Chapter 18: The Asylum Pantomime: 17

Perhaps because his hand had jerked hard enough, Ruan Yu’s body flinched and a muffled grunt escaped his lips.

Nan Lin steadied himself instantly and answered with a perfectly straight face. “Not that many.”

At this, the light in the other’s eyes brightened ever so slightly. “Really?”

Nan Lin nodded. “Mm.”

He added mentally: Really not that many. Only a dozen or so. And I returned every last one of them.

Once the bleeding was finally under control, Nan Lin wiped his hands clean. But before he could finish, he felt a tug at his hem.

Nan Lin looked down.

Ruan Yu blinked up at him, propping himself on the bed with his uninjured right hand, tilting his beautiful face slightly upward.

He was still flawless, though his lips were cracked and peeling, no longer lush and tempting.

After two seconds of thought, Nan Lin understood what Ruan Yu wanted.

He turned, grabbed a cup of water, and shoved it directly into Ruan Yu’s hands. His eyes said it plainly: The water’s right here. Hold it yourself and drink.

Ruan Yu blinked, then hugged the cup with a half-amused, half-helpless look, lashes lowered as he murmured: “Brother is so silly.”

“What?” Nan Lin swore he genuinely hadn’t heard.

Ruan Yu shook his head quickly and pointed toward the window behind Nan Lin’s back.

The bed he was lying on faced the window directly, so he could see the pond behind the two buildings at once.

From that dark, stagnant pool, a pair after pair of rotted hands had reached up through the surface. Even the mud along the pond’s edge was heaving and undulating, revealing the shapes of five-fingered hands.

Just looking at the scene, the two of them could practically smell the stench of rot and damp.

“Tanned corpses?” Ruan Yu propped himself up and asked, tilting his head.

Nan Lin shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. But they’re probably here for the daggers too.”

The participants in this game might extend far beyond what they could see. And the chaos would be far worse than they imagined.

Ruan Yu looked puzzled. “Brother, does this mean we have to compete with those monsters too?”

“Haven’t we been competing with instance monsters the whole time?” Nan Lin answered without turning around, shoving the window open with one hand.

“Mm, fair point.” Ruan Yu added, blinking. A flicker of chagrin crossed his face.

Like he’d done something embarrassing and was silently hoping Nan Lin wouldn’t mention it.

Nan Lin happened to glance sideways and saw a breathtakingly beautiful man sitting with his head bowed, looking thoroughly pitiful.

So for once, he offered words of comfort. “For a newcomer, you’ve done very well. You even found a clue about Chong Jiu, didn’t you?”

Ruan Yu’s gaze grew deep. He lowered his head and murmured his agreement.

Brother is as kind as he always was.

Such a good person, yet branded with the stain of a tyrant.

Nan Lin paid no attention to Ruan Yu’s thoughts. He watched more and more of those “corpses” crawl out of the pond. The water level had even dropped slightly, exposing layer after layer of black silt.

And once they had crawled out of the pond, they moved with clear purpose, converging on the two buildings.

“Hm? They’re gone?”

Nan Lin hesitated. He had watched them vanish the instant they touched the buildings’ shadows.

Like salt dissolving into water, they disappeared in a blink.

But the water had definitely changed. And they had definitely entered the buildings.

Nan Lin looked at Ruan Yu, his gaze settling on the injured left shoulder.

Ruan Yu met his eyes and asked, “Brother? What’s wrong?”

“There are quite a lot of them.” Nan Lin looked away and met Ruan Yu’s gaze again. “If you see those things, run fast.”

At this, Ruan Yu’s impossibly beautiful eyes locked onto Nan Lin. His left hand pressed against his trembling right.

His chest tightened. He felt wrapped up, caught.

Brother is warning me.

He took another step closer to Nan Lin.

Nan Lin offered no further explanation. Or rather, he didn’t care what Ruan Yu was worried about. What concerned him far more was the sudden, unexpected variable unfolding before them.

The danger level of this asylum was escalating with time.

Nan Lin didn’t turn around. He stayed by the window, surveying most of the asylum grounds below, watching with a calm expression as one monster after another crawled into the buildings and vanished in an instant.

When he came back to himself, he found Ruan Yu fast asleep, an unhealthy flush from the infected wounds coloring his cheeks.

Nan Lin checked his temperature, circled the bed, and pushed open the room door only to spot a suspicious puddle of water right in the entrance. The faint outline of a human handprint was barely discernible within it.

He shut the door expressionlessly. They climb that fast?

A moment later, someone knocked.

Nan Lin ignored it. Their door’s lock cylinder was intact. He settled back into the chair and played the voice recorder again and again.

Within the long stretches of Chong Jiu’s silence on the recording, there seemed to be another voice, murmuring something over and over…

Ancient… texts… ancient texts?

The murmured words kept repeating those two syllables. Nan Lin glanced instinctively out the window and saw that the things from the pond had already decreased by more than half.

If the recording was talking about ancient texts, could they be in the reading room?

Nan Lin played the recording again, but halfway through, the aging device running on its last reserve of battery finally gave up the ghost.

Nan Lin said nothing.

He tossed the recorder onto the table and glanced at the door again.

Whatever had knocked seemed to have left. Outside fell silent once more, save for the occasional wail of something in agony.

Everything appeared to have returned to calm. At least for now.

Nan Lin sat in silence, propping up his head, until a soft gasp from Ruan Yu drew his attention.

He followed Ruan Yu’s gaze and saw a muddy handprint on the window that had been clean moments before.

Nan Lin frowned and rose to inspect it more closely, but just then, their room door opened again.

He spun around and, upon finding the eerie female nurse in the doorway, felt an irrational wave of relief.

But halfway through that relief, Nan Lin spotted something new. A matching muddy print had appeared around the nurse’s ankle.

Nan Lin stared.

The nurse knocked again, her patience clearly thin. “Had fun playing games? Sorry to say, it’s cleaning time.”

“Listen up. I’ll only say this once.”

“Filthy things have been appearing in the rooms lately. When they do, you must deal with them immediately.”

“Before I inspect, you need to make sure there is not a single speck of dirt left in sight. Cleanliness is mandatory.”

She turned and left, still muttering under her breath.

“This really shouldn’t be my job.”

“Old Yang knows where he ran off to. They just found his body in the washroom. Serves him right.”

Nan Lin’s brow furrowed. Those things from the pond can actually attack the asylum’s “doctors”?

Meanwhile, on the bed not far behind him, someone had secretly pricked up their ears and let out a quiet breath of relief.

Ruan Yu thought: Good thing I cleaned up properly.

Among that group earlier… there had indeed been someone surnamed Yang.