269: Chapter 268 Horror Hospital

After finishing all this, Chu Xuan checked his phone again. The screen was flickering and damaged, but it was still barely usable. The time displayed was:

June 20th, 10:20 AM.

Chu Xuan remembered that the time they transmigrated from the plane to the War Dragon World was around 6:50 AM that same day.

When they appeared in the prison cell of the War Dragon World, Chu Xuan had checked the time; it was 7:25 AM.

Since then, the phone's time had never jumped abnormally again, passing at a normal rate.

Of course, this was without an internet connection.

After slaying the King and encountering the giant hand pressing down, the time Chu Xuan chose to return was around 10:00 AM.

Now that he had just returned to his original world, only twenty minutes had passed.

Everything seemed reasonable, but when Chu Xuan saw the electronic clock in the corner of this hospital ward, he felt something was wrong.

June 23rd, 23:59 PM.

"The time is off by three days..."

Chu Xuan's eyes flickered as he looked out the window. It was still pitch black, with no scenery visible.

"Thinking back, when we were on the plane, every time the phone's time jumped significantly, it seemed to be when returning from the War Dragon World to the original world. At that time, the plane's Wi-Fi was working normally, so..."

Thoughts flashed through his mind, and Chu Xuan roughly understood. When they traveled back and forth between the two worlds on the plane, the flow of time was different.

When they arrived in the prison cell of the War Dragon World, the actual time might not have been 7:25 AM; it was just that because there was no network, the time on the phone hadn't been calibrated.

Similarly, returning to this hospital in the real world now, the signal was blocked because of the Specter, so there was also no network.

Therefore, the time currently displayed on the phone was likely incorrect as well.

"So, it's very likely that three days have really passed..."

Chu Xuan's heart sank slightly.

In that case, it was hard to say whether this trip to the War Dragon World was a loss or a gain.

The real world was currently suffering from the accelerated invasion of The Gloom, and the level of horror was intensifying day by day.

Under these circumstances, if the speed of personal strength improvement couldn't keep up, it would be equivalent to standing still, or even regressing.

According to Chu Xuan's guess, this should be related to the fact that he traveled between worlds through the Spatial Turbulence.

Jian Mei and the others, who were teleported directly through the Contract Marks, likely wouldn't face this.

Otherwise, if completing a trial mission in another world only took a few hours while several days passed in the real world, the strength gained would probably not keep up with the growth speed of Specters in the real world.

In that case, what would be the point of a Contract Protector...

While lost in thought, Chu Xuan opened the chat software on his phone and scrolled through it. He didn't see any messages from Future Tang Zheng, confirming that he wasn't currently in a dream.

"According to the previous pattern, the next time I enter a dream should be at seven in the morning. I just don't know if things will change because so many days have passed..."

The faint screams from outside had already disappeared, and the electronic clock in the ward was still silently ticking.

As the final minute passed and the time on the electronic clock reached midnight on June 24th, the clean and tidy ward clearly didn't look any different at that moment, but Chu Xuan suddenly felt the surrounding environment become much colder.

"Hmm?"

Chu Xuan's mind tightened. He had just sat back down on the bed, and his palm unconsciously rested on it. The texture coming from the bedsheet now felt cold, wet, and slimy.

When he lifted his hand to look, it was covered in blood!

Chu Xuan's pupils constricted slightly.

Although he had many wounds on his body due to the Spatial Turbulence, they weren't deep and had already begun to heal slowly; the blood he shed had long since dried.

But the greasy blood currently on his hand was completely different.

Chu Xuan looked down and saw that the bedsheet was actually continuously seeping blood.

"What the hell is this!"

Chu Xuan's expression turned cold. The Fire of Nirvana appeared in his palm, and he slammed it down.

Buzz!

The flames instantly spread and burned, enveloping the entire bed. In an instant, the blood on the bed disappeared, and it returned to being a slightly rough, barely soft bedsheet.

[Your spirituality value +3]

Chu Xuan raised an eyebrow; he hadn't expected to get such a gain.

He had just used the Fire of Nirvana at its lowest efficiency, deducting only 1 point of spirituality value per second, for a total of two seconds.

Counting it up, he had made a net profit of 1 point of spirituality value.

"Even a mosquito's leg is meat."

Chu Xuan immediately went to another bed, pressed his palm down as Black Flame emerged, and having the previous experience, he tried to use it for only one second this time.

[Your spirituality value +3]

"Only one second is needed..." Chu Xuan understood. He followed the same method and used the Fire of Nirvana on the other two beds as well.

The four beds, minus the consumption of the Fire of Nirvana, brought a total gain of 7 points of spirituality value.

[Current spirituality value: 459]

Next, Chu Xuan searched other places in the ward but found no more abnormalities.

Looking at the small room, Chu Xuan was about to leave and go to other wards when he suddenly had a thought and walked to one of the beds.

Chu Xuan slowly bent down and looked under the bed.

Under the bed, it was pitch black.

Even with Chu Xuan's current eyesight, he couldn't see anything; the darkness under the bed was as deep as a void.

"Get closer and take a look, I really want to know what's inside..."

This thought flashed through his mind uncontrollably, and Chu Xuan slightly extended his neck forward.

But in the next second, his eyes sharpened, and he suddenly stood up and kicked the bed over.

"Waa!!"

Accompanied by a scream, a dark shadow suddenly lunged at Chu Xuan, but before it could get close, it was grabbed by a palm covered in Black Flame.

The scream had just begun when, after being crushed by Chu Xuan and incinerated by the Fire of Nirvana, it directly dissipated.

[You killed a Strange Creatures, your spirituality value +18]

Without stopping, Chu Xuan kicked over the other three beds as well, but he didn't find any more dark shadows like the one before.

"The System prompt said the target was a 'Strange Creatures,' similar to the prompt when I killed the King, not specifically a Specter. This might indicate that the thing just now wasn't parasitized, but had become Corrupted itself..."

This guess flashed through Chu Xuan's mind, and his expression was slightly grave. It wasn't because of the System's kill prompt, but because he had almost been influenced into actually sticking his head under the bed.

"Heart Bewitchment? No! With my current Mental Energy, it would probably take an S-rank Specter to affect me, and that thing just now clearly shouldn't have been able to influence my spirit..."

While thinking, a thought suddenly occurred to Chu Xuan.

"Could there be a factor of rules involved?"

He hadn't become careless just because his strength had improved rapidly, but he had almost fallen for a trick just now, which forced him to be on high alert.

Thud, thud, thud...

At that moment, a knock suddenly sounded at the door.

Chu Xuan narrowed his eyes slightly and didn't make a sound. With the previous experience, he decided to wait and see, but in the next second, Chu Xuan suddenly felt a throbbing pain between his eyebrows.

A strong sense of crisis enveloped his heart.

[Your health points -80]

Chu Xuan's expression changed abruptly.

Click!

The ward door's latch popped open automatically, and a nurse nearly as tall as the ceiling, with her neck twisted as if broken, walked in. Her entire body was greenish-black, and blood was constantly seeping out of her red mask.

Her eyes were hollow, without eyeballs, and the sockets looked like two swirling black vortexes, staring straight at Chu Xuan in the ward as she made a shrill, eerie sound:

"Ward 902, it's time for your medicine..."

"Eat your mother!"

A surge of rage rose in Chu Xuan's heart, and he fired off a Slash with a wave of his hand.

With a thunderous explosion, the eerie nurse, along with the door and the entire wall outside, were split wide open. The wall collapsed, kicking up clouds of dust and Smoke.

...

[You killed a Strange Creatures, your spirituality value +26]

...

[Your health points -80]