214: Chapter 213 People from the Qin Family Who Look Alike
Lin Fan followed her gaze and looked over.
At the end of the corridor, a young man was coming up from the stairwell, wearing a dark gray windbreaker and holding a document bag in his left hand.
He was a few years older than Lin Fan, about twenty-four or twenty-five, tall, lean, with fair skin, high brow bones, and a straight nose.
His facial contours were fifty to sixty percent similar to Lin Fan's—the curve of the brow bone, the depth of the eye sockets, and the line of the jaw; shadows of these features could be found on Lin Fan's face.
But on this person, they were more mature and sharper.
The man seemed to sense the gaze and looked up toward them.
His gaze lingered on Lin Fan's face for less than a second before moving away.
Lin Fan didn't take it to heart. Objects can be similar, and people can look alike; there are plenty of people who resemble each other.
...
Three days later, the results of the preliminary round were announced.
Lin Fan found the list of those who advanced on the association's official website. Numbers 073 and 074 were both on it, but no rankings were shown.
It simply said "Advanced to Semi-finals," clean and concise.
Ye Qing sent a message asking if he had seen it, and he replied with two words: "I have."
The semi-finals were held five days after the preliminaries.
Lin Fan and Ye Qing arrived at the examination hall early as usual, but this time they were moved to the treatment specialty area on the fifth floor.
The exam room was half the size of the circular laboratory from the preliminaries, but the equipment was more sophisticated.
Each workstation was equipped with a Psionic Detector, a set of surgical instruments, and a row of sealed potion bottles.
Several Psionic Cages were placed against the wall, and inside lay the "exam questions" for the semi-finals—all low-Rank Armor Beasts, but in much worse condition than the Rock Beetle larvae from the preliminaries.
A few were lying motionless, some were breathing rapidly, and one had obvious lacerations on its body.
Lin Fan found his workstation, number 073. Ye Qing was at number 074.
Just as he put down his backpack, his peripheral vision caught someone standing at workstation 075 next to him.
Dark gray windbreaker, tall and thin, high brow bones, straight nose. It was the man he had seen in the corridor.
Lin Fan glanced casually at the contestant badge pinned to the man's chest—Examiner Qin Yuan, number 075, a local from Longjiang City.
Someone from the Qin Family.
Lin Fan's expression instantly darkened. What he had already suspected was now becoming increasingly certain.
He forced himself to look away and didn't look in that direction again.
The woman hosting the semi-finals was the same one as last time, standing at the front of the exam room, her voice as steady as ever.
"The content of the semi-finals: Armor Beast Treatment. Each person has an injured low-Rank Armor Beast on their workstation. Please complete the injury diagnosis, treatment plan formulation, and on-site emergency treatment within thirty minutes. Scoring criteria: diagnostic accuracy, feasibility of the treatment plan, standardization of emergency procedures, and the post-operative state of the Armor Beast."
Lin Fan looked down at the Psionic Cage on his workstation.
Inside lay a Thunder Mouse, the size of a palm. Its silver-gray fur was covered in charred black burns, and a section of its tail was missing, with the stump already scabbed over.
It was curled up in the corner of the cage, breathing rapidly, limbs twitching incessantly, with white foam at the corners of its mouth.
The Thunder Mouse is one of the very few species among low-Rank Armor Beasts with a lightning-attribute Physique, making it extremely sensitive to spiritual power fluctuations.
Lin Fan opened the Psionic Cage, gently lifted the Thunder Mouse out, and placed it on the workstation's padded mat.
Its body temperature was very high, and the skin beneath its fur was red, as if it had a fever.
Lin Fan's left eye lit up, and a panel expanded in his field of vision.
[Race]: Thunder Mouse
[Rank]: Rank 15
[Aptitude]: Average Mortal Spirit (Limit: High Mystic Spirit)
[Status]: Critical. Lightning-attribute spiritual power is rampaging within the body, multiple Meridians are damaged, and the heart is overloaded. Cause: Long-term exposure to a strong lightning spiritual power environment, exceeding its own endurance limit.
[Conventional Treatment Plan]: Channel the excess lightning spiritual power out of the body, repair the Meridians, supplement with sedative potions, and rest for over a month.
[Additional Possibility]: The root cause of this individual's rampaging lightning spiritual power is a congenital deformity in a hidden spiritual power node, leading to unstable output. If this node can be corrected and external lightning spiritual power stimulation is introduced during the channeling process, there is a chance to trigger evolution.
Evolution Path: Thunder-Patterned Mouse (High Mystic Spirit)
Lin Fan's finger stopped on the Thunder Mouse's abdomen.
The deformed node was located slightly to the left of the Dantian. Usually, it didn't affect anything, but once it entered a strong lightning environment, it would be activated, causing spiritual power output to spiral out of control.
This wasn't a disease; it was a congenital defect.
Curing it only required channeling the excess spiritual power out, repairing the damaged Meridians, and then using potions to stabilize the heart.
But if he did that, it would remain a weak Thunder Mouse for the rest of its life and would rampage again the next time it encountered a strong lightning environment.
The only way to cure it fundamentally was to correct that deformed node.
Lin Fan flipped the Thunder Mouse over, belly up, and pressed his right index finger on the spot slightly to the left of its Dantian.
Spiritual power seeped in from his fingertip, following the Meridians to probe that deformed node.
The node was like a tangled ball of thread; spiritual power was blocked, rebounding, and rampaging here.
He used his spiritual power to pry open the deformed node bit by bit, like untying a thread, smoothing out the tangled spiritual power pathways one by one.
The Thunder Mouse's body jerked violently, and more white foam appeared at the corners of its mouth.
Lin Fan pressed its head down with his left hand, letting spiritual power seep from his palm into its brain to suppress the pain nerves.
The movements of his right hand didn't stop—prying, smoothing, reconnecting—every step precise to the millimeter.
Under the grooming of the spiritual power, the deformed node slowly unfurled.
Correction complete.
The Thunder Mouse's twitching stopped, and its breathing changed from rapid to steady.
Lin Fan didn't stop. He moved his left hand from the Thunder Mouse's head to its back, releasing a faint trace of lightning spiritual power from his palm.
It was standard lightning spiritual power drawn from the Psionic Converter equipped on the association's workstation.
The lightning spiritual power flowed along the Thunder Mouse's Meridians into the newly corrected node. The node was like an opened door, distributing the lightning spiritual power evenly to every Meridian.
The Thunder Mouse's fur began to change from silver-gray, as silver patterns spread from its spine toward its limbs.
It was as if someone had used the finest brush to paint a lightning-shaped pattern on its body.
A small piece of new flesh grew at the stump of its tail, covered in silvery-white downy fur.
The evolution was completed within seconds.
Lin Fan withdrew his hand and placed the Thunder Mouse on the padded mat in the corner of the workstation.
It opened its eyes; its pupils had changed from black to deep blue, with a thin silver pattern at the corner of its eye.
It stood up and shook its fur, the new silver lightning patterns on its silver-gray coat glinting under the lights.
Thunder-Patterned Mouse—the evolved form of the Thunder Mouse.
High Mystic Spirit; it could be considered top-tier among low-Rank Armor Beasts.
None of the contestants present were fools; everyone knew what this meant.
Curing a Thunder Mouse wasn't hard; everyone present could do it.
Evolving a Thunder Mouse into a Thunder-Patterned Mouse wasn't too difficult for some either, as long as they had enough time and Materials, the success rate wouldn't be too low.
But within a thirty-minute time limit, completing the evolution while simultaneously treating it, and using not their own prepared Materials but those few bottles of the most basic potions and a public Psionic Converter...
This wasn't a question of whether it was difficult; it was a question of whether it was even possible.