Breakthrough (I)

Ying Yungui discovered something unusual nearly half an hour after they set off.

By midnight, there were no pedestrians on the road and very few cars were on the road. It was rare to see a car in an hour. The road from City A back to the association base was empty.

Ying Yungui had originally planned to stay at his family's house for the night, thinking that since he had been traveling back and forth today and it was already late, Shi Youchen would have gone to bed. However, he was awakened by a nightmare in the middle of the night. After much deliberation, he decided to drive back to the association.

Although his daily vehicle had not been modified, he had traveled the road from the Ying family's residence to the association thousands of times. He knew exactly how long it would take to get to where, and which residential areas or wild scenery he could see.

So after watching the rice paddies unfold for five or six minutes, Ying Yungui realized something was amiss. While it wasn't harvest season for the paddies, and the copied-and-pasted grid layout was difficult to discern, this stretch of road usually took only three minutes at most.

Ying Yungui stopped the car, looked in the rearview mirror, opened the driver's door and got out.

Then, using the car lights and a faint moonlight, he looked around and found himself parked right in the middle of a field. In front and behind was an unimproved country road, a shortcut he had chosen to get back to the association quickly. To the left and right were stretches of rice paddies, their surfaces covered with frost. Further in the distance were rows of low farmhouses.

It was cold and quiet. A gust of wind blew, and the sound of weeds in the fields being blown by the wind could be clearly heard by Ying Yungui. He took out the candy he had taken from Lin Zhouze's office and threw it into the air.

There was a subtle "thump" sound as the candy sank into a pool of water in some unknown corner.

Ying Yungui buttoned up the top button of his collar to shield his neck from the wind, then walked step by step in the direction the car was originally heading. He looked at the pile of debris in front of a bungalow diagonally in front of him and silently counted his steps.

"Six, seven, eight." At the front of the pile of debris was a small cart.

"Fifteen, sixteen." By the seventeenth step, the cart disappeared.

To be precise, the pile of debris was still there, but the cart had disappeared from view. Ying Yungui turned his head to look straight ahead. The car that should have been behind him had suddenly appeared nearly a hundred steps in front of him.

"Ghost wall?" If it were any ordinary person, their first reaction when encountering this situation would probably be supernatural phenomenon, but Ying Yungui was so sensitive to space that he took out another candy, peeled off the candy wrapper and put it in his mouth.

The candy wrapper fell casually, fluttered in the air for a few times, and disappeared the moment it touched the ground.

"Positioning ability?" Ying Yungui asked, his mouth filled with the refreshing mint flavor, which in a sense was refreshing. "Pa pa pa" an unidentified applause sounded, and from a distance, a figure emerged from behind the car. It was a man in a black robe, and his appearance was unclear, but his figure looked more like a man.

The man simply clapped his hands, remained silent, and didn't come any closer. Ying Yungui sized him up and asked, "From the Maintenance Bureau? Here to avenge your companion?" His first thought was Ah Xian, who had just been imprisoned in the secret space. "Then you should have shown up earlier. Maybe there was still a chance."

Ying Yungui's sleepiness and tiredness had completely disappeared. It was inevitable that the person who came had bad intentions. Moreover, the fact that this person dared to appear in front of him alone at this time was enough to show that he was quite familiar with his whereabouts and should be quite capable.

Therefore, Ying Yungui did not approach rashly. In any case, notifying the association first was the safest approach.

Just as he moved his wrist, before he even raised his hand, the man in black arrived in front of him with a cool breeze. He had no weapon, no attack, but simply grabbed his wrist through a layer of black gloves, grabbing the bracelet on his wrist.

The bracelet glowed bright red and detached from Ying Yungui's body before the alarm sounded, a signal that an unknown external energy source had been detected. Ying Yungui was suddenly approached and raised his knee to strike, but the person in front of him reappeared at the rear of the car.

His back and forth movement took only a breath. "Does it make sense? Even if you do this, the association will still be alerted." Ying Yungui glanced disdainfully at his wrist, which had been touched by someone other than Shi Youchen, and pulled his sleeve down.

Whether he had the bracelet or not wouldn't have a significant impact on his combat, except for one thing—the need to open a domain. Ying Yungui's gaze deepened. That was clearly a perfect opportunity to attack. Was he missing a golden opportunity during the "information gathering" period before the two sides officially clashed?

Ying Yungui thought this as he raised his hand and removed the silver earring from his left ear. An invisible wind vibrated around him, the materialization of energy. The man in black paused for a moment, then felt locked in place. It was like standing on the ground, yet feeling as if he were floating on the sea.

Ying Yungui sensed that the man in black hadn't escaped his spatial lock, but for some reason, he didn't want to approach his coordinates. The two stared at each other for two minutes, and finally, Ying Yungui raised his foot and walked towards the car.

At an arm's length, Ying Yungui stood in front of the man in black. He was wearing a hood, the brim of which covered the part above the tip of his nose, leaving only his lips and chin exposed. Ying Yungui wanted to lift the hat that was in the way, but he stopped halfway, and then he saw the man sneer.

The man in black disappeared at the rear of the car, even as Ying Yungui was watching him without blinking.

The spatial lock hadn't been unlocked, so Ying Yungui could still clearly sense the location of the locked person. He turned around and looked in the direction he had just walked from. The man in black was standing where he had been a few minutes ago, his hood still untouched.

As if sensing the caster's astonishment, the man in black actually laughed twice, and then the figure flashed back and forth in various places under Ying Yungui's gaze.

There was an open space seventeen steps in front of the car, an open space a hundred steps behind it, a corner in the field, and behind oneself.

If this were in a movie, it would be a completely terrifying plot. Ying Yungui had this thought as he watched the figure that might appear from nowhere in the next second.

About five or six minutes later, the man in black stopped showing off and moved from behind Ying Yungui to a position a hundred steps behind the car.

Although he didn't speak or even show his face, the mockery in his expression was clear. Ying Yungui sighed softly, "I admit that you can move freely under my lock. That's quite remarkable."

"But I'm sure you've never fought someone with my powers before."

"Telekinesis is not just telekinesis, there's also telerepulsion." Ying Yungui finally bit off the last piece of mint candy in his mouth, then made a gesture with three fingers and stood between himself and the man in black.

The space lock was released, and just when the man in black was about to flash to the position behind Ying Yungui to attack, he found that he had regained the movement of his limbs, but had lost the previous point mark, and even the mark under his feet could not be moved a second time.

"How is it? Can't you move?" Ying Yungui walked closer with a smile. "My spatial lock can lock your body, but your ability cannot lock the spatial unit your body is in."

He once again stood in front of the man in black and raised his hand to lift the black hood. "But I have isolated you from this space, so you have also lost connection with your own 'coordinates'."

Under the hood was a face that Ying Yungui did not recognize. It was very young, but he certainly did not recognize it.

"Tell me, which district were you from before you defected, and what was your previous number?" Ying Yungui looked at his face carefully, and an ominous premonition came to his heart, "Why are you here?" This kid really hasn't attacked him yet, and the word "attack" is not quite accurate, so he could only ask this.

The man made a move to speak, but closed his mouth halfway and gave Ying Yungui a fierce look.

"Hey, if you weren't younger than me, I wouldn't give you this opportunity." Ying Yungui had never expected the other party's behavior. Now it seems that the show of ability just now was truly due to this kid's vanity.

"I'm telling you, even if you didn't attack me physically, you did cause me a mental shock. You're not going to get away with scaring people here in the middle of the night." Ying Yungui subconsciously raised his hand to check the time, then remembered that this person had taken his bracelet away. "You're not going to tell me, right? Then wait and tell me when we get back to the association's interrogation room."

Although the association has a rule that says anyone who escapes can be killed, the current situation is a special period where the association and the maintenance bureau are at war. Every mutant is an important source of information, and it would be best if they could be captured alive.

The "surface space" that Ying Yungui unfolded on the other person temporarily isolated him from all perceptions of the outside world, so he could not move freely as before even when locked. However, Ying Yungui could not achieve perfect control over this tiny space at all times, so he had to bring the person back to the association as soon as possible.

The "surface space" enveloped the opponent's body and fed back a key piece of information to Ying Yungui - he did not have any weapons that could be used for physical attacks.

So Ying Yungui reached out and grabbed his collar and pulled him in front of him: "What? Are you so arrogant that you dare to run in front of me without any weapons?" Until this moment, he could not see any tension or panic on the other person's face, which made Ying Yungui's ominous feeling deepen.

The ability this person demonstrated was indeed "positioning and movement".

The coordinates of each flash were fixed. With his parking spot as the origin, Point A was seventeen steps in front of him, Point B was a hundred steps behind him, where they were now, and Point C was thirty steps to the right, where the first candy he had just thrown landed.

I'm afraid that every time my car reaches point A, it will be moved back to the starting point or point B, so I can never finish this road.

Switching back and forth between these four coordinate points would be easily spotted by any experienced psychic, so how could they be frightened by a simple teleportation? However, the ability of "positioned movement" required a medium, a tool for determining the coordinates, before it could be activated.

What was his tool? Ying Yungui didn't sense any objects with energy attached to them.

"It's really as the teacher said. You just have a huge amount of energy for nothing." The man who was being pulled by the collar actually spoke. He glanced at Ying Yungui with disdain, "You don't even know how to use it."

"Surface space" actually only partially isolates the subject's perception of the outside world, similar to a domain that extends infinitely close to the body. It can indeed prevent the opponent from freely traveling between coordinates, but it is not unsolvable. Moreover, it only blocks the ability to move, not the body's movement.

The man in black, taking advantage of the force of being pulled forward by his collar, grasped Ying Yungui's arm with both hands and chuckled, "Is it hard to understand? My positioning tool is you."