Su Mali writhed against the chains. In no time the soft skin of her wrists was scored with purplish welts.
"Sob, don't come here!" she shouted.
After half a year of grinding effort and two months at a bottleneck, the Rubik's Cube Space finally rose to the seventh tier today. Jing Shu had no time to inspect the new features, the new land, or the new space.
She jerked hard but could not break free. Fei Zhuzai had not underestimated them. He had used iron chains. Her life was in danger, and on top of that someone wanted to take advantage of her.
She flicked a covert glance toward the surveillance bug, weighing how to kill Fei Zhuzai without tripping his watcher.
Fei Zhuzai actually stopped.
Not from a sudden pang of conscience, of course. On his way over, he stepped on the terrifying bugs gnawing Da Mao's remains. Like an army of ants, they swarmed onto his body and began to bite.
Sometimes Jing Shu felt Su Mali's luck was monstrous. Even in a dead end like this, chance would throw in wild variables. Yet if she thought it through, it was inevitable. Da Mao's death had drawn the bugs. Anyone who walked across that patch would get bitten.
Fate was a strange thing.
"Bloody hell," Fei Zhuzai yelped, slapping at his legs. "Gou Zai, Da Lü, Shou Rou! Get over here and help me, quick!'"
Four underlings rushed in from the corridor, stripped off their jackets, and started swatting.
But in the apocalypse the bugs were not what they were before. After brutal natural selection, they had evolved into efficient killers. If it was dead or edible, they piled on.
In moments the five men were a flailing tangle. Cursing, stomping, and slapping, they crushed a lot of bugs, and already they were bleeding.
Just when they thought the bugs were handled, a few snakes slid out from the baseboard. Tongues flickering, slender bodies rippling, they began a fresh round of man versus snake.
Su Mali screamed. Part of her wanted the snakes to bite the men to death. Part of her begged the snakes to keep away.
Snake: Dear VIP8 customer, your wish has been received.
The snakes were shot, hacked with an iron shovel, or smashed, dying every which way, but before the men could bleed the wounds and expel the venom, one after another they swayed and crumpled.
The five step viper was among the deadliest, and these had been fed with Spirit Spring inside the space for a long time.
"Good bite."
"Well done."
Su Mali shouted from the side, "Finish them. Wait, the key. Where is the key to our chains?"
Key: Dear VIP8 customer, your wish has been received.
Head lowered and eyes closed, Jing Shu 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 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 could suggest thoughts to living beings and ultimately steer their actions.
She 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.
She realized too that this did not overwrite the old abilities. It unsealed them and then evolved into exactly what she needed.
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 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 could not bond or command them, which had disappointed her.
From now on, at the seventh tier, that problem was gone.
As she 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, she bonded to the snakes at once and received their feedback. She sent orders. Come out of the wall and fight, and in the end die together with them. Yes, together. If the snakes had spared her and Su Mali, that would have looked suspicious.
In the past she could only nudge a snake to bite a target. She could not direct how to strike or how to fight. Before, it had been suggestion. Now it rose to control.
With the upgrade, she could not only control the snakes but also receive execution feedback and even borrow their vision. As scouts they would be excellent, better than cameras and far more flexible.
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, a single decisive misstep.
She activated the hallucination power and nudged Fei Zhuzai, the one holding the key. A spark of delusion told him that Su Mali held his only hope of survival. He staggered and pitched forward onto her. The key dropped free, and he went stiff as the venom took him.
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 would be one of her trump cards. In a critical moment, a hallucination could save a life and tilt many outcomes.
The surveillance feed relayed the scene.
"So it is just as I thought," Lin Yi murmured, tapping the tabletop in a steady rhythm. After months of observation, he already knew how uncanny this young lady was. He had refused to believe it and put her through an elevator nightmare. A dead end should have been inevitable. Yet she came out unscathed. He staged an ambush with guns, and she still slipped away with ease.