Chapter 656: You really ought to live there until you die

But just when Yang Yixie's body was about two-thirds datafied, a red shadow forcefully cut into his field of vision from the side, and Yang Yixie initially didn't take it to heart.

In the datafied state, he was nearly invincible; regular attacks could not harm him at all.

But the moment his peripheral vision caught that red outline, a sense of danger he hadn't felt in a long time washed over him; he immediately interrupted the datafication process, his body condensing from a semi-transparent data stream state back into solid form, and he stepped back.

Immediately, numerous green system pop-ups appeared around him; his fingertips tapped rapidly, stacking several layers of translucent energy shields around his body.

But those shields shattered one after another the instant they were struck by that blood shadow, the shattering sounds almost overlapping; Yang Yixie could only hastily raise a few more shields, and even though the final layer showed fine cracks on its surface, it still managed to block the damage.

"Long time no see!" his originally dim dark eyes suddenly brightened; the blood-crystal-formed sickle landed on the shield, and Yang Yixie immediately reinforced the shield with energy—only to see the sickle strike the shield, producing a blinding flash.

Yang Yixie made a vague grasp with his left hand, and a long cylinder appeared in his hand; he threw it forward, and as soon as it passed through the barrier he had set up, it exploded right in front of his face.

The blood shadow leapt out from the explosion's smoke, landing a short distance away and planting itself there.

Chi Jinan wore a blue-and-white striped hospital gown, its sleeves loosely rolled to the middle of his forearms, and on his feet were hospital white soft-soled slippers, yet he gripped a sickle whose entire body was made of dark-red crystal.

His face bore an undisguised, almost manic excitement; the brutality he had long suppressed finally found an outlet, and his visage was filled with eager anticipation.

Yang Yixie's gaze fell on the chest of that hospital gown, where a small line of dark blue text was printed—the abbreviation for the Third Psychiatric Hospital of Anning Road.

"Pfft."

Yang Yixie couldn't hold back; the smile that burst forth when he spoke was impossible to conceal.

"Which genius sent you to the mental hospital? You really ought to live there until you die."

Chi Jinan's expression froze for an instant, the tip of his sickle lifting from the ground and aiming at Yang Yixie's direction.

He stood amidst the dust kicked up by the explosion, tilting his head slightly, the corner of his mouth curling into a mocking smile.

"How can you compare to me? Or are you just hiding behind puppets, tinkering with scrap metal—when will you step out and fight yourself?"

Yang Yixie stood behind the shield, raised his hand to push up his glasses, his expression unchanged.

"What's wrong with that?" he said. "I just prefer long-range; you got a problem?"

The blood-crystal sickle dragged a trace across the ground, and Chi Jinan was in front of Yang Yixie in the blink of an eye, his speed greater than before, his white soft-soled slippers not slipping despite the high-speed movement.

Each footfall landed precisely at the edge of Yang Yixie's visual blind spot, like a predator already accustomed to its prey's movement habits; the sickle's arc traced a dark-red trajectory through the air.

Yang Yixie's fingers had already flown across a virtual keyboard in a round, blocking this strike; thereafter, the Ying Guang Lu lines behind him began to outline shapes, materializing several guns out of thin air, their bullets precisely sealing off all of Chi Jinan's attack routes.

Chi Jinan's body twisted in midair, the sickle following the motion to shatter each of those bullets one by one.

After landing, he ground the fragments of those bullets under the soles of his white slippers, as if crushing someone's skull.

"Is that all? I'd rather have your puppets fight me," Chi Jinan laughed loudly, "Where are your big guys? Bring them out!"

His sickle slashed diagonally, instantly carving several nicks into the shield's surface; Yang Yixie's fingers swiftly traced in the void, the Ying Guang Lu lines on the shield continually flowing and re-forming, yet the path the sickle had cut retained a shallow groove that deepened gradually.

Yang Yixie stepped back half a pace, his right hand making a vague grasp in the air, condensing a short-barreled energy gun in his palm, which fired the instant its muzzle pointed at Chi Jinan.

Immediately afterward, his body flickered, turning into a Ying Guang Lu data stream that pulled back to increase distance, causing Chi Jinan's next strike to hit empty air; the blade sliced into the ground, leaving a crack in the plaza's bricks that emitted a faint dark-red glow.

But as Yang Yixie re-solidified, he felt a layer of resistance, as if his data stream had been snagged by something during its movement.

"Still trying to run?" Chi Jinan's voice came from behind the sickle, the tail end slightly rising, "My blood crystal can annihilate your energy—this ability was developed specifically against you."

Nutcase.

Yang Yixie's hand swept through the void once more; this time he made no attempt to create distance, and the speed of his fingertip taps suddenly surged.

The several weapon nodes floating behind him in midair simultaneously reversed direction; Chi Jinan's body darted through the barrage, his sickle whirling in his hand, deflecting the energy bolts he couldn't dodge one by one, echoing amid the ruins before the mall entrance.

In the gap as Yang Yixie dodged, Chi Jinan's sickle suddenly slipped from his grasp, the sickle spinning in the air along a completely irregular arc, sweeping around Yang Yixie's front and cutting in from the side.

Yang Yixie's body entered datafication immediately, translucent Ying Guang Lu particles scattering swiftly to the side; the sickle's blade tip passed through his afterimage, his Blood Bar visibly fluctuating for a moment, but when the re-solidified Ying Duo returned to solid form, no wound appeared on him.

The annihilation principle—truly overbearing and unreasonable.

It seems there's truly no way to escape in the short term.

He frowned slightly, sensing an inexplicable viscosity in the surrounding air; the blood-crystal fragments that had been scattered after being shattered were now enveloping both of them in an encircling manner.

Chi Jinan stood at the center of the forming blood-crystal domain, his sickle back in his hand, tip touching the ground, his posture somewhat relaxed, as if the battle so far had merely been a warm-up.

He tilted his head to look at Yang Yixie's somewhat unsightly complexion, his dark eyes gleaming with manic excitement.

Compared to the perpetually expressionless Ying Duo, this person before him seems more fun to fight.

"You can't get away," he said.

Yang Yixie watched the blood-red crystalline layer spreading beneath his feet, lifted his hand to push up his glasses, and the lenses of those black-framed glasses reflected a thin, elongated red glint in the blood-crystal light.

"...... I've tolerated you for a long time."

His left hand pressed down in the void, and suddenly several rings of Ying Guang Lu rune arrays appeared all around him.

The glass at the mall entrance began to show new cracks in the aftermath of the two combatants' clash, the ceiling panels that had already been loosened by the previous battle fell one after another, the red and green collisions grew ever more fierce, and everyone could see the continual sparks of fire colliding on the horizon.