Jiang Ling listened to the incessant explosions and gunfire in the distance and realized how utterly awful her life was. After being a virgin for over thirty years, she suddenly traveled through time and space, possessing a system and superpowers. Yet, she was still huddled in a dark corner, waiting for someone to rescue her. What was the point of living like this? Every day, she was nothing more than a manure-making machine. Well, now, even that wasn't enough. Why did this country allow someone like her, with no ideals, no dreams, and no faith, to continue living?
She couldn't figure it out.
She recalled what she'd learned in her textbooks: Everyone needs a purpose, everyone should live for a goal. Now, she felt that statement was wrong—life was meaningless. In other words, the meaning of life shouldn't be found by oneself; it's something people impose on you, a summary of your life. Jiang Ling was trying to summarize her own life, and so she concluded it was abysmal. And now she felt terrible, and she felt like her life would never change. You see, that's the thing about summarizing your own meaning: it always changes based on your mood or experiences, and so your life is meaningless.
"Jiang Ling! Jiang Ling!" The two people on the side tried to call Jiang Ling, but she remained unmoved.
Why live? To eat? Jiang Ling, mired in self-doubt, was lost in pessimism. This time, Li Wenjia, the chatterbox, was no one to comfort her. She felt responsible for the people lying dead in a pool of blood downstairs. She hadn't considered the cost of failure. In a sense, this argument was valid: saving people was essential; abandoning them halfway was essentially harming them. But such an argument was based on a specific situation. Now, no one was there to tell Jiang Ling she'd done her best, that she'd done her best.
"Pa!" Jiang Wenwen saw that there was no response after she shouted for a long time, so she remembered the old method. Some people deserve to be beaten at certain times. She swung her arm and suddenly slapped Jiang Ling in the face.
Jiang Wenwen had never struck anyone like this since her transformation, so she didn't know the extent of her strength. Jiang Ling's face deformed like a water balloon as her palms shifted, and the force was then transferred to her head. The head moved along the balcony in a parabolic trajectory, following the force, along with her neck and body, before colliding with the wall on the side of the balcony with a dull "bang!"
"Wuwuwu!" Jiang Ling was stunned, her mind instantly emptied. Her eyes immediately filled with crystal tears, and her cheeks visibly swollen. Jiang Ling touched her face and tried to stand up, but was hit by the wall again. She tried several times and couldn't stand up. She just sat on the ground in a state of undignified manner, rubbing her face and sobbing.
Seeing Jiang Ling crying, Jiang Wenwen felt very satisfied, and then used her other hand to hit the other side of Jiang Ling's face again. This time the effect was better, and Jiang Ling stopped crying instantly. Her nose hit the ground, and her crying was directly knocked back into her stomach.
"Jiang Ling! Jiang Ling?"
"Stop fighting, stop fighting!" The guy put his face on the ground, raised both arms in front of him, scratching around on the ground, trying to stop this guy who started fighting at the slightest disagreement.
"I won't hit you if you're okay!" Jiang Wenwen threatened in her loli voice.
"Ahhh~ Stop hitting me, I'm fine! I'm fine!" She quickly shouted "I'm fine" several times, and then seemed to regain her spirit. People need to have a goal in life, and now her goal is to avoid being beaten.
"Are you really okay? Haha~" Huang Yun held up Jiang Ling's head with his hands, and saw the two slap marks on her face and the bleeding nose, and he laughed out loud.
"Woo, woo, I woo, it's okay!" Jiang Ling's head was in Huang Yun's palm, and some unclear wooing sounds came from her throat.
"I'm glad you're okay! I thought you were controlled by it too!"
"Huh? I'm being controlled by it?" Is that even possible? Jiang Ling shuddered, realizing it. It was indeed possible. After her failure, she immediately fell into a vortex of defeatism. Although she didn't consider herself a strong person, she wasn't so weak that she would become a loser just because of failure.
Jiang Ling discovered she had fallen into a misunderstanding. All the battles she had experienced were crushing victories; she had never witnessed a battle of equal strength. This arrogance had taken hold of her, and she had always believed that time travelers like herself were invincible. Even though she had repeatedly denied her own abilities, her subconscious arrogance persisted. She wasn't a loser, but she was definitely not a cautious and clever person. Recalling that day on the surface, she realized she had flaws everywhere. She neither planned her actions carefully nor acted recklessly.
"Yeah, why do I think I'm so strong? How could I be so arrogant as to take on a Level 3 mutant?" Jiang Ling climbed up from the ground. In just a moment, the swelling on her face had begun to subside. She realized that she had likely been manipulated from the beginning, but she was quite resistant. Even after being manipulated, she was still able to think independently, just like the people downstairs who were rescuing the wounded.
After regaining her true ability to think, Jiang Ling felt a brief moment of fear, but then a wave of anger. She had seen online some mutants that were not only intelligent but also rational, and that humans and rational mutants could coexist perfectly well. However, this one was completely insane and anti-human, and such a mutant must be eliminated.
"But what can I do? I only know that I can fight it with my consciousness. I don't know where its weakness is. Moreover, it is so big that even if I know its weakness, I won't be able to do anything to it for a while. Wait, fight with my consciousness?" Jiang Ling found some possibilities and maybe he could give it a try.
She recalled her own battle with the mutant's consciousness. It couldn't control its other limbs. If she controlled it outside its range, wouldn't it become a target? Finding its weakness would be inevitable, and by staying away from it, Jiang Ling wouldn't be able to detect her superpowers. So, she first needed to test the mutant's telepathic control range. The method was simple: she simply used her sensory abilities to observe the stationary points of light. She only needed a specific distance for reference.
"Mom and Dad, do you have a tape measure at home?"
"What do you need a ruler for?"
"You two should separate. I need to know the distance between you two."
"That's easy. The long side of this suite is eighteen meters. Your mother and I can just stand at each end."
Jiang Ling's consciousness immersed in the sensing space. She saw that the bright spot not far away was still moving away from her, while the two red dots around her had stopped. She used the distance between the red dots as a reference to estimate the mutant's control range.
"Five hundred meters? Only this much? No, it's shrunk a bit. It must have accidentally hit some weak spot."
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