Chapter 233: Decoy Bombs

Mist began to surge from a corner of the Ancient Town, as if the mass of mist itself were a living thing. Everyone understood what that meant: the final battle or total annihilation was at hand.

A window behind their heads was opened, and the busybody Mahjong couldn't help but leave one last will and testament, "Du Zhengyi, take it easy. I don't want to be stitching you up again tomorrow morning; I've truly had enough of this work. Once tomorrow's sun comes out, I'm retiring and going home, never doing this again, absolutely."

"Doctor," Du Zhengyi gazed at the pitch-black night sky with a calm expression, "I sense another wave of bats arriving. You had best close the window tight."

Mahjong looked at the empty sky with disbelief, sullenly pulled his head back in, and shut the window tight. There were no lights on in the room; Luo Qi could vaguely see Guan Xinyue hiding in the corner, likely because Mahjong had told her to stay in that blind spot.

Du Zhengyi had not lied. Luo Qi soon felt the bats flying in from the back alley. He secretly admired Du Zhengyi a little; he did not know what a Battle Mage relied on to distinguish such things—perhaps it was a profound instinct. Luo Qi hurriedly finished off those bats, and the thick fog surged in from the streets and alleys, covering them from mid-air. Half the town had already vanished from their sight, and the already dismal moonlight was about to disappear completely.

The mist twisted under the eaves of the building next door, as if it were a giant insect egg inside which countless monsters were struggling to break out of their shells.

Every bit of the thick fog's approach carried a noise that only Luo Qi could hear; it was the Consciousness of a team of Mind Mages, synchronized and launching a Consciousness Attack at him. Luo Qi carefully distinguished the Consciousness within the thick fog. He did not intend to care how high the intelligence of those monsters was; no matter how many of them charged over, he intended to end them all in one breath. Regardless of anything else, he did not want Du Zhengyi to actually have to strike.

Luo Qi concentrated his attention in his Consciousness Space, intending to grasp the characteristics of the next wave of Seal Beasts. He had an intuition that the Seal Beasts arriving wrapped in the thick fog were not bats. He needed to figure out their biological characteristics first before he could end their brains. As a result, the moment Luo Qi began to perceive the Consciousness, he was greatly shocked. He hurriedly withdrew from his Consciousness Space and asked Du Zhengyi beside him, "Why are there tens of thousands of Consciousnesses in the thick fog? How can there be so many monsters squeezed together? Is that possible?"

Du Zhengyi's brows furrowed together. He stared at the approaching thick fog, lost in thought.

Luo Qi was starting to panic. The thick fog would drift over within thirty seconds. On one hand, he began to have some self-doubt; on the other, he fell into the panic of real-time. He switched back and forth between two different time flows; the fleeting nature of real-time made him anxious to the extreme. He wished he didn't even have to waste time speaking. If Du Zhengyi gave him the authorization to link their brains, he could complete a conversation with Du Zhengyi in a thousandth of a second.

Damn it, how much of a waste of time is it to speak with one's mouth!

Luo Qi stared anxiously at Du Zhengyi's face, his mind racing like ten thousand horses in the world of Consciousness, observing everything in all directions.

Du Zhengyi suddenly spoke, "No, that's not very likely."

"Aren't they tens of thousands of bug-sized creatures?" Luo Qi said anxiously. If his judgment was wrong, the method he adopted would be completely wrong.

"I suspect they are bait, redundant bait," Du Zhengyi said sagely. "Since you can Copy Consciousness, they can too. Those Mind Mages are using High-Energy Crystals to infinitely copy subsets of their own Consciousness. They are accompanying the real Seal Beasts, acting as decoy bombs to interfere with you."

Luo Qi's heart settled slightly. In that instant, he understood that Du Zhengyi's battlefield analysis was correct, and the array composed of thousands of souls also completed its final analysis.