CR CH50

Chapter 50: Ability Awakening

Boom—

Thunder slashed through the night sky, casting a fleeting, sharp white light across the world. A low, rumbling crash caused already overwrought nerves to instantly shudder.

The ground was strewn with gravel. Chains tore through the air, their sharp, whistling wind scraping past his ears several times.

The small cuts on Jiang Tianji’s waist, abdomen, and arms were multiplying, and his combat uniform felt damp and sticky. Seizing a brief window between dodges, he reached his limit, ripped the jacket off, and slammed it to the ground.

The person behind him hadn’t even broken their breathing pattern. They seemed to know exactly where his limit lay and were closing in, inch by inch.

The chains blocked off all alternative routes. Jiang Tianji had a vague inkling that Ling Kongmiao was deliberately driving him in a specific direction.

An intellect fully occupied with countering attacks left little room for deep thought. In that split second of distraction, the figure who had been maintaining a distance suddenly approached like a ghost, choking Jiang Tianji by the throat and pinning him to the ground.

“Cough.”

The side of his face stung as it scraped against the coarse rocks. His opponent’s movements were swift and ruthless. Those fair, slender hands, usually so elegant when holding a pen, were now tightly strangling him. The intense sensation of suffocation made Jiang Tianji’s heart leap violently.

He swung the dagger in his right hand toward the other’s neck, but Ling Kongmiao intercepted it effortlessly, pinning his hand back down against the ground.

Jiang Tianji’s breathing was ragged. He struggled with all his might but couldn’t budge the other man a fraction. He bent his knee to strike, only for Ling Kongmiao to pin it down with his own knee.

“Yield.”

The cold voice drifted down from above, sounding entirely unsurprised by this outcome.

A fire flared up in Jiang Tianji’s chest. The near-humiliating, crushing posture of the man above him made his breathing grow even shallower. A blur of white swayed in his vision like a taunt. Jiang Tianji used his other hand to death-grip the hand Ling Kongmiao had wrapped around his throat.

For the first time, he found someone so completely incomprehensible. Sometimes he felt Ling Kongmiao wanted to see him fight for it—otherwise, those guiding words would have been redundant. But more often than not, the man before him was personally destroying the very opportunities he managed to grasp.

Why? Jiang Tianji suddenly wanted to demand an answer.

He felt the hand on his throat tighten even further. His vision began to vignette into darkness.

Ling Kongmiao sharpened his tone, leaning down to enunciate every syllable: “Yield.”

Fuck.

An inexplicable surge of emotion churned in his chest. Logically speaking, given the circumstances, he should do what he always did—give up, stop struggling, and whine his way back to the starting point to wait for the medics. But right now, he couldn’t convince himself to let go.

Suddenly, a crisp scent of lemon drifted into his nose.

Ling Kongmiao frowned. The pheromones of a premium-grade Alpha carried a certain aggressiveness, and he immediately experienced a rejection reaction. His movements grew harsher as he instinctively used his own pheromones to suppress it.

But reason yanked him back just in time. Hearing Jiang Tianji let out a strangled, breathless choke, Ling Kongmiao instinctively let go.

In that exact instant, a jolt of electricity surged from Jiang Tianji’s fingertips, racing through Ling Kongmiao’s entire body. Caught completely off guard, he took the full brunt of the shock.

“Hiss.”

Taking advantage of this opening, Jiang Tianji gripped his dagger, flipped over, and bolted up. His vision was swimming, his posture unsteady. But when he caught a faint scent of jasmine, his discomfort eased significantly. The sheer urgency of the situation left him no time to ponder this anomaly; he poured all his strength into running forward.

Sensing a strange surge of energy, Ling Kongmiao raised an eyebrow slightly, his eyes darkening.

With the chains blocking all other paths, Jiang Tianji could only run toward the cliff.

Colossal waves crashed against the stone walls with deafening roars, and a dense gray fog was rolling in from the deep sea. Turning back to engage in hand-to-hand combat offered zero chance of victory. Based on previous trials, the scoring system seemed to favor total survival time and reaction speed.

Ling Kongmiao’s chains were merely testing his instantaneous reflexes, rather than tracking him with the aim-bot precision seen in instructional videos. This gave Jiang Tianji room to breathe.

Several chains lunged toward his position like scorpion tails. Jiang Tianji’s silhouette traced an arc through the air, rolling into a perfect dodge upon landing.

By now, he was at the edge of the cliff. The hand he used to brace himself slipped backward, sending loose rocks tumbling into the ocean, swallowed instantly by the waves without a splash.

With no cover and no room to maneuver, Jiang Tianji leapt off the cliff before Ling Kongmiao could launch his next attack. Driving his energy dagger into the cliffside to slow his descent, he nimbly sprang onto a detached reef below.

Several loud crashes echoed above as countless chains glowing with a ghostly blue light pierced the rock face. While providing Ling Kongmiao with footholds, they wove together like a net, trapping Jiang Tianji within.

For a normal person with a zero-awakening status, this was glaringly an advanced-level problem beyond his curriculum.

For a fleeting second, he wondered if Ling Kongmiao actually wanted to use this opportunity to kill him. In live-combat simulations, fatal damage from mutants would instantly teleport a teammate back to the starting point. But fatal damage caused by a commander might well be classified as a training accident.

“Since you’ve reclaimed your life, treat it as a fresh start. There are still many missions… and people waiting for you.”

“Congratulations on failing. Keep trying, and you’ll be out of the Special Squad in no time.”

“More than knowing what they want, most of the time, a person only needs to know what they don’t want.”

“…Everything about you is the meaning.”

“Yield.”

Those words, which had left distinct marks on his heart, required no deliberate recalling. In a single heartbeat, they all flooded his mind.

You seem to want me to stand up, yet you’re dissatisfied when I merely stand.

In that stretched, slowed-down pocket of time, Jiang Tianji watched the approaching figure, a bizarre realization dawning on him.

He got the distinct feeling that Ling Kongmiao didn’t want him to become a certain way. Rather, in Ling Kongmiao’s original blueprint, he was supposed to be that way all along.

The past mockery carried an veiled complexity, while the occasional tenderness held a peculiar indulgence. The former never failed to ignite his long-dormant resentment, while the latter left him helplessly intrigued amidst his suspicion. They were polarized statements, yet like two matching puzzle pieces, they only made sense when put together.

It was a complex Ling Kongmiao—one he wanted to figure out to the very end.

Jiang Tianji tightened his grip on the dagger, leapt forward, grabbed a chain to swing himself, and launched an frontal assault.

Ling Kongmiao clearly hadn’t expected a sudden counterattack. Jiang Tianji was incredibly fast. Sidestepping the strike, both men landed simultaneously on a relatively spacious section of the reef.

He didn’t know what had gone through Jiang Tianji’s mind just now, but the boy was fighting like a furious lion cub, his movements carrying a desperate, do-or-die intensity.

Ling Kongmiao kept his attacks within a reasonable threshold. He avoided close-quarters grappling, relying primarily on his chains to execute strikes and using the whip-like motions to repel the boy’s sudden lunges and maintain distance.

But Jiang Tianji seemed entirely provoked by this detached style. His speed and strength spiked to unprecedented metrics.

The scent of lemon grew overwhelmingly potent, irritating the senses. Ling Kongmiao’s brow furrowed tightly. Yet, when he released his pheromones to suppress the boy, the opponent showed no signs of discomfort; if anything, it acted as a stimulant.

A faint burning sensation flared within his body. Ling Kongmiao abruptly looked out toward the sea, as if sensing something.

As Jiang Tianji swung his dagger once more, breaking through the defensive line to strike, Ling Kongmiao raised his leg and kicked him squarely into the ocean.

Moooaahh—

An ethereal, hollow cry echoed from the depths. A massive creature breached the waves, opening a maw large enough to swallow half the cliff.

Jiang Tianji fell backward toward it, his silhouette terrifyingly minuscule by comparison.

Taking fatal damage from a mutant triggers an immediate teleportation back to the starting point. It’s over.

Ling Kongmiao opened his device and glanced at the timer, which read over seven minutes past the target threshold. A flash of satisfaction crossed his eyes. He was about to input the termination command when a sudden mutation occurred.

Boom—

A crack of thunder exploded across the sky. Lightning struck the ocean surface, connecting with a sudden surge of energy from a specific point. It formed a massive vortex laced with electric currents, instantly dragging the mutant inside and tearing it to shreds.

The surface of the sea was covered in crackling arcs of electricity, throwing up wave after wave of towering spray.

Ling Kongmiao’s瞳孔 (pupils) contracted. His figure melted into the shadows, retreating flawlessly to a safe zone.

“Ugh!”

Caught in the blast radius of the shockwave, Jiang Tianji slammed heavily onto the open ground near the shore. He collapsed painfully into a puddle of water, his body covered in flickering static as he curled up with a muffled groan.

Not far away, Ling Kongmiao’s expression shifted slightly. Without a second thought, he started rushing toward him. But after taking two urgent steps, something clicked, and he abruptly came to a halt.

He stared at the figure twitching slightly in the puddle, his eyes flashing with unadulterated exasperation.

“Ugh… hurts… hurts…” Jiang Tianji’s voice was weak, his fingers spasming involuntarily.

In his peripheral vision, a pair of combat boots came to a stop beside him. Even without looking up, he could feel the cold indifference radiating from the man. Jiang Tianji felt a bitter, indescribable sensation in his chest as his head swam.

Seemingly unable to tolerate this pitiful display any longer, a large hand descended from above, pinching his cheek with considerable force.

“What are you whining for?”

Jiang Tianji winced from the pain. He heard Ling Kongmiao’s voice, delivered through slightly gritted teeth.

“Look closely. This is your own ability.”

“…”

In the dead silence, Jiang Tianji opened his eyes and looked down at his own body.

His bare upper torso was mapped with numerous small cuts. Electric energy was swirling around him, casting a bright glow over the puddle. He lifted his hand; the energy converged at his fingertips into a sphere of light, continuously spawning thin, dark-green bolts of lightning.

That pain just now… Jiang Tianji recalled the landing. It seemed he had accidentally pinned his own arm underneath himself when he fell, causing a muscle cramp.

His eyes caught Ling Kongmiao lightly shaking his fingers. If he wasn’t mistaken, there was residual static crackling on them.

It seemed his commander had indeed been exasperated to the absolute limit—willing to endure a shock just to pinch him.

An awkward silence blanketed the space between them.

“Get up,” Ling Kongmiao said.

“Oh, right.”

He stood up too quickly, nearly tripping over himself, but Ling Kongmiao caught him just in time.

The moment their skin brushed, Jiang Tianji acutely noticed that his commander’s fingertips were significantly hotter than usual. Every previous time the man had helped him with energy regulation, those fingers had been slightly cool. Furthermore… the scent seemed much more intense.

Before he could give it more thought, Ling Kongmiao withdrew his hand, glanced at the prompt on his device, and keyed in the termination command.

A black vortex materialized beneath their feet. After a dizzying bout of vertigo, they were back at the initial starting point.

The sudden rush of noisy, chaotic voices hit his ears, leaving Jiang Tianji momentarily dazed. He instinctively scanned the surroundings for Ling Kongmiao, only to catch a fleeting glimpse of white disappearing ahead of a nearby battleship.

And right behind… was Instructor Irene, hurriedly chasing after him.