said coldly, “Let her cry. If she’s giving up on living anyway, crying herself to death beats getting chewed up and swallowed whole by a monster!”

Hearing this, Qin Fu’an looked down at the writhing entity beneath his hands, struck by genuine curiosity: “Hey pal, no offense, but I’m legitimately curious—what made you think you could chase her down and take a bite?”

He had heard that when humans succumbed to incandescent fury, their combat prowess multiplied several times over. Qin Fu’an had always dismissed it as idle rumor, but looking at Nan Zhu, whose wrath had clearly redlined, he suddenly felt that even if he hadn’t stepped in, this creature—which had maxed out its agility while investing zero points into brute strength—might not have laid a finger on them anyway.

Store Clerk: “…”

Fuck off! Will you let go of me already?!

Sensing the foul profanities screaming in the clerk’s head, Qin Fu’an glanced up toward the colossal soul floating above the campus. Its tentacles had long since retracted into the ether. He began wondering whether his little deskmate’s leftovers would go cold if he took the time to ransack the store before heading back.

The exchange between Qin Fu’an and Nan Zhu finally snapped Zhao Jiayue out of her deathly trance. Sniffling, she cautiously cracked her eyes open. Registering the scene before her, she forgot all about crying and scrambled to her feet in a flustered hurry, instinctively pressing against Nan Zhu’s side once more.

“…I’m really not dead?” she asked, eyes brimmed with wet, trembling disbelief.

Nan Zhu remained impassive, though she answered without hesitation: “If you’re eager to die, you’re free to feed yourself straight into its jaws right now.”

She flicked her chin toward the clerk pinned beneath Qin Fu’an’s grip.

Her delivery was icy, her words dripping with razor-sharp sarcasm, yet Zhao Jiayue suddenly burst into a tearful laugh. Overjoyed, she linked her arm through Nan Zhu’s, chirping in a hushed, elated whisper: “I’m really alive! Sister Zhu, thank you so much! It’s so great that I didn’t get you killed!”

Nan Zhu: “…”

She desperately wanted to tell Zhao Jiayue that she wasn’t the one who had saved her, and that treating the man standing right beside them like thin air was a terrible idea.

Then again, Zhao Jiayue wouldn’t dare approach Qin Fu’an anyway, and Qin Fu’an couldn’t care less about meaningless gratitude.

He instructed the two players to get back to the classroom and work on their assignments; as their acting teacher, if students failed to finish their homework, he certainly wouldn’t help them cheat.

“Thank you for saving our lives,” Nan Zhu offered solemnly before briefing him on the situation inside the convenience store and the general directions the other three had fled.

Once they had hurried off, Qin Fu’an finally turned his attention to the cascade of messages scrolling across his interface.

“‘Streamer should’ve waited a bit longer, I wanted to see more of that high-stakes life-and-death drama between Nan Zhu and the newbie.'”

Qin Fu’an read the most repeated comment aloud, syllable by syllable, before inquiring with genuine perplexity: “Are audiences nowadays really this twisted? If I hadn’t stepped in, she would’ve been swallowed whole, bones and all. Is that the kind of life-and-death drama you enjoy watching?”

The moment the words left his mouth, a massive wall of ellipses rolled across the screen.

[I have never seen a streamer who ruins the mood this thoroughly. Zero flair for entertainment!]

[Nonsense! The atmosphere and entertainment value between him and his NPC deskmate are top-tier, hehehe~]

[The rookie is weak, sure, but she actually has principles. I just wonder how many game instances those principles and kindness will let her survive.]

[Hehehe, already dropped a follow on her. I love these naive, principled little streamers the most. Watching them get nudged into death or having their humanity shatter step by step is insanely rewarding. Hope she survives long enough to unlock a stream of her own in the next run~]

[To the guy above: maybe breaking someone like our streamer here would give you a bigger rush. Why don’t you give it a shot?]

[…Give it a shot and get shot into the afterlife?]

Qin Fu’an didn’t bother engaging with the audience as they squabbled among themselves. Recalling what Nan Zhu had reported, he knitted his brows slightly before deciding to resolve the problem right at its root.

Tilting his head down, his slender fingers clamped around the clerk’s jaw, forcefully tilting the entity’s face upward until their gazes locked.

The clerk had no choice but to stare directly into those deep, slitted green pupils.

“Have your colleagues bring my students back,” Qin Fu’an commanded with a faint smile, enunciating every word with deliberate precision as he stared into the creature’s fully dilated eyes: “Remember: I want them alive. And in one piece.”

It was only when he released his grip that the scrawny, hyper-agile clerk collapsed to the ground, coughing and hacking violently.

Once the entity scurried off, Qin Fu’an caught sight of a shimmering priority comment drifting past.

[I don’t know why, but this is clearly a high-stakes, lethal horror instance where one wrong move gets you slaughtered… yet in this stream, it feels strangely… relaxing. It feels like watching a high school drama, not a horror stream at all.]

Qin Fu’an tracked the comment until it faded away, then engaged with his audience in thoughtful amusement.

“Has it occurred to you that this might simply have been an ordinary campus to begin with?”

The moment the hypothesis dropped, the chat was nearly overwhelmed by a wall of question marks.

Yet Qin Fu’an continued his breakdown, delivering an absurd lie with impeccable logic: “From the perspective of the faculty and students living here, aren’t the players dumped into this place the real disruptive anomalies? As for me… compared to humans, I simply happen to be better at communicating with the local entities. If you just regard me as one of them, the dissonance ought to disappear entirely.”

[I’m crying, he’s actually thinking on our behalf and telling us to swap perspectives!]

[I’ve doubted my own eyes and ears before, but I’ve never doubted a streamer’s sanity like this. What sane person aligns themselves with the monsters?!]

[Did I ask for this philosophical breakdown?! I wanted to watch you running for your life, weeping in despair while being chased by horrors!!]

[Hahahahaha streamer is hilarious, followed! Hope you keep this easygoing vibe all the way through.]

Over the course of a single lunch break, the heat in Qin Fu’an’s channel surged upward by another massive margin.

Some debated his methods, others fixated on his unusual pupils, and many speculated on how long he would last. Yet as far as Qin Fu’an was concerned, there was only one detail that commanded his interest.

“Is it true that the merchandise on these shelves can only be purchased using academic credit points or bodily organs?” Walking down the aisles of the campus store, he posed the question aloud while lightly dragging a finger across a shelf.

The clean pad of his finger came away coated in a thick layer of dust. Evidently, up until today, virtually no student had ever set foot inside this shop.

Only Nan Zhu and her companions had blindly blundered through the doors.

If they hadn’t run fast enough, given that their daily conduct scores were already teetering on negative balances… under the clerk’s predatory, coercive sales tactics, none of them would have walked out of this unremarkable convenience store in one piece.

One hundred points of conduct merely translated into a single academic credit, while the cheapest hard candy cost ten full credits. With an exchange rate this absurd, an entire semester’s worth of effort wouldn’t be enough for an ordinary student to afford a single bar of chocolate.

Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite]