A bowl-sized black shadow swooshed out from the darkness and flew toward Lin Sanjiu at tremendous speed. Lin Sanjiu stooped down awkwardly, barely managing to dodge it. The black shadow suddenly turned back and chased closely behind her.
Not far from her was a monolith of nearly a hundred human faces staring at Lin Sanjiu. She knew that if she continued dodging, she would soon be pushed to the vicinity of that human-face monolith. With no better options, she opened her palms and headed straight for the black shadow. She grabbed the shadow and balled up her fist. The black shadow suddenly melted like snow in the sun.
In the end, Lin Sanjiu's Higher Consciousness was stronger than that if she used her Higher Consciousness to deal with it directly. However, Lin Sanjiu was against doing that unless she had no choice because the costs were too high.
Lin Sanjiu hissed with pain and let out some agonizing sounds like a wounded beast. Her voice could torture Mrs. Manas, who was trying her best to see if she could help Lin Sanjiu. "Be careful! Don't touch them, okay? Let's think of something else!" Mrs. Manas said anxiously.
After that bowl-sized human face disappeared for a few seconds, the red skinless humanoid curled like a shrimp, holding her wrist. She couldn't move at all. The hand she used to grab the black shadow had disappeared, bones, muscles, etc.
The cost of a single attack was a palm-sized amount of Higher Consciousness. If that wasn't bad enough, the worst thing about attacking that black shadow was the unbearable pain that Lin Sanjiu received. After going through a few apocalyptic worlds and struggling to survive for two to three years, even after she had evolved, her awareness of pain, which is used as a warning for survival, increased. Along with it, her resistance to pain had also greatly increased.
Right now, if Lin Sanjiu were to lose her arm, she could still stand up and fight. Yet, the moment she touched the black shadow, she was in such pain that she struggled to form even a sentence in her mind. She just continued hissing in pain as if she was about to die.
"Hahaha. Didn't I warn you? Don't touch it. Come over here obediently, and let me give you a quick death," Derik's voice escaped from the monolith of faces. The mouths opened and closed at the same time; the voices were almost like a choir, "If I have to nibble you slowly to death, it will hurt a lot!"
"Come here!" the multiple faces urged gently at the same time.
Lin Sanjiu could see their faces clearly, and they seemed almost alive. Some of them looked a little familiar, while others were totally foreign. Many were male faces, though there were also a few females. They didn't have necks, and their faces seemed to grow out from the monolith made of flesh. They covered the monolith like mushrooms on an old tree after the rain.
[Mankind's Bane]
Humans sin from the moment they can walk. Sinning is a unique aspect of human nature. Humans are the best breeding grounds for more sins. This ability makes the target feel the sins created by humans over the long course of human history. The pain inflicted far exceeds the most lethal poison in the world. Because human sin is boundless and unredeemable, Mankind's Bane is also an incredibly terrifying ability from which it is hopeless to escape.
As it is too lethal, the ability would destroy the very part of the target's body that comes in contact with it before it can even circulate around the target's body. However, the greatest nightmare is the amount of pain it inflicts as a side effect. As if people had ended their own lives after experiencing the evilness in the world, many targets—regardless of how high their levels were—who were inflicted by this ability chose to end their lives rather than endure the pain for another second.
Lin Sanjiu's Higher Consciousness moved rapidly, trying to remove the toxin from the ability from the whole of her Higher Consciousness form. They moved so fast that they could almost create smoke. After the red, skinless humanoid curled herself for a long time, the pain finally ebbed, and she slowly straightened her body.
At that point, her 'body' only comprised her upper body. Lin Sanjiu had used the remaining bit of her femur to create a hand. After 'standing up,' she raised her head as if to take a deep breath. Then, she prepared herself for battle once more.
The monolith of human faces stared at her without saying a word. The monolith moved very slowly; it was so slow that Lin Sanjiu could evade it even if she was walking. Its attack range was only a small area around itself. Therefore, Derik would release a human face to attack his enemy each time he activated this very powerful [Mankind's Bane].
Unfortunately, the more powerful an ability was, the more restrictions it had. Derik could only release one human face every minute. Though this was quite a significant limitation, most of his enemies would crawl to the monolith, struggling, crying, and begging for death before he even needed to release a second face. However, the enemy before him was unexpectedly hard to deal with.
He had already released four faces.
At the start, each face would chase the red humanoid without fail. However, Derik almost gasped with shock each time the faces, which he thought were indestructible, were destroyed by that thing. Logically speaking, if a person touches [Mankind's Bane] four times, that person would have killed themselves. Oddly, it seemed as though the red humanoid was actually slowly recovering.
'What the hell is it?' Derik thought. He had already killed 27 posthumans ever since he arrived in this world. This was the first time he felt a faint sense of regret.
"It can't continue like this," Lin Sanjiu suddenly said mildly to Mrs. Manas. "If he can release a face every one minute, I am just prolonging the time before I get killed."
"What are you planning?" Mrs. Manas felt a very bad premonition.
"I need to fight back," Lin Sanjiu's voice suddenly became cold and controlled. She used this unique tone every time a big fight was about to happen.
"Sorry," Lin Sanjiu said to Mrs. Manas, who didn't even have a corporeal body in her mindscape, "I'll implicate you if my attack fai..."
Lin Sanjiu started channeling and using all her Higher Consciousness and flew toward the top of the monolith at a speed that Derik had never witnessed before. When the monolith aimed an upward attack, Lin Sanjiu split her Higher Consciousness into two.