Chapter 37: Thorn Bomb.

"Today, I'm not going," Wang Wanrou suddenly said in the dream.

"You're not going?" Cheng Jinyang asked in surprise.

Has Miss Wang finally regained her dignity and decided she doesn't want to follow us around to leech off our experience?

"Yes," Wang Wanrou said. "I need to take a break."

Cheng Jinyang: ???

He left with the two girls, puzzled. In the safe house, Wang Wanrou sat back on the sofa and leisurely opened her diary.

"Hello, Xiaoli," she wrote in the notebook.

On the other side, Su Lili, sitting in the same position, picked up the pen on the table.

"Hello, Wanrou," she wrote carefully.

"If possible, can you tell me about Jinyang's recent activities?"

"Of course," Wang Wanrou responded.

In her vision, invisible to ordinary people, a vast amount of data started flooding her retina through the mental interface's analysis.

Unlike the precise logic of computer binary code, the structure of mental language is extremely chaotic, akin to the forever disorderly streams of consciousness in intelligent beings.

Instincts, thoughts, hunger, fatigue... all these ideas are intertwined, making it almost impossible to parse. In programming terms, this mess could be called a "pile of crap," a garbage project built from countless "crappy codes."

Every Mind Steel Seal ability user, when diving into the depths of thoughts and dreams, faces such a pile of crap. Their task is to carefully extract useful thought fragments, meticulously analyze and rewrite them.

As for the purpose of this, it involves a complex logic that can't be easily explained in a few words. So, Wang Wanrou didn't plan to explain it to Cheng Jinyang and the others. Partly because it's too troublesome to explain, and she even doubted if these people's IQs were up to the task of understanding it.

On the other hand, this so-called large-scale dream is indeed an artificial product... No, to be precise, it's a hybrid product.

The dream has two core sources, one from Cheng Jinyang and the other from Su Lili.

Cheng Jinyang's part of the code is a very typical human mental language, constituting most of the environmental parameters, such as the old house, the furniture inside, even the residential area outside, and the entire Wujiang Town.

In simple terms, these environments all originate from Cheng Jinyang's deep memory.

Su Lili's part of the code is another kind of unfamiliar mental language Wang Wanrou had never seen before. It had traces of human language but was fundamentally different.

These constitute the refresh mechanism and monster parameters. That is to say, "reviving after death," "monsters refreshing," and "gaining blood energy by killing monsters" all come from Su Lili's memory.

But Su Lili... what on earth is she?

A person's thoughts must be rooted in their body. If the large-scale dream is likened to a server, Cheng Jinyang's body is the hardware router, with thoughts being the software running on the hardware. The girls must be within his signal range to access this dream.

However, Su Lili's thoughts are more like a virus. It doesn't exist in a unique hardware carrier but only exerts its effect by residing in Cheng Jinyang's body, participating in the creation of the entire large-scale dream.

But it also transmits data outward. As for where the source is... Wang Wanrou had no evidence, but she had a rough guess.

Of course, researching the nature of the dream is just something she does in passing; now Miss Wang is most interested in how to create so-called "connections."

Killing demons to gain blood energy essentially comes from the network connection constructed by Su Lili. By imitating this mechanism to create connections for Cheng Jinyang, according to the current analysis and speculation, it should be possible to temporarily overlay the bloodlines of Xing Yanzhi, Chu Qingqing, and herself onto him.

What would this produce?

A precedent-setting composite superpowered individual, whose final bloodline concentration equals the sum of all the individuals' bloodline concentrations?

In this calculation, if killing demons only gives a negligible increase in blood energy, finding a new companion would add her abilities and bloodline concentration entirely - that would be far more interesting.

"Hehehe, hehehehe, hahahahahaha!" Wang Wanrou laughed weirdly, with a hint of madness, as she conversed with Su Lili through writing and stared at the rapidly scrolling data screen. "Su Lili, you are so interesting. Let me get to know you well..."

On the other side, Su Lili also wrote quickly. Her expression was complicated as she read Wang Wanrou's words.

So, Jinyang has found someone else he likes.

Sigh.

"What's wrong?" Xing Yuanzhi asked doubtfully, seeing Cheng Jinyang suddenly stop in the alley of Wujiang Town.

"I suddenly feel something's off," he said suspiciously.

"What's off?" Chu Qingqing asked, puzzled.

"It's like in a horror movie when the protagonist's team steps into a trap," Cheng Jinyang tried to describe. "That feeling of being watched by something. Don't you sense it?"

"No," Xing Yuanzhi and Chu Qingqing were speechless.

"Maybe it's just my imagination," Cheng Jinyang said helplessly.

Before he finished speaking, four demons rushed forward.

Cheng Jinyang quickly placed his hand aside, preparing the iron slide cannonball to fire at the demons. But Chu Qingqing stopped him roughly:

"Wait, Jinyang! Let me handle it this time!"

"You?" Cheng Jinyang doubted, as she always said she'd solo the enemies but ended up dying first every time. "Are you sure?"

"Huh? Don't underestimate me! I've developed many new techniques recently. Let me show you this time!" Chu Qingqing said confidently, wrapping herself in metal again into an iron ball and shouted excitedly from inside, "Come on, shoot me!"

Cheng Jinyang, somewhat helpless, kicked the iron ball. Under the force of gravity, the iron ball encasing Chu Qingqing shot forward.

The four demons quickly dodged to the sides, but as the iron ball approached them, it suddenly exploded in all directions.

"Thorn Bomb!" Miss Qingqing shouted.

With her fierce and wild roar, the metal that exploded in all directions solidified into sharp spikes, piercing through the four surrounding demons.

Cheng Jinyang: ...

Xing Yuanzhi: ...

Well, it actually worked. She really could solo them this time.