Su Mali's body writhed against the heavy iron chains, the metal clinking rhythmically in the damp silence; in no time her wrists' soft skin was scored with deep, purplish welts from the harsh friction.
"Sob, don't come here!" She shouted, her voice cracking with terror as she strained against her bonds.
After half a year of grinding effort and two months at a frustrating bottleneck, the Rubik's Cube Space finally rose to the seventh tier today. Jing Shu's mind buzzed with the transition, but she had no time to inspect the new features, the new land, or the expanded dimensions of the new space.
She jerked hard against the cold metal, but she could not break free. Fei Zhuzai had not underestimated them; he had used thick iron chains that bit into her skin. Her life was in immediate danger, and on top of that, someone wanted to take advantage of her while she was pinned.
She flicked a covert glance toward the tiny pinhole surveillance bug, weighing how to kill him without tripping his watcher.
Fei Zhuzai actually stopped in mid-stride.
It was not from a sudden flicker of conscience, of course. On his way over, his heavy boot stepped on the terrifying bugs gnawing Da Mao's remains. Like a dark army of ants, they swarmed onto his body and began to bite with a relentless, stinging ferocity.
Sometimes Jing Shu felt Su Mali's luck was monstrous; even in a dead end like this, chance had thrown in wild variables. Yet if she thought it through, the outcome was inevitable. Da Mao's death had drawn the bugs to the blood; anyone who walked across that specific patch would get bitten.
Fate was a strange thing.
"Bloody hell," Fei Zhuzai yelped, slapping frantically at his legs. "Gou Zai, Da Lü, Shou Rou! Get over here and help me, quick!"
Four underlings rushed in from the dark corridor, their boots thudding on the floor. They stripped off their jackets and started swatting at the swarming insects.
But in the apocalypse, the bugs were not what they were before the world fell. After a period of brutal natural selection, they had evolved into efficient, aggressive killers. If something was dead or edible, they piled on without hesitation.
In moments, the five men were a flailing, shouting tangle. Cursing, stomping, and slapping at their clothes, they crushed a lot of the bugs, and already they were bleeding from dozens of small, sharp bites.
Just when the men thought the bugs were handled, a few snakes slid out from the gap in the baseboard. Tongues flickering and slender bodies rippling over the tiles, they began a fresh round of man versus snake.
Su Mali screamed at the sight of the scales. Part of her wanted the snakes to bite the men to death; part of her begged the snakes to keep away from her.
Snake: Dear VIP8 customer, your wish has been received.
The snakes were shot with pistols, hacked with a rusted iron shovel, or smashed against the wall, dying every which way; but before the men had bled the wounds and expelled the venom, one after another they swayed and crumpled to the floor.
The five-step viper was among the deadliest in the region, and these had been fed with Spirit Spring inside the space for a long time.
"Good bite," Jing Shu thought, watching through narrowed eyes.
"Well done." Su Mali shouted from the side, "Finish them! Wait, the key. Where's the key to our chains?"
Key: Dear VIP8 customer, your wish has been received.
Jing Shu's head was lowered and her eyes were closed as she used the seventh tier of the Rubik's Cube Space in earnest for the first time.
Yes. If tiers one through six had a sealed-away potential, tier seven finally lifted the seal.
She finally understood why, before the upgrade, her awareness had blurred and her mind had swum until she could not tell dream from waking. The seventh tier had spawned a power that made living things inside the space's domain suffer pronounced sensory disruption: in other words, hallucinations.
Put simply, it had suggested thoughts to living beings and ultimately steered their actions.
Jing Shu also understood why she had been compelled at four every morning to get up and practice the cube; the new power had been pushing her from within.
She realized too that this did not overwrite her old abilities. It unsealed them and then evolved into exactly what she needed for survival.
Before, she had to live with the bees for half a year to influence them. She had to feed Xiao Dou a great deal of Spirit Spring to slowly forge a master-servant bond. That was before the hallucination power was unsealed.
She had lived with the five-step vipers for two months and still couldn't bond or command them, which had disappointed her.
From now on, at the seventh tier, that problem was gone.
As Jing Shu understood it, the Rubik's Cube Space now let her plant suggestions in the creatures within and induce perceptual errors. The suggestion was simple: "Jing Shu is your master. Obey Jing Shu."
So when the upgrade finished, Jing Shu had bonded to the snakes at once and received their mental feedback. She sent out the orders: come out of the wall and fight, and in the end, die together with the men. Yes, together. If the snakes had spared Jing Shu and Su Mali, that would have looked suspicious to the watcher.
In the past, she could only nudge a snake to bite a target. She could not direct exactly how to strike or how to fight. Before, it had been a mere suggestion. Now, it rose to total control.
With the upgrade, Jing Shu could not only control the snakes but also receive execution feedback and even borrow their thermal vision. As scouts, they had been excellent; they were better than cameras and far more flexible in the dark.
This was the hallucination power that induced cognitive errors in the space's creatures. It sounded minor, but it was formidable. Inside the space, she was the sovereign.
As for the part of the real world overlapped by the space, she would not go as far as directly seizing people's minds. But she could induce a flicker of cognitive slip, a brief suggestion, or a single decisive misstep.
She activated the hallucination power and nudged Fei Zhuzai, the one holding the metal key. A spark of delusion told him that Su Mali held his only hope of survival. He staggered and pitched forward onto Su Mali. The key dropped free, hitting the floor with a metallic ring, and he went stiff as the venom took hold of his heart.
Su Mali got the key with no difficulty.
To make a person see things for a heartbeat, to choose wrong for a heartbeat: this power was strong. It had been one of Jing Shu's trump cards. In a critical moment, a hallucination could save a life and tilt many outcomes in her favor.
The surveillance feed relayed the scene to the distant monitor.
"So it's just as I thought," Lin Yi murmured, tapping the tabletop in a steady, rhythmic cadence. After months of observation, he already knew how uncanny this young lady was.
He had refused to believe it and had put her through an elevator nightmare. A dead end had been inevitable. Yet she came out unscathed. He had staged an ambush with guns, and she still slipped away with ease.