Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite] – CH24

Chapter 24: Spook High (24)

Having resolved the immediate crisis, Qin Fu’an did not sit back down.

Stepping past Xie Yunhuai, who remained standing in silence, he walked over to the slain aberration and leaned down slightly. With the warped steel pipe in hand, he effortlessly hooked and hoisted the monster’s shattered, elongated neck.

As casually as if lifting a bloody, grotesque dead serpent on a stick, he carried the dripping carcass to the hatchway.

He jerked the pipe back.

Deprived of support, the dead abomination plummeted through the narrow opening, hitting the floor below with a dull, heavy thud.

“I’m heading down,” Qin Fu’an said, turning back toward Xie Yunhuai, who had silently followed him over. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the massive countdown timer burning crimson in the night sky.

There was only an hour left in this exam.

Down below on the sports field, the panicked, hopeless shrieks were gradually thinning out, replaced instead by a rising chorus of rasping, feral roars.

This meant the balance of numbers between candidates and Physical Training Aids had begun to tip.

Being caught three times by an Aid automatically converted a student into one. As more and more examinees fell and turned into Aids, evading pursuit and hiding out would only become exponentially harder for the survivors.

Calling it a struggle where every step meant death was no exaggeration.

From the moment he entered this instance, Qin Fu’an had constantly sensed the game’s malice directed toward the players.

This examination was a prime example: it forced players into a brutal dilemma between hiding or mounting a direct counterattack.

If players chose to hide, then with no one actively culling the monsters, the second half of the exam—and every day that followed—would devolve into a siege by an endless swarm of horrors. After all, the NPC students they called “classmates” would have all been turned into Physical Training Aids.

Training Aids had no need to attend lectures, nor did they take exams.

Their sole function was to hunt players around the clock.

Under those conditions, dreaming of surviving until the fifth day to sit for the Gaokao was pure fantasy.

Yet if players opted to fight head-on… with the meager attributes of novices who had cleared only one or two beginner runs, trying to take on a campus crawling with mutated horrors was practically signing their own death warrants.

“Perhaps the Gaokao never actually existed in this school to begin with,” Qin Fu’an murmured, piecing together his thoughts.

Though phrased as a mere hypothesis, both Xie Yunhuai and the viewers in the livestream caught the undeniable thread of certainty running through his tone.

The bullet chat froze for a split second.

Then, an explosive deluge erupted across the screen—

[AHHHH I CAN FINALLY POST!! That was suffocating me! That rule blocking unrevealed instance info is utterly unhinged!!]

[How on earth did the streamer deduce that? I’m genuinely dying to know, mind sharing your train of thought?!]

[I wanted to spit it out ages ago, but the system slapped me with a mute warning the moment I hit send! I could only watch the streamer flirting with his NPC while pulling my hair out!!]

[As someone who’s watched dozens of beginner instances, I have to take off my hat to the streamer’s sharp intuition. Someone might actually clear this death run after all!]

[…Wait, what do you mean? What’s a ‘death run’? Is there some special lore behind it?]

[Of course there is! Every tier has a few notorious instances famous for their absurdly high casualty rates. In the rookie tier, Spook High is one of the Three Big Death Runs because literally every player who enters dies within the first two days. No exceptions.]

[Hiss… Are you serious? Then why hasn’t it been bumped up to an advanced tier? That lethality rate is higher than most high-tier instances!]

[Because to top-tier veterans, it’s actually laughably straightforward. Take Teacher Zhang, for example: ordinary players can’t do a thing against him, but an elite can squash him like a bug. That’s why the system never upgraded its rating, leaving it lurking in the low tier. Plenty of viewers just call it the ‘Rookie Graveyard.’]

Rookie Graveyard.

Qin Fu’an caught the chilling moniker amid the dense flood of comments. Savoring the freezing wind, heavy with the stench of gore settling over the quiet campus, he knew his instinct had been dead on.

A zero percent clearance rate meant that indeed, not a single player had ever survived to the fifth day to face the Gaokao.

Lifting his gaze, he looked toward Xie Yunhuai, who had frozen completely numb the moment those words left Qin Fu’an’s lips.

Qin Fu’an had overheard those little tentacles gossiping more than once. They had said that Xie Yunhuai had never lived long enough to see the Gaokao.

Now that this grim reality had been laid bare, what was going through Student Xie’s head as he stood there lost in thought?

“Do you want to come down with me?” Qin Fu’an asked, abruptly abandoning his original plan of having Xie Yunhuai wait up here.

Xie Yunhuai snapped out of his daze, his eyes faintly rimmed with red as he looked back at Qin Fu’an.

“Could you… say that again?”

The wavering light in his eyes held an emotion torn between timid dread and desperate yearning.

Qin Fu’an reached out, fondly ruffling the boy’s frost-tipped hair, and offered an easy smile. “Do you want to come down with me?”

Xie Yunhuai drew a sharp breath. “…Not that part.”

The tempest churning in his chest settled slightly, and he no longer needed Qin Fu’an to repeat it. Glaring at the man through reddened eyes, he made up his mind first: “I’m coming with you.”

Pausing a beat, he added with resolute conviction, “Don’t worry, I won’t hold you back!”

In the past, he had always believed he was simply too weak, which was why he kept dying so early, trapped in an endless loop from which he could never escape.

Yet now Qin Fu’an was presenting an entirely different reality: no student had ever survived to the Gaokao, and not a single soul had ever walked out of these gates alive.

If that was the truth, then what were all his past efforts and hopes for? What purpose had all that desperate studying and rote memorization served?

Perhaps graduating via the Gaokao had never been anything more than a carrot dangled before his eyes—visible, yet forever out of reach.

The mere thought of that possibility stoked an inexhaustible fury and bloodlust from the deepest recesses of his soul.

“I won’t hold you back,” he repeated, his voice tightening with fierce, unyielding certainty.

He would fight with everything he had to survive tonight. Even if no one stood by his side to shield him, he would never close his eyes and passively wait for death like a coward again.

Because he had to see the ending he had missed across countless loops with his own eyes.

He had to uncover whether the Gaokao he had yearned for day and night was nothing more than a grotesque, cruel lie!

Qin Fu’an saw the blazing fury burning in the youth’s eyes, and he saw the myriad dark tentacles surging violently from Xie Yunhuai’s frame.

The pitch-black limbs blotted out the night sky once more, but they were no longer listless and drained as they had been during the day, nor were they whispering of hunger and childish whims.

Carrying the raw venom festering in Xie Yunhuai’s heart, the colossal black tendrils coiled around the vast campus in suffocating layers, their unearthly murmurs laden with a dizzying, maddening bloodlust.

Even Qin Fu’an felt the jarring weight of their presence.

Those muffled, furious whispers sent dull, throbbing aches through his temples, momentarily muddying his focus. Had his soul not possessed considerable resilience of its own, he might have been warped into the likeness of the monsters prowling the lower floors right then and there.

Yet he let none of that strain show. Staring straight into the youth’s bright, burning gaze, he chuckled softly and nodded. “Alright. Take this, and keep yourself safe.”

He pressed the bubble-blower tool he had taken from Nan Zhu into Xie Yunhuai’s hands.

Before Xie Yunhuai could decline, Qin Fu’an had already caught the wall ladder and begun his descent.

The moment his feet touched the floor, Qin Fu’an instantly registered the eerie, stifling quiet blanketing the instructional building.

A heavy reek of blood surged into his senses, so thick that even the biting wind couldn’t disperse it.

Frowning, Qin Fu’an immediately pulled up the proctor interface to check the exam status of Grade 12, Class 4.

The green dots inside the classroom had dwindled to a fragile handful, and the markers scattered across the rest of the campus were just as sparse.

He tapped on the markers for the four surviving players one by one. Both Yake and Chen Qi had suffered a point deduction, while the rookie, Zhao Jiayue, remarkably maintained a perfect score.

By the time he finished reviewing the class roster, Xie Yunhuai had caught up from behind.

“Let’s move. Stay sharp.”

Qin Fu’an dismissed the proctor interface, hid the flickering stream chat from his vision, and led Xie Yunhuai down the corridor.

Corpses lay strewn across every turn, blood trailing down the stairs in sluggish rivulets. Their footsteps dragged through the pooling gore, the stairwell otherwise so silent that a dropped pin would have sounded like thunder…

Every sight that met the eye did not resemble a school; it was purgatory.

A few steps down, a monster caught their scent and lunged straight for their faces. Qin Fu’an stepped aside with practiced ease, leaving the target to Xie Yunhuai, who was already poised behind him.

Staring at the creature’s familiar, mangled features, Xie Yunhuai tightened his grip around the steel pipe. The instant it lunged within reach, he squeezed his eyes shut and swung with all his might toward its neck—

“That’s nowhere near enough force.”

Before the monster could snap its jaws in retaliation, Qin Fu’an drove his own steel pipe through its back, skewering its heart clean through to the other side.

Chilling, foul blood splattered across Xie Yunhuai, mottling his blue-and-white uniform with speckles of dark red beneath the flickering lights.

Opening his eyes to see the creature right in front of him, Xie Yunhuai’s face paled slightly. Yet even though the beast was already dead, he gritted his teeth, raised the steel pipe, and brought it down again and again onto its skull with ferocious intensity.

Qin Fu’an held the corpse upright, letting the boy use the unfortunate wretch for target practice.

Only when the monster’s head had been pulverized into a bloody, unrecognizable pulp did Xie Yunhuai slump against the gore-stained wall, panting in utter exhaustion.

“Need a breather?” Qin Fu’an tossed the corpse aside, glancing sideways at Student Xie, whose eyes had grown noticeably red after venting his fury.

Xie Yunhuai shook his head. Handing the blood-smeared pipe over to Qin Fu’an, he cradled the bubble blower to his chest and admitted with slight frustration, “I’d better stick to this.”

He was simply starving. Every cell in his body was screaming for sustenance, sapping him of the strength he thought he could muster.

Rather than being a burden, relying on this lightweight tool would at least allow him to provide support for Qin Fu’an.

His mind was caught in a strange haze between muddiness and razor-sharp clarity; he possessed an unsettlingly detached rationality, knowing precisely what needed to be done while feeling utterly at a loss as to what else he was capable of.

Seeing him make the call, Qin Fu’an wasted no more time. Guiding him across the carpet of severed limbs and mangled flesh, they bypassed the fifth floor and descended to the fourth.

Amid the instructional building’s increasingly suffocating silence, he raised a hand and knocked firmly on the door of Grade 12, Class 4 without blinking an eye.

Click here to download the full novel (PDF & EPUB)