Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite] – CH14

Chapter 14: Spook High (14)

Yet the clerk confronted with this question merely turned pale, remaining dead silent for a long while without offering an answer.

Qin Fu’an tilted his head toward him, noting the obvious inner conflict written across the creature’s face, and murmured in sudden realization, “So there really is another way.”

It was just that the staff, as subordinate employees bound by the system’s management, were not permitted to disclose such channels.

Qin Fu’an didn’t particularly care. He had no desperate craving for food; having slept for thousands of years, he had attained the art of fasting and inedia long ago.

Had he not awakened to a completely transformed mortal realm and spent years mingling among humankind, he might not have even recognized the names and packaging on these shelves.

Having his secrets read so easily rattled the clerk, but before it could formulate an excuse, several figures squeezed into the small shop from the outside.

It was his monstrous colleague who shared the shift watching the convenience store, dragging behind him three players bound together like a string of game by strange, glistening cords.

Chen Qi, Bai Song, and Yake.

Qin Fu’an matched each face to its corresponding name. Ignoring the sudden surge of pleasant surprise and desperate pleading in their eyes the moment they caught sight of him, he stepped forward with an easy curl to his lips.

Simultaneously, the first clerk frantically hauled his aggressive coworker back, preventing any rash assault on Qin Fu’an.

For the moment, the corner where Qin Fu’an stood with the three players remained undisturbed.

“Boss, we got separated! Aside from the three of us, Nan Zhu and the newcomer are still unaccounted for…” Yake squirmed against the tight cords, desperately trying to plead for the other two players’ lives as well.

With him speaking up, Chen Qi and Bai Song looked toward Qin Fu’an with wide, pleading eyes, their faces brimming with unconscious hope.

Looking into their genuine worry and earnest entreaty, and catching the livestream chat endlessly debating how long these people could maintain their kindness, Qin Fu’an suddenly understood why this infinite streaming system granted newcomers three beginner instances.

With naive temperaments like theirs, if they were dropped straight into standard instances alongside seasoned veterans, every single one of them would be exploited and bled dry without exception.

It would be a massacre—ten dead out of ten, without a soul left breathing.

Yet it was undeniable that Qin Fu’an rather liked mortals who still clung to their naive benevolence.

Such people were far easier to coax, deceive, and manipulate than jaded veterans hardened by ruthless slaughter and cutthroat competition.

He arched an amused brow, his tone almost gentle as he answered, “No need to worry. I’ve already saved them and sent them back to the classroom. You’ll see them shortly.”

The moment the words fell, the three captives—who had still harbored a sliver of covert wariness—let out a collective breath of relief. The delight and affinity in their eyes became unmistakable. Even while bound inside the very shop that had nearly claimed their lives, an air of grounded, reassured confidence washed over them.

“Boss, you really are a good person! Meeting you in this instance is the luckiest break we’ve ever had!” The naturally talkative Yake flashed a beaming eight-tooth grin, chatting away with practiced familiarity. “By the way, how did you subdue these monsters? I honestly thought we were dead meat!”

Qin Fu’an gave him an appraising once-over before asking, “You’ve survived several instances already and received personal attribute boosts. Have you never considered fighting back when confronted by an anomaly?”

This had been a genuine point of confusion for Qin Fu’an. To ordinary humans, this was a lethal, horrifying survival game. Yet whether observing Nan Zhu or the others, he noticed that whenever they faced an entity, they invariably recoiled in paralyzing terror. Their instinctive, physical reaction under any circumstance was to dodge and flee; he had almost never witnessed an attempt at a counterattack.

“Uh…” Yake choked on the spot. His chatterbox tongue seemed abruptly clamped by an invisible hand, leaving him stammering without another coherent syllable.

Beside him, Chen Qi and Bai Song merely gave Qin Fu’an bitter, helpless shakes of their heads.

“It’s useless,” Bai Song sighed. “We’re just rookies. Clearing those previous instances was pure dumb luck. The rewards we earned in points and attributes were pathetically meager. Besides, stat points are split across several categories, and I didn’t put mine into Strength.”

He had dumped all his points into Agility back then, which was the only reason he had managed to run so fast.

“I invested in Intelligence, because right before I was pulled into the game, I was preparing for an important examination…” Chen Qi pressed her lips together, having long since come to regret that impulsive choice.

Yake sheepishly raised a hand. “Er, I actually did put mine into Strength. But as you can see, my baseline build was never great to begin with. Even with the boost, I’m only barely stronger than an average person.”

In short, it wasn’t that they refused to fight back; they were painfully aware that they lacked the capacity to do so.

“On top of that, we don’t know the full extent of the creatures’ abilities, nor have we awakened any offensive skills. Running is our only viable option,” Chen Qi admitted with an unpromising grimace, laying her cards bare on the table.

It was not born of blind trust in Qin Fu’an, but profound gratitude.

She was well aware that he had saved their lives, and that over the coming days, they would inevitably have to rely on his overwhelming strength. Rather than being secretive, it was far better to candidly offer every scrap of information he sought.

Surviving was what mattered most.

“Among our group, Nan Zhu is probably the only one who has awakened a personal skill, though it likely isn’t offensive either,” Bai Song speculated in a low murmur.

They were all players who had survived a run or two. At the opening of an instance, the only people who dared step forward to take charge—aside from pathologically brazen extroverts or clout-chasers fishing for viewer heat—were those who had a solid grasp of their own capabilities and trump cards.

Nan Zhu’s demeanor fit neither of the former categories. That left only one explanation: she possessed a sufficiently formidable trump card that gave her the confidence to lead.

Coincidentally, both Chen Qi and Yake shared Bai Song’s deduction. After all, Nan Zhu had mentioned surviving a Remnant Instance; walking out alive from a scenario where seasoned veterans were hopelessly trapped spoke volumes about the caliber of her safety nets.

That was precisely the primary reason they had obediently followed her lead from the start.

Taking in their calculating expressions, Qin Fu’an decided to retract his earlier assessment of their naivety.

Those who could survive any instance game—aside from pure flukes of luck—were rarely reckless fools.

Though, more often than not, fortune mattered far more than brains or brawn.

Qin Fu’an had no desire to pry deeper into their backgrounds. Having sated his curiosity, he laid bare the true reason he had intervened.

“Why were those two clerks hunting you down?” he stated calmly. “If this were merely aggressive upselling, the pursuit should have concluded the moment you cleared the shop doors.”

Yet the reality was that they had been chased nearly to the brink of death.

The moment the question landed, the three players who had answered so freely instantly fell mute.

Their expressions soured into deep discomfort, as if poked in a tender, shameful spot, their gazes darting away in evasion.

Guilt was written all over their faces.

At that very moment, the two clerks eavesdropping nearby suddenly puffed up with righteous fury.

One of them leaped forward, pointing an accusatory claw at the trio and screeching, “They’re thieves! Our shop has always operated cleanly! Granted, students rarely visit, but they’re always well-behaved and never steal! Yet out of these five intruders, four of them were dirty thieves!!”

Since students couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, the staff naturally had no choice but to hunt them down and sever their thieving limbs.

Qin Fu’an arched an amused brow, glancing at the three players whose chins had sunk almost to their chests.

Theft… In any world, human or otherwise, being caught red-handed rarely ended well.

“I-I didn’t mean to…” Chen Qi was the first to muster the courage to defend herself. Furrowing her brow, keeping her gaze firmly averted from the nearby shelves, she looked straight into Qin Fu’an’s eyes and offered a lucid explanation: “I don’t know what came over me at the time. The moment I walked up to the shelf, a bizarre impulse seized me, telling me I absolutely had to possess it. I tried my hardest to fight it, but my hands moved on their own and snatched it up!”

With that, she opened her trembling palm, revealing a jelly cup that had been clenched in her grip the entire time.

Qin Fu’an looked down. It appeared to be an ordinary cup of fruit jelly—if one disregarded the unidentifiable eyeball floating suspended in the translucent gelatin.

With Chen Qi breaking the ice, the other two—who had been equally bewildered by how easily their moral compass had shattered—felt the fog lift and hastily produced their own “stolen goods.”

Bai Song held a pristine box of bandages, while Yake clutched a jar of honey shimmering with an alluring, golden radiance.

Three distinct items, yet bearing a singular, eerie commonality: each carried an uncanny detail that had no business being there.

The illustration on the bandage box depicted a severed, spurting human finger, while within the honey jar lay an unmoving, preserved bee-like hornet.

“Save your pathetic excuses! A thief is a thief! Our surveillance cameras caught every second crystal clear! If you refuse to return the goods and accept your punishment, even if you manage to leave this school, you won’t survive a day in the Eldritch Domain!”

The clerk spat venomous threats with a vicious snarl, though it didn’t sound like a bluff.

The three players flinched, yet none of them moved to surrender their loot.

Without needing them to speak, Qin Fu’an already understood why.

The moment his gaze swept over the three items, their latent system attributes revealed themselves clearly to his eyes.

Clear-Sight Jelly: Consuming it permanently enhances visual acuity and grants moderate resistance to all ocular-type entities.

High-Efficiency Bandages: Treats all physical trauma sustained by the body. A single strip can instantly reattach severed limbs or knit ruptured internal organs back to perfection.

Golden Nectar: Feed this honey to any living entity to subjugate and command it for up to three hours.

Having reviewed these three items that easily qualified as high-grade tools, Qin Fu’an turned toward the indignant clerk. “What was the other missing item?”

“A bubble blower!” the clerk answered without hesitation. “That bubble blower was a brand-new novelty toy developed by our boss just recently! Most of the shipment went to kindergartens and elementary schools; Spook High only received a single demonstration sample!”

“Who took it?” Qin Fu’an’s pale green eyes rested serenely on the players.

The clerks remained silent, while the three players hesitated before deciding to cough up the truth.

“It was Nan Zhu.” They hadn’t wanted to sell her out, but since Qin Fu’an had a habit of saving people, this hardly counted as betrayal, right?

Besides, the three of them had been dragged back in chains while Nan Zhu had escaped scot-free with the prize; a bitter sense of unfairness had inevitably festered in their hearts.

And under the weight of Qin Fu’an’s gaze, that subtle grievance seemed to magnify exponentially without their conscious awareness.

Just like… being driven by sheer covetous desire to steal those items in the first place. Only back then, they had still possessed the faculties to resist; beneath Qin Fu’an’s eyes, they detected nothing amiss whatsoever.

Qin Fu’an’s mind drifted back to the image of Nan Zhu stubbornly hauling Zhao Jiayue away from the clerk’s snapping jaws.

If the trio’s words held true, Nan Zhu possessed formidable hidden reserves and had swiped a rare novelty item from the shop; she should have possessed more than enough means to save Zhao Jiayue in a pinch.

Yet she hadn’t used them.

Had her prior behavior been a calculated facade, or had she sensed Qin Fu’an’s approach? Or was there… an entirely different reason?

A flicker of contemplation passed through Qin Fu’an’s gaze, though he had no intention of digging into Nan Zhu’s true motives at this exact moment.

He needed to settle the matter right before him first.

“If you refuse to return these three items, prepare yourselves to bear the curse, or earn enough conduct credits over the coming days to pay for them.”

Qin Fu’an laid out three choices for the group.

The two clerks hovered nearby like hungry wolves, yet showed remarkable deference toward Qin Fu’an. While the three players dithered in agonized indecision, the clerks sidled up to Qin Fu’an’s elbow, inquiring if there was anything he fancied purchasing.

“We can offer you a thirty percent faculty discount!” the clerk promised, eyes gleaming with eager longing.

Qin Fu’an’s mind flicked back to the lollipop he had acquired that morning.

He had haggled with this very clerk for quite some time, ultimately paying a minor price to take that sweet away.

“Perhaps later,” Qin Fu’an replied courteously. “I might drop by tomorrow to browse your wares.”

Why tomorrow?

Because the homeroom teacher dragged off to the Principal’s office hadn’t returned yet. He had yet to see whether that esteemed teacher had successfully wrangled any back-pay or welfare benefits for the faculty.

Qin Fu’an looked forward to it immensely. The bright, easy smile spreading across his brow made him look as though he belonged to an entirely different dimension from the hollow, walking corpses populating the campus.

During the lull, the three players finally reached their verdict.

“We… we’ll return the items,” Bai Song ground out on behalf of the group.

Qin Fu’an was not surprised by the choice.

And having surrendered the goods, Bai Song and his companions felt a surge of relief when they caught the clerks’ unmistakable expressions of bitter disappointment.

It seemed they had made the right call after all.

Once the dispirited players were sent back to the classroom to tackle their homework, the two clerks inexplicably lost their earlier fawning warmth. They began eyeing Qin Fu’an with skittish wariness, unable to fathom why this harbinger of doom was still lingering on their premises.

Catching the confusion in their monstrous eyes, Qin Fu’an’s gaze curved into a mild arc. Slender fingers casually took up the jar of golden honey resting on the counter, rolling it in his palm as he asked with feigned nonchalance:

“You’ve only reclaimed three items. That custom-crafted bubble blower from your boss… are you just writing it off?”

One of the clerks cracked a bloodthirsty grin. “Naturally not. If she doesn’t voluntarily surrender the stolen merchandise, I guarantee she won’t walk out of Spook High with a diploma in this lifetime.”

It seemed Qin Fu’an’s conjecture was entirely accurate: regardless of the world, student theft carried catastrophic ramifications once uncovered on campus grounds.

Recalling the chocolate Nan Zhu had offered him earlier, Qin Fu’an decided to dispense a meager drop of charity. “Now that I think about it, as an acting instructor, she is technically my student. When a pupil strays from the rules, the teacher bears a share of the blame.”

He fixed his deep green pupils onto the two entities, his voice a slow, silken drawl: “How about this: I’ll ensure she returns the item alongside a three-thousand-word formal self-criticism. That way, you won’t face penalties from your employer for dereliction of duty.”

Noticing the obvious temptation dawning on their grotesque faces, Qin Fu’an finally laid out his terms. Lifting the honey jar, his voice took on an almost hypnotic lilt: “As fair exchange for recovering all your stolen inventory, consider gifting this cheapest jar of honey to me. Courtesy begets courtesy; we may cross paths frequently down the line, and a little mutual goodwill goes a long way, don’t you think?”

He had already calculated it: compared to the other two items, this honey suffered from the narrowest operational utility.

Correspondingly, it was the cheapest of the lot, serving as the ideal token of goodwill without pushing their boundaries.

Sure enough, after a mere beat of hesitation, the two clerks nodded in eager accord.

Perhaps convinced that he was fundamentally different from the petty thieves, the clerks dropped virtually all vigilance during the conversation that followed. Amid casual complaints, they inadvertently spilled a wealth of insider lore regarding Spook High.

Surrounded by a blinding deluge of priority super-chats, tips, and praises from the stream, Qin Fu’an took the scenic route and finally walked away with exactly what he wanted.

He could easily have snatched the prize from the players’ hands by force, but he had no way of knowing whether the curse would transfer to the bearer, nor did he wish to forge unnecessary enmities this early on.

He had little interest in clearing the instance to survive; even if he failed the trial, this little game possessed no power to end his life.

Yet he was intensely curious about the game itself, curious about Xie Yunhuai, and curious about this unfamiliar realm.

Moreover… would the attribute buffs, skills, and tools granted upon clearing a run prove effective on him?

The mortal plane had long since plunged into the Age of Dharma Decline, where even metaphysical arts had hit a dead end, to say nothing of cultivating spiritual power or advancing one’s realm. A being as formidable as Qin Fu’an had been reduced to relying on centuries of slumber just to stave off the rot of time and the slow degradation of his soul and vessel.

If this infinite horror game could truly yield benefits that restored or bolstered his cultivation, Qin Fu’an wouldn’t mind donning the guise of an ordinary human, playing along by the rules for a very, very long time.

Carrying this fresh curiosity toward the game’s mechanics, Qin Fu’an wandered through the campus at his own pace, taking full advantage of his exemption from homework to saunter leisurely back to the classroom.

The moment he slipped into his seat, he collided with his deskmate’s disapproving, faintly probing stare.

“You took too long. It’s already cold,” Xie Yunhuai murmured, pursing his lips as he slid the half-finished bento box onto Qin Fu’an’s desk.

Qin Fu’an looked down. The food inside was neatly partitioned, with exactly half remaining—so precise it looked as though it had been sectioned off with a ruler.

An inexplicable urge to laugh bubbled up within him, and genuine amusement crinkled the sharp, handsome contours of his brow, softening his intimidating edge into something disarmingly warm.

Xie Yunhuai, however, took this as another symptom of his neighbor’s mental instability. Knitting his brows, he snapped, “What are you laughing at?”

He had shown remarkable forbearance before, but having realized that Qin Fu’an operated entirely outside the bounds of human logic, Xie Yunhuai simply refused to hold back any longer.

Meeting that sharp interrogation, Qin Fu’an caught the soft, shadowy tentacle outside the window out of the corner of his eye, eagerly inching through the glass to pry the container open for another feast. The amusement in his gaze deepened.

“Nothing,” he answered smoothly, only to lean in close to the tight-lipped boy the very next second, his voice dropping into a clear, hushed rumble: “You were clearly starving, so why didn’t you finish it? Don’t you know that skipping meals leads to malnutrition and stunted growth? You’re a high schooler… precisely at the age where your body needs nourishment.”

Warm breath brushed against the boy’s cold neck and earlobe. Xie Yunhuai leaned back uncomfortably to evade the proximity, steadying his breath before offering a cool, detached retort: “You haven’t eaten either.”

He had no idea how Qin Fu’an had procured such an extravagant meal, nor why the man had been so inexplicably generous as to offer it all to him. But… Xie Yunhuai knew that Qin Fu’an had gone without lunch.

This was Qin Fu’an’s meal to begin with.

Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite]