The last four words were delivered with deliberate, crushing weight.
Qin Ruyan’s heart hammered frantically against her ribs, entirely out of her control. She realized with a jolt that she was utterly powerless against this man. His gaze, his tone—everything about him exuded an absolute, unquestionable dominance.
She struggled out of Lin Feng’s arms, her legs still trembling beneath her, threw him a withering glare, and practically bolted from the hospital room. "You just wait!"
Watching her hasty retreat, Lin Feng’s smile only deepened.
"Oh, by the way," he called out suddenly toward the doorway. "Make sure the agreement specifies that sleepover duties cost extra."
Qin Ruyan, barely reaching the threshold, stumbled and nearly hit the floor. She whipped around to glare daggers at him, but met only an expression of utter innocence. Lacing her teeth in pure frustration, she sped up and vanished down the end of the corridor.
Inside the room, only Lin Feng and a dumbfounded Su Aoxue remained.
Lin Feng’s smile faded, his gaze growing deep and distant. He walked over to the window, watching the endless stream of traffic below, and murmured to himself.
"Earth women have a certain charm after all. Compared to those nine arrogant saintesses of the Immortal Realm, she seems far more interesting... Pity, it is ultimately just a fleeting mortal trial, a dream one is forced to pass through."
The "nine saintesses" he spoke of had once been the brightest pearls of the Immortal Realm, each completely devoted to him, willing to give everything they had. Yet looking back now, how much of that so-called adoration was genuine emotion, and how much was simply awe of his power and authority?
At that moment, the door to the hospital room was shoved open violently once more.
A flamboyantly dressed, swaggering young man stormed in, flanked by two burly bodyguards in black suits.
"Where is Qin Ruyan? Get her out here!" the young man roared the second he crossed the threshold. His eyes swept the room and finally locked onto Lin Feng, filled with utter contempt and disdain.
"So you're that living corpse Lin Feng who's been asleep for three years?"
The intruder was none other than Qin Ruyan's cousin, Qin Kun. He had long harbored designs on Qin Ruyan and hoped to use her to latch onto the Qiao Family, viewing Lin Feng as an absolute eyesore. Hearing that Lin Feng had finally woken up, he had immediately rushed over with men.
Lin Feng turned around, looking at him with cool indifference, as if gazing at a buzzing fly.
Stinging under that stare, Qin Kun surged forward with a burst of rage. He pulled a thick stack of banknotes from his jacket and slammed them viciously onto Lin Feng's bed.
"Here is one hundred thousand! Take the money and get the hell away from my cousin! A loser like you, do you really think you're worthy of her? Don't push your luck! Get lost right now!"
Lin Feng’s gaze drifted slowly from Qin Kun’s arrogant face to the red bills scattered across the mattress. There was not a ripple of emotion in his eyes, only a faint, mocking amusement.
"One hundred thousand?" he chuckled softly, his voice low yet carrying clearly across the entire room. "Are you trying to brush off a beggar?"
Qin Kun froze, then flew into a fury. "What did you say? You're a useless vegetable who's been asleep for three years, and you think one hundred thousand is too little? Who the hell do you think you are?"
"How much I'm worth is not for you to decide." Lin Feng's gaze suddenly sharpened, as if it could pierce straight through a person's soul. "However, if you want to solve this with money, that's not out of the question."
He raised three fingers.
"Thirty million."
"What?" Thinking he had misheard, Qin Kun dug his finger into his ear with an exaggerated gesture. "Thirty million? Are you out of your goddamn mind? Why don't you just go rob a bank!"
"That is the price your cousin named herself to buy a single year of her freedom," Lin Feng said, his tone as flat as if he were stating a plain fact. "What's the matter? Coming from you, your cousin's value drops three-hundred-fold? Or do people in the Qin Family just talk nonsense?"
This remark was not only a direct insult to Qin Kun, but also a subtle reminder that he was already fully aware of Qin Ruyan's "transaction."
Standing to the side, Su Aoxue watched with her mouth hanging open, feeling as though her brain had completely stalled. A vegetative patient wakes up, insults the chief physician, strikes a contract-marriage agreement with a stunning beauty, and now is haggling over thirty million? What kind of insane reality was this?
Qin Kun's face flushed to the color of a bruised liver. Lin Feng's words struck like daggers, leaving him utterly humiliated and unable to back down. Driven mad by rage and dropping all pretenses, he waved a hand at the two bodyguards behind him. "Take him down! Break his legs! Let's see how arrogant he can be then!"
The two bodyguards, towering over six feet two with bulging muscles, instantly bared their teeth and closed in on Lin Feng from both sides. The heavy thud of their footsteps and the suffocating pressure they radiated made the air in the room turn dense.
Su Aoxue’s face went pale, and she instinctively cried out, "Stop! This is a hospital!"
No one paid her any mind.
The bodyguard on the left threw a punch with a fist the size of a sandbag, cutting through the air with a whistling rush straight toward Lin Feng's face. If that blow landed squarely, forget a patient who had just woken up—even a healthy man would suffer a concussion.
At the exact instant the fist was about to connect, Lin Feng moved.
He didn't dodge, nor did he even shift his stance. He merely raised his right hand in an unhurried, casual motion, bringing his index and middle fingers together to tap forward lightly.
The movement was effortless, as if he were swatting away a stray gnat.
*Thud!*
A dull impact echoed through the room.
The bodyguard's immensely powerful fist was precisely intercepted by Lin Feng's two fingers, unable to advance even a fraction of an inch further.
Time seemed to freeze in that exact moment.
The fierce snarl on the bodyguard's face instantly vanished, replaced by sheer, unadulterated terror. He felt as though his fist had slammed into a piece of white-hot iron, and a blinding, agonizing pain surged instantly from his arm straight through every meridian in his body!
"Agh—!"
A piercing scream shattered the quiet air. The bodyguard yanked his hand back, clutching his right arm as he rolled frantically on the floor. His entire arm turned bluish-purple at a visible speed, gripped by violent, uncontrollable spasms.
Seeing this, the other bodyguard was scared out of his wits. The charge he had just initiated ground to an abrupt halt, and he stared at Lin Feng in absolute horror, too terrified to take another step forward.
The entire sequence had happened in the flash of a spark.
The savage grin on Qin Kun's face remained frozen, his mouth wide enough to swallow a whole egg.
Su Aoxue covered her mouth, her beautiful eyes wide with sheer, disbelieving shock. She had seen it with absolute clarity: Lin Feng had disabled a giant of a man using just two fingers! That was power and skill no ordinary human could possibly possess!
Lin Feng didn't even glance at the wailing bodyguard on the ground, instead turning his cold gaze back to Qin Kun as he took a slow step forward.
"You..." Terrified, Qin Kun stumbled backward until his spine hit the cold wall with nowhere left to retreat, his voice shaking uncontrollably. "D-don't come any closer! I'm warning you, my dad is a director at the Qin Group! Just try laying a hand on me!"
Lin Feng stopped right in front of him, looking down from above with an icy curve at the corner of his lips.
He raised a hand and patted Qin Kun's pale, terror-stricken cheek lightly.
"Go back and tell your master: if you want to settle this, bring some genuine sincerity."