121: Chapter 121 The Brand is Two-Way

But within that trembling frequency, there was a trace of an indescribable... excitement.

When Shen Xiao's fingers gripped Xia Lengbai's cold wrist, the Silver Pattern spread instinctively, like countless tiny silver roots, instantly probing into her Meridians.

No damage.

The Meridians were intact, and the flow of spiritual power was only slightly sluggish due to tension.

But the problem lay elsewhere.

When the Silver Pattern's perception probed the left arm where the dark red mark was entrenched, what it fed back was not a fluctuation of spiritual power, but a... cold "void."

To be more precise, that area was emitting a strong sense of resonance, as if the mark on Xia Lengbai's arm was a forcibly activated receiver, continuously drawing in some kind of information stream from the outside.

Meanwhile, the two Mechanical Beetles stopped.

They halted thirty zhang away, one on the left and one on the right, forming a stable angle.

The pale detection light on their heads was no longer fixed, but flickered alternately in a complex, almost communicative frequency.

Their gravel-like eyes turned toward the direction of Xia Lengbai's arm, then glanced at the metal fragments still suspended and slowly rotating in mid-air after the explosion.

"They... are sharing vision and commands."

Xia Lengbai's voice squeezed through her teeth, carrying suppressed pain, but more than that, it held a strange sensation—a mix of repulsion and peculiar insight born from being forcibly "connected" to some cold network.

"That last hit... it was like a 'beacon' being hammered in even harder."

Shen Xiao's gaze darkened.

He "looked" following the Silver Pattern's feedback—not with his naked eyes, but through the energy landscape analyzed by the Silver Pattern.

Deep within the mark on Xia Lengbai's left arm, those dark red lines were glowing slightly, like awakened blood vessels.

From their ends, extremely fine, almost imperceptible threads of energy extended, piercing through the Void Realm and generating a weak but continuous resonance with some kind of circuit inside the two Mechanical Beetles in the distance.

Bidirectional. The mark was bidirectional.

Through the mark, the Mechanical Beetles "saw" a part of Xia Lengbai's perception, and perhaps even the more subtle energy fluctuations around her.

Meanwhile, Xia Lengbai passively received a cold "scanning sensation" from the Mechanical Beetles.

It wasn't thought, but more like strings of primitive, purposeful data streams: target confirmation, threat assessment, energy characteristic analysis, path simulation...

"Not a beacon."

Shen Xiao said in a low voice.

The Silver Pattern quietly retreated from Xia Lengbai's wrist, but left behind an extremely thin protective barrier to isolate some of the direct energy intrusion.

"It's a data interface. They are reading you, and through you, they are also reading the environment beneath our feet."

Before he could finish speaking, a new change occurred.

The metal fragments suspended at the center of the explosion seemed to hear a silent summons and began to move slowly.

It was not a chaotic dispersion, but rather, defying common sense and as if attracted by magnetism, they converged toward the feet of the remaining two Mechanical Beetles.

The edges of the fragments flickered with an unstable dark red glimmer, colliding with each other and making faint "clinking" sounds.

Slowly, piece by piece, they overlapped, spliced, and interlocked, as if trying to reconstruct something beneath the two Mechanical Beetles.

The black gravel on the ground began to tremble slightly, the tiny particles jumping as if the earth's veins of the entire Gobi Desert were being agitated by some low humming.

Shen Xiao's gaze swept rapidly around.

The Gobi Desert remained empty, and the outline of the Bone Mountains in the distance appeared blurred and ferocious under the gloomy daylight.

A frontal clash?

His Silver Pattern reserves were running critically low, and his body had not yet recovered from serious injuries.

The opponents were two relic constructs in perfect condition, and they could also use that eerie connection of the mark to "predict" Xia Lengbai's, and even his own, action intentions based on energy usage.

A head-on collision had less than a twenty percent success rate, and once entangled, death was almost certain.

He needed a variable.

He needed chaos.

He needed to cut off, or at least interfere with, this damned "connection window" between them and the mark, even if only for a split second.

His gaze fell upon Xia Lengbai's left arm, which was trembling slightly from pain and some internal agitation, and then swept over the alternately flickering detection lights of the two Mechanical Beetles in the distance, as well as the metal fragments slowly reorganizing beneath them.

An extremely risky, near-suicidal plan formed in his mind instantly.

"I need you to do one thing."

Shen Xiao's voice was suppressed to an extremely low volume, but his speech was as fast as a gale.

While speaking, he silently extracted the majority of the Silver Pattern power he could still mobilize and laid it out in front of him, seemingly casually.

The Silver Pattern sank into the ground, not forming a barrier, but transforming into an extremely thin, almost transparent "net" that possessed the potential for specific high-frequency tremors, covering an area of about ten zhang in front of them.

The silver light was restrained, and it was completely invisible from the surface.

"It might be a little 'painful'."

He added, his eyes sharp as knives, staring intently at Xia Lengbai's reaction.

"But for you, that shouldn't be anything, right?"

The cold sweat on Xia Lengbai's temples was dried by the dry wind of the Gobi Desert, leaving behind a few white streaks.

She tugged at the corners of her mouth, the smile appearing somewhat twisted due to her pallor and the lingering excitement in her eyes: "Speak."

"Use your Tomb Guardian Seal."

Shen Xiao stared into her eyes, enunciating clearly and quickly, "Do not go to wrap that 'void,' and do not go to fight it.

Go 'touch' it, go 'imitate' those cold 'scanning sensations' it transmits to you, that 'feeling' of being analyzed, evaluated, and locked onto."

He paused for a moment, observing the change in Xia Lengbai's gaze: "Then, with your fastest speed, imitate this 'feeling'—no, this 'sense of malicious peeping'—and then 'throw' it toward the Mechanical Beetle twelve zhang away to your front left.

Imitate its frequency, but magnify the 'malice of being observed' by ten times, a hundred times, and turn it into a poisoned spike specifically aimed at its data receiving end!"

Use their own way to pay them back?

No, it was turning the passively received peeping into an actively instilled, magnified echo of malice.

Upon hearing the words "malice," "magnify," and "aimed at," Xia Lengbai's eyes suddenly lit up.

It was not fear, but a nearly voracious eagerness.

The desire for destruction and manipulation in the bones of a yandere was instantly ignited by this proposal full of risk and eerie gamesmanship.

Pain?

Risk?

Those were merely the most insignificant seasonings in this dangerous game.

"Understood."

She didn't even ask another word and simply closed her eyes.

The clear radiance of the Tomb Guardian Seal turned slightly in her Sea of Consciousness, no longer the harmony of protection, but becoming sharp and concentrated.

She carefully retraced that cold, analytical "scanning sensation" that had been transmitted during that instant when the mark on her arm was forcibly "activated."

That feeling was like fine ice needles, probing every inch of her energy fluctuations and every trace of her emotional ups and downs.

She imitated it.

With the cold essence of the Tomb Guardian Seal, she simulated that inhuman, mechanical, and purely utilitarian "peeping."

It was awkward and stiff, like asking moonlight to imitate the cold gleam of a blade.

But she succeeded—at least on the surface—condensing a sharp mental fluctuation filled with the malice of "being stared at."

This fluctuation carried the "seasoning" of her own emotions: a trace of annoyance at having her territory violated, a trace of disgust at the unknown connection, and... a trace of twisted pleasure in returning this "malice" to the perpetrator.

She gathered her strength.

Shen Xiao's gaze was locked tightly onto the Mechanical Beetle to the front left.

It seemed to be fully focused on processing the data of the fragments converging at its feet, its head detection light stably pointing at the fragments, but the monitoring lens in the corner of its eye was undoubtedly still firmly locked onto Xia Lengbai, the other end of the data chain it was continuously reading.

Now.

Shen Xiao nodded almost imperceptibly.

Xia Lengbai's eyes snapped open, clear radiance and red light flashing deep within her pupils, and the mark on her left arm suddenly erupted with a scorching red light far exceeding before!

But this time, all the erupted energy, along with that condensed, malicious mental fluctuation, was pushed back with all her might along that invisible "data connection channel"!

There was no sound, no light or shadow.

There was only a cold, sharp, and malicious "sense of peeping" that flowed upstream along the thin energy thread between the mark and the Mechanical Beetle, violently "crashing" into the core receiving unit of the Mechanical Beetle to the front left!

"Buzz!!!"

The Mechanical Beetle was hit as if by an invisible heavy hammer!

Its massive metal body shook violently, and the detection light on its head instantly erupted from a stable pale white into a crazily chaotic flickering, like a snowy screen!

It let out a high-pitched hiss that was sharp to the extreme, almost piercing the eardrums, its articulated limbs striking the ground wildly, creating irregular noise, and its entire "body" experienced a brief, uncontrolled trembling.

It was "burned" by a "signal" that was highly similar yet filled with hostility, transmitted from the other end of its "network."

It was like a scanning terminal suddenly receiving a violent, polluting data stream aimed at the scanning protocol itself!

Its logic core, its CPU, was nearly fried.

And the instant its chaotic hissing sounded, the other Mechanical Beetle's head detection light also flickered violently, and its movements showed an extremely brief stiffness.

Their shared "vision" and "command" network inevitably suffered impact and interference when the Mechanical Beetle to the front left was subjected to the violent fluctuations of the "mental counterattack."

What Shen Xiao was waiting for was this fleeting "window period."

His body moved, but not toward either Mechanical Beetle; instead, he lunged violently to the side and back, while roaring in a low voice: "Now! The 'net' under your feet! Use your maximum perception to 'listen'!"

Almost instinctively, the moment the Mechanical Beetle was in chaos and a gap appeared in the connection, Xia Lengbai channeled all the remaining perceptual power from her Tomb Guardian Seal and the mark on her left arm, ignoring the stinging pain, and frantically directed it toward the area under her feet covered by the Silver Pattern.

She "heard" it.

In the "listening network" formed by the high-frequency tremors of the Silver Pattern, she "heard" the fine, chaotic "noise" emitted by the temporarily disordered internal energy circuits of the two Mechanical Beetles due to the interference; she "heard" the weak repulsion and collision sounds between the metal fragments converging at their feet, caused by the lack of unified commands; and she even "heard" something deeper, beneath the black gravel of this Gobi Desert—a kind of dormant, ancient, and extremely faint "breathing" that had been briefly "startled" by their recent chaos and explosive energy.

Shen Xiao half-knelt and rose beside her, his face pale, a trace of blood overflowing from the corner of his mouth again, but his eyes were terrifyingly bright.

The last sliver of Silver Pattern power at his fingertips was poised and ready, pointing not at the Mechanical Beetle, but at the direction from which the "breathing" she "heard" was coming—which was also the area where the fragments were most densely gathered beneath the feet of the Mechanical Beetle that had fallen into chaos.

"The water has been muddied."

He licked the bloodstain from the corner of his mouth and grinned, revealing a smile mixed with pain, exhaustion, and cold calculation.

"Next, it depends on whether the fish dies or the net breaks."

The tiny glimmer at his fingertips sank silently into the ground.