Desperate people, accept the seed of my soul!

"I saw someone! Someone really did!" The guard who fired the shot was pale, his finger tightly gripping the trigger. "Wearing a black combat uniform, exactly like you, he was standing right behind you just now!"

I saw it with my own eyes! He raised his hand to tap you on the shoulder, and I shot him, not you!

His breathing was rapid, as if he had just finished a five-kilometer cross-country run; his chest heaved violently, and the Velcro straps on his bulletproof vest opened and closed with each breath.

"There's nothing behind me!"

The guard who had been grazed shouted, his gun still firmly pointed at his comrade's head, his eyes wide open behind his night-vision goggles.

"There are only four of us on this street, are you hallucinating?"

"I don't!"

The two argued fiercely, pointing their guns at each other, neither daring to put them down first.

The other two guards were also bewildered by this sudden turn of events, unsure of whom to believe.

Their gazes darted rapidly between their two companions, unsure where to point their guns.

If you look outside, you can't see any enemies; if you look at your teammates, they're not traitors.

No one noticed that while they were arguing, a faint, almost invisible halo of light was seeping into the gap at the bottom of the command vehicle.

The light was very faint, so faint that no one would notice it during the day, let alone in the dead of night amidst gunfire and flashing lights.

Like a wisp of smoke or a drop of water, it silently seeped into every weld and rivet hole of the metal carriage, without triggering any alarms or leaving any trace.

Lin Shen squatted behind a trash can thirty meters away, his back against the cold metal sheet. Fine beads of sweat seeped from his forehead, trickling down his temples and gathering into a droplet on his chin before dripping onto his knee with a soft pat.

His eyes were tightly closed, his lips were pressed into a thin line, and the muscles on his face twitched slightly due to excessive mental exertion.

Something's not right. Something's really not right.

In that instant, he could clearly feel his abilities being lifted up by something and suddenly surge upwards—

It's like the floor you've been standing on is suddenly pulled out and replaced with a spring mattress, and you're bounced up to an unprecedented height.

When manipulating illusions, he usually needs to focus intently on each target, writing false sensory signals into their minds one by one, like lighting matches one by one with a needle in the dark.

Controlling the perception of three to five people at the same time is already his limit; any more than that would give him a splitting headache and a nosebleed.

But now—now his mental tendrils are spreading outwards like vines, easily covering the entire block of guards without him having to guide them.

The mental fluctuations of hundreds of people were as clear to him as constellations in the night sky, each star representing a brain, a set of senses, and a portal that his illusions could invade.

He can simultaneously inject fake human figures into the visual centers of dozens of people, and write the burning sensation of a bullet whizzing past into the tactile nerves of a dozen people, even down to the point that each person's hallucination is different—

Some saw enemies in army combat uniforms, some saw traitors in security uniforms, and some saw grenades smoking at their feet.

His mental energy was indeed greatly depleted; his breathing had become rapid, and his temples were throbbing, but he was far from reaching his limit.

The increase in his abilities was so dramatic that he didn't have time to be surprised; the first thing that came to his mind was vigilance.

He didn't know if he had suddenly come up with a brilliant idea that broke through some kind of ability limit, or if there was some other reason.

The question flashed through his mind for only a moment before he forcibly suppressed it, because now was not the time to think about it.

The forces that were encircling them had advanced to the main gate, and the howitzers were pointed directly at the sixth floor of the Emperor Club. Two of their companions were still trapped inside, and every second of delay increased the risk of them being riddled with bullets.

He gritted his teeth, cleared all distracting thoughts from his mind, concentrated all his energy, and precisely projected the illusion through the less than two-centimeter-wide gap in the command vehicle window.

The gap was as thin as a hair; he had to compress his mental energy to the extreme to get through, like squeezing the water of an entire river into the eye of a needle.

He could feel his brain burning, and more sweat was dripping from his forehead, sliding down his nose. One drop fell into his eye, stinging with salt, but he didn't dare blink.

Any slight distraction could cause the illusion to break down, and the people in the command vehicle—especially Zhou Zhengqing—were professionally trained veterans who were far more sensitive to the methods of the awakened than the ordinary soldiers outside.

Inside the carriage, Zhou Zhengqing was about to order the system to restart when, before he could even utter the words, he caught a glimpse of a figure out of the corner of his eye that shouldn't be there.

A person was standing next to the control panel.

Not the operator—the operator was sitting in a chair, typing away on a keyboard, with his back to him.

The figure was standing on the other side of the control panel, just two meters in front of Zhou Zhengqing, as quiet as a stone statue.

He was wearing a crisp army combat uniform, with the rank of major on his shoulder insignia—the same rank as the deputy director Li Cheng had just mentioned.

His posture was perfect, with his legs slightly apart and his back straight, clearly that of a professional soldier who had received rigorous training.

But his face wore an expression that was completely out of place with the tense atmosphere around him—calm, even indifferent, with a slight downturn at the corners of his mouth and empty eyes staring at everyone in the command vehicle.

Then he raised his right hand.

He was holding a grenade.

It was a standard-issue fragmentation grenade of the Federal Army, with a standard serial number and batch number engraved on its dark green casing, and the trigger handle had been removed.

The fuse at the tip of the grenade was hissing and smoking, the white smoke rising and twisting in the dim light of the carriage, like a small snake struggling in its death throes.

The smoke had a faint sulfurous smell, pungent and acrid, 100% real.

Zhou Zhengqing's pupils shrank to the size of a pinhead in a fraction of a second.

He had witnessed the abilities of awakened beings too many times in Lieyang Province, and every case he recorded and archived left an indelible impression on his mind.

He thought he knew enough about the monsters' methods and that his mental defenses were strong enough.

But the moment a living, breathing army officer pulls the pin on a grenade right before his eyes, all his professional training and rich experience crumble before the adrenaline.

His brain didn't even have time to tell if it was real or an illusion—the grenade was just two meters away, the fuse was already a third burned, and white smoke filled the carriage.

At this distance, the kill radius of a fragmentation grenade is enough to turn everyone in the command vehicle into a sieve; even bulletproof vests cannot stop the high-speed flying steel balls and fragments.

"Be careful!"