Chapter 28: Strong Wall of the Soul |
The ghost Gizzard became even more foolish and blind.
The moment he was released, he charged straight in one direction.
Infinite Summer couldn't stop him, and before long, Gizzard turned back into a tattoo on his body by himself — that was beyond a thousand-meter range.
"What happened to you?"
Infinite Summer tried several times with the same result. When pushed, Gizzard still shouted, "Let me go! I thought of a solution! I can definitely untie it!"
But it was useless. Whenever he was more than a thousand meters away from Infinite Summer, he automatically returned to the man's back as a tattoo.
"Brother Xia, don't you know he got his mind warped by the tangled mess?"
Only then did Wu Zhong realize Infinite Summer had been unaware of this.
"The tangled mess?"
"I told him to deliver you to Containment Room 013!"
There was no doubt: the ghost Gizzard, in that state, was essentially ruined.
He no longer obeyed orders; once out, he went straight to look for the tangle.
Wu Zhong glanced at Yang Chunsha.
Infinite Summer's tone grew heavy: "Whether she heard or not doesn't matter. Just tell me directly!"
"Is the ghost tattoo—the only disaster artifact I own—just wasted like that?"
Upon hearing "doesn't matter," Yang Chunsha reacted not with relief but with dread.
She covered her ears and ran off: "I'm not listening! I'm not listening! Talk among yourselves, I'm leaving."
Infinite Summer flashed forward and pinned her to the ground with his foot: "Stay put!"
This Dim Passage was her turf. If she vanished, Infinite Summer wouldn't be able to find her.
She might even use earth magic to seal things and trap Wu Zhong underground.
So Infinite Summer wouldn't let her stray too far from him.
Hum! He trembled; purple light shone across the surrounding rock walls, viscous streams coating the stone. In an instant, everyone found themselves immersed in a gorgeous purple environment — clearly meant to block the Night Wandering Deity's prying from the dark.
Wu Zhong looked at the woman lying on the ground with her hands over her ears and told the whole story about the Unit 985 base.
After listening, Infinite Summer was shocked: "Weren't you carried out by Gizzard?"
"Gizzard broke the moment he went up?"
"You went out alone, only following my single sentence—'use the tunnel from Containment Room 013'—and you escaped?"
Wu Zhong nodded: "Yeah. Apart from Gu Yue and a few later hidden patrols, I didn't meet anyone else."
"All thanks to you, Brother Xia. You attracted all the attention, and without your intel, I couldn't have shaken off the tracking dogs."
Infinite Summer scrutinized Wu Zhong with an unprecedented seriousness: "This isn't just about my intel; you... you are truly the rare kind of..."
Wu Zhong blinked, not understanding what he meant.
Yang Chunsha shuddered and mumbled: "So that's the solution to the laughing grenade..."
A civilian who didn't even know how to use a gun, with two lines of intel and a simple door-welding ability, escaped a Unit 985 containment room, neutralized hidden patrols, and evaded tracking dogs.
Was it really his first time encountering a disaster artifact? He even self-solved after being hit by a laughing grenade?
Wu Zhong looked down at her: "It's very simple."
Yang Chunsha froze, covering her ears and crying out: "I didn't hear that! I didn't hear that!"
Infinite Summer withdrew his foot, took out a pill-like thing, and shoved it into Yang Chunsha's mouth: "Get up. From now on, he's your big brother."
"If you don't listen to him, or run off without his permission, no matter where you escape to, I'll detonate you remotely."
Yang Chunsha tasted bitter on her tongue, not knowing what she'd been given. The disaster world had all kinds of terrifying things.
She could only nod miserably.
Wu Zhong pointed at himself in astonishment: "Huh? Big brother? Me?"
"She knows magic; I don't know anything."
Infinite Summer patted his shoulder: "Don't belittle yourself. You're far stronger than this woman."
"She only knows magic, but you're a born contain-er. You're just lacking methods."
"You'll acquire diverse methods sooner or later, but your trait for solving disasters in a crisis is rare."
Wu Zhong said: "What kind of trait is that? I only had a sudden idea."
Infinite Summer sighed: "That single flash of insight—many people can't do that."
"With repeated exposure to disaster artifacts, experience yields tricks and methods, but how much experience is enough? Sometimes experience gets people killed."
"You ask her: what happens if you hit an unknown negative effect..."
Yang Chunsha pushed up her glasses: "Either despair or death... if you're lucky, imprisonment or being half-crippled."
"So I never dare accept missions that require confronting unknown disaster artifacts, no matter how rich the reward."
"Because those missions are basically traps—someone posts them out to lure the greedy to risk their lives to fetch intelligence."
"The laughing grenade is actually one of the milder ones. I once saw a silver-ranked expert knocked out by a grenade plus an air shield, then treated like a strung-out dog by the firefighters and dragged away..."
"On the platform, there was a bounty for intelligence on how to neutralize the laughing grenade—worth 300 Bits."
"But no one dared take it, because that angers Unit 985. It means directly confronting the world's top containment unit, or infiltrating Unit 985 to find their secrets."
"Whatever the method, a single mistake could result in being surrounded by the containment forces and making the task impossible."
"Not like you—trying it yourself, a flash of insight, and you crack it. Lucky or not, 'trying it yourself' is the simplest-looking but most difficult and dangerous route."
"Almost all the intel on disaster artifacts with negative effects was learned by people who risked or lost their lives."
Her voice grew bitter toward the end.
Don't be fooled by her money; she spent a lot too.
She just wanted to get by and never took high-level missions.
A job like today—helping a strong ally escape—is already dangerous. She hadn't done well and ended up in Infinite Summer's hands; pathetic and unlucky.
Wu Zhong pondered: "Is it really that difficult? If someone hit by a laughing grenade was captured but didn't deserve death, they'd presumably be debriefed, right?"
"If so, someone would learn the neutralizing method. Unit 985 must have leaks—maybe they uploaded it to the mercenary club? Maybe like a dream upload."
Infinite Summer laughed: "You think it's that simple? Kid, Unit 985 has memory-deletion features."
Wu Zhong realized—memory deletion? Oh, then never mind...
Infinite Summer looked at him: "But speaking of which, kid, you actually have mental resistance, no, even a psychic bastion... I never expected that."
"Mental resistance? Psychic bastion?" Wu Zhong tilted his head.
Yang Chunsha couldn't help but butt in: "Unit 985 soldiers and that ghost were both mentally warped by the tangle, but you weren't. You must have some kind of mental-resistance effect."
Wu Zhong touched his face: "I actually have a second trait?"
Infinite Summer shook his head: "Not exactly. It's probably just tied to your door-welding trait."
"But absolute traits like this can't be looked at one-sidedly; they're two-faced, even multi-faced."
"Like the Ever-Thirst effect example I gave before: labeling effects as positive or negative is human judgment. The trait itself isn't inherently good or bad."
"Blessings and curses coexist. For disaster artifacts this is normal. A trait with multiple sides can create strange effects in unpredictable domains."
"Your case... I guess that the moment you gained this trait, you welded your 'heart-gate' shut."
At the last words, Wu Zhong shuddered.
What? Heart-gate?
"Exactly. The heart-gate is also a door!"
Infinite Summer's tone was delighted: "Strictly speaking, it's the gate of the mind. Combined with the fact that the door you create can only be broken by you, others cannot destroy it."
"So your heart-gate blocks external intrusion. It's essentially a psychic bastion that stops mental corruption."
Wu Zhong pondered: "A gate of the mind can still crack, right? It's not absolutely sealed; can't mental corruption get through?"
Infinite Summer shook his head: "Hmm, don't interpret conceptual things with physical thinking."
"From what I understand, this should be a purely conceptual door, not your mind physically shaped into a gate. Does that make sense?"
Wu Zhong considered: "You mean the gate of the mind is immaterial, detached from the mundane world—it's a conceptual-level thing."
"It's called a door because people think entering someone's inner world requires a portal, hence the gate of the mind."
"Essentially, it's metaphor and imagination. Since it's metaphorical, it represents a definition, a concept."
"It's got nothing to do with physical form; it concerns function and meaning."
"And its purpose is to guard the passage into the mind."
"My absolute trait actually turns this so-called door's purpose on: I welded shut the defined 'guarding the gateway into the mind.'"
Infinite Summer didn't expect Wu Zhong to reason it out clearer than himself and clapped: "Ah yes, yes, that's exactly it."
He was very pleased, his eyes glittering.
Mental-resistance traits are rare; an all-encompassing psychic bastion is rarer still.
Wu Zhong possessed a cost-free psychic bastion, a diluted treasure!
Infinite Summer continued: "Maybe you can't use other conceptual gates, but you can use the one inside your own mind, of course."
"So the day you mysteriously gained your ability, you automatically got the gate of the mind."
"To you it's normal, so you don't feel it, but when external interference hits, the absolute-gate property shows."
Wu Zhong murmured: "Absolute Gate—is that the name of my power?"
Infinite Summer shrugged: "Names are given by people. Calling it 'welding doors' all the time sounded silly."
"In any case, your trait should be able to create various absolute gates. The doors you make in the physical realm are invulnerable in a soft way, but on the conceptual level of the mind, they're truly invincible."
"Because concepts aren't soft or hard—only existing or not."
"As you said, you welded the concept of 'guarding the gateway into the mind'—metaphysical, not something shaped like a specific thing."
Wu Zhong scratched his head: "Truly invincible? The laughing grenade almost killed me."
Infinite Summer was surprised, then laughed: "Hey, the laughing grenade isn't mental corruption; it forces you to laugh physiologically. Your consciousness and thinking weren't affected at all."
Wu Zhong tilted his head—indeed, his mind had been clear. Otherwise, he wouldn't have calmly solved it.
Infinite Summer gave a 'be grateful' look: "Actually, your psychic bastion is the closest to 'perfect' that I know."
"Even very powerful mind-warders pay some price, like being unable to sleep—the mind cannot rest."
"Absolute traits, you understand, that's how they are—blunt and uncompromising when they manifest in a person."
"No disaster artifact is tailor-made for humanity; they don't care about human concerns."
"But you're different. You nailed a metaphor of human civilization inside yourself. That's naturally very perfect."
"For example, natural hormonal influence, neural effects, external stimuli, emotional impulses—you still accept those normally; you don't resist them."
"But irrational, conceptual-level mental corruption, you automatically resist."
"That's the perfect psychic bastion: no price, no presence, so much so that you only noticed it now."
"Unless a higher-priority disaster artifact comes along, you're immune to all mental corruptions."
Wu Zhong asked: "What level of disaster artifact could invade my mind?"
Infinite Summer shook his head bitterly: "Who knows? Disaster artifacts have no consistent hierarchy. A beats B, B beats C, yet C might beat A."
"What I mean by higher priority could be something specifically designed to 'break the gate of the mind.'"
"Like 'If you don't have a gate, you're fine; if you have the gate, then this will definitely hit you.' Who can reason with that? Disaster artifacts are weird."
"So I said: there are no unchanging rules; only practice yields truth."
"You won't know what you can't be immune to until you try."
Wu Zhong's face contorted: "Trying could mean death!"
"If the negative effect is extremely terrifying, isn't that gambling with your life?"
Infinite Summer shrugged: "It's gambling with your life. The disaster world is full of risk—who hasn't gambled with their life?"
"Don't gamble lightly, but when it's absolutely necessary, you have to."
"Unless you're like her—someone who muddles along with no ambition."
He teased Yang Chunsha as he spoke; she looked unconcerned.
After understanding why the ghost Gizzard had been ruined, Infinite Summer felt helpless.
"Whatever, the ghost tattoo's ruined—ruined it is. We'll think of something later."
He pondered. Without being able to find the Night Wandering Deity and with his ghost assistant ruined, he needed Wu Zhong to have self-defense. He would have to rip off part of his own symbiote armor.
Purple light condensed on his chest, something alive shifting inside.
Infinite Summer reached in and tore; his face showed pain as he carefully pulled, as if tearing out an organ.
After a while he removed the purple mass and pressed it onto Wu Zhong's right shoulder.
At the same time, Infinite Summer's purple armor reformed; his right arm vanished, revealing an ordinary arm.
"Ugh!"
Wu Zhong screamed in intense pain as the thing immediately corroded his whole arm.
He felt like his arm was being chewed in a meat grinder, sweating from the pain.
"Endure it! This is my symbiote right arm—I'm lending it to you." Infinite Summer said solemnly.
Wu Zhong gritted his teeth and endured.
After a while things eased; the pain stopped.
His right arm looked normal.
But Wu Zhong could feel a living thing hidden in his flesh, connected to his nerves.
At his thought, a mass of purple fluid oozed out like countless tiny tendrils, spreading along his right arm to form a shimmering purple arm-plate.
Boom!
He threw a punch at the rock wall; a dull cracking echoed.
The stone blasted out into a punch pit. His fist sank into it.
Recoil hit him but was mostly absorbed; his arm trembled, his shoulder whipped back, and his body staggered a half-turn.
Whoosh! Boom!
At another thought, purple light gathered in his palm and shot forward, blasting a deeper hole in the rock.
Wu Zhong crouched to pick up a fragment of stone and crushed it into powder with a pinch.
"This arm has a two-ton grip, material strength ten times that of special alloy steel, and can absorb about one ton of recoil."
"Purple-melt ordnance's energy is roughly equivalent to 10 kilograms of TNT, but it's not explosive; its force focuses on corrosive melting and severing."
"Use it as you like; it consumes my Source Energy anyway."
Infinite Summer introduced this calmly while Wu Zhong grew wildly excited.
Yang Chunsha drooled, eyes glazed in envy.
Wu Zhong said: "It consumes your Source Energy? Then I'll conserve the purple-melt rounds. It's already more than enough to deal with the Night Wandering Deity."
Infinite Summer chuckled: "No need to conserve. I'm lending part of my symbiote—the main drain is what the piece on your body uses."
"As for the purple-melt ordnance, fire away. You won't run out. One Bit of energy I inject can charge seven thousand rounds!"
Wu Zhong's eyes widened—seven thousand rounds?
Yang Chunsha spoke sourly: "You think one Bit isn't a lot? Before Bitcoin was invented, the disaster world used TNT equivalent as the unit, with one kilogram equivalent to '1 point of multiversal power.'"
"Later they found Bitcoin could increase the holder's multiversal power, so the standard changed."
"The new standard: one Bit equals 77,000 points of multiversal power under the old standard."
She sounded proud as she spoke.
"You think my 20 Bits of Source Energy are little? I almost train daily and study that otherworldly magic to improve further."
"Many awakeners I know have only a few tenths or even hundredths of a Bit of Source Energy."
"My 20 Bits came from seven years of scraping by while training relentlessly."
Wu Zhong was first stunned—indeed, Yang Chunsha wasn't weak.
She built a vast Dim Passage and could tunnel five kilometers underground in an hour—no small feat.
But then Wu Zhong joked: "Don't you have over sixteen Bitcoins? So you trained for seven years and only increased by less than four Bits?"
...Yang Chunsha's face turned purple.
Infinite Summer laughed heartily, then vanished in a flash.