Cold, pale, dagger-like claws, like poisoned daggers, tore through the viscous air, carrying a strong, nauseating smell of blood, striking directly at Ling Chen's vulnerable throat!
The distance was less than twenty centimeters! The gap between life and death was compressed to the extreme!
At the critical moment, the Soul Jade Physique erupted with its final icy will!
Time was forcibly stretched and solidified in Ling Chen's perception! The wing mark behind his right shoulder instantly sent a tearing, fiery pain, as if his flesh and blood were being forcibly ripped open by an invisible force! But this intense pain also instantly dispersed the last remnant of the illusion!
He couldn't dodge!
There was no time to retreat or turn sideways! The speed of that claw carried extremely high explosive power!
But his experience from his previous life made him incredibly calm! Ling Chen did not retreat; instead, his left foot stomped hard on the ground!
He lunged towards his right side—which was where he perceived the edge of the illusion, the edge of the flowerbed, a broken heather tree trunk—crashing into it! He forcibly pushed his body to the outside of the attacker!
Rip—!!!
The cold claw tips, with the crisp sound of flesh and clothing tearing, slashed fiercely across the outside of Ling Chen's right arm! Three deep, bone-revealing wounds, as if ploughed by a razor, instantly bloomed!
Warm, crimson blood spurted out like a fountain!
The immense impact sent his body crashing hard into the sturdy heather tree trunk behind him, like a kite with a broken string!
“Bang!”
The intense pain was like a tsunami, but his will from his previous life, honed over several years, was like the hardest alloy; he didn't even let out a whimper of pain.
And it was in this lightning-fast collision and intense pain that the illusion completely melted away like shattered glass! The bloody, foul-smelling reality of the ruins poured back in like icy tide!
The fragmented scene clearly presented itself before his eyes—wildly growing vines entwined around broken statues, the sickly sweet scent of wisteria pervading over the stench of blood. And the attacker's true form stood five paces in front of him!
A woman.
Or rather, what used to be a woman… a husk.
Her body looked much more complete than an ordinary ghoul, with no obvious signs of decay. She was even wearing a blue-black tracksuit and shorts, heavily stained with blood and grime, but still vaguely recognizable as a professional outfit—
A set of professional attire that originally belonged to a school sports teacher! Her figure could vaguely still be seen as slender and strong, but her skin was an unnaturally pale white. Her shoulder-length hair was disheveled, clinging to her sweaty cheeks and neck. Her hair was dark brown, but stained with dried, blackened crimson blood clots.
What was most unsettling was her face. The lower half of her face seemed to retain its original delicate contours, with soft lines and slightly parted lips, stained with a few drops of fresh blood—precisely the splatters from Ling Chen's right arm!
But the upper half of her face, especially the eye area!
Her eyes… were hollow!
It wasn't that she had no eyeballs, but where her pupils should have been, there were only two bottomless, swirling vortices!
The edges of the vortices were murky grayish-white, while the center was a deeper, dark red abyss, as if drawing in all light and reason! There were no whites of the eyes, no pupils; it was as if her eye sockets were not embedded with biological organs at all, but two entrances to a mad nightmare!
The center of those vortices seemed to be rotating ever so slightly, like nebulae in the universe, emitting mental fluctuations that distorted reality!
It was actually a mutated ability user, an extremely rare special case! For some reason, she had simultaneously awakened an ability and become a mutant!
At the same time, he also recalled the woman's name from before she died.
Zheng Xiyun!—The star teacher of the third-year sports group, the winning coach of the school volleyball team, and also the physical education teacher for several classes in Ling Chen's grade! She had considerable prestige among students for her vibrant and capable image and her precise and sharp training guidance! Fragments of memory flashed, forming the most terrifying contrast with the pale, hollow, twisted being with drooping arms and dripping fingertips before him!
Seemingly sensing that Ling Chen had broken free from the illusion she had meticulously woven, those "eyes," composed purely of mental vortices and not "looking" at any physical entity, suddenly locked onto Ling Chen's direction!
Although there was no actual focus, Ling Chen instantly felt as if his soul was being tightly gripped by an invisible hand, and an icy mental pressure crashed over him like a tsunami!
Ability: Daydream Nightmare, enhancement type, mental type, control type.
“Ling… classmate…” A strange, ethereal voice, as if coming through thick glass, sounded.
It was Zheng Xiyun speaking! That voice… still carried a hint of the gentle quality of Teacher Zheng from his memories? Like the concerned greeting of an older sister next door!
But this gentleness was more chilling than a hysterical roar! “When… training… you must… concentrate… no… slacking off…”
Accompanying this eerie "greeting," the corners of her mouth, on her face which appeared even paler and more broken against the tracksuit, slowly curved upwards as if forcibly pulled by an invisible hand.
That wasn't a smile; it was more like a forced arc! A hollow, stiff "smile," as if pieced together from a nightmare, solidified on her face!
Even stranger, she was clearly standing there speaking, several meters away from Ling Chen, yet Ling Chen once again felt a deadly threat! The threat wasn't coming from the front, but from… below?!
Ling Chen's retina caught an extremely faint reflection! It was in the weeds next to where he had just been knocked down! It was Zheng Xiyun's fingernail! A long, sharp fingernail had fallen off at some point!
It was silently flying along the ground at a speed that defied gravity! The tip of the fingernail shimmered with an eerie glow, a mixture of crimson and dark blue! It was a concentrated, deadly attack of ghoul poison and mental pollution!
Once an ordinary person was scratched, they would not only be poisoned, but their will would instantly disintegrate, pulling them into a deeper mental purgatory!
A double kill! Overt mental pressure with a disguised fatal smile for delay! Covert, silent flying nail for a swift kill!
“Is it because the awakening of the mental ability strengthened her brain, so she retained a part of her intelligence?”
Zheng Xiyun's combat instinct as a Daydream Nightmare mutant had perfectly integrated illusionary deception with ghoul slaughter! She didn't need to move at all! Standing there, she was a death trap on both mental and physical levels!
Watching the fingernail about to pierce his neck, Ling Chen's expression remained calm.
“Screech, screech, screech—!!!”
At the very last moment! The three dark Purple Lightning Bats that had been dormant on Ling Chen's shoulder for a long time let out an unprecedentedly sharp shriek!
Under Ling Chen's powerful mental coercion and control, they instantly broke free from their previous dormant disguise mode!
They were like three poisoned arrows released from a bowstring, carrying a crimson electric glow! They didn't attack Zheng Xiyun's main body, but rather, they recklessly lunged at the eerie poisoned nail flying along the ground!
Puff, puff, puff!
The three bats collided with the rapidly flying poisoned nail almost simultaneously!
Crimson blood and fragmented, charred muscle tissue splattered! But their collision also successfully altered the poisoned nail's flight path!
At the same time! The interfering sound waves spewed from the bats' mouths, carrying a small-range mental disruption, crashed like invisible ripples onto Zheng Xiyun's pure eyes, which were composed of mental vortices!
Boom!!!
Zheng Xiyun's stiff "smile," as if forcibly pulled out like a doll's, instantly froze! It was then torn apart by an uncontrollable, instinctive rage!
In her hollow, vortex-like eye sockets, the dark red center suddenly expanded! Like a provoked venomous snake raising its neck!
A silent mental shriek, far more intense than before, chaotic, insane, like billions of rusty needles stirring in the brain, erupted!
This shriek indiscriminately impacted the entire flowerbed area! The wildly growing vines trembled violently, their leaves blackening and curling!
But facing this seemingly immensely powerful blow, Ling Chen merely smiled faintly, walking forward with his hands in his pockets. A closer look would reveal that he had two earplugs in his ears.
It was merely the crudest application of mental power.
This mental shock was not only directed at Ling Chen! The anger, chaos, and especially the instinctive bloodlust characteristic of ghouls contained within it, like an invisible amplifier, instantly penetrated the vine barrier of the flowerbed and rushed towards the teaching building!
At the same time, Ling Chen had already walked in front of her, calmly swinging out a claw, a claw… with purple lightning.
Counterattack!
Such a large Purple Lightning Bat was not for nothing. Although the body strength of two blood patterns only allowed a certain part to possess powerful might, it was enough to deal with such brainless… oh no… slightly intelligent creatures.
Sizzle!
Ling Chen's right hand was now wreathed in electricity; his right hand had completely transformed into a mutated form. Five bone claws, sharp as blades, with jumping dark purple electric arcs at their tips, like poisonous snakes preying, fiercely grabbed at the only normal physiological feature visible on Zheng Xiyun's pale neck—her carotid artery, which was violently throbbing with rage—the instant her terrifying mental vortex eyes turned towards the bats and erupted in chaotic roars!
Pfft!
The fingertips were not a physical attack, but more like a penetration of some kind of energy! The dark purple electric arcs instantly disappeared into her skin like living things!
In an instant!
Zheng Xiyun's eye-socket vortex, which had been spinning like a mad nebula, suddenly stagnated! The dark red center, expanded to its limit, was as if frozen! The silent eruption of chaotic mental shrieks abruptly ceased!
Her stiff body violently twitched, as if pierced by high-voltage electricity!
Then her body stiffened, and she fainted.