Chapter 1484: Thought Invasion

“Heart!”

Jian Changsheng woke up from his dream with a start!

The desolate, cold wind of the Gray Realm brushed his cheeks. He looked at the barren land before him and the iron fence in the distance with the sign “Twilight Society members please use this gate to enter,” his brain stalling for a moment…

Where is this… outside the Lingxu Domain gate?

Wasn’t he just at White Dove Square? How did he get here in an instant??

At the same time, a rustling sound came from the side. Sun Bumian also sat up slowly, and after being stunned for a long while, his expression became incredibly strange.

“Damn it, we were played by Heart!”

“What do you mean??”

“‘Go if you want to’—it really was ‘go if you want to’!” Sun Bumian spread his hands and said helplessly. “No wonder Heart dared to let us attend the meeting. I guess he used some method to directly bring our thoughts into the Lingxu Domain…”

“You mean… we were all sleepwalking just now?”

“No wonder I couldn’t get full no matter how much I ate.” Jiang Xiaohua touched his still-empty stomach and let out a long sigh.

“Calling it sleepwalking probably isn’t appropriate… After all, others could indeed see us, we did attend the meeting, and everything we saw and heard really happened. If you have to call it something, it was a super-large-scale group sleepwalking based on reality.” Sun Bumian figured out most of it and couldn’t help but click his tongue.

“Heart’s methods are getting more and more sophisticated…”

“But, but when did we start sleepwalking?” Jian Changsheng was incredulous.

“Isn’t it obvious? We are now at the edge of the Lingxu Domain, which means we were hit the moment we entered the domain… Let’s walk around the edge of the domain; we might be able to meet other awakened members.”

“Then does that mean everything that just happened was real?” Jian Changsheng looked toward the Lingxu Domain again. “We’re out now, so Heart…”

“He… should still be inside.”

……

Under the swaying tree shadows,

the figure in the theatrical robe and the four K-cards faced the hundreds of figures of the swarming knight orders alone, looking thin and lonely from a distance.

But facing such a disparity in numbers, Chen Ling not only had no worries, but the smile at the corners of his mouth became even richer.

Yes,

the members of the Twilight Society had never truly stepped into the Lingxu Domain.

Even though they had indeed “entered” the Lingxu Domain, participated in the meeting, and seen and heard everything here with their own eyes—and even the crowd and the knight orders had truly seen their existence—in essence, only their “thoughts” had come.

Just like Chen Ling in the past, when his physical body was sealed, he still used a thought storm to go to the Tian-Shu Domain to help Lord Red Dust defeat the Calamity of Turbidity…

Although they “appeared” here, their physical bodies remained outside the domain.

This was not a “thought storm,” but a new ability Chen Ling had just extracted:

——[Thought Invasion].

In the World-Ending War not long ago, Chen Ling had completed two performances in a row and also obtained two opportunities to extract abilities. After hesitating for a long time, he still chose the Calamity of Thought as one of his extraction targets.

The Calamity of Thought was, after all, World-Ending level, and its abilities were quite bizarre and mysterious. A thought storm had helped Chen Ling accomplish many incredible things, so he chose to gamble again.

The ability of [Thought Storm] was to let one’s own thoughts intervene in the thoughts of others; while [Thought Invasion] was the exact opposite—it was the ability to forcibly pull the target’s thoughts into one’s own thoughts and connect them to each other.

The simplest example was the previous World-Ending negotiation.

Chen Ling, who used to sleep in the underground palace, once had his thoughts dragged away by the Calamity of Thought, directly colliding and intertwining with the thoughts of several other World-Ending Calamities. That was the manifestation of [Thought Invasion]… And now, Chen Ling had applied this ability to the Twilight Society members.

The moment the Twilight Society members entered the Lingxu Domain, the Gray King, who had been using moonlight to watch the edge of the domain, would tell Chen Ling which members were there.

Then, as long as he dragged their thoughts, as well as the thoughts of the surrounding crowd, into his own thoughts and connected them to each other, the Twilight Society members didn’t need to physically enter the Lingxu Domain at all to participate in the meeting. No matter what happened in the real world, it was impossible to endanger their lives. All risks were borne by Chen Ling alone.

But there was one exception… and that was Lord Lingxu.

Lord Lingxu was, after all, Ninth-Order. No matter how strong Chen Ling’s thought invasion was, he couldn’t easily influence him. Therefore, in the eyes of the other knights and the crowd, those Twilight Society members who were “conspicuous” were completely invisible to him…

And Lord Lingxu hadn’t noticed the abnormality of the knights behind him at all. From the beginning, he had been focused entirely on deducing the chess game. After Chen Ling appeared, his attention shifted directly to Chen Ling.

Thus,

a bizarre situation was created.

The “chess game,” which was originally intended to seal the area and prevent the Twilight Society members from leaving, hadn’t trapped a single ordinary Twilight Society member in the end… Now, they only had Chen Ling, who could turn into a World-Ending Calamity at any moment, and four Eighth-Order K-cards with explosive combat power.

This net had failed to catch a single useful person, only entangling a “nuclear bomb” that could explode at any time.

“Lord Lingxu…”

“Those Twilight Society members… have all disappeared.”

Captain Amber bit the bullet and told Lord Lingxu what he had seen.

Lord Lingxu looked at Chen Ling, who was smiling without a word, and after a long silence, he ultimately let out a long sigh…

“…Forget it, you win.”

“Not playing Gomoku either?” Chen Ling raised an eyebrow. “I’m in a good mood now, I can play a few more games with you.”

“You go.”

Lord Lingxu waved his hand.

With those Twilight Society members not present, there was no point in using force against Chen Ling now. It was better for this troublesome bomb to leave the Lingxu Domain as soon as possible. The longer he stayed, the more variables there would be.

Chen Ling stood up unhurriedly and brushed the dust off the sleeves of his theatrical robe as casually as he had been when he first sat down, as if he hadn’t been attending a negotiation from start to finish, but had just come to the park to play a casual game of chess before preparing to go home.

“There’s one question I’m actually curious about.” Chen Ling looked down at Lord Lingxu, who was still sitting on the meditation cushion.

Lord Lingxu didn’t even look up. “Speak.”

Chen Ling paused for a moment before speaking slowly:

“If the Twilight Society had really been here just now, if you had really wanted to strike…”

“How much certainty would you have had in killing me?”

“Or rather…”

“How much certainty would you have had in killing the Calamity of Mockery?”