Chương 69: Chapter 68 — Training Arc (3)

Lin Che watched the pill-core hybrid drop from the man's head to the floor as his mind slowly shifted from curiosity into genuine panic rather than the detached calmness he usually reserved for himself. He put a hand to his chest without meaning to.

"Che," said Shen Yue, from somewhere behind him. He didn't answer — he was already mentally somewhere else, inwardly retreating to his mind and soul, which meant that the outside world had reduced to background noise now. It didn't take a genius to recognise that the pill was what turned this man into a mannequin. The side effects he'd thought he was experiencing due to grain issues were, most likely, the pill, or someone in charge of the pill, attempting to take hold of his entire body.

When the pill vibrated and the mannequin-like sensation ended, he'd naively thought that this cause-effect relationship was one of healing; not the opposite. The first thing he tried, standing there in the wreckage of the carriage with cores piled on the seats, was the obvious thing of attempting to expel the pill. He reached inwards with his own Qi and found the pill immediately, and simply attempted to push it out of his body, But it resisted.

Instead of being pushed in one singular direction, the force of Lin Che's Qi pressed into the pill, deforming it like a finger being pushed through clay. The moment he stopped pushing, it bounced back into shape once again. Therefore, Lin Che pivoted tactics. He drew a slow breath and redefined his sense of self to exclude the small foreign ball in his chest in an attempt to make his body passively hostile to the pill, just as the original Hollow Bell described.

The pill melted and dissolved inside of him, which seemed promising. Only, it once again reformed into a sphere the second he stopped focusing on it. Okay then, next method it is, thought Lin Che to himself, ignoring the fact that he was already most of the way through his list of methods. He growled a deep sound in his chest, relying on sound arts and resonance to shatter the pill the way he did to the mannequins on the train, and— Nothing. He stopped before he did any real damage to himself.

The single most precise instrument he had for taking things apart had absolutely no purchase on the thing lodged closest to his own heart. Which only left cruder options. Lin Che looked down at his own hands, and seriously began considering something he knew he wouldn't do. Theoretically, since the pill was a physical object inside of him, he could simply reach in and pull the thing out manually. A knife, perhaps.

Or even just his fingers reinforced with enough Qi to tear through skin and muscle and bone — this was all technically possible. His body could survive a great deal of trauma these days, and he wasn't sure of the limits just yet. The main issue with this idea, however, was that the pill sat deep rather than superficial.

It wasn't like a splinter sitting just beneath the skin, but was instead close enough to the heart that Lin Che could not be confident that an attempt to remove the pill would not end up with his own heart in his hand instead. And, even if he could survive the attempt — even if his body could survive the absurd physical trauma of digging a foreign object out of his own sternum — there was no guarantee, none at all, that killing himself in the process would reset him back to a version without the pill.

Which meant that there was a chance that he'd have to manually extract it at the start of every loop. At least I'd have good aim after a while, he joked to himself. So he threw out the idea of manual extraction for the foreseeable future. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. If it were possible to see a surgeon immediately, then he would have had a chance of successful manual extraction.

Unfortunately, however, he was stuck on a train headed out of the city, and, for whatever reason, it seemed unlikely that the next loop would be back in his bathroom. When it came to the loops in the holy land, Lin Che reasoned that, as it was in an entirely separate dimension, he looped back to the moment he entered it. When he returned to earth, his spawn point hadn't updated to his return, but rather stayed inside the bathroom. He was fairly confident that he was still on earth.

Which meant that his spawn location had been overwritten into him being mid-fight, surrounded by mannequins, in a train with far fewer potential routes for him to go down. Lin Che pushed the overflowing cores back onto one seat and sat himself down beside them. He closed his eyes and his hand found one of the cores from the pile, which he threw up a few inches and caught. He threw it again, and caught it again.

There was something steadying in the repetition of this movement; in the tiny predictable arc which he had near complete control over. Throw, catch, throw, catch. After the eighth or ninth repetition, another idea arrived in his mind: if the pill was resistant to being taken apart directly, then perhaps the answer wasn't to attack it, but to bury it. What if he overwhelmed the entire thing beneath a flood of something else entirely? Initially, he took the pill to get rid of grain.

So what if he distracted the pill with its original job of clearing grain? If he flooded his own system with enough foreign material — enough raw, undigested Qi, delivered all at once, in a quantity his body would have to scramble to process — perhaps the pill would find itself simply outpaced. He opened his eyes and looked at the core resting in his palm.

It was, he reasoned, already inert — whatever mortal had originally been turned into a mannequin was long past saving, the core the only remaining trace of whatever life had once animated the body it came from. There was no cruelty in consuming it that hadn't already been committed the moment the transformation took place. And, it was a plentiful resource. There were some forty of the things piled up next to him. Lin Che let the Boundless Intake Sutra loose and drew the core into himself.

Almost immediately, a flood of memories took over his vision. He was no longer Lin Che, but rather another man, Ma Yinglun, who was just slightly younger in his early-twenties. He was sitting in some cramped apartment counting money that clearly wasn't enough, with a voice on the phone promising to cancel his debts if he just took one job — an escort job on a train.

He met with his client in a poorly lit underground space, and a figure Lin Che couldn't quite resolve into a face was standing, elevated on a platform of clay, and looking him up and down. He paid extra attention to the face, and the memory sharpened and focused into a familiar shape. The last thing the man had ever known, before whatever remained of him became a mannequin was Elder Wong's hand closing in on his skull.

"Che." Lin Che opened his eyes. Shen Yue was crouched in front of him, hands moving off his shoulder now. Her face was more alarmed now than during the fight itself.

"How long was I—""Long enough," she said, cutting him off.

"The train skipped our stop."

"But the transfer station was the last stop."

"It passed it and didn't slow down. And now, look—" she pointed at the now updated electronic sign. Next stop: Dalian.

"The driver," he said.

"I thought that too," Shen Yue was already glancing towards the door which connected towards the driver's control panel.

"If they're compromised, or if they're—""Go," said Lin Che.

"Find out what's happening up there. If it's the driver, you know what to do." Shen Yue didn't argue. She simply nodded once before stepping over the ash and glass as she moved quickly towards the connecting door at the front of the carriage. Lin Che watched her go and waited for a while. There was no sound of her fighting, which was a neutral sign — noises could be suppressed by talismans, after all.

But he was confident that Shen Yue was doing fine in the front of the train, as it was better than thinking of the alternative. Lin Che fiddled with another core before using the Boundless Intake Sutra on it as well. This time, it was a young lady who was promised treatment for a drug addiction, and was genuinely glad to finally receive the help she needed. Instead of treating her withdrawals, the pill took over the moment she swallowed.

It seemed the pill could very easily transform a mortal into a mannequin, given how long it had taken to have minor effects on Lin Che in comparison to this poor lady. Lin Che opened his eyes again, just in time to see Shen Yue walking out of the driver's region with a large smile on her face. And, beside her, was her dearest Elder Wong carrying a mannequin core in her hand.