42: The battleground has been upgraded to a dual-core system.

The survival bus came to a steady halt amidst the piercing screech of brakes, looking like an exhausted metal beast.

Su Chen pushed open the driver's cab door, and a cold wind, dry and smelling of sulfur, rushed toward him.

He narrowed his eyes, his gaze sweeping over the oil storage tanks that bulged like tumors. His sharp intuition told him this place wasn't clean.

"Underneath this... something is breathing."

Su Chen muttered to himself.

Just then, the dust on the ground was swept up by an invisible gust of wind, revealing a hidden mechanism within the cracks of the concrete.

The originally parched ground unexpectedly revealed a faint layer of pale golden patterns.

It was as if some massive blood vessel was pulsating underground, bringing waves of heart-palpitating warmth.

"The Yang Meridians converge here. In the old era, this was a geomantic treasure land; now... it's a life-claiming scale."

Zhao Wanting's phantom flickered on the windshield. Due to energy depletion, her body appeared more translucent, like a layer of smoke that could dissipate at any moment.

Her hollow eyes stared fixedly at those golden light patterns, her voice carrying a hint of chilling coldness.

"Someone must step barefoot into the formation eye and activate the node with a sincere Q&A."

"Answer one question wrong, and that bit of sincerity will turn into dry firewood, burning you to ashes."

She turned her head, her illusory gaze passing over Su Chen's shoulder and landing on the pale-faced Lin Mengyao behind him.

"You are of the Lin family bloodline, with the foundation of 'Ice Skin and Jade Bones' in your body. This formation only recognizes noble blood like yours, born with a silver spoon."

"Sincerity?"

Lin Mengyao looked as if she had heard a massive joke, her lips curling into a morbid arc.

"An heir like me, raised as a precision instrument since childhood—my heart was sealed long ago by the family's medicinal pills."

"Zhao Wanting, you want to see my sincerity? Where would someone like me get sincerity from?"

Su Chen didn't respond; he simply observed Lin Mengyao calmly.

He saw that although her words were as hard as steel plate, the hand hanging at her side was trembling slightly, her nails digging deep into her palm, with a strange crimson seeping from the gaps between her fingers.

An egoist's intuition told Su Chen that forcing her at this moment was useless.

He nimbly pushed open the car door, and the wind, mixed with rust and rot, instantly poured in.

"Since you have no heart, there's no need to stay in this bus."

"Anyway, once time is up, we'll all turn into scrap metal together."

Su Chen made a move to jump down, his tone as flat as if he were discussing what to have for dinner.

"Wait!"

Lin Mengyao's voice suddenly rose, carrying a tremor she hadn't even noticed herself.

Su Chen stopped in his tracks but didn't look back.

He heard the soft sound of fingernails piercing flesh. Lin Mengyao gritted her teeth and actually used her nail to force open her index finger.

She stumbled past Su Chen, stepping barefoot directly onto the cold asphalt surface.

The moment her feet touched the ground, the previously slow-moving light patterns gathered frantically under her feet like a pack of sharks smelling blood.

Lin Mengyao let out a muffled groan as her slender ankles were tightly entwined by those golden lights.

She crouched down, her bloody fingers rapidly sketching on the ground.

Those movements looked familiar to Su Chen; it was exactly that secret talisman seal of the Lin family known as 'Borrowing Heaven's Mandate'.

As the blood talisman was completed, the entire gas station suddenly shook violently.

Su Chen felt a violent surge of Yang Energy erupt from underground.

Within his field of vision, light and shadow began to distort.

In the void behind Lin Mengyao, a bizarre illusion rippled out like water.

The image showed a six or seven-year-old girl, wearing an expensive puffy dress, yet kneeling in a gloomy ancestral hall.

A man with a blurred face was stuffing a black pill emitting a chilly aura into her mouth.

"For a daughter of the Lin family, emotion is a weakness, a burden."

The man's voice was like a crawling venomous snake.

"Eat it. Sever your emotional roots, and only then can you sustain this trillion-dollar family business."

The scene shifted, and the landscape changed abruptly.

It was a certain night.

Su Chen's broad back filled the frame. Lin Mengyao was leaning on his back, the whistling wind and Su Chen's steady heartbeat in her ears.

Even through several layers of clothing, that branding-iron-like body temperature still made her back feel burning hot.

It was the first time in ten years, under the control of that red pill, that she felt something in her chest actually beating wildly—at a frequency so fast it made her want to scream.

Su Chen witnessed all of this, his expression remaining as calm as a deep pool of water.

He stepped into the formation. The golden light of the Yang Meridians, which was enough to incinerate a mortal body, touched his skin but seeped into him joyfully, like swallows returning to their nest.

Su Chen crouched down and firmly grasped Lin Mengyao's ankle, which was convulsing in pain.

"Hiss—"

Lin Mengyao gasped, not because of pain, but because of the aura being transferred from Su Chen's palm.

It wasn't plunder, but a nearly tender consolation.

"If it hurts, shout it out. There are no living people here besides me; no one will laugh at you."

Su Chen's voice still lacked warmth, yet it was like a stabilizing pillar, pinning down Lin Mengyao's crumbling sanity.

At that instant, the stubborn pale blue mark on Lin Mengyao's wrist—

That palace maiden mark symbolizing the Lin family's shackles—actually made a crisp sound like cracking porcelain.

Under the washing of Su Chen's Sacred Yang True Qi, it rapidly turned from blue to gray, finally transforming into a wisp of light smoke that was blown clean by the cold wind of the wasteland.

Lin Mengyao shuddered all over, as if she had finally regained control of her body.

She suddenly grabbed Su Chen's wrist with a force that seemed like she wanted to embed her fingers into his flesh, her voice carrying a trace of an indiscernible sob.

"If... I am no longer the heir of the Lin family, but just Lin Mengyao... would you want me?"

The question was asked with extreme selfishness, yet extreme humility.

Before Su Chen could answer, a low rumble came from beneath the gas station, like the roar of an ancient beast.

"The node has recognized its master!"

Zhao Wanting screamed from inside the bus, her tone filled with disbelief.

"But... that's not right! Why is the energy branching?!"

Su Chen's pupils constricted.

He saw the erupting pale golden light split strangely in two in mid-air.

One part tightly entwined Lin Mengyao's ankle, continuously repairing her damaged meridians.

The other part, as if possessing its own consciousness, traced a golden arc, flowing back into the survival bus, straight through the window, and crashing into the rear compartment where Qin Ya was.

It was Qin Ya.

Even across the vehicle's body, Su Chen could faintly perceive that the usually gentle and restrained Class Teacher was currently holding a broken hairpin, weeping and praying to the void.

Her power of will, untainted by any schemes or calculations and pure to the point of being foolish, actually forcibly snatched half of the Yang Meridian resonance from Lin Mengyao's hands.

The two streams of energy, one hard and one soft, actually formed a bizarre balance at this moment.

The entire survival bus began to shake violently.

The metal shell emitted creaking sounds under the baptism of the golden light, as if undergoing some painful evolution.

The paint on the gas station peeled off in the violent shaking. In the depths of the distant wasteland, some gargantuan entity seemed to have been awakened by this energy fluctuation, letting out muffled roars.

Su Chen looked at those two completely different energy flows, a helpless bitter smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"Great. The Shura field has just upgraded to dual-core drive."

He supported the unsteady Lin Mengyao, whose eyes were beginning to lose focus.

He could clearly feel that something originally suppressed within this woman's body was completely unsealing, and her body temperature was soaring at an abnormal rate along with it.

The Lin family toxins that had suppressed her were swept away, but what followed was a torrent of Yang Energy rushing wildly without any dams to block it.

Lin Mengyao's current body was like a porcelain doll stuffed with an overloaded battery, in danger of bursting at any moment.

And in the compartment behind him—

An equally powerful yet more flexible aura was producing a frantic resonance with the Sacred Yang Divine Body inside him through the metal plating.