Raising a Wife in a Supernatural World [Infinite] – CH6

Chapter 6: Spook High (6)

Before he could retort, the paper-flat apparition in front, Teacher Zhang, was already calling for the papers in a grim, sinister rasp.

Qin Fu’an walked up and handed in a completely blank test paper.

He went to turn it in himself. As he stepped up to the podium and held out the sheet, the look Teacher Zhang shot him was dripping with venom.

The very instant Teacher Zhang clearly registered what Qin Fu’an had turned in, ecstasy surged through him. He slammed the blank sheet violently onto the podium, his voice shrieking an octave higher than the previous period as he interrogated, “Why didn’t you do your homework?! Do you think you’ve already mastered everything? That you don’t even need a teacher to instruct you, and you can still score full marks, is that it?!”

As he spat those words, he was already envisioning the terrified, despairing expression on Qin Fu’an’s face—even fantasizing about the boy dropping to his knees to beg for mercy. Emboldened, his aura surged. His paper-thin frame seemed to puff back into rounded fullness, his eyes boring straight into Qin Fu’an as his lips stretched into an eager, malicious grin.

“How did you know?” A surprised voice abruptly cut him off.

Teacher Zhang choked. “…?”

His freshly inflated body abruptly deflated once more, like a punctured balloon.

He whipped his head up to glare at Qin Fu’an, the rancor in his eyes sharpening into undisguised, bone-deep murder.

If looks could kill, Qin Fu’an would have already been sliced into a thousand pieces.

Unfortunately, his glare possessed no such lethality. Far from being fazed, Qin Fu’an reached down, picked up the blank test paper slapped onto the lectern, and arched a brow in inquiry: “Respected Teacher Zhang, just take a look at what you teach in class. Oversimplified, crude, and devoid of any real substance. Is this truly the extent of your professional competence?”

Under the wide-eyed, horrified stares of the entire class, Qin Fu’an gave the test paper a light flick, the corners of his lips curling into a smile of mock pity. “If this level of instruction qualifies someone to teach Grade Twelve, it’s genuinely hard not to question the academic standards of Spook High… That one-hundred-percent advancement rate—could it be that the administration achieved it purely through blatant fraud?”

His fingers loosened. That pristine sheet of paper—lacking even a name or class section—drifted languidly through the air, settling right at Teacher Zhang’s feet.

The papery flesh of Teacher Zhang’s flattened cheeks twitched visibly. Panting in fury, he glared at Qin Fu’an, his voice choked with rage and raspy hysteria: “Qin Fu’an! Do you have any idea what you’re doing?! Turning in a blank paper is one thing, but you dare to openly slander your teacher and the school in the middle of class?! I’m going to string you up from the school flag on the field, tear you into ten thousand shreds, and let every teacher and student devour you alive, flesh and bone!!”

As his shrieks grew increasingly shrill, the students clutched their ears in agony, curling into balls in their seats. The entire classroom—no, the entire instructional building—seemed to rattle beneath his incandescent fury.

Yet at the very instant that withered claw reached toward him, Qin Fu’an, the prime culprit, let his own expression turn ice-cold.

The youth’s pale green pupils darkened to a bottomless depth. He watched every flicker of the entity’s hysterical breakdown, then seized the wooden pointer resting on the podium and brought it down viciously across that reaching hand.

—Smack!! The crisp crack resounded jarringly across the dead-silent classroom.

An even more piercing, unearthly screech erupted right after, but before it could last two seconds, it was abruptly cut short by heavy footsteps approaching rapidly from the corridor outside.

Those footfalls didn’t just silence Teacher Zhang’s agonized wails; they drained all color from his flattened face. Instinctive terror seemed to grip him before the presence looming beyond the door.

Yet in the blink of an eye, realization struck, and his venomous stare locked onto Qin Fu’an once more. He rasped with a sinister sneer: “Violating classroom rules, turning in a blank exam, slandering and physically assaulting a faculty member… Your hour of death has arrived!”

With that, he straightened his back. Across his flattened, broadened face, his eyeballs rolled greedily, brimming with gleeful, impatient malice.

Qin Fu’an couldn’t be bothered with these empty threats.

Lowering his gaze slightly, he watched the chalk dust on the podium quiver with each thudding step from outside. He knew full well that his blatant provocations had broken the mold. He was no longer constrained to merely sitting through class in a four-walled room, nor was he limited to dealing with a low-tier grunt of a teacher.

Braced with anticipation, Qin Fu’an turned toward the windows.

Along the narrow hallway, a silhouette even more massive and grotesque than the original Teacher Zhang ambled past the window glass, coming to a halt at the classroom threshold a few paces later.

Under the watchful eyes of a classroom torn between dread and anticipation, the hulking frame bent down, revealing a head that looked no different from an ordinary human’s.

Yet chillingly, the neck attached to that head elongated without limit the next second. Like a boneless serpentine monstrosity, it slid the head straight through the doorway and deep into the room.

“Teacher Zhang. Campus Rule Number Three: Loud disruptions are strictly forbidden during class hours.” The head drew impossibly close to Teacher Zhang’s face, its lifeless monotone ringing out like a death warrant: “You have violated school regulations.”

In the next breath, the neck surged upward above Teacher Zhang’s crown. Its cavernous, blood-slick jaws unhinged silently, poising to snap down and cleave Teacher Zhang’s head off in one bite.

“—Wait!!” In sheer terror, Teacher Zhang scooped the blank paper off the floor, holding it high as he stammered in panic, “Dean! It was this student! He turned in a blank exam in class and insulted our school’s reputation! It’s all his fault!!”

That blank exam fluttered directly before the Dean’s lowered face.

It eyed the paper, then slowly dragged its ravenous gaze toward Qin Fu’an.

From their desks, Nan Zhu and the other players broke into a cold sweat on Qin Fu’an’s behalf. But even if they wanted to intervene, with the blank paper and those incendiary remarks setting off a catastrophic chain reaction, players who hadn’t even cleared their beginner instances were utterly powerless!

As for the rookie Zhao Jiayue, the moment the Dean’s neck slithered inside, she clapped both hands over her mouth to strangle her own screams. Even so, her frail frame shuddered violently, tears spilling uncontrollably down her cheeks as she choked back every whimper, terrified of making a single peep.

Across the aisle, Xie Yunhuai held the candy loosely in his palm, watching the chaos at the podium with a detached expression.

Though he remained convinced that his new deskmate was completely unhinged, Xie Yunhuai inexplicably sensed that the man had handed in a blank paper to provoke Teacher Zhang on purpose. Thus, even if Qin Fu’an was truly courting death and about to perish, Xie Yunhuai had no intention of lifting a finger.

What could he possibly help with anyway? Xie Yunhuai was nothing more than an ordinary high schooler himself. Successfully graduating from Spook High was the sole reason he still sat here.

Beyond that, anyone’s survival or demise had nothing to do with him.

At the front of the room, the Dean—who by all rights should have snapped Qin Fu’an’s neck in fury—looked down into the youth’s upturned face and met a pair of feline, eerie green eyes. Its rancid mouth hung open, baring pale fangs threaded with shreds of bloody meat, as it slowly rasped: “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Qin Fu’an lowered his gaze slightly, letting the abnormal hue in his pupils fade, and replied with unbroken composure: “I hope you understand that I had no intention of disrupting classroom order. If I provoked the teacher, it was solely because I harbor grave doubts regarding Teacher Zhang’s professional ethics and pedagogical standards.”

Teacher Zhang glared at him with a contorted, venomous sneer. If the Dean hadn’t been present, he would have lunged forward long ago to shred Qin Fu’an’s haughty, insolent face to pieces.

Regrettably, even in an instance teeming with eldritch horrors, there was no room for “what ifs.” And so Qin Fu’an was able to lay out his grievances step by step, measured and irrefutable, before the podium.

“First: A single class period lasts a precious forty minutes. Yet Teacher Zhang’s physical form lacks the agile perfection of your own, Dean. Each time he enters or exits the classroom, it takes him at least fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes wasted for every single student. That means in today’s class alone, across all thirty-seven students in our room, Teacher Zhang has squandered a grand total of five hundred and fifty-five minutes of our most valuable time.

“Second: In the previous period, students already voiced that Teacher Zhang’s lectures were esoteric and obscure. Yet rather than adjusting his curriculum, he simply droned on about the exact same problem type over and over. As a result, students who should have been absorbing a broader breadth of material were forced to endure repetitive, barren exercises—which, rather than expanding our knowledge base for the Gaokao, has only severely limited our preparation.

“Third: Regarding the exam questions. While reviewing the old to learn the new is customary, Teacher Zhang’s lecture was already tedious and dry, and the homework offered zero innovation or progression. As such, aside from continuing to waste the students’ study time and stunting our capacity for new knowledge, may I ask what possible benefit it brings?

“Fourth: When I attempted to inform Teacher Zhang and suggested introducing fresh material, he not only refused to accept constructive feedback, but resorted to verbal intimidation and threats against a top student like myself. You should know that on the previous simulation exams, I achieved perfect scores. Yet Teacher Zhang wanted to hoist an honor student like me onto the school flagpole to be humiliated to death… It is difficult not to wonder whether students in the other classes he teaches are currently enduring similar reign-of-terror threats.

“Dean, if I recall correctly, the Principal stated just moments ago that academic achievement is the sole hall pass of Spook High. Am I right?”

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