Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite] – CH4

Chapter 4: Spook High (4)

Having swallowed a bellyful of biting wind during their sprint, the very first thing Xie Yunhuai did the moment they finally halted was violently tear his arm from Qin Fu’an’s grasp.

Qin Fu’an didn’t mind in the slightest. Letting go naturally, he turned his head to survey the sports ground where the student body had gathered.

It looked like an ordinary athletic field: a sea of densely packed students, school administrators lined up on the raised stage, and beside them, an ominous flag soaring into the air, its hue a crimson so dark it bordered on black.

Qin Fu’an tilted his head back, examining the dark banner as it whipped wildly in the wind. A bizarre, twisted emblem was painted across it, rendered in pigments that closely resembled human blood.

Unnamable. Unfathomable. A mere two seconds of looking at it sent a sharp, stabbing ache through the eyes and cerebral cortex, drawing involuntary, physiological tears.

These were the conclusions Qin Fu’an drew from the other players.

After all, he had merely cast it a passing glance. Yet the moment the other players laid eyes on that banner, they were ensnared by an insidious glamour, unable to tear their gazes away until Nan Zhu and Yake forcefully shoved their hands in front of their faces to block the view.

“What… what is drawn on that flag?!” Bai Song clutched his eyes, groaning from the needle-sharp agony tearing through them. It didn’t feel like tears rolling down his cheeks, but thick, fresh blood spilling over his lashes.

When he pulled his hands away, his condition hadn’t improved in the slightest. He waved a trembling hand in front of his face, his voice cracking with sheer terror: “What’s happening?! Why is everything getting so blurry?!”

He was not alone. Within half a minute, every player who had looked up at the flag experienced the exact same symptoms.

Most of their vision had been brutally stripped away.

All from a single, fleeting glance that hadn’t even lasted five seconds.

Qin Fu’an took in their rising panic, yet had no intention of stepping forward to offer comfort or exchange information.

Even when Nan Zhu turned to look at him while gripping that scrap of paper, Qin Fu’an merely cast her a cool, detached glance, subtly freezing her in her tracks and halting her approach.

The three-minute grace period had expired. Across the athletic field, the students stood within their designated class formations like elongated, silent specters. Their expressions remained as vacant and numb as ever, yet the instant the female voice over the loudspeaker cheerfully announced the names of the tardy students, their heads whipped toward the track entrance in unison.

A few students who had previously appeared just as lifeless as the rest stood frozen at the gates. But the moment their names were broadcast, the vast sports field—teachers, students, and administrators alike—seemed to plunge into a bizarre, localized domain. Everything fundamentally warped.

The previously frail, scrawny frames of the students swelled silently. Their lifeless eyes were abruptly flooded with extreme greed and frenzy. Ragged, ravenous growls scraped from their throats, and under the sunlight, mottled patches of crimson blood began to bleed through their blue-and-white uniforms.

Meanwhile, the teachers and administrators on the raised stage underwent an even deeper, grotesque mutation. Yet instead of lunging toward the late students, they bounded with deranged laughter toward the homeroom teachers of those offending classes, tearing into them and feasting like wild beasts while their victims flailed and shrieked.

Excluding the players, the only figure on the entire field who remained upright and composed was the principal standing at the very front of the stage, impeccably dressed.

He watched the slaughter on and off the stage with a placid smile, closing his eyes to let out a low, blissful sigh of satisfaction. His voice, layered with an eerie, insidious charisma, boomed across the entire campus through the microphone:

“Students, keep our Spook High motto engraved upon your hearts. Uphold the motto, obey the class rules, study with your soul, and face the Gaokao with your very lives! That is the sole, absolute truth behind Spook High’s hundred-percent advancement rate since the founding of our school.”

“As for the wretched children who violate our rules and class discipline—just as you see before you, they shall serve as the rich, fertile nourishment that spurs our model students to flourish and grow!”

“Academic achievement is the only hall pass recognized by Spook High!”

“In Spook High, there is no such thing as a failing student!”

Delivered in such an elegant aria, with such fiery passion, the blood-soaked students and teachers parted their crimson-stained lips in rapturous accord. The handful of players caught in their midst looked like glaring anomalies by comparison.

“…Are they insane?” Yake stammered, staring in horror as the late students trudged back from the entrance, completely drained. He swallowed with immense difficulty, his scalp prickling with ice.

As those twisted students shuffled past, his body locked up, every nerve drawn taut, terrified of making the slightest wrong move.

Yet while Yake could still witness this absurd, blood-drenched revelry in vivid detail, the other players beside him were drowning in blind terror.

What was happening?

Who was speaking? What did he look like?

Why wasn’t their vision returning? They hadn’t broken any rules—they had only looked at the school flag for an extra second!

“The mall… the system mall! There must be medicine to fix this!” One player, retaining a shred of presence of mind, frantically jabbed at the virtual interface before him.

Yet to his mounting despair, it wouldn’t open. Aside from a steady stream of pitying or mocking bullet chat telling him to hurry up and die, he couldn’t access the system mall at all!

Seeing the man spiraling into madness, his eyes heavily bloodshot, Nan Zhu stepped in to halt his flailing hands. She whispered, “…It’s useless. Once you enter an instance, the system mall is locked. Whatever supplies you need can only be purchased before the run begins or after it clears.”

“Then do you have any?!” Trapped in his blindness, the player grabbed desperately at Nan Zhu’s sleeves, his voice pitched in hysterical urgency: “Do you have medicine? You’ve already survived two games! You must have brought healing items with you, right? Share some with me, please! I can transfer you points! Give me some right now! I don’t want to die, I—”

His words cut off abruptly.

A spray of warm, fresh blood splattered across Nan Zhu’s clothes. The sudden shock of his death knocked the breath clean from her lungs. When she finally processed what had happened, she slowly, rigidly lifted her gaze, meeting a cluster of crimson eyeballs that were greedily chewing away.

Nan Zhu stumbled backward in sheer terror. If not for a hand extending from behind to steady her, she would have collapsed onto the asphalt.

Deprived of her support, the player’s corpse hit the ground. From beneath his skin, countless new eyes began to sprout, blinking in sick amusement as they gnawed his flesh into bloody tatters. In moments, nothing remained but a blood-stained uniform and a pile of pale bones resting silently on the running track.

He was dead.

His end had come without warning, cut short while he was still begging for a scrap of survival.

Yet he had not died from his ruined eyesight. An eye had silently gnawed a ragged, bleeding cavity straight through his heart, devouring him completely from the inside out.

“During morning calisthenics, students in the ranks are strictly forbidden from shouting and causing a ruckus. I do not wish to see a repeat of this,” the teacher covered in eyeballs reminded the frozen, shivering Nan Zhu, his “lips” curving into a grotesque smile.

Yet despite claiming he didn’t want to see it happen again, every single eye across his body betrayed a gleeful, insatiable greed. Blinking in chaotic rhythm, the eyes latched onto every student in Class 4 like a slimy web, as though peering into a fish tank to select the prime catch for the butcher’s knife—a long-awaited, exquisite delicacy.

Beside him, the monstrous teachers from the other classes cast envious, resentful glances his way, turning back to their own students to berate them with renewed ferocity for their obedience.

To the players, everything unfolding before them felt like a surreal, gore-drenched nightmare.

At the very rear of the formation, Qin Fu’an calmly stretched his arms, going through the motions of standard morning exercises. He showed no trace of empathy for the dead player; the cold detachment in his brow and eyes sent a chill down the spines of many watching the stream.

[I don’t know why, but compared to him, those creepy student NPCs actually look more like normal living beings.]

[Is this guy some kind of psychopathic murderer in the real world? I was watching him the whole time—while that player was getting eaten alive, he didn’t even bat an eye!]

[This human… why does he look creepier than the eldritch entities themselves? Did the streaming system bug out when picking streamers?]

[If he refuses to team up, it doesn’t matter how strong he is—he’s bound to hit a wall sooner or later. The more arrogant you are in these domains, the faster you die. Dropping a follow just to wait for the day he gets himself killed.]

Plenty of viewers in the chat shared that sentiment. Of course, just as many stuck around simply because they favored Qin Fu’an’s striking face and brazen attitude, or coveted his crystalline, gem-like pale green eyes.

Thus, without lifting a finger, on the very first day of his very first rookie instance, Qin Fu’an saw his follower count skyrocket, his stream heat rapidly closing in on veterans like Nan Zhu who were already on their third run.

In reality, however, Qin Fu’an hadn’t ignored the scene out of callousness. He had simply noticed that his deskmate seemed rather unwell.

From the moment the loudspeaker began calling the latecomers, every other student had stampeded toward the entrance to greedily lap up the fresh “nutrients.” Xie Yunhuai was the sole exception, remaining rooted beside him, brows knitted as he watched the grotesque, nauseating spectacle.

And when the class homeroom teacher—the mass of eyeballs—had hollowed out and devoured that player from the inside out, Qin Fu’an noticed Xie Yunhuai’s throat convulse, as if suppressing a wave of dry heaves.

Now that was peculiar.

Qin Fu’an blinked in genuine confusion, his vivid, pale green pupils clearly reflecting Xie Yunhuai’s lean, rigid posture.

From the moment this game began, what Qin Fu’an’s eyes perceived was fundamentally different from what the other players saw.

Where the others saw eldritch monsters, Qin Fu’an looked past the misshapen fleshy vessels to behold the countless souls imprisoned within.

And among all the spirits tethered to these anomalies, Xie Yunhuai’s soul was by far the most gargantuan—so immense that it billowed brazenly out of that slender mortal frame, casting its sprawling, shadowy mantle over the entire school campus.

Compared to Xie Yunhuai, even the principal preening on the podium possessed a soul no larger than a pitiful, insignificant ant.

Yet Xie Yunhuai, the bearer of such an unfathomably terrifying soul, was visibly sickened by a standard feeding session.

Qin Fu’an stared at his deskmate, a slow question mark forming in his mind.

Could eldritch abominations suffer from anorexia?

How on earth had he managed to feed his soul to such a colossal size on an empty stomach? It really couldn’t have been easy.

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