Chapter 2749 The Lively Mushroom <TOC> Chapter 2751 Traveler’s Hymn
Translator: SumTLMan
The Black Count thought Angel wouldn’t be bold enough to shift the blame onto Rhine. However, he still underestimated Angel.
That said, since it concerned information about Heart Sigh, Rhine would certainly cover for Angel; this was part of their tacit understanding.
Once the Black Count confirmed that Mystlight had no problem and was merely a somewhat special phantasm, he pursued the matter no further and drifted over to Vai’s side.
Immediately after, Angel saw every pore that could open on Vai’s body begin madly jetting out white, floss-like filaments.
In the space of an instant, Vai became a fully furred sphere.
These white filaments held together for two seconds, then a light breeze passed and the fluff fell like snowflakes, revealing the Vai within once more.
Vai’s true face showed only briefly before a fresh wave of white filaments began to emerge.
Round after round.
At this, Angel already understood: the Black Count was helping Vai clear out the mushroom buttons inside his body. Judging by this efficiency, it was countless times faster than Vai cleaning himself.
At this rate of cycling, it would likely be done in a few minutes.
However, even though the clearing speed had increased, for Vai such rapid cleansing might not be entirely a good thing.
From Vai’s tightly knitted brows and lips pressed to a line, it was clear he felt unwell; but because it was the Black Count helping him clean up, he had no choice but to endure.
When Vai cleared it on his own, he did not feel such discomfort because he knew his own psychological threshold, knew how much in one go would cause discomfort; thus he could always keep the process under a comfortable safety line.
But now that the Black Count had joined the clearing, he shattered Vai’s psychological bottom line at once, plummeting straight from the plains to the floor of a rift valley, even, one could say, down into a bottomless abyss.
Acceleration alone was already hard to bear; such an enormous differential only magnified Vai’s discomfort.
It’s like having sore muscles and asking someone for a massage: moderate kneading eases pain and helps you relax; but if it’s not so moderate…… one might even say「excessive」, then it turns frightening. What began as a mild ache evolves straight into「scraping the bone to treat the wound」.
From this you can tell how much pain such acceleration causes.
Yet the bodily pain is actually manageable; the greater pain is psychological. When the body collapses, you can grit your teeth and endure; but a breach in the psyche can crush all your steely resolve in an instant.
Imagine this: you had arranged a small wound as the outlet for expelling the mushrooms. But now, every opening on your body, those seen and unseen, painless and painful, openly visible and secretly shameful, erupts in unison. The mere thought of that can make your skin crawl.
Originally, the mushroom buttons could be cleared in a concentrated manner; now they were made to spread through your flesh and blood, exploring every part of your body, burrowing like ants into every corner, then gushing out from places you’d be embarrassed to mention.
Most importantly, this was happening in full public view.
Angel felt this psychological damage might exceed whatever injury Vai’s body had sustained.
Even with the speed increased, Vai would likely be left with some psychological shadow because of it…
That said, the Black Count had largely left Vai to his own devices along the way. Though their relationship was close, he was more like a detached elder observing from the sidelines, quietly watching the younger generation stumble along; so long as the general direction wasn’t wrong, he wouldn’t speak up to guide.
So why had the Black Count suddenly begun to manage Vai, helping him expel the residual mycelium within him?
「Tsk tsk tsk, brutal.」Daus’ clicking tongue sounded at Angel’s ear.
Angel looked back; at some point Daus had sidled over, eyes fixed on Vai.
Though Vai was doing his utmost to endure the pain, as Vai’s old friend and dearest companion, Daus saw at a glance the endurance and restraint behind it.
「Too pitiful. Alas.」Daus sighed again.
Across the way, Vai seemed to hear Daus’ voice; his pressed lips tightened further.
Angel shot Daus a glance and sent over the mental connection:「If you stop talking, he might feel a bit better.」
Right now, beyond physical pain, Vai’s greater torment was the shame-inflicted psychological harm. Daus’ repeated sighs wouldn’t ease Vai’s pain; they’d only make him wish for a crack in the earth to crawl into.
So the best response was, in fact, silence.
Pretend you don’t know, haven’t seen.
Daus narrowed his eyes and replied over the mental connection:「Oh, I understand.」
He paused, coughed twice, then spoke aloud:「I mean on the stage, that pink-haired young girl, yes, Pink Jasmine, truly too pitiful, too miserable.」
This kind of clarification was already a bit overdone; but said as it was, one could let it pass. Yet Daus simply had to add, after the words fell,
「I absolutely am not talking about my dear best friend.」
Angel gave Daus a look and did not bother to persuade him again over the mental connection. Without a doubt, the fellow was doing it on purpose.
What surprised Angel, though, was that Vai actually held it in and showed no sign of psychological collapse.
Bear in mind, when Daus first spoke up, Vai’s emotional fluctuations were astonishingly large. In Angel’s perception, Vai had been a single step from a psychic breach.
But now, Vai’s face was calm as still water; though his mood rippled, the waves were smaller than before.
Was the Black Count speaking with Vai? Or had Vai already gone into a state of「if the jar is broken, let it break」?
If it was the latter, Angel wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. Because giving up like that is tantamount to losing your sense of shame.
Granted, without shame one can quickly reforge a hardened psychological shell; but without shame as a bottom line, how low a person might sink, even you yourself won’t know.
Just look at Daus: a textbook case.
「What do you think Lord Black Count suddenly expelling the mushrooms from Vai is meant to accomplish?」Daus asked Angel over the mental connection.
「I think you’re asking the wrong person.」In truth, this was exactly what Angel wanted to ask as well:「But since you’re now speaking over the mental connection, why not just ask out loud? Perhaps Lord Black Count will answer you.」
Daus chuckled, flashing a look of「you know, I know, heaven and earth know」.
After tossing a saucy wink, Daus returned to a serious face and said:「My guess is Lord Black Count wants Vai to go on stage once more.」
Angel weighed it for a moment. Daus’ guess wasn’t without basis; it was indeed possible.
Come to think of it, the Black Count had already been odd earlier. From his perspective, the result of this duel was of great consequence to the Noah lineage, so much so that he was willing to trade his own secret spell to have Angel continue traveling with them.
Yet at this critical moment, the Black Count chose to test Vai.
You should know: for Vai versus Ghost Shadow, even Vai’s friend Daus didn’t think much of it. Angel’s lip-service about Vai having a chance was really just opportunism; inwardly he agreed with Daus.
No one expected Vai to win.
Of course, now that Vai had won, working backward from the result made everything seem acceptable… but if Vai had lost?
If Vai lost and they still wanted apprentices to enter the ruin site as well, then all hope would rest on Kael.
With「extraneous」means, Angel could have Kael one-against-four.
But is the Black Count the sort to pin his hopes on others?
This concerned the crucial ruin site of a Noah ancestor. If Angel were in his place, he wouldn’t entrust all expectation to outsiders either.
And yet the Black Count had behaved out of character at this moment, that was very strange. Had he foreseen Vai’s victory? Unlikely, because Vai’s win hinged entirely on his opponent’s carelessness; had Ghost Shadow kept up the sneak attacks without giving Vai time to recover, he would not have lost.
So what was the Black Count’s reason for doing this?
Angel truly couldn’t figure it out….. but since the Black Count had already done something so abnormal, having Vai go back on stage again wouldn’t be any more out of the ordinary, would it?
While Angel and Daus chatted, the battle on the arena had reached its endgame.
Kael versus Pink Jasmine had, in fact, been decided about the time Daus shifted his attention to Vai.
Daus turning away meant there was no suspense in the duel; Kael was sure to win.
And so it proved.
Kael won even faster than anyone imagined. The little abacus Gray Merchant and his cohort had been fiddling with did not work at all.
They sent in Pink Jasmine to probe Kael’s abilities; however, Kael hardly used any abilities at all, he simply kept producing space rifts, constricting Pink Jasmine’s combat space to an extremely limited scope.
In the end, Pink Jasmine was completely trapped in a prison of space rifts, unable to escape.
As for Pink Jasmine’s illusions? Of course she used them; but from beginning to end, Pink Jasmine’s illusions had no effect on Kael, as if Kael were naturally immune to illusion.
Without illusion to rely on, Pink Jasmine’s strength dropped by eighty percent at once.
On one side stood the fully capable Kael; on the other, Pink Jasmine at twenty percent. They were of the same realm, and Kael had roamed major ruins for years, no ivory-tower academic lacking real combat experience. In such a contrast, Pink Jasmine’s defeat held no suspense.
Defeat was one thing; what vexed Gray Merchant and the others was that they couldn’t discern how Kael avoided the illusions.
When Pink Jasmine came down, they had intended to learn something from her. After all, Pink Jasmine had engaged Kael directly; perhaps she could tell how Kael evaded the illusions.
But Pink Jasmine only pulled a long face:「I don’t know either.」
As Pink Jasmine spoke, Gray Merchant’s group furrowed their brows even tighter.
At first Pink Jasmine probed Kael with different illusions; but whether it was a mist illusion, a guiding illusion, or conjuring a false image of herself, Kael didn’t care in the least.
He simply kept laying down space rifts, constricting Pink Jasmine’s room to move.
By this point, Pink Jasmine had judged Kael largely immune to illusion, so she immediately changed tactics.
She began using differences of on-site vantage and manipulating the projection of light and shadow to apply psychological suggestion to Kael.
This was no longer an illusionist method, but a very sophisticated technique of hypnosis.
Some of the props Pink Jasmine used were bestowed by Shrew. They had no killing power, but for apprentices whose sea of consciousness lacked defenses, they were surefire once picked up.
Yet to Pink Jasmine’s chagrin, her psychological suggestions still had no effect on Kael. It was as if all her arrangements were, in Kael’s eyes, clownish antics.
In the end, after exhausting all means, Pink Jasmine had no choice but to concede defeat.
Hearing Pink Jasmine’s account, Gray Merchant and Shrew exchanged a glance; in each other’s eyes they still saw only puzzlement.
Kael’s victory was too simple. The entire duel hinged on a single decisive factor: Kael was immune to illusion.
Under the sway of that factor, Pink Jasmine couldn’t even get close, much less probe Kael’s abilities.
「Could it be the work of that wizard you met earlier?」Shrew meant Angel.
Gray Merchant:「Possibly. He’s very likely an illusion-school wizard. But even if he is, how could it be that even we can’t tell what method he used?」
Shrew and Gray Merchant looked at each other. This was an answer they likely would never know.
In truth, the principle was simple.
Just like the Mystlight phantasm Angel created within Vai, something not even Vai himself could see, much less outsiders. The Black Count was an exception: his nose is symbiotic with Vai. If the Black Count’s nose and Vai were two separate individuals, he might not have discovered Mystlight either.
By the same method, Angel planted a mark within Kael as well.
A mark wrought by the power of Nightmare Aura, a Nightmare Illusion Mark.
The effect of Nightmare Illusion utterly crushes ordinary illusion. Especially against apprentice-level illusions and related mental attacks, it can even provide direct immunity.
With the help of this Nightmare Illusion Mark, Kael used no other trump cards, not even summoning Speedling. With only a basic space cantrip, he secured victory.
……
As in previous duels, the Sovereign of Wisdom granted both sides time to rest and reset.
From the moment the match ended, Kael suppressed the joy of victory, for he knew what came next might be the hardest part.
After stepping down from the arena, Kael intended to calm his surging emotions at the side, so as not to affect the next battle.
But Vai’s condition drew Kael’s attention.
At some point, Vai had lifted the petrification from his entire body and was standing quietly at the Black Count’s side. At a glance, the nauseating white mushroom fluff from earlier was gone; his skin was very smooth, with no visible scars at all.
By the time his duel ended, had Vai already been healed?
And if healed is a happy thing, why did Vai’s gaze look so dim?
Chapter 2749 The Lively Mushroom <TOC> Chapter 2751 Traveler’s Hymn