"No, you're not Li Zheng!"
Zhan Zhouzhou furrowed her brow and coldly demanded, "Who exactly are you?"
The person on the ground...
No!
Or rather, that being looked remarkably like Li Zheng, except the skin of its head, exposed by the open hood, was a bluish-purple, and its snake-like vertical pupils showed no emotion.
"Language... identification... loading..."
A chanical voice emitted from the hooded figure's mouth, sounding exceedingly eerie to the ears.
Zhan Zhouzhou was one hundred percent certain that it was a living being, yet its reactions were like those of a rigid machine.
"Mission... obstacle... elimination..."
"Strength... assessnt... threat..."
"Plan... level one... activation..."
"Energy... consumption... eighty percent..."
"Effect... spiritual... annihilation..."
As each word erged from the opponent's mouth, Zhan Zhouzhou's heart grew increasingly heavy with ominous foreboding.
She wanted to get closer and use Prel's Eye to identify the being, but suddenly, her heart tightened, and her vision went black.
She had gone blind!
"Damn it!"
Not only was her sight lost, but even her hearing was quickly slipping away from her perception, the sound of the wind becoming distant and ethereal, as if it could vanish at any mont.
The opponent's thods were more bizarre than those she had encountered during her ti in the Matrix, able to directly influence her five senses?
She tried to rally her spiritual power, instinctively wanting to unleash Sword Qi in the direction of her mory, but discovered sothing even more terrifying.
"My spiritual power is dissipating?!"
This completely unsettled Zhan Zhouzhou.
The spiritual power she had painstakingly honed through daily sword practice was mysteriously dissipating because of this sudden opponent?
It felt as if the dough she had spent twenty years kneading was suddenly tossed into water by soone, and even the 'gluten' was washed away!
Forget the 'gluten', even the diluted 'starch water' was disappearing into thin air!
"How can my spiritual power be controlled by soone else?!" Zhan Zhouzhou was both angry and unwilling to accept this powerlessness over life and death.
"I can't just sit and wait to be killed; I have to find a way to fight back!"
Zhan Zhouzhou quickly thought this through, deciding to stop holding back, she removed the necklace from her neck, unbound her self-imposed restraints, and went all out.
"No matter how you did it, as long as I kill you, this state will naturally end, right?"
With a cold expression, Zhan Zhouzhou, unable to see, simply closed her eyes.
Unable to see the target, she tried to use her spiritual power to seek the enemy, only to find it dissipating and impossible to control, so she decisively chose to abandon it and rely on other senses.
Forcing herself to calm down, years of sword training gave her an unflinching resolve and a superior utilization of her senses compared to most people.
With her hearing gradually fading, she stopped worrying about what she could hear.
At that mont, all her concentration was on the Purple Extre Sword in her hand, flickering with intense purple electric light.
Her sense of sll was stripped away.
Zhan Zhouzhou remained unmoved.
Her sense of touch was also taken.
Still, Zhan Zhouzhou stood unmoved.
Her spiritual power flickered like a candle in the wind, on the brink of extinguishing, yet she remained motionless.
Even as the thrusters dragged her through the air, her face turned a bluish-purple, resembling a lifeless corpse.
"Threat... re-evaluating..."
"Warning... warning... warning..."
"High-energy alert ahead..."
"Source... unknown direction..."
"Plan... retreat... confird..."
The hooded figure rely glanced at Zhan Zhouzhou, and its entire state seed to age decades in an instant, drained of vitality and spirit.
At this point, any ordinary player could probably finish him off.
However, the most threatening Zhan Zhouzhou was already in a 'shutdown' state, while his mouth continued to emit repetitive danger warnings.
"Warning... warning... warning..."
The aged, hunched figure turned to flee, but before he even lifted his foot, a thread of brilliance pierced his chest from behind, the indifferent, emotionless eyes instantly losing all light.
"Warn..."
The warning abruptly stopped.
Thud!
The body fell, death was clean and swift, without any unnecessary drama.
Whoosh~
The brilliance turned back, hovering above the corpse, it turned out to be the Purple Extre Sword Body that Zhan Zhouzhou always held!
Suspended montarily above the body, a blood-red glow suddenly erged from within the corpse, wrapping around the sword body, nourishing it imnsely, and its light shone brightly!
Monts later, the blood-red glow was completely absorbed, the sword body returned to Zhan Zhouzhou's palm, and it fell into silence.
After a silence lasting half an hour, a vitality slowly spread across Zhan Zhouzhou's ashen face, tenaciously and gradually absorbing sothing from the surrounding air.
...
"Hiss~"
"Phew!~"
Exhaling a breath of turbid air, Zhan Zhouzhou opened her eyes, confirming carefully that she hadn't been injured, feeling a lingering fear.
"The Wilderness..."
"No wonder the Outer City residents are afraid to easily step in here, it's truly dangerous..."
Her beautiful eyes hidden with deep fear, she had looked down on the Outer City residents before coming to the Wilderness, thinking they didn't dare face potential threats.
Only when it was her turn did she realize so dangers are silent and extrely bizarre, she almost got killed by so unknown guy using so unknown strange thods!
But from disaster often cos fortune; she had developed another new exclusive ability because of this crisis.
Zhan Zhouzhou silently felt it, knowing that although she lost the support of the data panel upon entering the Outer City, she was more familiar with the effects of her self-created ability than anyone.
The reason she was able to kill the hooded figure in the end largely ca from her accumulated knowledge and understanding of the 'sword', unexpectedly achieving an insight at the last mont of spiritual dissipation called "Emotions Entrusted to the Sword".
If it were in a previous data-backed state, this ability might have the following attribute description:
[Emotions Entrusted to the Sword]
[Entrust spiritual power to the weapon, rging with it for remote control. If the entrusted weapon is destroyed, spiritual power damage is determined based on the shock received.]
Because this was an ability Zhan Zhouzhou realized herself, there is no precise Tier or Level division, its specific effects and strength increase based on the corresponding requirents.
Indeed...
This doesn't even belong to 'Genetic Ability', but a higher tier of 'Spiritual Ability' that even Li Zheng hadn't formally mastered!
"If I hadn't preserved that last bit of brilliance, might I have beco an idiot or a vegetable due to complete spiritual dissipation?" Zhan Zhouzhou pondered, approaching the corpse and lifting the hood that covered its face when it fell, revealing a face at least seventy percent similar to Li Zheng.
"Why does this guy look so much like Li Zheng?" Zhan Zhouzhou used Prel's Eye, attempting to discern the identity of the corpse before her, only to see a string of aningless scrambled information.
"Huh?"
Seeing this scenario, Zhan Zhouzhou let out a startled "Huh", as she had encountered such a situation before!
Back then, while still in the Matrix, during her routine exploration she entered a tomb-like room; there was nothing in there except for one mummified corpse.
With a mindset of never leaving empty-handed, Zhan Zhouzhou dug out that corpse from its resting coffin.
Upon seeing the corpse, Prel's Eye produced the sa kind of scrambled aningless data as now!
Zhan Zhouzhou's eyelids lowered slightly, she hesitated for a mont then took sothing from her capsule.
It was a body wrapped in layers of linen bandages, eyes sunken and shriveled, clearly dead for a long ti.
However, upon exposure to Outer World air, the chest region of that corpse slightly twitched imperceptibly.
It.
Was breathing!
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