After Clearing the Infinite Flow, I Tamed the Mad Dog Boss - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

“What just happened? I think I fell asleep just now and had this terrifying dream.”

“Me too! But I can’t remember what it was about. Ugh, I’m covered in cold sweat.”

“Same here. Isn’t this way too bizarre? Could there be some kind of toxic gas in the office?”

“We haven’t opened the windows for ages, right? They’re all shut, and the central air’s off too. Oh my God, didn’t we just narrowly escape death? Hurry up and open the windows!”

The office descended into chaos. Some people immediately opened the windows to let in fresh air, while others kept discussing what had happened. Most of them assumed the problem was the air and didn’t jump to anything supernatural.

Qin Xian closed his eyes and carefully sensed the atmosphere around him. Everything was normal. He found nothing at all.

Either this was the real world, but the real world was different from what he had imagined, or this was an unusual instance, one so unusual that even with his current abilities, he couldn’t detect anything unusual.

“Everyone, assemble in the conference room within three minutes!”

“Everyone, assemble in the conference room within three minutes!”

“E-e-everyone-ne-ne, three… bzzzt… three minutes…”

The broadcast that suddenly blared to life startled everyone.

“Is the PA system broken?”

“Why are we having another meeting right when it’s almost time to get off work…”

“I’m done. Stupid $%#…”

Qin Xian’s expression turned icy.

What was going on? Was this a loop instance? Or had that been the dream, and this was only now reality?

With a dark expression, he stood and was the first to head for the conference room. As he brushed past the colleague beside him, the person instinctively shuddered, as though they had encountered something terrifying, and immediately cleared a path for him.

He pushed open the conference room door, and a foul stench wafted out. CEO Zhao’s corpse was lying on the floor, already beginning to rot. There was no telling how long he had been dead in here.

“Ah!! There’s a dead body!! CEO Zhao is dead!!!”

The colleagues drawn over by the smell saw the horrific scene in front of them and immediately screamed. The office fell into chaos. Qin Xian backed up a few steps, took out his phone, and called the police.

After two beeps, someone actually answered. The person on the other end spoke clearly. After asking Qin Xian a few questions, they immediately said in a grave tone that they would dispatch officers right away and asked Qin Xian to protect the scene.

Seeing a colleague beside him raise their phone to call the police, he said calmly, “I’ve already reported it. Everyone get out. The police will be here soon.”

His colleagues looked at him. Most of them had little impression of Qin Xian, but his words seemed to carry a kind of magic, one that made people instinctively fear him and obey.

The group returned to the office. This time, no one was clacking away at their keyboard anymore. Most of them gathered in twos and threes, heatedly discussing the death scene they had just witnessed. Others held up their phones and frantically tapped at their screens, most likely sharing this major incident with friends, family, or people online.

Compared to earlier, everyone in the office now had vivid expressions. They seemed very much like real people.

Qin Xian opened a window and looked downstairs. A sanitation worker was watering the flower beds, a young couple by the roadside had bought a cup of milk tea and were sharing it, and a delivery rider on an electric scooter wove nimbly through the pedestrians.

It was very real. A kind of reality he had not seen in two years, nothing like being inside an instance.

“Hey, who is he? Did we have someone that handsome in our office?”

“That’s Qin Xian. It’s written on his employee badge.”

“I think I have a bit of an impression of him, but as far as I remember, he basically never talks… Was he always this good-looking? And he seems so refined.”

“Sister Li, go add him on WeChat later.”

“…N-no, I’m good. I don’t know why, but just looking at him makes me a little scared…”

“Don’t say that. Actually, no, you’re right. I’m kind of inexplicably scared of him too.”

Qin Xian turned to look at them, and the colleagues who had just been chattering immediately turned away and changed the subject.

“Hey, the boss is dead. Do we still have to come to work tomorrow…”

Probably no need to go to this awful job tomorrow, Qin Xian thought idly.

A little over ten minutes later, a team of police officers came upstairs and set up a cordon outside the conference room. Two officers entered the office to question them, asking who had discovered the scene and when CEO Zhao had last been seen.

After CEO Zhao’s body was discovered, everything that happened afterward was normal.

Qin Xian looked out the window at the world again. Deep down, he was still more inclined to believe this was the real world. After all, in unlimited-flow instances, calling the police usually wasn’t an option, and most of the time, police officers didn’t show up at your door to handle a case.

He walked over to the police and tested the waters. “Officer, we actually encountered something strange. Just now, everyone in our office fell asleep, and we all had a nightmare.”

The officer abruptly looked up and asked, “All of you fell asleep? What kind of nightmare was it?”

“Yes, yes, we really did fall asleep. Maybe for a dozen minutes or so.”

“I don’t remember exactly what the nightmare was. What about you guys?”

Qin Xian said, “I remember a little. I dreamed that CEO Zhao called us into a meeting, but he turned into a monster covered in fat and tried to kill us.”

At his reminder, the others suddenly seemed to recall something.

“I think I dreamed CEO Zhao turned into a monster too! But after that, it seemed like someone…”

Qin Xian said, “Officer, could this have been caused by some kind of hallucinogenic gas?”
A female officer across from him said reflexively, “Probably n-”

Her colleague immediately cut in. “It’s possible. We’ll come back later to test the air quality here and see whether someone introduced any toxins. Thank you all for cooperating with the investigation. Please provide your names and phone numbers. If the investigation requires anything further, we may need your cooperation again.”

Qin Xian took in the two officers’ reactions. It was obvious they had some theory about the bizarre mass sleep incident. At first, the police seemed to be treating this as an ordinary death case, but after he mentioned the strange happenings in the office, several of them looked as if something had suddenly clicked.

These police officers very likely knew that things existed in this world that defied common sense.

Could there have always been strange, supernatural things in the real world? Had he simply never come into contact with them before?

Qin Xian went downstairs with a grave expression. To test whether this world was real, he hailed a taxi and had it drive from the east side of the city to the west, then loop around the outer ring road.

Under the taxi driver’s cheerful farewell, Qin Xian scanned the code to pay with a cold face. The fare came to three hundred and fifty yuan, leaving a little over six thousand seven hundred in his bank account.

Now, Qin Xian could more or less confirm that he had returned to reality. Up to this point, he had never seen any instance capable of simulating a huge, complex, living city, where every tiny detail, every person’s behavior, even the ants crawling through the flower beds were normal, without a single logical flaw.

So-called game instances were, in truth, nothing more than unique Domains belonging to some strange entity. The small ones were only a single building; the large ones could be as big as a town or a small half of a city.

The sky had gone completely dark. After eating a bowl of beef rice noodles nearby, Qin Xian slowly followed the street home.

Although this was more likely the real world, the situation had become even more surreal. There were actually supernatural things in the real world too. Had they only appeared recently, or had they always been here?

A streetlamp ahead suddenly flickered. Qin Xian stopped at once, frowning as he stared warily forward.

A passerby beside him gave him an odd look, then walked under the streetlamp with a laugh.

The light flickered twice more. Mosquitoes and gnats could be seen dancing under the flashing glow. There was nothing else unusual. It was simply a minor short circuit.

Qin Xian frowned in irritation and continued forward.

He lived in an old part of the city. The roads had been newly repaired, but many of the other facilities and buildings were extremely old.

The buildings here had no elevators and were only six stories high. Many windows were old-fashioned casement windows, and ugly anti-theft grilles had been installed outside them.

Qin Xian stopped in front of one building, looking at the familiar place.

This was where he had grown up. He had once had a fairly warm home, too. His parents had run a small noodle shop nearby. But after he went to university, both of them passed away from illness, and now he lived here alone.

“Heh.” Qin Xian gave a laugh.

Why did he keep reminiscing today? How gloomy.

He had just lifted his foot to go upstairs when he suddenly heard a faint whimper from the alley beside him. The light did not reach the alley, leaving that side in complete darkness. Was it a small animal, or something supernatural?

Qin Xian turned and walked into the alley. In the dimness, he saw a curled-up black shape.

When he got closer, he found it was a black dog. There were traces of blood on its body, and the fur around its paws had clotted into tangled knots. Its thigh bore a torn wound so deep the bone was visible.

He really was getting paranoid… He knelt on one knee and carefully examined the poor animal.

The dog lifted its eyelids to glance at him, then immediately closed them again.

It seemed cold and wary, though it might simply have been too weak.

“You’re pretty pitiful, but I can’t take you in. I mean, I’d like to have a dog, but right now I can barely afford to support myself.”

After all, starting tomorrow, he would be unemployed.

The dog lifted its eyelids again and looked at him. Another soft whimper came from its throat.

Qin Xian’s expression did not change after hearing it. He stood, turned, and left. Even as the whimpers behind him grew more and more pitiful, he never once looked back.

The black dog fell silent, its eyes fixed on the direction Qin Xian had gone. A trace of blood-red flashed through its pupils. Threads of black aura condensed beneath it, gathering into a darkness blacker than shadow. The black dog sank bit by bit into that darkness, but before it could disappear completely, its ears twitched. It immediately returned to its original state, lying weakly on the ground.

Qin Xian’s figure appeared once again at the mouth of the alley. This time, he was holding a disposable cup. He crouched down and poured the water directly into the gap between the black dog’s lips.

The dog’s clearly defined black-and-white eyes rolled toward him, and it opened its mouth, gulping down the clean water with little smacking sounds. After feeding it more than half the cup, Qin Xian set the cup aside and stood. “All right. If you can drink water, it probably isn’t too serious. There are plenty of kindhearted people around here. Keep howling for a while, and someone should take you home.”

With that, he left for good without looking back. Once he got home, he collapsed tiredly onto the sofa and closed his eyes, sinking into a state halfway between sleep and wakefulness.

But after only about twenty minutes, his lashes trembled uneasily twice, and he opened his eyes. They were perfectly clear, without the slightest trace of sleepiness. This was another aftereffect of spending too long in the Infinite Flow World: he could no longer sleep peacefully.

Qin Xian was already used to it. He simply took out his phone and started searching for discussions about supernatural incidents. But after browsing through all kinds of bizarre rumors, he found nothing worth noting.
But when he switched to searching the news, he found a few strange things.

The first headline was about a student jumping from a building at a certain school, an incident that had shocked the entire country. It had sparked heated discussion online, with several related topics exploding onto the trending searches. Amid the conversations about academic pressure and school bullying, a few comments caught Qin Xian’s attention.

[Netizen 1: My classmate goes to that school. He said the place is haunted. When he was heading back after evening self-study, he saw a ghost hand holding the top student’s hand and leading him upstairs, then pushing him off the roof.]

The ghost hand mentioned in the comment sounded a bit like one of the weaker anomalies commonly seen in the Infinite Flow World.

He opened the replies under that comment. Quite a few people with IP locations in the same province were agreeing with it.

The second piece of news that caught Qin Xian’s attention was about a bus catching fire.

Although the police said the cause of the fire was still under investigation, a considerable number of people claimed they had watched the entire bus suddenly become completely engulfed in flames.

Judging from the photos of the bus’s remains, there were no signs of a major explosion. For the whole vehicle to be swallowed by fire all at once did not fit normal natural laws.

After that came a gas explosion in a new residential complex, a serial killer appearing in the city, multiple people going missing, and so on.

All of these news reports were from the past two months. Many netizens were sighing that major accidents seemed to have become more frequent lately. Could something have gone wrong with the real world?

Qin Xian put away his phone and closed his eyes, mobilizing the abilities he had gained in that world just as he had inside the instances. When he returned to the real world, he had tried it before. Nothing had changed. It was as if he had completely turned back into an ordinary person.

But just now, he had felt something subtle.

Qin Xian’s closed eyes snapped open, his irises turning a brilliant gold.

This was one of the skills he had obtained in the Infinite Flow World, called “Insight.” It allowed him to see the true nature of things and also perceive the aura of contamination emitted by anomalies, thereby locating them. More importantly, the ability could only be blocked, not deceived. If he could see something, then what he saw was definitely real.

It sounded very useful, but in reality, it could only be used once a day, and each use lasted only a few seconds. If he exceeded that limit, it would place a tremendous burden on his eyes, possibly even blinding him.

The world before him did not change. According to the power of “Insight,” that proved to a great extent that this world was not fake.

A stabbing pain began pulsing through his eyes. Qin Xian endured it and walked to the window, gazing into the distance, but still discovered nothing.

The pain had become unbearable. He could only close his eyes. When he opened them again, they had turned dark brown once more.

Qin Xian stood beside the bed, frowning in thought.

His skill had activated again, but his other abilities had not fully returned. For now, only Insight could be used.

And the answer Insight had given him was that this place was indeed the real world.

Then this was really damned weird. Had he simply failed to glimpse the true world for more than twenty years? Or was there an even more terrifying possibility?

Qin Xian’s face darkened as he thought: that strange, sinister Main God might not have been kind enough to send him back so easily. Could he have brought some filthy things with him when he returned?

Qin Xian’s five fingers tightened around the window frame, the pads of his fingers turning white from the force.

He had no desire to become the sinner who brought about the end of the world.

“Woo, woo…”

The familiar whimpering came from downstairs again. Qin Xian lowered his head and looked down. That stray dog was still curled up where it had been, with no one coming to take it away. Even its cries sounded much weaker than before.

Qin Xian looked down with a frown.

He did not know what the dog had gone through, or whether it had been abused. But he did know that pets who died miserably from abuse were the easiest to attract anomalies, or to become anomalies themselves. By then, they might cause other casualties. He ought to intervene.

He immediately turned around, rummaged a clean bath towel out of the wardrobe, and went downstairs.

The black dog in the alley was still lying where it had been. Perhaps because it was too weak and frightened, its tail lay flat against the ground without moving. Even when it saw Qin Xian again, it merely opened its eyes coldly and watched him in silence.

Qin Xian crouched down and carefully draped the towel over the dog.

As if it knew the human was trying to save it, the stray dog did not move. It obediently let itself be wrapped up and lifted.

The smell of blood mixed with dog odor and other foul stenches hit him straight in the nose. Qin Xian was slightly disgusted. “Tsk, you’re filthy. Too bad I can’t give you a bath right now.”

The dog remained silent and gave no response. Then again, one could hardly expect a dog to understand human speech and answer.

Qin Xian carried it upstairs and settled it on the balcony.

There was no helping it. The smell was too strong. In any case, it was spring now, neither cold nor hot, so leaving it on the balcony was not a big problem.

Next, he dug out the household first-aid kit, found disinfectant supplies and bandages that were close to expiring, then simply and skillfully cleaned and disinfected the dog’s wounds before wrapping them up.

“All right. It’s just a slightly fractured leg. And a few open wounds, that’s all. No need to go to a pet hospital, probably. Even if you needed to, I couldn’t afford it. If you’re not dead when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll keep you for now.” Qin Xian patted the dog’s head, then turned back into the room and closed the balcony’s sliding door.