Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite] – CH20

Chapter 20: Spook High (20)

The second thing that caught Qin Fu’an’s eye was the object in her hands.

A bubble-blower tool. Unless his eyes deceived him, it was the exact novelty item swiped from the convenience store.

And its barrel was leveled squarely at his chest.

Qin Fu’an gave a slow, soundless arch of his brow, asking with mild curiosity, “Did you wait here specifically to hunt me?”

A careful ear might have picked up the faint note of genuine amusement beneath his words. He had always been the one doing the hunting; this was perhaps the very first time anyone had marked him as prey.

Nan Zhu assumed he was merely stalling for time. With the item in her grasp, the deadliest physical training aid on the floor already dispatched by Qin Fu’an himself, and the viewer count in her stream spiking wildly from the confrontation… With all these advantages stacked in her favor, she had nothing to fear from a few extra seconds of conversation.

She had no objection to playing the generous, accommodating conversationalist for a moment. At the very least, this player deserved to die knowing exactly how he had been outplayed.

“Yes,” she admitted with an easy nod. “Since you hold the Proctor status, ordinary students can’t harm you. So before coming here, I lured another Proctor straight into the path of an anomaly, helped the creature devour him, and took this badge from the remains.”

Her fingers brushed lightly across the badge pinned to her chest. Her eyes curved into a placid, gentle arc. “I was curious: stealing one [Proctor] badge and keeping it until the exam ends yields an extra fifty points. But if I have the means to wear more than one, will the cumulative bonus bring me an even bigger surprise?”

“By then, the payout from this single exam might be more than enough to cover the conduct points owed for this tool. What do you think?”

She spoke in a relaxed, conversational cadence, yet the ambition dripping from every syllable was unmistakable.

Qin Fu’an clapped his hands in open admiration. “No wonder you refused to hand it back. You had this mapped out from the start. A clever approach indeed.”

Nan Zhu was, without question, an extraordinarily sharp woman.

“Would you be willing to forfeit this badge voluntarily, then?” Nan Zhu raised the muzzle of the bubble blower by a fraction, her voice mild yet threaded with clear coercion. “Surely you wouldn’t mind doing me this small favor?”

Qin Fu’an raised his gaze, the pale green of his irises catching the rapid blur of bullet chat rolling across his own floating interface.

Every comment was singing Nan Zhu’s praises—how ruthless she was, how sharp her methods were, how cool her execution looked—with a flood of viewers announcing they were unfollowing him to subscribe to her instead.

So that was it. Nan Zhu’s true goal wasn’t just the badge; she wanted to use his surrender and humiliating defeat as a stepping stone to catapult her own streaming fame into the stratosphere.

A pity that out of everyone she could have targeted, she had chosen Qin Fu’an.

“If I were to forfeit the badge voluntarily…” Qin Fu’an put a faint, deliberate emphasis on the word voluntarily, then dismantled her pretense without mercy: “I imagine the consequence waiting for me wouldn’t be as simple as losing the Proctor role, would it?”

To eliminate any future threat, a pragmatic operator like Nan Zhu would strike immediately, ensuring his corpse stayed pinned to this floor forever.

One had to remember: she held that novelty tool, but she had other aces up her sleeve as well.

Having her intentions laid bare didn’t fluster Nan Zhu in the slightest. Watching the heat metrics in her stream surge to unprecedented heights, satisfaction flashed in her eyes. Refusing to waste another breath, her expression hardened, and without a word of warning, she pulled the trigger straight at Qin Fu’an.

[Item: Toy Bubble Blower (A specialized children’s novelty)]

[Ability: Fires a soap bubble that completely immobilizes the target for 10 seconds. Efficacy diminishes in high-temperature environments.]

[Description: Never underestimate a child or the toys in their hands. Even a delicate, translucent soap bubble can rob someone of all motor function. However, if an adult possesses sufficient brute force and blinding speed, they might just snatch the brat up and give them a good thrashing before the prank even lands.]

[Vulnerability: As formidable as this novelty bubble is, never forget that at its core, it remains nothing more than a fragile, easily punctured soap bubble~]

Robbing a target of all mobility for a full ten seconds. From the moment she laid hands on this tool, Nan Zhu had lost all dread of this instance. She was utterly certain that ten seconds was more than enough time to butcher any target.

Including the enigmatic, unorthodox player standing before her.

Truth be told, Nan Zhu hadn’t intended to make an enemy of Qin Fu’an initially. But his bizarre, rule-shattering antics had siphoned away nearly all the viewer traffic that should have belonged to her. Her earnings had plummeted, while her chat mocked her endlessly for being useless and boring to watch.

The moment she stepped into the campus store and laid eyes on this tool, she had made up her mind: moving forward, she would make Qin Fu’an eat dirt. She would show those arrogant critics in the chat who was truly worth backing.

This wasn’t an impulse born of petty spite; it was an investment in her long-term survival. Only by driving her stream heat higher and hoarding more points could she secure the capital needed to stay alive in future trials.

She had to survive. And before that goal, anyone who threatened her interests or stood in her path would be pulverized into gravel beneath her boots.

Just like the veteran player she had murdered in the previous instance, they were all merely fuel to feed her own rapid ascent.

The flurry of calculations took barely a heartbeat. Nan Zhu pulled the trigger without an ounce of hesitation, and Qin Fu’an had no intention of waiting around to be caught.

Before she could even complete the motion, Qin Fu’an moved at a speed far beyond her capacity to track.

A soap bubble. Ridiculously easy to handle.

Qin Fu’an couldn’t tell whether this was his own stroke of luck or Nan Zhu’s tragic misfortune.

With a soft, delicate pop, the massive bubble burst apart mid-air, dissolving into a mist of moisture that vanished into nothingness. In that very instant, Qin Fu’an ghosted straight through the vapor, materializing directly in front of her.

His long, defined fingers closed effortlessly around her slender, fragile throat.

As shock and horror tore through her eyes, Qin Fu’an let out a soft, almost pitying sigh. “Before coming in here to hunt me, did you never bother to check how that monster died?”

A soap bubble. A monster bloated into a rounded ball of flesh… The connection between the two was so glaring, so laughably direct.

His right hand tightened steadily while his left rose to eye level. Right before Nan Zhu’s bulging, terrified pupils, he revealed the weapon he had been palming the entire time:

A small, utterly ordinary drafting compass.

“A pity. Fate doesn’t appear quite as fond of you as it once was,” Qin Fu’an murmured. Beneath her weeping, desperate, pleading stare, his slender fingers snapped closed with effortless finality.

Crack. A dull, sickening snap of bone broke the silence.

The clever strategist—who had maintained such composed, calculating grace from the moment she entered the game—perished at Qin Fu’an’s hands in a manner so swift, so laughably absurd.

Just as Qin Fu’an had noted, fortune had likely smiled upon her countless times in the past. But tonight… fate had chosen to stand on the opposite side of the board.

Qin Fu’an opened his hand, letting Nan Zhu’s limp corpse tumble backward into the narrow aisle between the student desks.

Her protruding, lifeless eyes remained wide with lingering despair and pleading, but she would never have the chance to calculate another scheme to secure her survival.

Lowering his gaze to the contorted, unblinking mask of her death, Qin Fu’an casually tossed the metal compass onto her chest.

“If you have another life to live, whether as a human or an anomaly, I wish you peace and joy.”

He seemed to reserve a strange, parting blessing for every soul he killed—words that invariably sounded more like mocking arrogance to any outside listener.

Bending down, Qin Fu’an pried the bubble blower from Nan Zhu’s stiff fingers. Just as he straightened up to leave, he noticed another small object clutched in her palm.

A bead of translucent, glistening crimson.

The moment his fingertips grazed the surface, its attributes materialized before his vision:

[Item: Eldritch Pearl (Special)]

[Ability: Wearing the Eldritch Pearl causes aberrant entities to recognize the bearer as one of their own. Upon contact with a living creature’s blood, the user may directly siphon half of the target’s vitality for personal use (3 charges remaining).]

[Description: The Eldritch Domain harbors countless peculiar beads of unknown origin. Some bring fortune, while others reap mortal lives. Then again, perhaps they were once nothing more than toy marbles tucked away in a child’s collection?]

Staring at the crystalline bead, Qin Fu’an pieced together what Nan Zhu’s full plan had been.

His arm was already wounded. Once she had him immobilized, she wouldn’t have needed to lift another finger; a single touch from this bead would have drained half his vitality on the spot, allowing her to butcher him with zero resistance.

Even if she had spared his life, losing half his vital essence would have stripped him of all capacity to withstand future dangers. In an examination like this, death would have been his only possible end.

Pocketing the bead, he reached down and unpinned the [Proctor] badge from her uniform jacket. Bypassing the corpse on the floor, he walked toward the doorway, pausing just at the threshold to look back over his shoulder.

The student NPCs who had been hiding in various corners of the classroom had been cautiously, eagerly creeping out to feed on the fresh corpse. Yet the second Qin Fu’an stopped and turned, they froze in sheer terror, shrinking into balls and holding their breath in petrified silence.

“Do any of you have a clean uniform jacket?” Qin Fu’an asked calmly.

The cluster of monstrous students stared at him in wide-eyed bewilderment. A few of the sharper ones hurriedly nodded, trembling violently as they dug out two pristine uniform jackets and held them out with quivering hands.

They maintained as much distance as humanly possible, looking as though they were terrified that stepping an inch closer would result in Qin Fu’an swallowing them whole.

Ignoring their terror, Qin Fu’an took the jackets. He cast a cool glance over the surviving students, his tone completely flat: “Stay alive. As your acting teacher, if you turn into physical training aids and come looking for me to play… it’s going to make things rather awkward when I have to put you down.”

The corners of his lips curved into a faint, languid smile as he asked the shivering figures, “You wouldn’t want to make things awkward for your teacher, would you?”

Student NPCs: “…”

Tears welling in their eyes, the battered little pushovers nodded their heads like mad.

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