CHAPTER

27

Dirty Fighting

I

Hao Zhen stood a few feet away from his opponent. Some distance away, Hao Zhen could see Tian Jin and Duo Lan engaged in their own battles.

Seeing the older disciple reposition himself and raise his sword to attack again, Hao Zhen called out to him, “Hey!”

The man paused, and Hao Zhen produced one of the talismans from his spatial ring. Then, before his opponent could react, Hao Zhen channeled some spiritual power into the paper tag and threw it in front of him, using his spiritual power to propel it forward.

The talisman then flashed while still mid-air, and a barrier of shimmering light appeared between Hao Zhen and Du Jian’s lackey, separating them.

Hao Zhen had only barely managed to avoid the man’s previous attack, and that was because he had been able to see it coming and react. Now that the distance between them was so much smaller, Hao Zhen didn’t think he’d be able to dodge in time again, so he needed to put himself in a situation in which he wouldn’t need to dodge.

Hao Zhen then retreated backward, using the barrier to buy himself some time. The barrier was slightly transparent, and he could vaguely see his opponent on the other side charging straight at it instead of going around before striking it with his sword.

A crack appeared on the barrier, but thankfully it didn’t collapse. Hao Zhen reached into his pocket, grabbing one of the spiritual beacons there. He then glanced past his opponent, estimating the distance between him and the others in the clearing based on the position of their blurry figures through the barrier, and judging that they were sufficiently far away that what he was about to do wouldn’t interfere with their battles, started channeling spiritual power into the pellet in his hand.

The thin outer disciple’s next attack broke the barrier, and just as he launched himself at Hao Zhen, Hao Zhen stopped channeling spiritual power into his eyes, deactivating Spiritual Sight, and threw the spiritual beacon that he had been charging straight at his attacker. Moments after leaving his hand, just as it was nearing the charging outer disciple, the red pellet exploded into a cloud of red smoke.

Hao Zhen, who wasn't using Spiritual Sight, was barely affected, only seeing the thick red cloud spread around him in a blast after the pill burst apart, quickly expanding to an area of a few dozen feet. His opponent, on the other hand, let out a cry of pain. This world may not have flashbangs, but there was nothing to stop Hao Zhen from improvising.

Inwardly, Hao Zhen cheered upon hearing the man’s scream, as it meant he had been using Spiritual Sight after all. That was good—if that hadn’t been the case, Hao Zhen would have had to go with another plan.

Without missing a beat, Hao Zhen tapped into Ethereal String Puppetry, before attaching an Ethereal String to the man. He then glanced back, confirming that he had calculated the distance correctly and that the tree line was just behind him, before hurriedly taking a few steps back and hiding behind the nearest tree, the massive trunk completely obscuring his body.

Before the older disciple could recover from his momentary blindness and leave the spiritual beacon, Hao Zhen focused on the Ethereal String connecting the two of them and started putting into motion the plan he had come up with for situations just like this.

Hao Zhen knew he could have taken advantage of his opponent’s current state to attack, but there was no guarantee the man wouldn’t instinctively react if he got close, and if he were to use a talisman instead but missed, he’d pretty much lose the element of surprise. Ultimately, Hao Zhen only needed to stall in order to win, so that was what he focused on doing. There was no need to take any unnecessary risks.

Through the Ethereal String, Hao Zhen established a connection between himself and his opponent’s optic nerves and waited. Through the Ethereal String, Hao Zhen had a rough idea of what state the man was in and what he was doing, and the moment Hao Zhen felt him open his eyes again, he immediately activated the optical nerves, firing them off in a burst.

The man cried out in pain, shutting his eyes close again. Hao Zhen, on the other hand, inhaled sharply, a shudder running through his body as he felt both his mental stamina—his willpower—and his spiritual stamina take a solid hit. Sweat pooled on his forehead, and he had to force himself to remain focused on his opponent.

Over the past few days, Hao Zhen had dedicated a lot of his time—while Tian Jin and Duo Lan were fighting—to figuring out just what he could and couldn’t do with Ethereal String Puppetry.

The first thing that Hao Zhen had determined was that there were two ways Ethereal String Puppetry could be used—two ways Hao Zhen could control the target. One of those ways was what Hao Zhen had dubbed seizing, and it boiled down to directly taking control of the target’s body. The other way Hao Zhen had termed commanding, and it involved indirectly taking control of the target by issuing commands to them. Seizing expended much less willpower and spiritual power than commanding. Hao Zhen had already had a rough, intuitive idea of this, but it was only over the course of the last few days that he finally solidified these concepts in his mind.

After figuring that out, Hao Zhen had focused on finding out just what exactly he could do with his newfound way of using Ethereal String Puppetry. Originally, he had only been using the skill the traditional, conventional way: through either seizing the target’s limbs—their skeletal muscles—or commanding the target as a whole. After realizing he could also seize the target’s nerves, however, Hao Zhen had explored what exactly he could do through that and whether there was anything else he could seize.

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The first thing that had become clear after some experimentation was that Ethereal String Puppetry actually revolved around controlling the nervous system. When he seized a target’s limbs, their skeleton muscles, what he was actually seizing were their motor nerves. Similarly, when he commanded the target as a whole, he was in fact controlling their brain through commands. No other parts of the target’s body could be directly controlled through Ethereal String Puppetry, though being able to control the target’s nervous system did, in practice, allow him to control almost every aspect of the target’s body.

Hao Zhen didn’t know why that was the case, but he didn’t spend too much wondering about it, instead focusing on what exactly he could do through seizing. As he had realized during the fight with the glistening horn rhinoceros, he could seize not just the target’s motor nerves that controlled their muscles, but also other nerves, even though at the time he hadn’t really understood what he was doing.

As he discovered, he could seize any of the target’s nerves. He was also limited to deactivating and activating them—disabling and firing them off. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do any sort of fine control through nerve seizure. As it turned out, even though Ethereal String Puppetry gave him an intuitive understanding of where each nerve was located and what each nerve did—now that he was actively thinking of such a thing—it didn’t allow him to understand how nerve impulses were interpreted by the brain or by the body’s muscles and organs. Because of that, he was only capable of provoking simple and crude reactions through nerve activation by seizing, such as causing a certain muscle to contract.

Provoking a sensory overload was simple enough to be within the realm of possibility, however, and that was precisely what Hao Zhen had just done to his opponent by erratically firing off their optic nerves. Judging by the insights on the target’s state provided to him by the Ethereal String and by the cries of pain, Hao Zhen guessed that the man was in worse agony than whatever the sudden flash of the spiritual beacon had caused.

Hao Zhen himself wasn’t much better off, however. He wiped some sweat off his forehead, gritting his teeth.

Something else Hao Zhen had determined over these past few days was that a target could resist Ethereal String Puppetry in two ways. One way was through conscious resistance. If the target realized that they were under the effect of spiritual skill and had a rough idea of what way they were being affected, they could consciously resist attempts to control them.

The other way was through unconscious resistance. As Hao Zhen had discovered through experimentation, the mind of all beings unconsciously resisted Ethereal String Puppetry, even if they weren’t consciously aware that a spiritual skill was being used on them. At one point, their group had come across a sleeping second-level red-grade monster, and Hao Zhen had tried using Ethereal String Puppetry on it, only to feel the same level of unconscious resistance he felt from awake second-level monsters.

The problem was that, as far as Hao Zhen could tell, the strength of the target’s unconscious resistance was determined by their level in relation to that of the user. Even if the target was only one level higher, their unconscious resistance was strong enough that commanding them would take more spiritual power and willpower than Hao Zhen had. That meant only seizing was possible against higher-level targets.

Some nerves were easier to seize than others. Limb seizing—the seizing of motor nerves connected to skeletal muscles—expended much less spiritual power and willpower than seizing any other type of nerve. On the other hand, senses seizing—the seizing of sensory nerves—expended more spiritual power and willpower, though still less than commanding. Viscera seizing—the seizing of nerves connected to the internal organs—was by far the costlier type of seizing, expending just as much spiritual power and willpower as commanding.

Against a higher-level target, limb seizing could be done for a little under a minute if the target didn’t consciously resist it, and for a few moments if they put up some conscious resistance. Senses seizing could only be done for a few moments, even if the target was only unconsciously resisting. Viscera seizing couldn’t be done at all, just like commanding.

Hao Zhen had also determined that attempts to cause direct harm to the target were met with much higher unconscious resistance, as they triggered some kind of heightened unconscious response. It was to the point it was impossible to kill or deal significant harm to a target at the same level through seizing, let alone a target at a higher level, even if they didn’t consciously react to it.

Even what Hao Zhen had just done—merely firing off the target’s optical nerves for an instant to provoke a sensory overload—was enough to significantly tire him mentally and spiritually. During that moment, Hao Zhen had also gone perfectly still, leaving him completely defenseless—entering a state similar to the one Ke Li had been in during his fight with Tian Jin, unable to move. Hao Zhen reckoned he’d only be able to cause a sensory overload a few more times before he ran out of both willpower and spiritual power. Spiritual power, at least, he could recover through spiritual recovery pills, but willpower was a different story.

Hao Zhen theorized that the only reason he had managed to get rid of the glistening horn rhinoceros’s sense of pain for more than a few moments back in his first fight together with Tian Jin and Duo Lan was that the beast had wanted the pain gone, so not only had it not put up any conscious resistance, it had also instinctively dropped its unconscious resistance. Otherwise, Hao Zhen believed he wouldn’t have been able to keep the monster in that state for more than a second.

Because of the expenditure of willpower and spiritual power, Hao Zhen had decided that the best way to go about his plan would be to space out his sensory attacks, waiting for his opponent to start recovering before doing it again. The cover of the spiritual beacon also ensured that Du Jian and his other lackeys couldn’t see what was going on inside or provide any help, although Hao Zhen reckoned that they were too busy with Tian Jin and Duo Lan to pay him and his opponent any attention.

Never taking his focus off his opponent, Hao Zhen bided his time, waiting for the man to show signs of recovery. He knew that this strategy of his was nothing short of dirty and underhanded, but his life was on the line, and he didn’t have the luxury to worry about such things.

He would be repeating this process only three more times at most, after which he believed he’d be bordering on mental and spiritual exhaustion. If by that point Tian Jin or Duo Lan weren’t finished yet, he’d instead take advantage of the last sensory overload to use one of his fireball talismans and hope that it’d be enough to deal a killing—or at least a crippling—blow.

He didn’t want to waste any talismans if he didn’t need to—nor did he want to risk the enemy somehow dodging and things going awry, as the fireball would burn through the spiritual beacon—so he really hoped either of his companions would be done soon.

Despite the stress of the situation and the state he was in, Hao Zhen couldn’t help but feel amused that taking biology back in high school, thinking it’d help him out with cooking, would have had such a pay-off.

This unorthodox application he had found for Ethereal String Puppetry may have had its limitations, but it was still allowing him to pretty much neutralize a cultivator at a higher level and even potentially finish them off. He also wasn’t done exploring the full extent of what Ethereal String Puppetry could do, and if he made it through this battle, he’d keep exploring its applications.

Hao Zhen might have transmigrated into rather poor conditions, but the realization that he could make use of not just his knowledge of cultivation novels, but also his modern knowledge, made him believe he might just be able to turn things around.