Chương 68: Chapter 67 — Training Arc (2)

There was no time to think. Lin Che already knew that in roughly four seconds, a set of nails would slice through his neck from behind, so he channeled his Qi the second his consciousness came back. It came up through him in a rush of relief, as though all of his power had been kept behind a dam that had finally broken. He used the very first instant of it to throw himself downwards rather than up in a desperate lurch to avoid decapitation.

The nails pressed close enough that he felt the air of them against the back of his neck, a near-miss, but a miss nevertheless. In fact, it was a miss that brought just enough time for the tribulation to send its first arc of Qi down into the moving train, the force punching a hole through the ceiling of the vehicle. The world went white and loud, the presence of the heavens filling the space between floor and ceiling with a crackling pressure which caused the bones in Lin Che's chest to vibrate.

The mannequins that had been holding him vaporised once the wrath of lightning infiltrated their bodies. The only remaining evidence of their existence was that of the cores from which they received their power and the scorched shadows imprinted on the carpet. With the nearest mannequins gone, Lin Che's next priority was to aid Shen Yue in combat. And, for that, she needed her backpack.

He could see her backpack still hanging by its one intact strap against the outside of the train, whipping in the wind at a speed that made the fabric look close to tearing, and, beyond it, a churn of green and yellow as the countryside blurred past at a velocity no sane person dared jump into. Lin Che jumped into it anyway. He broke through one window, and the glass caught him at the sleeves of his arms and his right thigh, drawing thin lines of blood he wouldn't notice until the adrenaline wore off.

Wind hit him with the solid force of an anvil, flattening his shirt against his chest and stealing the air out of his lungs on contact. He caught the strap of the backpack with one hand, his Qi reinforcing his grip onto the speeding snake lest he get picked up by the wind and end this life with a high impact, high velocity death. He'd already experienced one of those before, and he didn't intend on experiencing another so soon.

Lin Che hauled in the backpack, wrapping the strap around his wrist before re-entering through the nearest already-broken window. There was no convenient way back in — the frame was jagged with sharp glass and had to shred more of his flesh to re-enter the train, since breaking more windows would suck more air into the carriage, potentially causing his footwork inside the train to become much more unstable. In his absence, Shen Yue kept on fighting.

She was circled by four mannequins in a narrow aisle, and her limbs blurred in a series of strikes which all varied in their level of reinforcement, as though she were unintentionally rationing her Qi reserves. She turned and provided Lin Che a subtle nod, providing him with a cue to throw the backpack towards her. It sailed through the air in a direct arc towards Shen Yue, who caught it without looking.

Her free hand closed around the strap and dug directly through fabric and paper to reveal a deep, orange-brown pill, which she dry-swallowed with a slight wince. Almost immediately, her Qi output dramatically increased, thickening enough that her strikes were now imbued with lightning and frost elements. One punch stunned a mannequin, and the next strike froze it solid, before a roundhouse kick caused the entire construct to shatter and leave behind its core.

Lin Che turned his attention back to the mannequins closer to him. He didn't have to worry about Shen Yue, as she was clearly more capable than him in combat. He drew his breath and let the first note of the Hollow Bell Resonance whistle through his domain, causing the mannequin nearest to him to stagger as the resonance worked through the joints in its legs. In a narrow, metal container such as this, using sound arts simply made the fight unfair.

Sound had nowhere to go in here except through the things that were trying to kill him. One mannequin's head came apart along a hairline crack that widened over time, the crack spreading down the neck and into the torso before it simply crumbled into one singular core. Another mannequin jumped backwards, just beyond the reach of the Hollow Bell, but Lin Che charged forwards towards it. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Once the joints were disabled, it couldn't avoid the next attack, and it, too, crumbled into a solid core. Shen Yue, having defeated the mannequins on her side of the battlefield, watched Lin Che in combat in an attempt to better assess his strength. She had initially thought the man to be much stronger than her, but then he ended up being pushed onto the floor by a few mannequins. After that, however, they were annihilated by tribulation Qi — but it didn't seem like he was undergoing a breakthrough.

She hadn't probed his cultivation level just yet, still erring on the side of caution, but someone past their third body transformation would not have been cut so deeply by shards of glass, and, even if they had been, the wounds would have mostly healed by now. So, seemingly, he had undergone his second body transformation, which implied he was only just past the Qi Gathering realm — but that couldn't be the case.

She watched the constructs she'd been forced to use physical strikes on simply crumble and dissolve into dust by merely being in his presence. With the way the Hollow Bell Resonance worked, she could not hear the sound arts as the technique was entirely isolated inside of Lin Che's domain — the range at which he externalised his Qi. Since these arts were invisible, she had no way of knowing what they were without channeling her own Qi into her eyes.

But, since the constructs crumbled in his presence, Shen Yue came to the conclusion that she was correct all along, and that Lin Che was someone who, for whatever reason, hid his cultivation level and was certainly much, much stronger than he let on. She simply watched, mouth agape, as mannequin after mannequin folded in on itself and left behind their cores.

After the fighting ended, the two gathered all the cores and placed them onto one seat. There were so many cores that the pile ended up spilling onto the seat next to it too. Out of all of the passengers on this half of the train, only two hadn't been turned into mannequins: Lin Che and Shen Yue. Since the train kept on moving, it seemed like the driver was entirely unaware of everything that had been going on.

Perhaps the attacker had attached a silencing talisman or manipulated the driver into not noticing or not caring, but Lin Che did not pursue this trail of thought much longer. If the driver ended up being a mannequin, he'd deal with it after they arrived at the station, as, between the two of them, neither knew how to drive a train.

"Seems like they were only tier three," said Lin Che under his breath, hoping Shen Yue caught his words. She did.

"Almost forty cores," she replied.

"This was an expensive attack on us." She paused.

"Your enemies must be as wealthy as the Shen Clan itself, if not more." So she's fishing for information, thought Lin Che. Unfortunately for her, I also don't know who the enemy is.

"Do you want to keep the cores?" he asked her, eventually.

"I'm sure the Shen Clan has a better use for them, and I'm willing to sell you my half at a discount."

"You know I can't contact the clan right now," she said back.

"I left my phone behind as instructed."

"I'm sure you have a phone number memorised which you can call via the burner phone," he retorted.

"Besides, the terms of the sale will all be decided after we are back from Dalian."

"Alright," said Shen Yue.

"Empty one of the passengers' bags — we'll fill it up with the cores." Lin Che moved over to the nearest bag he could find. It was next to the half-mannequin half-man whose entire front half of the head he'd blown off with his fist. He looked at the man for a while longer and then looked back at his fist. It was too late for regrets — the man would stay dead no matter what he did. His new spawn point was set after his death, and no good would come from ruminating on this man's unfortunate demise.

He was already dead when he became a mannequin, Lin Che convinced himself. He looked down and reached for the bag, before he heard a buzz coming from the corpse's throat. The impact of his fist must have dislodged something, enabling a spinning pill to migrate upwards from the sternum and out the hole in the man's head. It was half-pill, half-core, and looked exactly like the pill deep inside Lin Che's own sternum.