Chuanmu’s quality was very high; he quickly regained consciousness, and then even more quickly discovered that his left hand had lost all feeling.
Or rather, it had been blown off.
This was impossible.
His body had been strengthened and purchased several times over, long since not what it used to be; even small-scale explosives used normally would only burn a few layers of skin if detonated on him.
And that mere cigarette…
No, it was obvious, that couldn’t be an ordinary cigarette explosive; it was a special Phantasms explosive! It contained Fantasy Factor, which was why it had such a harmless appearance and bizarre power!
Bang!
Before he could even get up, he was knocked back to the ground by Qingye Heshi with an air bullet just as he started to climb.
At this moment, Chuanmu further realized that Qingye Heshi was no longer the child of his friend he remembered.
He had heard that Qingye Heshi also possessed Fantasy Factor, but he had it too, and even multiple ones, so he didn’t think he would be much weaker than the other party.
But the recent exchange made him realize something was wrong.
Qingye Heshi’s violence index subtly showed a tendency to surpass his own.
“Considering you are my father’s good friend, I will spare your life, but given your previous actions, don’t expect to live a comfortable life,” Qingye Heshi said to Chuanmu.
“Heh, ridiculous,” Chuanmu spat out blood foam, laughing miserably, “How ironic, I’ve been working so hard for Zong Si for so many years! As long as I kept doing things step by step, I could make him wake up! And now, the final and biggest obstacle standing before me is you, Qingye Heshi! Zong Si’s filial son!”
“I told you, don’t use my father as a shield,” Qingye Heshi said mercilessly.
“How can you be so sure I’m deceiving you? Do you know why Zong Si was attacked and ended up like this?!” Chuanmu questioned.
Qingye Heshi subconsciously held his breath.
In fact, he really didn’t know; that day he was at school, and when he heard the news and rushed back, his father was already in that state.
Ichinose Supervisor, who was closest to his father, also didn’t know, and the only one who did, Chuanmu, disappeared shortly after.
“Then why the hell don’t you say it?!” Qingye Heshi finally couldn’t help but curse.
“The Banmu Office reached a certain scale back then and was targeted by a group of guys. That Illusion, it’s an Illusion that takes people’s mental consciousness as property!” Chuanmu quickly revealed the truth.
“…You found that Illusion?” Qingye Heshi was silent for a moment, then asked.
“Of course I found it, but Zong Si’s consciousness had long been used as property. To get it back, we need more chips, more ‘money’.”
Zheng Fan, hearing this, raised an eyebrow.
“Then your calculations for this return…”
“I don’t care about the Banmu Office. Ultimately, it’s just Zong Si’s ideal, and I was just accompanying him. All these people, aren’t they ready-made money? With the Banmu Office’s current scale, if we manage it a bit, we can accumulate even more ‘wealth’! Then Zong Si can wake up!”
Chuanmu staggered to his feet, looking at Qingye Heshi with a sinister smile: “Now I’ve told you everything, filial son, it’s your choice. Do you want this chaotic office, or do you want your father back? As long as you hand over the main authority of the office to me, most of your forces can be retained, and you and your subordinate studios will naturally be safe and sound. Wouldn’t it be good if we worked together to wake Zong Si?”
Zheng Fan covered his mouth beside them: “What touching friendship.” No emotion.
Qingye Heshi briefly lowered his head in silence, his breathing somewhat rapid, then he looked up, suppressing his anger, and said word by word: “What a load of bullshit. These brothers who have followed us for so long, you just treat them as ‘wealth’ in your mouth?”
“Hahahaha! Truly his filial son! You don’t deserve to be his son!” This answer was not unexpected; Chuanmu laughed wildly and then shouted loudly towards the warehouse: “Open for me!”
As soon as he said this, Su Hongyuan and the others hesitated slightly.
But then they thought about how their bodies were almost burned bald by those lunatics, and they immediately dared not hesitate any longer. Especially Su Hongyuan, who was even more puzzled: Cheng Fei and his group had worked under her for a while back then!
Were these arsonist explosion maniacs really the same group of common hoodlums from back then?!
What did Cheng Fei experience that night he went to trouble Lin Yilin, and what kind of wrong medicine did he take!
Without daring to think further, each of them immediately pulled out a small bottle from their bodies. The bottles were filled with greyish-white mist, which they randomly threw in all directions.
The bottles were either shattered in mid-air or broke upon hitting the ground.
The seemingly thin mist, after losing the restraint of the bottles, began to spread and expand, like a suddenly enlarged marshmallow, instantly enveloping them.
Zheng Fan, Qingye Heshi, and Chuanmu, at the edge of the mist, were not spared either.
Qingye Heshi tried to disperse the mist with air currents, but it was useless. He shouted: “You’re creating an overlap here?!”
“We’ll see each other again, filial son!” Chuanmu’s voice, whose figure was already invisible in the mist, faded away faintly.
“Overlap?” Zheng Fan asked.
“This is a method of artificially creating World Overlaps. They actually got their hands on this; it’s forbidden in the Dadu,” Qingye Heshi suddenly remembered: “Were they preparing for this when the Mist World approached earlier?”
Zheng Fan vaguely had some impression of it; a newspaper Lin Yilin bought during the foggy weather seemed to mention a brief overlap of the Mist World in a certain Grey District of the Dadu.
He couldn’t remember the specific Grey District.
But if connected… presumably that Grey District was either Xixikede, or somewhere very close to Xixikede.
After the mist descended, visibility dropped to an extremely low level.
Only a greyish-white expanse surrounded them; a slight lapse in attention could lead to being separated here.
The vision swallowed by the mist also took away the noisy and chaotic sounds.
“That…”
“Quiet,” Qingye Heshi warned.
“Huh?”
Qingye Heshi lowered his voice: “In the Mist World, sounds might attract hunters from within the fog.”
Zheng Fan scratched his head. What the mist deprived them of was not just vision; to be precise, it deprived them of most of their reconnaissance and perception abilities within this mist.
Vision was the first to go, then hearing, while smell wasn’t as noticeable…
“But it’s not that easy to encounter them; you still need to be careful,” Qingye Heshi reported after using air currents to confirm their surroundings.
“You’re quite good at this.”
“It’s not that I’m good at it; Fox Rabbit is good at it.”
“Hútu?”
“Fox Rabbit.”
“Hútu.”
“…It’s my Illusion; it’s formed from the overlap of the Mist World and the Black World,” Qingye Heshi refused to engage in ineffective communication with Zheng Fan, but it was difficult to persist under Zheng Fan’s influence.
“Then how do we get back?”
“The overlap is only temporary. Don’t run around too far from the original spot; just wait quietly. This should be the escape route Chuanmu and the others prepared for themselves… what a pity.” Qingye Heshi now really wanted to personally finish off Chuanmu.
He shouldn’t have shown mercy just now out of respect for his father; that lunatic.
Suddenly, in the mist, a dazzling white light pierced through, which even the peculiar mist around them could not conceal.
Scattered footsteps slowly approached, followed by figures appearing in the mist.
Under the gaze of Zheng Fan and Qingye Heshi, that not-at-all-pleasing figure appeared.
“I knew there’d be a lot of trouble on your side, good thing I stayed a bit… What’s wrong?! You all look like that when you see me?” Hong Yijia had just started to show off a little, but then she looked closely and saw that both Qingye Heshi and Zheng Fan were genuinely showing expressions of considerable disgust, like seeing someone else’s mischievous child visiting during a holiday.