Desperate people, accept the seed of my soul!

Zhou Zhengqing reacted almost entirely based on muscle memory.

His body snapped open like a spring that had been compressed to its limit, and he lunged forward, slamming the operator who was sitting at the control panel typing on the keyboard to the ground.

The weight of the two people slammed onto the carriage floor with a dull thud, and the operator's forehead hit the chair leg, causing him to groan in pain.

Zhou Zhengqing's own elbow slammed heavily onto the floor, sending a sharp pain through his bone.

But he didn't care about the pain at all, and reflexively closed his eyes, waiting for the explosion that would tear the air apart.

"Bang!"

There was a sound, but it wasn't an explosion.

The console monitor shook twice when Zhou Zhengqing lunged at it, and the static on the screen jumped even more violently.

The flashing was extremely fast, making everyone's face in the carriage alternate between light and shadow.

The keyboard was pushed to the ground by Zhou Zhengqing's elbow, its cable dangling in the air before hitting the computer case with a crisp plastic thud.

The operator lay on the ground, trembling with fear, his glasses flying off somewhere.

No grenade exploded.

No shrapnel flew everywhere.

There was no shockwave.

The only sounds in the carriage were the flickering lights of the display screen, the operator's heavy breathing, and Zhou Zhengqing's own pounding heartbeat.

"Detective Zhou? What's wrong?"

Li Cheng was startled by his actions and crouched down in the corner of the carriage, quickly scanning the entire carriage with his gun.

He glanced in the direction Zhou Zhengqing had been looking, and the crosshair of his gun lingered there for two seconds—

The corner next to the control panel was empty except for a spare bulletproof vest hanging on a hook on the wall, swaying gently in the air conditioning.

It turned out to be just a bulletproof vest.

There was no one. No army officers. No grenades.

There was nothing there.

"It's an illusion!" Zhou Zhengqing suddenly stood up. "There are other Awakened Ones! They are the people of the Fire Seed! They've come!"

His voice carried an extremely complex emotion—anger, fear, but more so, the excitement a hunter feels when he smells his prey.

The forest is deep.

He had studied this person repeatedly in the archives of Lieyang Province—

A user of illusion weaving abilities, he was a researcher at the Provincial Institute of Biology and studied under the late Professor Song Yuanming.

After awakening, he was hunted down by the Five Mountains Society, but was rescued by Xu Suyuan and joined the Fire Seed Squad.

The ability's upper limit is controlling the perceptions of three to five people simultaneously, creating realistic illusions, but it cannot cause physical harm.

The file also included a special note:

This ability user excels at infiltration and interference but lacks the ability to engage in direct combat. When encountering them, the priority should be to cut off their mental energy output channels and force them to retreat with saturation firepower.

It lacks the capability for direct combat.

Zhou Zhengqing cursed inwardly.

The assessment in the file is wrong—

It can simultaneously disrupt the entire encirclement of more than two hundred people, and cause the soldiers on the outer perimeter to fire at each other;

To be able to almost fool a veteran like him with illusions goes far beyond the scope of "lacking the ability to fight head-on".

Either the records underestimated Lin Shen, or Lin Shen's abilities have undergone a qualitative leap during this period.

Neither possibility is good news for him.

He had barely finished speaking when a deafening explosion rang out outside.

This time it wasn't a hallucination; the explosion was real.

The aftershocks of the shockwave traveled along the ground to the chassis of the command vehicle, causing the entire vehicle to sway slightly.

Dust fell from the roof, landing on the operator's hair, the keyboard, and in the coffee cup.

The explosion rolled overhead, muffled yet violent, like a huge clap of thunder in the sky, followed by a series of smaller, more frequent explosions—

That was a chain reaction caused by the ammunition box being detonated by the high temperature; the explosions came one after another, crackling and popping like firecrackers.

The army's mortar positions deployed in the back alley were blown up.

The entire process was only reconstructed after the surveillance footage was retrieved.

Although all communications were interrupted at the time, several independently operating recorders still captured footage of the events before and after the explosion.

The footage shows the communication interrupted 37 seconds ago.

On the mortar position where Deputy Battalion Commander Zhao of the Army garrison was stationed, a gunner suddenly turned around and fired two shots at his ammunition box.

Two bullets pierced the metal shell of the ammunition box and hit the mortar shells that had just been opened inside.

Two shells exploded at the gun emplacement, sending orange-red fireballs soaring two stories high.

The shockwave overturned the surrounding ammunition boxes like building blocks, causing the shells inside to explode in a chain reaction due to the high temperature.

Explosions rang out in succession, and several artillerymen who couldn't escape in time screamed as they fell into the flames.

Deputy Battalion Commander Zhao was thrown three meters away by the shockwave, his head hitting the tracks of the armored vehicle, and he lost consciousness on the spot.

No one knows why the gunner suddenly fired at his own ammunition.

His helmet camera was damaged in the explosion and failed to record the last thing he saw.

But when they gave their statements afterward, all the surviving artillerymen said the same thing: "He shouted 'Don't come any closer' into the air before he fired, and then he pulled the trigger."

It's still an illusion.

"It was one of our own who fired the shot!"

The shouts from the outside were transmitted via a wired telephone line that was not completely disconnected to a still-functioning communication terminal near the command vehicle.

The communications soldier in charge of the line cried and shouted, "Deputy Battalion Commander Zhao ordered the cannons to be fired!"

They're fighting their own people! The Third Battalion's position has been bombed! Casualties unknown! (Repeated: Casualties unknown!)

"Stop fighting! We're on the same side!"

"Retaliate! The army has mutinied! Retaliate!"

Chaotic shouts and gunshots rang out from all directions.

The short bursts of assault rifles, the long bursts of submachine guns, the single shots of pistols, and the deep rumble of grenades.

All the sounds were mixed together, making it impossible to distinguish friend from foe, or near from far.

Someone shouted "Stop shooting!" but the words were quickly drowned out by even more intense gunfire.

Someone was hit by a stray bullet after running only a few steps in the alley, screamed and fell into a pool of blood, twitched a couple of times and then stopped moving.

The entire encirclement resembled a pot of boiling water that had been overturned.

Order collapsed in an instant, and everyone descended into a frenzy of infighting.

The security team members saw the army soldiers running towards them with guns drawn, and the hallucination they had just experienced immediately flashed through their minds—

Those hallucinations of people in riot police uniforms shooting their teammates were all Army personnel in disguise.

So he raised his hand and shot.

The army soldiers were enraged when two of their comrades were inexplicably killed.

They assumed the security team had planned to double-cross them, so they opened fire with submachine guns.

The bullets struck the riot shield with a series of thuds, leaving numerous dents on the shield.

The riot shield formation was torn apart by friendly forces rushing in from the flanks, and several large gaps appeared in the originally impenetrable formation.

The shield bearer fell to the ground, his helmet rolling a long way.

The replacement was hit in the leg by a stray bullet before he could even get to his position, and he screamed and fell to his knees.

A grenade flew in from an unknown direction and exploded in the most densely populated area of ​​the crowd.

Several security guards and army soldiers were blown away at the same time, their blood and flesh splattering onto the nearby wall, still warm, and dripping down the wall.