Chapter 243: Back To That Key Moment ⑧

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Chapter 243: Back To That Key Moment ⑧

Leo quickly checked the people around him. Once he confirmed that no one appeared to be in immediate mortal danger, he triggered the alarm. While waiting for rescue personnel to arrive, he began replaying what had just happened.

The psychic-landscape simulation required students to enter a state of mental emptiness, construct their own psychic domains, and block out as much outside interference as possible. That was why Leo had not noticed anything wrong at first. By the time his brain sent him a danger signal, only a few dozen seconds had passed, but it was already too late to react.

The scene before him felt strangely familiar. After thinking for a moment, inspiration suddenly struck, and a hazy memory surfaced. Before his rebirth, his elementary school had indeed suffered a terrorist attack. He and the other children had all fallen unconscious and were not cured until several days later. Three children had died in that attack, while another fifteen permanently lost their chance to evolve.

Leo had been too young at the time to remember much firsthand; most of what he knew came from later news reports. Now history was repeating itself, and he had received no warning at all. The only difference was that this time, he had escaped the attack.

The same time, the same place, the same training exercise—so why had he avoided it this time?

A thought struck Leo. He looked down at the jade pendant hanging from his neck. If there was one variable that had never existed in the original timeline, it was this pendant, carved personally by his papa.

Just as he was thinking, hurried footsteps thundered from the far end of the corridor. The rescue team had arrived.

Before they could rush into the training room, Leo warned them, “It was probably a psychic-toxin gas attack. Put on respirators, and don’t use psychic scans.”

The words had barely left his mouth when several rescuers suddenly collapsed unconscious. They were the Sentinels responsible for reconnaissance, who instinctively scanned the surrounding area before moving in. Their psychic power was immediately contaminated by the lingering toxin, knocking them out on the spot.

The team leader’s expression turned grim. He immediately revised the plan and redeployed the rescuers.

By the time Shang Ke arrived, Leo was sitting beside an ambulance while a doctor examined him.

“Leo, are you all right?” Shang Ke crouched in front of him and used his psychic power to check his condition.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry, Papa.” Leo took Shang Ke’s hand and silently reassured him.

“I heard it was a poison-gas attack?”

“Yes.”

A cold glint flashed through Shang Ke’s eyes. “Those bastards. They’ve sunk low enough to target children now!”

The Anti-Government Alliance was a terrorist organization founded by ordinary people and had recruited many highly capable members. They regarded all Sentinels and Guides as enemies, convinced that these evolved humans would eventually exterminate ordinary people. Their sense of existential crisis was extreme to the point of irrationality, and for centuries they had devoted themselves to opposing the government ruled by the evolved.

As evolved humans grew stronger, the Alliance’s methods became increasingly vicious. No one knew how many innocent people had already become their victims. This time, they had not even spared children.

After the doctor finished examining him, Leo pulled the jade pendant from beneath his clothes. “Papa, this pendant…”

Seeing it, Shang Ke felt a wave of relief. As a precaution, he had carved a defensive formation into the pendant to protect the wearer’s soul. He had never expected it to prove useful so soon. Unlike the formations he had used in cultivation worlds, however, this one was powered not by spiritual energy but by the psychic power he had infused into it.

“Mm. This pendant can protect your psyche from contamination to a certain extent,” Shang Ke explained simply. “But it won’t help once contamination has already taken hold, so make sure you keep it on you at all times.”

Leo nodded in understanding and toyed with the pendant, gaining yet another new appreciation for his papa’s abilities. Even more than ten years in the future, no one had managed to create such a compact psychic-protection device. If everyone could carry one, wouldn’t that practically eliminate the threat of gas-based psychic contamination?

What Leo did not know was that the psychic power used to activate the formation had to come from a Guide. The higher the Guide’s rank, the longer the charge lasted and the better the protection. Once the stored psychic power was exhausted, the formation had to be recharged. Even with Shang Ke’s Rank-S strength, one infusion would last only about a year.

As they spoke, rescuers carried the unconscious victims out one after another. As the only person caught in the incident who had remained unharmed, Leo was naturally loaded into an ambulance with the others, accompanied by dozens of guards.

“Papa, if someone asks why I’m completely fine, what should I say?” Leo asked quietly.

“Tell them the truth.” Shang Ke saw no reason to conceal the formation in the jade pendant. He could apply for a patent later and eventually sell the devices openly. The problem was that carving the formation was not something an ordinary person could master. It had to be engraved in coordination with psychic power and demanded extraordinary precision.

Just as they were about to leave, another crisis erupted. The first rescuers who had been exposed suddenly woke from their comas without warning and began attacking everyone around them indiscriminately. In barely a dozen seconds, dozens of people were injured. Screams rose from every direction, and the scene collapsed into chaos.

Soon afterward, the children who had already been placed in ambulances began “waking” one after another. They cried, screamed, struggled, and fled in every direction.

Anyone looking closely could see the terror in their eyes and the distortion in their expressions, as though they were seeing something horrifying. Others might not understand what was happening, but Leo, with memories of the future, recognized it almost immediately. This was an evolved form of dissociation syndrome, one that caused victims to merge their nightmares with reality until they suffered a complete mental breakdown.

Amid the chaos, several Guides instinctively attempted mental guidance on the berserk victims to stabilize the situation. Every one of them became infected through the psychic contact and collapsed, making an already disastrous situation spiral even further out of control.

The pathogen could spread through psychic power. Guide support was not merely useless—it became another vector of infection. For the moment, their only option was physical force: restrain the berserk victims directly.

Unfortunately, there were too few security personnel and the scene was already out of control. Worse, the people going berserk were either armed Sentinels or unarmed children, making accidental injuries almost inevitable. Within only a few dozen minutes, the number of infected had risen from around forty or fifty to seventy or eighty.

“Requesting backup! Requesting backup!” the guard captain shouted urgently into his communicator.

“Papa…” Leo leaned against Shang Ke, worry written across his face.

Before he could say more, a child in their ambulance suddenly sprang off the stretcher and hurled himself toward the wall. He was a split second from smashing his head open when Shang Ke caught him with lightning-fast reflexes.

The child thrashed violently in Shang Ke’s grip, sobbing and screaming. His agitation seemed to trigger the other unconscious children as well, several of whom began showing signs of going berserk.

Leo was about to ask what they should do when Shang Ke suddenly pulled a small bottle from inside his clothes and flicked the cap open with his thumb. A sharply pungent odor immediately flooded the semi-enclosed ambulance.

The smell was appalling—like vinegar mixed into shit. Even an ordinary person could barely tolerate it, much less a Sentinel with hypersensitive senses. Leo clamped both hands over his nose and mouth, every hair standing on end, his face contorted as though he were suffering catastrophic constipation.

Then something astonishing happened. Under the assault of that horrible smell, the children who had been going berserk gradually calmed down and slipped back into unconsciousness.

Leo stared, wide-eyed. He could hardly believe that the problem had been suppressed so simply.

Shang Ke noticed his astonishment and explained, “I’m using a second olfactory stimulus to counter the first—fighting poison with poison. It can temporarily suppress the original toxin’s effect, but only for a few hours at most.”

He made it sound simple, but obviously not just any strong odor could produce this effect. Leo desperately wanted to ask how his papa had concocted something this bizarre. A pathogen that had plagued Ta for decades could not even withstand the smell. Wasn’t that absurdly overpowered?

Leo also understood the limitation: scent-based effects required a relatively enclosed space. Outdoors, the odor would disperse before it could build to an effective concentration. The Anti-Government Alliance’s gas attacks were restricted by the same principle; otherwise, Ta would have descended into chaos long ago.

“Boom!” The ambulance suddenly rocked violently with a deafening impact.

Shang Ke frowned. “Stay in the ambulance. I’m going out to take a look.”

He jumped down from the vehicle. Everywhere he looked, people were fleeing in panic. Laser fire flashed intermittently through smoke and dust. A security cordon had been erected around the area to keep the panic from spreading beyond it.

But seventy or eighty berserk infected people were no small threat. With Guides unable to assist, subduing them through force alone would inevitably cause casualties.

Worse still, one of the contaminated victims was a Rank-C Dark Sentinel. He unleashed a psychic attack that instantly infected dozens of nearby Sentinels. Newly infected victims initially only lost consciousness rather than going berserk, but lying defenseless in the middle of such chaos placed their lives in immediate danger.

“Captain, we’re down to barely a dozen people who can still fight!”

“Hold the line! Backup will be here soon!”

“How soon is ‘soon’? We won’t last another two minutes!”

“Fuck! Then hold on anyway! Is that combat armor you’re wearing just decoration? You’re the damn tank—so tank a few rounds of fire!”

The moment the Rank-C Sentinel attacked, the other infected Sentinels seemed to be stimulated by him and began activating their psychic power one after another.

Faced with chaotic psychic attacks from every direction, the guards did not dare raise psychic defenses. The moment they did, they would become infected as well.

Just as they were gritting their teeth and preparing for the worst, everyone suddenly felt their psychic power being pulled by an outside force. It began circulating automatically, flowing outward beyond their control and merging with the psychic power of the people around them until it formed a shared defensive field.

They were horrified. All they could do was watch as the infected Sentinels attacked, certain they were about to die. Yet after several moments, none of them showed any sign of infection. Only then did they realize that beyond their shared defensive field lay a second mental barrier: a pale-blue glow like an ocean, enclosing every one of them. It was this layer of mental shielding that blocked the pathogen’s psychic contamination.

Following the psychic fluctuations, everyone quickly traced the source of the barrier to the legendary Rank-S Dark Guide—Shang Ke.

“Stop standing there in a daze! I can block the psychic contamination, but I can’t stop weapons!” Shang Ke’s cool, clear voice rang through the air, somehow remaining perfectly audible even amid the surrounding chaos. As his voice spread, the Sentinels’ agitation gradually settled.

Watching from inside the ambulance, Leo’s eyes practically shone. His admiration for his papa erupted like a volcano. A jade pendant that protected against psychic contamination, a terrible-smelling concoction that suppressed the pathogen, and now a mental barrier capable of blocking its spread entirely!

Papa, from this day forward, you are officially my idol!

【Psychic power has broken through its bottleneck, advancing from Rank S to Rank SS. Attribute restrictions have been broken. Host is now compatible with all Sentinels.】

【Congratulations, Host. From this day forward, you will become the idol of the entire nation, a world-class superstar, and officially embark upon the road to building a harem.】

【Please open your arms and fill your harem to your heart’s content. One tiny Yonis can no longer satisfy our dear Host φ(≧ω≦*)?】

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