Chapter Fifty-Six: Ambush
Ling Yun looked at the ferocious-looking Young Master Fan, who was right in front of him, and his mental field solidified again. His telekinetic power instantly transformed into an invisible heavy hammer, which slammed hard into Young Master Fan's black chest, which was already bulging high and bursting through his clothes.
Young Master Fan roared, his massive body flying far away. With a loud crash, he slammed into a parked military jeep, the one-ton vehicle groaning under its strain. The front of the jeep caved in, and the heavy machine gun mount on the roof snapped in two with a bang. The fifty-kilogram machine gun, along with a double-row of ammunition, tumbled to the ground with a clatter.
Young Master Fan scrambled to his feet, his white eyes, devoid of pupils, still radiating a fury akin to a volcanic eruption. Ling Yun's heart skipped a beat. The iron hammer formed by his telekinesis possessed an attack force of 1,500 kilograms, yet Young Master Fan seemed unharmed after taking that blow. Could it be that being possessed by a ghost grants such formidable combat power?
Young Master Fan turned around, grabbed the military jeep, and lifted the enormous vehicle over his head as if it were a toy, then hurled it at Ling Yun without warning. Although Ling Yun could catch the jeep with his telekinesis, why bother wrestling with this inhuman monster? He simply dodged a few meters to the side, and the jeep flew past where he had been standing, crashing heavily to the ground with a loud bang.
The fuel tank was damaged upon landing. The immense friction generated by the vehicle's impact sparked a trail of sparks, instantly igniting the leaking fuel. With a deafening roar, the entire fuel tank exploded from the intense heat, transforming the military jeep into a massive, blinding fireball, its flames raging into the night.
Young Master Fan's ferocious face looked even more menacing in the bright firelight, but before he could launch a counterattack, Ling Yun's mental field had already been activated. He could tell that this ghost did not seem to have telekinesis and was only attacking temporarily with its super speed and hard claws. If it relied solely on these ordinary attack methods, it would not be able to harm Ling Yun in the slightest.
The telekinetic power formed several heavy hammers, one after another, striking Young Master Fan's chest. Each attack was precisely controlled by Ling Yun to weigh around 1,500 kilograms. After meditation training, his telekinetic control had reached an extremely powerful level.
In the blink of an eye, the telekinetic attack had already unleashed more than ten strikes. Young Master Fan was completely powerless to resist, roaring repeatedly but helpless. After being possessed, his body became exceptionally strong, rendering ordinary physical attacks completely ineffective. However, Ling Yun's mental energy field was almost omnipresent and intangible. If he created distance, one could only be beaten without being able to retaliate.
Although 1,500 kilograms of force wasn't much to Young Master Fan, continuous attacks gradually caused him pain, even with his strong physique. Moreover, with Ling Yun's precise control, the power of the telekinetic hammer continued to increase.
Ling Yun was also shocked. The fact that his physical defenses could withstand so many of his telekinetic attacks was truly terrifying. Even a simple steel ingot would deform and shatter under such continuous bombardment of telekinetic power. Clearly, Young Master Fan's physical strength far exceeded expectations.
Young Master Fan covered his head with both hands, his body moving erratically across the open ground like a ghost, occasionally trying to rush forward at top speed to grab Ling Yun's side and launch a fierce claw attack. However, the telekinetic energy moved with Ling Yun's will. No matter how fast Young Master Fan was, how could he compare to Ling Yun's lightning-fast thoughts? Moreover, the activation of the mental field was without warning and had no sense of direction. Young Master Fan had no way to judge the direction of the telekinetic attack based on his eyes or other sensitive organs.
Finally, after being ravaged by dozens of mentally powered hammers, the disheveled young master Fan finally found a way to temporarily break the mental field: keep a distance of more than 100 meters from Ling Yun. This distance is the critical point of the range of Ling Yun's mental field. Beyond 100 meters, the mental field will rapidly weaken and eventually disappear.
The boy also stopped his telekinetic attack, staring at the motionless, monstrous-looking Young Master Fan from a distance of a hundred meters. A vague unease crept into his heart. The continuous high-intensity telekinetic attacks had already depleted a significant portion of his energy, but it seemed the monster hadn't suffered any substantial damage. If another round of the same attack were to occur, Ling Yun would have to reduce the range of his mental field, but this also meant the threat of the opponent's attack would greatly increase. A distance of several dozen meters was nothing more than a fleeting moment for the opponent.
Without the protection of telekinesis, could his body withstand the attack of those claws? Ling Yun shook his head; the answer was no. Although his body was so strong that bullets couldn't harm him, it was still as fragile as paper against Young Master Fan's claws. All power is relative. Young Master Fan didn't have the elusive mental field of a superhuman, but his defense and attack capabilities far surpassed it. If Ling Yun's physical strength were as formidable as Young Master Fan's, the battle would be a one-sided affair.
Young Master Fan stood quietly for a moment, his hunched body seemingly gathering strength. His clothes were tattered, revealing his inhuman black skin, a side effect of being attacked by Ling Yun's telekinetic power.
Suddenly, Young Master Fan opened his bloody maw like a monster, and his extremely sharp and high-pitched voice instantly broke the silence of the night sky. The powerful sound wave surged towards Ling Yun, who was a hundred meters away, like a roaring torrent.
Within the visible, hazy sound waves, the faces of countless skeletal ghosts appeared and disappeared.
Ling Yun's heart suddenly stopped beating. The blood in his body vibrated violently the instant the sound wave erupted. If one were to look into his blood vessels, one would find that the normally flowing blood was rippling with countless waves. His skin undulated visibly, as if countless insects were crawling beneath it.
The military jeep, still burning fiercely, suddenly went out the instant the roar of the engine passed by, as if an invisible giant hand had extinguished the fire, leaving only a steel ruin with wisps of smoke rising from it.
Snow-white streaks appeared in the air on either side of the sound wave; these were air waves generated by the immense force propelling the air at incredible speed. Small fragments of stone were lifted into the air by the unstoppable force, then continuously shattered into dust and fell back down.
Ling Yun's head was buzzing, and he groaned. Two lines of blood flowed from his nose and ears. For a moment, he felt dizzy and unable to stand. His face turned deathly pale. Fortunately, his physical defense was up to a certain level. Otherwise, if an ordinary person were here, they would probably have had their internal organs shattered by the shockwave.
He took a deep breath, barely managing to calm his dizzy mind. With a thought, his mental field was activated again, erecting five invisible barriers within a fifty-meter radius.
The moment the telekinetic barrier made contact with the tip of the sound wave, Ling Yun felt as if he had been struck by lightning. His body trembled, and he retreated rapidly, leaving two deep trenches in the hard concrete ground. The sound wave swept through the other four telekinetic barriers like a devastating force, and in the blink of an eye, it was in front of Ling Yun. Within the misty wave, several terrifying ghosts composed purely of sound waves let out silent, eerie laughs, opened their blood-red maws, and pounced on Ling Yun.
Young Master Fan's counterattack was surprisingly powerful.
Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Ghost Master
Telekinetic defense is very effective against ordinary attacks, but when the force of the attack becomes sudden, rapid, and extremely powerful, the effectiveness of the mental field becomes relatively limited. Clearly, Young Master Fan found a weakness in the mental field in a very short time, and in turn, delivered a fierce blow to Ling Yun.
Ling Yun gritted his teeth, his telekinetic power pushed to its limit. This was a life-or-death moment, unlike in the fifth layer of the barrier where death meant a fresh start. In reality, life was only given once. Moreover, the opponent's attack was so fast that there was no time to dodge.
In the critical moment, the boy roared, and his right arm suddenly burst forth with dazzling light, instantly expanding several times its original size, as if he were holding up a towering tree, fiercely meeting the oncoming sound wave.
It was as if a space shuttle traveling at full speed had suddenly crashed into an unmoving mountain. Visible ripples of air emanated from Ling Yun's arm as his incredibly thick hand gripped the tip of the sound wave, like holding a powerful python, whose body struggled incessantly in his palm, trying to break free of his grasp.
Ling Yun felt waves of intense pain coming from his right arm. Every tiny sonic wave impact pierced through the thin mental energy field protection on his arm and fiercely stabbed directly into his skin. Although he had used the steel-enhancing technique, making his entire right arm feel like it was forged from steel, it still felt like being stabbed by thousands of needles in the sonic waves.
Another flash of light, and Ling Yun's shoulder twitched. Suddenly, his enormous fist clenched, capturing the sonic wave that had shrunk into a sphere within its grasp. Countless sound waves emanated from between his steely fingers. His massive hand trembled slightly, as if he were holding a volcano about to erupt. But after a brief stalemate, the sonic wave finally subsided, and his fist slowly retracted.
Ling Yun endured the excruciating pain. His right arm, which had recovered to its original state, was completely unresponsive and hung limply. He had successfully blocked the sound wave at the cost of almost his entire arm. Although his powerful self-healing ability had begun to take effect, Ling Yun was still unable to use his right arm for the time being.
The ferocious figure in the boy's pupils gradually enlarged. After unleashing a sonic boom, Young Master Fan did not stop for a moment. His high-speed body broke through the distance of over a hundred meters in just two breaths. When he was still a few meters away from Ling Yun, the demon-like Young Master Fan rose into the air, his two sharp claws making a swishing sound as they slashed towards Ling Yun's head.
All of this happened the instant Ling Yun withdrew his arm. Clearly, Young Master Fan intended to take advantage of Ling Yun's exhausted old strength and unawakened new strength to deliver a fatal blow.
He was greeted by several spears made entirely of air. Ling Yun flicked his left hand, and one after another, air spears appeared around him, shooting towards Young Master Fan in mid-air. The young man's face showed a calmness far beyond his years. Although his right arm was unusable, his mental field had not suffered any substantial damage; having or not having an arm made little difference.
The claws tore the air spear to shreds, but the air spear also neutralized the force of Young Master Fan's claws. Unable to attack, Young Master Fan used the momentum to land on the ground, about to launch another close-range attack. At this moment, he was only a dozen meters away from Ling Yun. At such close range, his mental energy field protection was definitely no match for the powerful thrust.
Suddenly, Young Master Fan's ferocious expression froze, his body stiffening as he lunged forward. His gaze slowly fell upon his exposed waist, where a bloody hole the size of a teacup's rim lay between his ribs. An invisible spear, formed from psychic energy, had pierced deeply into his body. Even with Young Master Fan's formidable physique, he couldn't withstand the full force of the psychic spear's attack.
Those aerial spears were all illusions created by Ling Yun to lull his opponent into a false sense of security. The delay was merely a prelude to a surprise attack when Young Master Fan launched his assault. Due to his exceptionally precise control over telekinesis, Ling Yun conjured spears in an incredibly short time, and with a flick of his finger, pierced Young Master Fan's body. Prior to this, none of his telekinetic attacks had materialized into sharp or blade-like weapons, because Ling Yun wasn't confident he could kill his opponent in one strike. These attacks were necessary to assess his opponent; otherwise, if the opponent became prepared, a surprise attack would become extremely difficult.
Looking up at Ling Yun, Young Master Fan opened his blood-red lips, and a sonic boom once again formed from his gaping maw. But Ling Yun, who was already on guard, would not allow him to use a sonic attack again. In an instant, he rushed in, a dazzling ball of light forming in his left palm, and then he slammed it into Young Master Fan's wide-open mouth.
Young Master Fan's originally ferocious expression suddenly turned into something incredibly strange. His eyeballs, with only the whites of his eyes, suddenly bulged out, as if an unnamed force was rampaging through his head. His already grotesque features suddenly became distorted, and the muscles of his brownish-yellow face twitched incessantly. Two long, muffled sounds came from his pointed ears.
Ling Yun released his grip. Young Master Fan's once bright red lips had turned charred black, with parts of the curves of both his upper and lower lips missing, and most of his sharp teeth were gone. Clearly, this was the result of Ling Yun's energy sphere. The terrifying sonic boom ultimately did not erupt; most of it was reverted to energy and returned to his bloodstream.
The fatal wound inflicted by the telekinetic spear finally took effect; Young Master Fan swayed and finally collapsed to the ground.
A phantom struggled to float out of Young Master Fan's body; it was the ghost that had possessed him before. However, the ghost's shadow appeared exceptionally transparent and pale, clearly indicating that the telekinetic spear had inflicted significant damage on the ghost.
Ling Yun stood pale-faced in front of the ghost-possessed Young Master Fan. With a flick of his finger, a small barrier enveloped Young Master Fan's body. The ghost, which had already struggled out halfway, immediately stopped its futile movements and slowly sank back into Young Master Fan's body. This barrier had the effect of resisting all forms, and the ghost was also within its effective range.
Ling Yun finally breathed a sigh of relief. Just dealing with this mysterious and unknown ghost had already exhausted most of his telekinetic power and one of his arms. Although the battle was temporarily over, Ling Yun's unease had not completely disappeared. During the fight with the ghost, Young Master Fan, Ling Yun vaguely sensed a faint connection to the ghost's back through a mental energy field. This most likely meant that the ghost was actually being controlled by someone, and that the controller was somewhere nearby.
As if to verify his idea, Ling Yun's expression suddenly changed, and he quickly retreated more than ten meters.
Seven deep, neatly arranged holes appeared on the ground where Ling Yun had just stood, as if they had been driven in straight lines by a pile driver following standard construction markings.
Ling Yun looked up and saw a wild black shadow flash across the night sky, landing with a thud on the ground where Young Master Fan lay. With a flick of his finger, the barrier Ling Yun had set up shattered, and the ghost, as if attracted by something, leaped joyfully from Young Master Fan's body, turning into a wisp of mist and disappearing into the black shadow's sleeve.
Chapter Fifty-Eight: Miniature Barrier