novelraw Chapter 357: The Pain of Not Being Able to Breathe
Chapter 357: The Pain of Not Being Able to Breathe
The moment the three beasts, formed from semi-transparent red mist, lunged at Lin Jie, the scent in the air suddenly intensified several times over, as if every ounce of oxygen in the space had been instantly replaced by this chemically laden gas with strong hallucinogenic and numbing effects.
Lin Jie's right hand had already pulled the trigger of the Serene Heart the instant his eyes tracked the smoke's movement.
"Shiu! Shiu! Shiu!"
Three alchemical rounds sliced through the viscous red fog within ten meters, each diving into the most condensed spot on the foreheads of the three mist beasts.
But the expected scenes of blood and flesh splattering or spiritual dissolution did not occur.
When the bullets contacted the red mist, they only caused a few ripples on the rolling surface of the vapor and produced no substantive damage. They didn't even create a momentary impediment before passing straight through the creatures and striking the lead-plated wall behind them.
Physical immunity, even immunity to alchemical rounds.
This was one of the trickiest and most despair-inducing properties to face in inner world combat. It meant that kinetic weapons humans rely on for survival lost their authority against such entities that transcended material form.
"No use."
The Pharmacist stood by the cultivation tank and sneered with contempt."They have no bones, no organs, no life structure as you understand it. They are merely tangible extensions of a hungry will."
As his words fell, the three mist beasts had already rushed up to Lin Jie.
The middle one, the largest, opened its massive maw. Though it had no teeth, the high-concentration corrosive vapor would instantly dissolve flesh into a puddle of pus if it directly contacted human skin.
Lin Jie held his breath. His White Vulture's Mark sent sharp, warning stings through him when it detected the low but ferocious aura of its kin, forcibly keeping his oxygen-starved, slightly groggy brain alert.
He did not try to block that snapping maw with his Withered Cicada. He knew precisely what the smoke would do to the weapon in his hand.
At the crucial instant, he suddenly lowered his center of gravity.
Blue ghostly light rippled across the surface of Black Mercury, and the phase slip property that could reduce friction to nearly zero fully activated.
Lin Jie planted his feet hard on the floor.
Like a puck sliding at high speed across ice, he glided under the belly of the leaping mist beast.
The sensation was extremely strange.
Even with the coat's force field protecting him as his body passed through the red smoke, he still felt bone-chilling cold and the crawling of countless tiny insects across his skin.
Those were flesh spores trying to find gaps to burrow into his body.
"Hiss—"
A faint corrosive sound whispered across the windcoat's surface, but that was all; the phase deflection field successfully slid most of the corrosive vapor aside.
The instant Lin Jie slid out of the encirclement, he planted one hand on the ground, used that inertia to flip up into a smooth recovery spin, and with that momentum swept his Withered Cicada in a horizontal slash behind him.
The gray-white blade sliced across one of the mist beast's hind legs.
This time there was finally a reaction.
The short blade, fused with Withered Cicada traits, triggered the Extinction principle upon contact with the mist. The vapor-formed hind leg collapsed under the law's suppression for a moment, scattering like foliage torn by a gale.
But it lasted only a second.
The dense, almost insoluble red fog immediately surged back in and sealed the gap.
"Damn it."
Lin Jie cursed under his breath.
This environment was far too favorable to these creatures.
The high-concentration red vapor saturating the entire lab was not only their food but also the eternal spring of their regeneration. Unless he could completely destroy their cores at once or sever the environmental supply, this was a battle doomed to be lost by attrition.
Worse still, the oxygen content in the air was plummeting.
The red spores were greedily stealing every scrap of breathable oxygen. Lin Jie felt his lungs stuffed with a lump of burning coal; every strenuous effort to hold his breath was squeezing the last oxygen reserves from his cells.
"Your movements are getting slower, Mr. Hunter."
The Pharmacist's genteel voice drifted left and right through the red fog, tinged with the mockery of a cat playing with a mouse.
"Does your chest feel tight? Do your limbs tingle?"
"It's okay. As long as you open your mouth, even if you just take the slightest breath, all the pain will vanish. You'll enter a paradise of bliss."
He was attempting to hypnotically coax him with words.
Lin Jie answered with only a cold snort and an even faster advance.
If he couldn't kill the smoke, he'd eliminate the one who made it.
His figure became a black streak. Using the wall as a springboard, he executed a rebound jump through the air, bypassed the three clumsy mist beasts, and shot like a black arrow straight for the Pharmacist standing at the console.
It was an aggressive tactical choice.
In Lin Jie's judgment, enemies like the Pharmacist—an experiment-obsessed manipulator, a "mage-type"—usually had severely weak close-combat bodies despite any biological modifications. If he got close, the sharpness and toxin of the Withered Cicada should end the fight in a few slashes.
Ten meters.
Five meters.
The short blade in Lin Jie's hand had already locked onto the Pharmacist's carotid artery.
But a second before the blade touched the white-clad figure, the Pharmacist—who had so far acted polite and unruffled—made a move completely inconsistent with his appearance and demeanor.
He didn't panic and retreat, nor did he try to use the smoke as a shield.
He merely shifted his body slightly, stepped his left foot half a step back, and arched his upper body backward with an eerie, soft-bodied flexibility.
It was a standard evasive stance derived from the ancient South Seas martial art "Silah."
Lin Jie's blade grazed his nose, shearing the bridge off his gold-rimmed glasses.
Immediately after, the Pharmacist's right hand, which had been hidden behind him, struck like a long-coiled viper. His fingers curved into talons, each fingertip fitted with several sharp metal thimbles.
"Ding!"
That claw perfectly latched onto the spine of the Withered Cicada. The force made the web between Lin Jie's thumb and forefinger go numb.
This was hand-to-hand combat honed by relentless practice.
This British man, who had long trafficked through the South Seas underworld and dealt with every kind of scoundrel, was not as frail as he looked.
He was not only a mad scientist but also a lethal fighter skilled in killing techniques.
"Surprised?"
As he blocked the attack, the Pharmacist used the momentum to step forward. His knee rammed into Lin Jie's abdomen like a battering ram.
Lin Jie had to abandon his attack. He crossed his hands and pressed downward to absorb the savage knee, using the reaction force to slide backward and create distance.
"To survive in this brutal, violent world and carve out my kingdom, I've sacrificed more than most can imagine."
The Pharmacist straightened, tossed aside the broken glasses, revealing eyes reddened with excitement.
He unbuttoned his suit jacket, exposing his shirt.
Beneath that thin fabric, Lin Jie could just make out the dark red, tumor-like raised patterns scarring his skin.
They were physical mutations from prolonged use and injection of high-purity Blood Resin.
Those mutations granted him far greater strength, reaction speed, and that hopeless resistance to blunt force.
"Now, round two begins."
The Pharmacist sneered and waved his hand.
The three mist beasts, having lost their target, immediately reoriented, forming a perfect encirclement with their master and trapping Lin Jie dead center.
Fronted by a combat master, backstopped by undead beasts, surrounded by poisonous air.
Lin Jie felt like his lungs were about to explode; the dizziness brought on by hypoxia was steadily eroding his vision, and black spots began to dance before his eyes.
He had to breathe.
But if he inhaled now, the greedy spores would flood into his body and turn him into the next petri dish.
It was a perfect dead end.
"Cough…"
Lin Jie forced down the tickle in his throat and rapidly scanned the sealed lab with his eyes.
This was a specially reinforced underground space, the walls plated with lead, the door heavy brass, with no visible escape gaps.
But he knew that any closed ecosystem needed a channel to exchange matter with the outside.
Especially for spores that relied on large amounts of fresh air to stay active, the ventilation system was an indispensable lifeline.
They were the ventilation intake and exhaust.
In the lab's corners, a few windproof lamps had been fitted with reservoirs of industrial alcohol to sustain experimental lighting.
A mad and dangerous plan formed in his mind.
If physical attacks were useless, and these things were essentially gaseous or aggregates of tiny particles, then they still obeyed fluid dynamics and thermodynamics.
They feared wind.
They feared fire.
"Want to play with fire?"
Lin Jie sneered inwardly and acted.
He became an out-of-control top, performing highly irregular Z-shaped maneuvers inside the tight encirclement, using the slip property to evade the mist beasts' attacks.
"Stop him!" The Pharmacist bellowed as if sensing something.
But Lin Jie's speed was too great.
He reached the corner bench, lifted his foot, and his tactical boot struck the metal rack holding the alcohol lamps with thunderous force.
"Clang!"
The rack collapsed.
Several windproof lamps full of high-concentration industrial alcohol crashed to the floor. The glass shades shattered and the alcohol flowed out, instantly ignited by the still-lit wicks.
"Whoosh—"
Blue flames rapidly spread across the floor, forming a wall of fire that obscured vision.
But that alone was insufficient.
That amount of flame wouldn't be lethally damaging to the mist beasts.
Using the reaction of kicking down the rack, Lin Jie leaped high; his target was the ceiling.
His posture in midair was decisive and resolute, and the Serene Heart in his hand fired four shots in quick succession.
"Shiu shiu shiu shiu!"
Four bullets struck precisely at the four hidden ventilation grates behind the decorative patterns on the ceiling.
"Boom!"
The not-so-sturdy metal grates ruptured under the bullets' impact, revealing the dark, rapidly spinning duct openings and exhaust fans behind them.
With the grates destroyed, the smooth airflow balance was disrupted.
Combined with the thermal convection from the flames on the floor, the air currents inside the lab quickly went berserk.
A powerful suction drew toward the holes in the ceiling while the hot air from below violently surged upward.
A miniature, artificially created indoor storm formed.
"Woo—!!!"
The air screamed in a high-pitched howl.
When the red vapor, condensed into beastly shapes, encountered the violent, chaotic airflow disturbance, it was like dough thrown into a blender.
Their aggregative structure collapsed and they could no longer maintain a fixed shape. They were shredded into harmless red strands and involuntarily swept toward the ceiling exhausts.
"No! My babies!"
The Pharmacist let out a pained scream and tried to use his smoke-control techniques to re-concentrate them, but against the brutal laws of physics his efforts were pitifully futile.
Chaos consumed the hall.
Flames burned, smoke swirled, alarms screamed.
Visibility dropped to nearly zero, and breathing grew difficult. Ordinary people could barely take a step.
But for Lin Jie, this was the perfect hunting ground.
He dropped to the ground and crouched in the shadow of the fire wall.
Finally, he could take a deep breath of air that, while smelling slightly of char, was relatively clean.
Oxygen flooded his lungs and strength returned.
He closed his eyes.
If he couldn't see, then he wouldn't rely on sight.
He raised his left hand and quickly toggled the mechanical dial on the Cursebreaker Vambrace.
"Click."
Mode switch.
Spiritual Sonar activated.
An invisible pulse wave rippled outward.
In his mind's eye, the chaotic flames, the violent airflow, and the dissipating red mist were all filtered away.
The world reduced to a black-and-white, three-dimensional geometric map.
At the very center of that map, there stood a glaring red humanoid silhouette radiating intense, chaotic spiritual fluctuations.
That silhouette was standing at the console, frantically trying to operate equipment that had already failed, his heartbeat pounding like a drum, breathing quick and panicked.
It was a prey exposed on the open plain after losing its pack.
Lin Jie opened his eyes.
The flicker of the flames reflected in his dark pupils, but there was no warmth.
He now needed to do only one thing.
Remove the source that had created all this chaos—
the lesion.
"Surgery."
Lin Jie murmured, tightening his grip on the gray-white short blade.
"Proceed."
His figure passed through the fire wall.