Chapter 71: Harvesting Force of Consciousness

Chapter 71: Harvesting Force of Consciousness

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…