Chapter 71: Harvesting Force of Consciousness

by cnwebnovels

When Yang Renhu saw me, his face was full of questions.

“You’re still stuck on how you lost, aren’t you?” I said. “I’ll tell you, then. My force of consciousness really isn’t as strong as yours. But my consciousness shielding power is unmatched—that’s why you couldn’t find me once I turned invisible. If you couldn’t see me, how were you supposed to counter my attack with martial techniques?”

“It’s that simple?” Yang Renhu asked.

“Yes. That simple. Before I came to the Eighteen Levels of Hell, I had a force-of-consciousness contest with King Qinguang. His force of consciousness was rank ten. Mine was only weak rank five. And yet we fought to a draw, without my using martial techniques at all.”

“You only had weak rank five. Without martial techniques, how could you possibly draw with him? How did you do it?”

“The correct way to use force of consciousness isn’t brute strength—it’s adaptation. I fused same-frequency sensing with my force of consciousness and matched the other party’s brainwaves on the same frequency. That way, he could no longer identify friend and foe through consciousness, and I was able to draw both our forces of consciousness into a single vortex. The vortex swallowed everything we threw into it and grew larger still. That is intensity. In a contest of force of consciousness, what decides the outcome is intensity, not raw strength.”

Yang Renhu stared at me, disbelieving. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

He threw his head back and let out a long sigh. “Twenty-one. Only twenty-one! A heaven-sent genius, truly. Losing to you, I can accept. Your parents must be great figures in the Elite World.”

“No,” I said. “To be honest, I come from the Mundane World.”

Yang Renhu went pale with shock. “You come from the Mundane World? No—impossible. Don’t—don’t say any more. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know too much, or I’ll never be able to leave this place. My force of consciousness—here, take all of it, quickly.”

Watching him so flustered he barely knew what he was doing, I almost wanted to laugh.

The fact that I came from the Mundane World was something the city lord and the others already knew—they even knew that my true body’s name was Gu Beichen. So what was left that I dared not say?

I could sense that Yang Renhu had already laid open all his insight to me. There was no need for politeness now.

I activated same-frequency sensing at once, sending my force of consciousness deep into his brain and taking over all of his thoughts.

Strand after strand of force-of-consciousness insight I drew out without the least ceremony, letting it pour into the consciousness body in my own brain, merging with what was already there. More insight surged in, and merged again—like two turbulent rivers colliding, combining, colliding again, combining again, until at last they became one.

I closed my eyes and slowly felt the insight that came after harvesting force of consciousness. Feng Du had not been wrong. This insight truly did carry the whole of Yang Renhu’s understanding of the world and of life—cognition and control, the driving force of will, psychological awareness and regulation, and activation of subconscious energy, all four aspects of it.

I steadied myself slowly, letting the insight settle and become my own, until it felt almost as if I had lived through Yang Renhu’s life myself.

I could not say how much time passed. When I opened my eyes again, Yang Renhu had fallen asleep before me—sleeping soundly, peacefully, utterly still.

This, perhaps, was his true state when he was not being tormented by Steamer Prison.

I could not tell whether harvesting his insight had done any harm to his actual brain—or whether, because of what I had taken, some part of his force of consciousness was now simply gone.

If there truly was no effect at all, then wouldn’t the children of the resistance, or the children of elite people, all grow up to be superhuman?

Then I caught myself. I could not let my mind run down that path. If I did, I would carry the weight of it the next time I tried to do the same thing.

In any case, no one would tell me, and I had not asked. I did not want to know more than that. So I chose to believe he would suffer no lasting harm—much as when I had once secretly copied the martial techniques out of the Sweepers’ minds, and it had never dulled their own skill.

Besides, this had been a fair wager, nothing more. I had only claimed the stakes that were rightfully mine. As for him—he had gambled, and he had lost.

With that settled in my mind, I began to consider who should be next.

I rose, told the jailers to send Yang Renhu back to his cell once he woke, and instructed them to spare him the torment of Steamer Prison for the next half month.

Back in my quarters in the underworld, I shut the door and slowly turned over everything I had gained that day.

My force of consciousness had indeed grown—though not nearly as much as I had hoped. Roughly speaking, I had gone from weak rank five to strong rank six. It seemed that absorbing another’s insight did not mean gaining insight in equal measure. Once it passed into my own consciousness-body, much of it simply overlapped with what I already possessed. What truly settled and remained was closer to a rank and a half.

I felt a small pang of disappointment, but was satisfied all the same. Left to my own devices, there was no telling how long it would have taken to gain that much.

The next day, I began going through the files of every prisoner in the prison, working from the highest ranks down. My focus was on finding the hard bones—the ones no one had harvested yet.

Naturally, some were simply too strong for me to touch. There was a Sect Master-level prisoner in Wrongful Death Prison, for one, whose case had been handled personally by City Lord Feng Du—and nothing at all had passed between them. That one I could not gnaw down. And there were others too weak to be worth the trouble—ranks two through five. Beating them would gain me nothing of consequence. Besides, knowing full well they could not match me, none of them would agree to wager in the first place.

It took half a day, but I finally sifted out four prisoners from among more than a thousand, all of them rank ten in force of consciousness. One, notably, was a woman.

I went first to Boiling Oil Cauldron Prison. Looking at the rank-ten man inside—a man who had killed for profit—I felt something like a starving man catching the scent of hot fish. I could barely hold myself back.

Boiling Oil Cauldron Prison lay in one of the deeper reaches of Hell, so word of my match with Yang Renhu had not yet reached him.

I woke him with the Judge’s Brush and used the same words I had used on Yang Renhu, stirring in him the same confidence to wager against me.

The suffering of Boiling Oil Cauldron Prison was severe—the prisoner’s spiritual world was tormented nearly past bearing. I had not even finished speaking before he seized on my challenge.

The outcome was exactly as I expected.

Like Yang Renhu, he could not see through my shielding and invisibility. A single kick sent him out of the ring.

This time I dispensed with the courtesy I had shown Yang Renhu. Right there beside the ring, I took hold of his mind directly and drew out the whole of his force of consciousness.

And yet this harvest gained me even less than the last—barely more than a single rank, bringing me only to weak rank eight.

I rested two days to recover, and once I felt at my best again, I turned to the second prisoner.

This one was held in Stone-Crushing Prison, a man who had killed his own child with his own hands. I had little patience for men like him, so I wasted no words—I simply made him the offer, and told him plainly that refusal would only earn him worse punishment.

Sure enough, he clung to the same fool’s hope the others had. Between the possible and the certain, people will almost always choose the possible—and I had, after all, offered him a sliver of a chance to escape.

I ended that fight as quickly as I could. But the insight I harvested raised me by less than a full rank, bringing me only to strong rank eight.

Though I had not leapt a full rank this time, it meant something else: it gave the prisoners still to come some hope of defeating me when their turn arrived.

The third harvest came without much trouble at all. As my force of consciousness grew, so did my ability to adapt and to strike.

By the time I had defeated him, my force of consciousness had reached rank nine.

At that point, both my spirit and my strength had reached something of a peak. I felt a restless urge to release it. It was then that I began learning to manifest a consciousness avatar of my own, projecting it beyond the Eighteen Levels of Hell to wander outside for a time. But the night was too dark, and I saw no one about the castle.

So next, I turned my thoughts to the final prisoner—the woman.

She was held in Sin-Mirror Prison.

Sin-Mirror Prison was a vague sort of charge—generally reserved for criminals who had fled justice, whose crimes the mirror would reveal before they were sentenced elsewhere. But for reasons unclear to me, this woman had remained in Sin-Mirror Prison all along, never resentenced to suffer in any other level of Hell.

I summoned her for questioning first.

She was not old—perhaps in her thirties—but her rank was formidable: strong rank ten. She was the hardest bone of the four, which was why I had saved her for last.

According to her file, she had once posed a grave threat to the Shadow Pavilion and had escaped during her capture.

That thought turned my mind at once to myself.

Du Xiaoran and I had stolen data from the Quantum Research Institute, and after we succeeded, we had fled—dragging Pu Liuqian along with us as we went.

If my own crimes were ever proven, perhaps I too belonged among the prisoners here.

The thought left me a little uneasy. If Feng Du already knew who I truly was, why had he never arrested me? My virtual body was here in Hell this very moment—it would have been the simplest thing in the world to imprison me.

Of course, catching my true body would be another matter entirely. And I did not particularly care whether I kept my status as one of the elite people. Perhaps that was exactly why Feng Du chose not to act.

I offered her the same tempting terms I had offered the others. To my surprise, she dismissed them outright, mocking me with open contempt as nothing more than a hound of the Shadow Pavilion. That raised my suspicions. Could she be with the resistance?

If so, I could not bring myself to touch her.

“The file says you fled after committing a crime,” I said, “but it doesn’t say what the crime was. Tell me—what did you do?”

“Don’t you people have the Sin-Origin Mirror?” she said. “Look into it yourselves and see.”

I had looked, in fact. I had seen nothing at all—only her, running.

“Are you with the resistance?” I asked directly.

“Believe whatever you like,” she said. “I only did what a person ought to do.”

“Then why not give up your virtual body and return to the real world? Why endure such deathlike suffering here instead?”

“I still have a mother who needs looking after. I can’t go back—not unless I want to be exiled to the Mundane World.”

“What’s so terrible about the Mundane World?” I said. “People can still live there. It only affects one’s lifespan somewhat.”

“You’re awfully young to be minding other people’s business,” she said. “You know nothing of the Mundane World. Don’t go around lecturing people you don’t understand.”

Damn it. Who exactly didn’t understand the Mundane World?

As far as I knew, there was no one alive who understood it better than I did. But that, of course, I kept to myself.

I genuinely wanted to let her go, so I offered, “What if I use only thirty percent of my strength against you? If you win, I’ll set you free. Truly.”

“Save your little schemes for someone else,” she said. “I’m not leaving. My sentence is nearly up.”

That caught me off guard.

I checked her sentence at once. Sure enough—only three months remained.