First place in the interview? Zhou Qi’an nodded—he really was made for work.
The system prompt continued:
[Special Side Quest – Roleplaying Mission Activated]
Position: School Infirmary Assistant
Mission Objective: The school doctor is taking a nap. When he wakes up, assist him in performing a surgery. Do not leave your post during the procedure. The operation is considered successful once the patient can stand and walk.
Reward 1: Clock in for three consecutive days of work-study to receive a scholarship grant.
Day 1 Clock-In Time: Now
Day 2 Clock-In Time: 9:00 AM
Day 3 Clock-In Time: 9:00 AM
Reward 2: 1 important clue; chance of receiving a pharmaceutical item.
He wasn’t qualified, yet still got assigned the position. A pie falling from the sky usually meant trouble. Zhou Qi’an tried to focus on the positive—besides high-grade weapons, the rarest items in the instance were usually medicinal rewards.
“Three days in a row…”
If scholarships and grants were evaluated together, and exams were also scheduled for the next three days, then this instance likely wouldn’t last too long.
Still, he really didn’t want to eat poisonous mushrooms for three more days. Even less did he want to work. If he could finish the instance early before his business trip days ran out, maybe he’d get to rest for once.
Zhou Qi’an looked at his progress in exploring the story background. The green escape route still seemed the most reliable.
As he thought, he started wandering around the infirmary.
The room’s layout felt off.
Most notably, there was a large freezer oddly placed inside. Zhou Qi’an kept his eyes on the school doctor, confirming that he showed no signs of stirring, and quietly opened the freezer to take a peek.
A frost-covered pig-like human head suddenly came into view.
Zhou Qi’an took a deep breath and opened the gap wider to see more clearly.
It was a pig-headed humanoid dressed in a student uniform, with a bloody hole in its chest.
He stared, confirming it was the same monster he’d pierced with a holy weapon the other night. It wasn’t clear whether it had been brought here for “repairs” or disposal as medical waste.
Suppressing his nausea, Zhou Qi’an quickly reached in to search the pig-head man.
Moments later, he retrieved a book titled Driver’s Training Manual.
“Weird…”
The corpse was clearly the remodeled body of a dead player, and a book like Driver’s Training Manual was definitely not something the player would’ve owned in life.
Then, a system message popped up:
[Driver’s Training Manual: Essential reading for obtaining a license in the game world.]
“A world tour after death, huh…”
Obviously, the purpose of driving was to, well, drive.
Muttering to himself, Zhou Qi’an walked back toward the desk. The moment he touched it, the school doctor’s body twitched.
He quickly pulled his hand back.
The school doctor shifted, then resumed his deep sleep.
Zhou Qi’an tried again, creeping his hand forward. Almost immediately, the doctor moved again—this time more noticeably than before.
Abandoning his wishful thinking, Zhou Qi’an gave up on touching the desk.
He picked a distant spot to sit down. The spot was perfect—it allowed him to keep the school doctor in view in case the NPC made any moves.
Every minute he could idle was a win. Hopefully, he could just coast through today’s shift.
But after doing nothing for so long, Zhou Qi’an started feeling drowsy. He absentmindedly looked up at the wall clock. The minute hand pointed at four, the hour hand… Zhou Qi’an tried to keep his eyes wide, but the clock face just kept getting blurrier.
Out of nowhere, his lower back went weak, and he slid halfway off his chair.
What the hell?
He blinked slowly. Beneath the sharp smell of disinfectant in the infirmary, there seemed to be something else in the air.
His limbs began to lose strength. A beat late, he finally realized: anesthetic gas.
The memory of being drugged by Xun Er surfaced. Damn it—are all these NPCs this shameless?!
His consciousness faded in an instant.
Just before blacking out, Zhou Qi’an vaguely saw the school doctor rise slowly from behind the desk.
He had a strange smile on his face, and his flabby body jiggled as he hurried toward Zhou Qi’an.
Shhhhhh, shhhhhh—
It was the sound of pouring rain.
Clunk.
More like the sound of wheels.
He had no idea how much time had passed. Consciousness gradually returned, though he was still stuck in darkness. Zhou Qi’an instinctively tried to identify every sound around him.
Pain. His head felt like it was going to explode. It hurt so much that it cleared his mind completely.
But why couldn’t he see anything?
“Surgery is starting. Don’t slack off,” came the school doctor’s voice.
Zhou Qi’an moved and bumped into something. He reached out and felt handles—scissors, scalpels—probably a surgical tray, judging from the earlier sound of wheels.
“Hand me the scalpel.”
The headache didn’t go away—in fact, it got worse. Zhou Qi’an wanted to rub his temples. He raised his arm and groped in the air.
“The scalpel,” the school doctor repeated, voice now much deeper and colder.
Like receiving a royal decree, Zhou Qi’an couldn’t resist. He handed the scalpel toward the source of the voice.
The doctor seemed to pause for a few seconds after taking it. Though Zhou Qi’an couldn’t see, he felt the weight of a gaze pressing down on him. He was sure that at any moment, the doctor would turn and slice him into pieces.
He resisted the urge to run and stood still.
Finally, the gaze faded.
But just as Zhou Qi’an was about to relax, a sharp pain flared in his right shoulder. He was sure no one was standing there—yet the pain kept intensifying.
It felt like he was being slowly cut open.
Something clicked. Gritting his teeth, Zhou Qi’an reached forward along the edge of the operating table. His slender fingers moved up the patient’s body until two fingers pried open the eyelids.
The surgical lamp was on overhead.
It was the only light in the infirmary.
In the patient’s lifeless pupils, Zhou Qi’an saw a reflection of himself: a headless monster, its neck severed completely, nerves dangling like tangled wires.
Long—countless strands.
No head, yet somehow he could still see? Combined with the physical pain, Zhou Qi’an confirmed his earlier suspicion—the only explanation.
He was the one lying on the operating table.
His body still retained some consciousness—like being awake under anesthesia—but most of his awareness had shifted into this nameless corpse. The separation made it impossible for Zhou Qi’an to summon any items.
Suddenly, hatred surged from his heart. Zhou Qi’an couldn’t stop himself—he raised his hand and started helping the school doctor dissect his own body.
“Kill him… he deserves to die…” The scalpel sliced into his other shoulder, the pain feeding directly back to him.
Zhou Qi’an felt like he was losing his mind.
The urge to tear his own body into pieces kept growing.
Slice.
The sound of blade cutting into flesh was terrifyingly clear.
Because his other hand was holding the eyelid open, the hand holding the knife was unsteady. Blood quickly soaked his palm.
Why did he want to hurt himself?
In the reflection of the patient’s eye, the headless corpse appeared shorter and had a cross tattoo on its wrist.
The same kind of tattoo that Yu Tian—the guy who knocked his own head off playing ping pong—had.
Finally, Zhou Qi’an pieced it all together.
If a player harbored intense hatred toward someone before death, there was a high chance they would turn into a ghost and seek revenge. He had seen this happen more than once.
Although Zhou Qi’an was trying hard to resist the urge to self-harm, the consciousness attached to his mangled body was only a small sliver of his own. Compared to the surging hatred, it was negligible. Moreover, he realized that whenever he engaged in this kind of inner struggle, he edged closer to a total outburst.
He even had the impulse to recklessly attack the school doctor like a moth to a flame.
The school doctor gave a sinister laugh. “This is blood willingly donated by a student.”
Besides being cut open, several tubes were extracting blood from Zhou Qi’an’s body.
“A child with a sense of sacrifice. His body will be made into a specimen…”
The young man’s upper clothes had been removed on the operating table. Several cuts were visible on his thin but evenly built muscles. Under the shadowless surgical lamp, one could clearly see the flesh and tissue inside.
Zhou Qi’an couldn’t see his body, but the pain alone allowed him to imagine just how gruesome it looked.
This hellish place was clearly several times more brutal than the classroom.
“Of all poisons in the world, there is always an antidote within five steps.”
Zhou Qi’an forced himself to calm down. He dared to come to the infirmary precisely because of this compensation clue—there had to be some way to escape his current state.
Something that could suppress the school doctor had to be nearby.
Since his half-unconscious self was lying on his back, Zhou Qi’an could only desperately recall the layout of the infirmary from memory.
Medicine cabinet, desk, and the operating table.
The big three.
The antidote was just a metaphor. It didn’t necessarily refer to real medicine.
While he was thinking, the school doctor was still slowly slicing his skin. The movements were sluggish—starting with the surface, now already cutting into the flesh. If it went on any longer, the next step would be bone.
A hellish beginning, a mind-breaking start.
Zhou Qi’an wanted to take a deep breath, but all that came in was cold air.
When he tried moving toward the desk, the school doctor’s previously calm voice suddenly sharpened: “Where do you think you’re going?”
Just like before, the body Zhou Qi’an’s consciousness was attached to couldn’t disobey the doctor’s orders—it stopped moving on its own.
Fine. So this is how we’re playing?
“Huh…”
Strange sounds of blood and air bubbled out from his ruptured trachea, as if he were laughing.
Yes, if he still had a head, Zhou Qi’an would definitely be smiling.
He stopped resisting and gave up the struggle for control. Strangely, the moment he did that, his control over the body actually deepened. Those nerve endings, dangling like electrical wires, could now extend freely.
Zhou Qi’an quietly cooperated with the school doctor while attempting to control those nerves to search the infirmary in place of his hands.
His flesh turned inside out bit by bit. For most people, cooperating in their own dissection would have mentally broken them already. But for Zhou Qi’an, who had a history of staying conscious through anesthesia, it was still tolerable.
The school doctor suddenly pressed the knife down. The blade struck bone.
Zhou Qi’an felt a wave of searing pain.
“Ah!” But it was the school doctor who screamed.
“Huh.” Air bubbled again from Zhou Qi’an’s severed neck vessels.
[Bone Poison].
This was a blessing he had received from Jin Taotao’s rice shop—any monster that touched his bones at zero or negative distance would be contaminated to some extent.
Zhou Qi’an was quite pleased with himself:
“Big brother, you finally managed to poison someone else.”
The doctor’s wrist turned an unnatural shade of blue-black. The pain made him stagger.
Zhou Qi’an didn’t know how long the bone poison would last. He used the opportunity to move toward the desk using only his memory. On the desk were just a few medical records—useless, since he couldn’t see. He started rummaging through the drawers instead.
Two-pronged search—his fiber-like nerves stretched toward the medicine cabinet.
Every time the nerves touched an object, pain shot back to him through the nerve endings.
Zhou Qi’an ignored the pain and forced the nerves to move faster.
But random searching was inefficient. Suddenly, the school doctor screamed again. He had chopped off the infected hand and was now trembling as he picked up the scalpel with his remaining hand. “You…”
A thick gloom covered his ugly face.
Keys, nail clippers, gum… the drawers were filled with junk. Same with the medicine cabinet.
“You’re just an assistant,” the school doctor snarled as he lunged forward. “You were brought in to help, not to rummage through everything!”
In the cramped space, the sound of urgent footsteps grew louder.
The bone poison couldn’t be neutralized just by chopping off a hand. At least, it didn’t stop the doctor from charging forward—which bought Zhou Qi’an a bit more time.
He sped up his search. The school doctor didn’t go for the body on the operating table first, but reflexively went for the desk instead. That meant there was something important here.
When Zhou Qi’an got to the third drawer, a small badge scraped against his palm. He froze slightly.
A gust of wind swooshed from above.
Zhou Qi’an instinctively dodged to the side.
“Not having a head is kinda nice.”
Otherwise, he might not have been able to dodge that blow.
He rushed to the operating table and pulled open his own eyelids.
The badge he had just found was reflected in the pupils. The information on it transferred to his consciousness. The school doctor charged again—this time there was no room to dodge.
Zhou Qi’an didn’t move. He held the badge high under the shadowless lamp.
The moment the school doctor caught a glimpse of the photo on the badge, he grabbed his large head and suddenly collapsed to the ground, screaming wildly.
Zhou Qi’an finally relaxed. He had gambled right.
What he was holding was an employee ID.
Even people who don’t like wearing badges at work rarely stuff their ID into the bottom corner of the bottom drawer.
And this one had colorful scribbles and knife marks all around the photo.
Except—the photo itself was spotless.
The person in the picture looked quite delicate. It seemed the school doctor couldn’t bear to see his former self. He couldn’t accept what he had become.
Zhou Qi’an could even imagine the scene: the school doctor had tried everything to destroy or get rid of the badge, but it always returned to him.
“I killed you, I killed you…” The doctor was completely unhinged. “Get out… get out…”
The headless body still followed the doctor’s orders unconditionally. Zhou Qi’an stiffly walked toward the door.
As he stepped into the hallway and the body disappeared into the darkness, a crushing sense of weightlessness overwhelmed his consciousness, and the world faded into black.
Roughly thirty seconds passed.
On the operating table, the young man slowly opened his eyes. He stared into space for a few seconds, then yanked out the blood tubes and clumsily climbed off the table. The wounds on his body pulled with his movement, making him frown in pain.
“Do you still remember who you are?”
Zhou Qi’an weakly looked at the still-unrecovered school doctor clutching his head and coldly read the name on the badge: “Fan Hong.”
The slightly handsome young man in the work photo now had a terrifyingly hideous face, thick with flesh and dotted with strange lumps.
“Stop saying it… stop…” the doctor groaned, smashing his head harder.
His upper body was bare and covered in wounds. Zhou Qi’an stumbled over to the medicine cabinet, trying to find gauze to stop the bleeding. His breathing was rapid, and there was a small cut on his mouth from the doctor’s earlier clumsy scalpel move.
In theory, he shouldn’t be speaking much in his condition.
But Zhou Qi’an didn’t care.
“Oh, Fan Hong, Fan Hong, Fan Hong…” he kept chanting the school doctor’s name. Eventually, he even turned it into a rhythm like a song.
It hurt to say.
It hurt to hear. The school doctor looked like he might bash his own skull in.
Zhou Qi’an found that this pain somewhat soothed his own torment from earlier—the mental and physical abuse.
“The blood and sweat of us working folks won’t be spilled in vain.”
Zhou Qi’an thought for a moment, went back to the operating table, picked up the ID, and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he opened the medicine cabinet and continued: “Fan Hong.”
Having no head earlier and being unable to speak had nearly driven him mad.
He didn’t care about anything anymore—anything he could grab, he stuffed into his pockets. He’d analyze them later outside.
While he was happily gathering meds, his hands suddenly froze mid-motion.
The medicine cabinet was near the door. In the mottled, blurry light at the doorway, a shadowy figure had silently appeared at some point, standing there, staring straight at him.
