Chapter 1344 — Plant-Man vs. Plant-Man
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Only then did Gao Yang react, several beats late, and remind her from across the table: "You're inside the neural network... we generally drink our tea..."
"I'm used to watering myself..." Beiyila stood in the flower field, clawing at her soaking wet hair, and glanced up at Gao Cen. Her figure rapidly fading, she said hurriedly, "I'm going back to continue the advance plan!!"
The next second, her figure had vanished completely from before Gao Yang, leaving only the empty white flower field and the round table and stools at its center. Gao Yang stood beside the table, staring for a moment at the direction in which Beiyila had disappeared, and only then did certain remembered images slowly surface from the depths of memory. After a long while, he smiled and shook his head with a complicated expression: "An expression I haven't seen in seven hundred years..."
As the words fell, his figure too vanished from the flower field, and this "attached" space specially constructed from the neural nodes of the Solin Giant Tree sank into darkness within the neural network.
...
Deep in the canopy of the Solin Giant Tree, within the "main consciousness chamber" formed by the interwoven growth of massive wooden structures and countless vines and leaves, a special-model immersion pod was quietly operating near the central platform. Yet the pod's outer cover remained open, and the interior was empty. Only a great many nerve fibers, like fine vines, wound their way out from the nearby "floor" and "walls," clustering toward the pod and creeping inside, their sucker-like ends clinging to the metal contacts on the seat's backrest.
Suddenly, those nerve fibers entwined around and clinging to the pod twitched, then swiftly detached from every contact point, retreating in the blink of an eye into the shadows of the nearby wooden structures. On the central platform close by, a tangle of flowering vines squirmed and drew back to the sides, and from within emerged Beiyila's mimetic avatar—this avatar blinked after disconnecting from the link, as though adjusting to the sensory shift from the virtual world to reality, and only after a few seconds did it fully regain clarity.
She raised a hand and touched the dry, coarse-feeling "hair" atop her head. On her face, lacking in expressive variation, there seemed to be a faint trace of dejection, and her muttering voice echoed through the chamber: "So stupid. I'm so stupid..."
Moments later, the dejected muttering turned into a cold soliloquy: "This embarrassment should be repaid by Bertlem..."
...
Bertlem suddenly shivered—though no cold wind was blowing across the wasteland at that moment, and his body, mutated for many years, had long since grown insensitive to changes in external temperature, he nonetheless distinctly felt a "chill" seeping into his spirit like cold water flooding over mouth and nose, and that chill instantly put him on full alert.
This was no illusion—after operating at the edge of this wilderness for many days, he had long since accumulated valuable experience in this regard. This soul-piercing chill was real; it was the aftereffect left by psychic attacks, and also the "reliance" that had allowed him to return here and be given important duties again after committing a series of terrible mistakes: this was the psychic perception between predator and prey.
Unfortunately, he occupied the position of prey, and whenever this chill struck, it meant that the terrible "predator"—one who had mutated so far beyond the bounds of common sense—was radiating intense hostility toward him, meant that the predator's fangs and claws were moving within a very dangerous distance nearby.
Yet Bertlem had grown used to this. That mad "Saint" had been radiating this hostility and "appetite" toward him for more than a day or two, and over all these days, conducting sabotage operations under this "hostility" had been his primary work.