After Clearing the Infinite Flow, I Tamed the Mad Dog Boss - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The hands of the clock in the corridor were already pointing to twelve. The hospital had fallen into an unnatural silence. The nurses on duty and the officers keeping watch had all vanished, leaving the empty hallway to stretch away beneath his feet and disappear into the darkness.

“Tap, tap, tap!”

A rapid patter of footsteps came from somewhere ahead. Something was running. Perhaps it was a terrified human being, but it could just as easily have been something else.

“Tap… tap…”

Qin Xian’s steps, however, were as steady as his expression. He even had the leisure to glance through the observation windows as he passed the wards.

Most of the beds inside were empty. There were no lights on and no people in the rooms. That proved the culprit’s ability was mediocre; it couldn’t drag too many people into its Domain.

It should be easy enough to deal with.

But Qin Xian was the only one who would find this easy. For every other living person, it was a different story entirely.

The suspect who had been brought to the hospital woke from a nightmare and opened his eyes to see the fluorescent tube above him glowing red.

All around him was dead silence, yet he could hear countless murmurs mingling with the sound of his own heartbeat.

Those murmurs belonged to men and women, old and young. At first, he couldn’t make them out, but gradually, the pained groans grew clearer and clearer.

They were cursing, begging, screaming, until at last they merged into a single shriek that sounded as if it would tear through their throats.

The man immediately struggled to sit up, only to realize his hand was cuffed to the bed frame. The handcuffs clanged against the sturdy iron rail. He grabbed the chain and yanked with all his strength, but it wouldn’t budge.

As if startled by the noise he made, the murmuring and screaming around him abruptly vanished.

The man froze as if someone had hit pause on him, holding his breath. But it was too late. In the darkness, countless gazes turned toward him.

“You look… so healthy. Give us your body…”

The paused motion snapped back into action. No longer caring whether he broke his wrist, the man endured the pain and pulled at the cuffs until they clattered wildly, but the handcuffs remained firmly fastened to the bed frame.

“Aaaaaah! Let me go! I’m not healfy! Can’f you see my fafe is all caved in? Don’t come after me! Fuck!”

The light overhead grew dimmer and redder. In that faint glow, the surrounding walls rapidly blackened from the corners inward.

Something had covered the entire wall.

Then the black film began to bulge and writhe. One screaming human head after another pressed hard against it, their entire facial contours clearly visible.

“Fuck! Ha, fuck!!!” The man changed position and tried to kick the iron rail with all his might. It was obviously a stupid move. A burst of agony instantly robbed him of his voice, and he doubled over, stars flashing before his eyes for several seconds.

In just those few seconds, dozens of human upper bodies had already emerged from the walls. They pushed the black film into uneven protrusions, their straining fingertips looking as if they were about to tear through it at any moment.

But the black film refused to split. Several pairs of black hands suddenly seized the hospital bed’s rail. The bed frame began to shift, its metal legs scraping across the floor with a piercing screech.

“Aaaaaah!” the man screamed, trying to retreat toward the head of the bed. But the handcuffs pinned him in place as if welded there. He could only watch helplessly as countless hands crept closer and closer, nearly poking into his eyes.

“Bang!”

The ward door was suddenly blasted open by a tremendous force. The ghosts protruding halfway out of the walls froze, then all snapped their heads toward the doorway in unison.

Their sunken eyes beneath the black film seemed able to see, and they stared fixedly at the newcomer.

Seeing that he had escaped disaster, the man on the bed collapsed limply forward. His chin slammed hard against the rigid bed board, tugging at his old injuries.

Tears sprang from the pain, but he still forced back his cry and looked toward the door.

Because his face was injured and swollen, he could only make out that the person who had arrived was a tall man wearing a black trench coat and carrying a white object in his hand.

For some reason, he felt that thing looked a little familiar.

“You are healthy. You are even healthier! Give me your body!!!”

The Black Membrane Figures on the walls suddenly shouted in unison. They moved rapidly along the wall, their arms stretching like molded rubber as they reached for Qin Xian.

Qin Xian stood where he was without moving, but there was no fear in him. He even tossed the bone club upward at leisure. The bone spun twice in the air before he caught it firmly in his hand, then chopped straight down from above. The three or four ghostly hands at the front bent sharply into acute angles.

“Aaaaaah!!! It hurts! It hurts so much! My bones are broken! They’re broken! I don’t want bone-setting, don’t put in steel plates! It hurts!!!”

Shrieks rang out one after another. Most of these strange entities were formed from the resentment of the dead, and the ones that had experienced the pain of broken bones screamed especially miserably.

“You hurt me! Pay up! Pay me for my medical bills and lost wages!!!”

Screaming, the entities forced more of their bodies out and lunged at Qin Xian.
Qin Xian silently raised the bone.

The black silhouettes all froze for a beat, but their bloodthirsty instincts quickly won out, and they charged at him again.

Qin Xian gave a cold laugh, hoisted the bone, and started beating ghosts with it. He deliberately avoided lethal spots, aiming instead for the places that hurt the most.

Kneecaps, bridges of noses, jaws, finger joints-the screams turned the entire ward into something out of the eighteen levels of hell.

Even the man strapped to the hospital bed couldn’t stop trembling as he listened.

Who was this big shot who had suddenly descended from on high? He had to be one of the top few on the game’s clear leaderboard, right? But which of those people used a club?

He strained to open his eyes wider, but could only vaguely make out that the other person was wearing a mask. He couldn’t see his face at all.

And in the few seconds he spent thinking, Qin Xian had already beaten the Black Membrane Figures so badly that most of them had shrunk back into the wall. Only a handful still dared poke their heads out and bare their teeth at him.

Qin Xian raised the bone club and swept it at the things sticking out of the wall, but the bone passed straight through their black human-shaped bodies.

This was the trait of the eerie things before him. They were vengeful spirits condensed after the deaths of large numbers of humans. When they gathered in a swarm, they could form physical bodies to attack. But once beaten, they could turn themselves back into phantoms.

At times like this, purely physical attacks couldn’t hurt them at all. Without any other means, they were extremely troublesome to deal with.

“Tch. Annoying pests.” Qin Xian stopped paying attention to these lowest-level eerie things. He turned, glanced at the information by the bed, and asked, “You’re Xun Dawei?”

The man on the hospital bed nodded frantically. “Y-yes, I’m Xun Dawei. Th-thank you, big bro, for saving my life!!”

“I’m not that kindhearted,” Qin Xian replied icily.

Xun Dawei bent even lower at the waist, practically lying flat on the bed as he asked, “Uh, big bro, what did you want me for? I won’t hide anything I know!”

Qin Xian asked, “How did you get out?”

“How did I get out? What do you me-” Xun Dawei suddenly choked off. Then, trembling, he raised a finger and pointed at Qin Xian. “I know. I know who you are! You know about that world, but you don’t know how we escaped. You’re Huang’er! Aren’t you!!”

Qin Xian’s expression remained indifferent, even though the man had comically slurred his title, “Xuan,” into “Huang’er.”

He said coldly, “Answer my question.”

“Hahahaha!!” Xun Dawei burst into laughter. “You’re confused, right? Confused because the Main God clearly said only first place could leave. You risked your life to take first place, only to find out failures like us got out too. I won’t tell you why unless you take me somewhere safe and help me hide from the police!”

He screamed incoherently, and fresh blood began seeping through the bandages on his face.

Seeing this, Qin Xian turned around, stepped back to the head of the bed, and said to the black membrane on the wall, “You can’t have my body. But this man has no real value anymore, so I’ll give him to you.”

“Really? You’ll give him to us?”

The black membrane on the wall stirred restlessly. Several figures reached out again, stretching their hands toward Xun Dawei on the bed.

Xun Dawei struggled violently. “Don’t you want to know the answer!? Huang’er, screw your mother! You think you’re hot shit, don’t you? Right now, you’re just an ordinary person! But some players are different. If they find you, you’ll die a horrible death… Ah! Don’t eat me! Xuan, I’ll tell you how we left. Make them go away!”

Qin Xian sneered. “The Main God promised you something, didn’t it? For example, it could let you leave, but you had to bring eerie things back with you.”

Xun Dawei abruptly froze, his mouth hanging open, at a loss for words.

“So that’s how it is. The Main God really does have a good grasp of the darkness in human nature.” Qin Xian took a step forward, moving closer to Xun Dawei.

The eerie things that had been about to eat him also stopped in unison, their eyeless heads turning to follow Qin Xian. They couldn’t figure out what Qin Xian intended to do and didn’t dare act rashly.

Qin Xian continued, “You hate the fact that only I got to come back. You also hate the ordinary people who live safely on this side. Why should you be the only unlucky ones? Even if it means becoming traitors to humanity, you’d be more than happy to bring eerie things into this world, wouldn’t you?”

“You… you-so what if I did! You’re right, but I’m not wrong either! Is it wrong that I want to survive!?” Xun Dawei stuck out his neck, his face flushed with agitation.

Qin Xian gave a cold snort. “Who cares? Save that for the police.”

Before Xun Dawei could understand what he meant, he saw a pale white bone swinging toward his head again.

“No! ‘Seed paper’! I’ll tell you about the ‘seed paper’!”

The bone stopped just in time. Qin Xian asked, “Seeds?”

Xun Dawei stammered, “Powerful eerie things can’t enter this world directly. They turned into seed paper and were brought over. Anything else, I don’t-fu-!”

Before he could finish the curse, Qin Xian knocked him unconscious with one swing of the bone, sending him toppling headfirst downward.