Volume 8: A Trip to the Sick Village Chapter 400: Overwhelming Power
Finally, Marshall crossed that boundary line.
Ze Luo's hand was still on Ke Lan's back without moving away, so Ke Lan could still see things that were invisible to the naked eye - Marshall's mental power appeared as a dark blue in this field of vision. He put on a piece of armor condensed by mental power, and those black tentacles kept whipping the armor, and then broke it apart.
Although this scene looked a bit like "an egg hitting a rock", under the continuous attacks of the black tentacles, the thickness of the dark blue armor was decreasing at a speed visible to the naked eye. The collapse of each black tentacle could disintegrate a small part of the armor, and countless fine powders flew up from the surface of the armor and quickly turned into nothingness.
Although Marshall was constantly repairing the armor, the gap between the repair speed and the consumption speed was getting bigger and bigger. It was estimated that within ten seconds, the armor would be completely destroyed.
Marshall was already in a situation where he couldn't move forward, but he could only push forward with all his strength - if he chose to retreat, all his defenses would completely collapse in an instant.
"Zeluo, pull him back!" Ke Lan shouted.
The girl nodded and stretched out a slender arm forward. Suddenly, several sharp thoughts like blades penetrated into the control field of the puppet individual, cutting off all the black tentacles around Marshall. Marshall seized this opportunity and quickly retreated from the quagmire.
"Damn... this thing is so strong that it's abnormal..." Marshall wiped away the blood that once again flowed out of his nose and said with a gasp, "Its absolute control area is just like that corridor full of radiation. With every step forward, the strength will increase several times!"
"Are you okay?" Ke Lan glanced at Marshall. Not only was his nose bleeding, but a small amount of blood was also seeping out of the corners of his eyes and ears. His face was an abnormal purple-brown color - this was caused by large-scale rupture of subcutaneous capillaries.
"It's OK. I won't die for now." Marshall forcefully spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva. "Just now when I rushed in, this thing was screaming in my head again. Luckily I was prepared this time, otherwise I probably wouldn't be able to come back."
"But what makes me feel strange is that this thing clearly has the power to kill us easily, but why hasn't it taken the initiative to attack us?" Ke Lan said in confusion. After all, this is not a single-player game with a storyline, and NPCs and monsters will not go offline when the game player is speaking lines.
"This can't be because of you, right?" Ke Lan looked at Ze Luo who was standing aside.
Ze Luo shook his head and said, "It took away the thoughts that originally belonged to those sacrifices, so its power is stronger than mine."
"Much stronger." The expressionless girl added.
"The intentions of the sacrifices...are they the obsessions?" Ke Lan asked, "These things sound very illusory. Can they be used to improve strength?"
"Yes." The person who answered Ke Lan was not Ze Luo, but Marshall. "If the thoughts she refers to are mental power, then for people like us, as long as we can integrate them, we can improve our strength. You said that the heretic sect killed hundreds of people in order to create this thing. If the mental power of these hundreds of people is gathered together, it will be a very terrifying force."
"A terrifying power? But... these people are just ordinary people. Let alone a thousand people, even if there are ten thousand people, it is absolutely impossible for them to succeed in lifting a stone with their mental power... If quantitative changes in something like mental power can lead to qualitative changes, the world would have been in chaos long ago." Ke Lan said puzzledly.
Apart from anything else, in the old era, there were nearly 10 billion people on Earth, and every moment there were people imagining some strange things in their heads. If something would come true just because enough people imagined it, then the Earth would probably have been destroyed before the Ark was built.
"But they can strengthen the minds of these people... Because these people are already dead, there is no need to consider whether they can withstand the power of their minds amplified by 'that thing', so they can strengthen the brains of the dead without restraint. In this way, it is equivalent to combining the power of thousands of experimental subjects together." Marshall said in a deep voice, "Although I don't know how the carrier of this power was created, anyway, they did it."
"'That thing'... is it the device used to stimulate the subjects' mind power in the telekinetic human experiment?"
"Well, it's a cabinet made of some weird alloy... well, it looks like a coffin. They would put the test subject in the coffin, fill it with LCL liquid, and then insert hundreds of electrodes into the test subject's head - just like acupuncture in ancient Chinese medicine. When that thing is activated, the test subject lying inside will fall into an extremely absurd yet extremely real dream. If they can wake up from the dream, it means that they have completed a strengthening process..." Marshall recalled.
"What if he doesn't wake up?"
“Then it goes directly into the waste disposal process.”
"So... is the chance of waking up high?"
"I'm not sure. It varies from person to person. I've been through 17 enhancements, which is one of the best among the test subjects. But during the last enhancement, I almost drowned in that strange dream. According to those white coats, I lay there for eleven days and they thought I would never wake up. As for that guy Asano Akira, it seems he only went through four enhancements."
