Chapter 108: Trigger

Luo Qi's Consciousness World began to grow unstable. Those fragments of consciousness radiating pain constantly snatched at his attention. He faced the dark currents of countless emotions with suspicion, when suddenly, a clearer, more powerful consciousness stirred. He was drawn in, leaning in to listen.

He heard that voice coming from the volcano beside him. Magma churned, and a steady thought spoke in a voice like thunder, yet the content of what it said was very simple. Because it was simple, it was full of power, without a shred of doubt. He carefully identified it; it was Du Zhengyi's thought, conveying only one will—ignore it.

Luo Qi strove to strengthen his own thinking based on this will, gathering up those now-useless feelings of sympathy, empathy, fear, and shrinking away. He first returned to the depths of his own consciousness, arming himself from the root, and stabilized his Mental World. Then he returned to the surface-level Consciousness World and began to search for the culprit's consciousness, which lay as still as a pool of water because its host was in a coma.

Luo Qi looked into the deep pool, stripping away the surface-level emotions, and in the blink of an eye, he was inside the deep pool. He kept pushing aside those chaotic, disorganized consciousnesses, but some consciousnesses caught his attention; they occupied too prominent a position in the surface consciousness. It was as if someone were forcing this person to keep thinking about a certain thing. Luo Qi pondered and began to set about examining this segment of consciousness.

A moment later, Luo Qi began to swim toward the deeper parts of the pool. Deep-level consciousnesses kept rushing toward him. Luo Qi had no time to explore his thinking in the form of structures; he simply delved deep in the form of a stream of consciousness, searching for those most important nodes in the depths of this person's memory.

In the deep water, Luo Qi encountered a massive vine knot, the contents of which spread out countless branches and leaves within this person's mental world. Luo Qi carefully examined this vine knot; it looked like it had been there for a long time, and the structure that had spread out was complex, not looking like it had been implanted by someone. He ignored these intangible vine structures and went straight into the core. He unfolded these memories and discovered their structures were much the same, so he randomly entered a memory fragment.

The world grew brighter, but it was far from bright; it was as if it were forever overcast in these memories. Luo Qi rashly extended his feelers, briefly merging with the owner of the mind, and a surge of intense fear immediately gripped him, nearly making him vomit in the Consciousness World.

He looked up in someone else's memory and saw a stupid, square-shaped face. That face glared at him with two giant yellow eyeballs, and Luo Qi was so frightened his heart palpitated. He immediately realized this was a distant memory; the true appearance of events had already been transformed by the mind. It was like a modern oil painting, describing the truth of the heart rather than the truth of the world.

The giant with yellow eyeballs burned with rage. This world was filled by the giant and began to become meaningless. He began to yearn for an end, to yearn for death. A belt lashed out, and Luo Qi shuddered in fear. At first, there was a shame more painful than the pain itself—the shame of being beaten—and then the pain surpassed everything, and the man wailed aloud. Luo Qi trembled and turned down the frequency of his empathy, soon realizing the host was begging another person for mercy.

Luo Qi saw a woman. She was not deformed, but her face bore a hard coldness and ugliness. She turned her face away, refusing to look at him, and a guilty conscience made the expression on her face exceptionally rigid. "Your father is disciplining you for your own good." Luo Qi cringed at this sentence.

He unfolded the next level of sub-memories. That woman was also trembling in front of the man. She could not keep herself from being beaten, yet she could not stand with her son, blindly pandering to her husband—weak, yet heartless.

Luo Qi did not perform precise measurements within the structure, but he roughly sensed the existence of a critical threshold. This human's spirit was far more sensitive than the average human's. Although he could not perceive the world like a Mage Telepath, he was already approaching that critical threshold. He perceived harm more than the average human, and when the trauma in his heart repeatedly tortured him, he could not call for help like a Mage, nor could he save himself like a Mage.

He exited this fragment and immediately entered other memory fragments; each one was much the same, one fragment after another composing a desperate childhood.

Luo Qi wandered in a bottomless dark Abyss. The joy of being human was entirely absent. Luo Qi felt this darkness beckoning to him; it extended its tentacles to compare itself with Luo Qi's pain. Luo Qi chewed out an unsolvable misery from within his pain. Luo Qi backed out and pushed away this darkness. His path was overhead. He kept looking back at his own world to prevent this darkness from swallowing him. His self was connected to a trustworthy Anchor Point, and he used the consciousness evoked by the Anchor Point to distinguish his self from his surroundings.

He retreated toward his own world. Near the surface-level consciousness, he once again encountered that constantly flashing memory. He hesitated for a moment and moved to disperse this layer of memory. It was not forgetting, but rather, like modifying a layer in an image, he moved this layer of memory away from the focus area. He felt the person's violent headache vanish; he should have completely fallen into a peaceful coma. Someone had made him keep thinking about this thing, unable to rest, unable to stop. The forced thinking had kept his brain nerves in an abnormal state. Now, Luo Qi simply let the thing he was forced to keep thinking about return to a status equal to other memories.

Having finished these things, Luo Qi completely withdrew, returned to the Consciousness World outside the deep pool, and then severed his connection to the Consciousness World.

Du Zhengyi was watching him from the side. The moment he signaled, Du Zhengyi pulled him up. As the security guards rushed into the first section of the L-shaped dessert shop, Du Zhengyi and Luo Qi disappeared together under the red velvet cake.

They appeared behind a pillar on the first floor. Du Zhengyi threw Luo Qi behind the pillar, where he vomited wildly for a while. He had experienced entering the Consciousness World and then operating in a multidimensional space today; he was a bit dizzy from both. Du Zhengyi even suspected he was a bit squeamish about blood and wounds.

When a dizzy Luo Qi came back from behind the pillar, the riot police had already run into the main entrance. Luo Qi walked to the side of Du Zhengyi, who was observing the police, and took a bottle of water that Du Zhengyi had definitely stolen from a vending machine to rinse his mouth. Fortunately, he wasn't the only one who had vomited today; his appearance wouldn't attract the police's attention at all.

"Speak," Du Zhengyi said in a low, angry voice, "why didn't we know the time, only the location, yet we were still able to arrive exactly when the incident broke out."

"Someone messed with his head," Luo Qi said, "as if making him recall a piece of social news."

"What social news?"

"I remember this incident too," Luo Qi said, "about half a year ago, a person with antisocial personality tendencies killed people indiscriminately in a shopping mall."

Du Zhengyi was startled, "Someone was encouraging him?"

"This person had problems himself; he naturally had these tendencies. But clearly, someone found a way to make him keep thinking about this incident. His spirit was still very agitated; even after falling into a coma, it wasn't completely suppressed, as if he had drunk a case of Red Bull in one breath." Luo Qi said in a low voice, "Someone carefully selected a person and successfully stimulated him."

"And then waited for the investigators to arrive before triggering it," Du Zhengyi said. "This is a demonstration."