Published: February 6, 2025
Red Hair stood up, one hand gripping the long crossbow arrow, slowly pulling it out from her body.
Some pale pink liquid flowed from the wound, strangely exuding a hint of abnormal beauty.
She hadn’t evolved to the fifth evolution level yet.
A drop of blood of evolution could allow a level 3 mutated lifeform to evolve to level 4, but it couldn’t help a level 4 evolve to level 5.
With her current evolution level, Red Hair needed at least three drops of blood of evolution to advance further.
Moreover, the one drop she had used mostly went to repairing her injured body.
Thus, this self-aware human puppet cast a somewhat grim look at the members of the Radiant World Army.
Red Hair understood very well that some things come at a cost.
For example, after she severed ties with the master who 'created' her, it was no longer possible for her to obtain resources beneficial to herself without any effort, as she once did when she was with her master.
If she wanted something now, she had to do things for her former master.
When she first gained self-awareness without being next to her master, Red Hair felt nothing; she evolved just like countless other mutated lifeforms in this world.
But after encountering her former master again, Red Hair couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable, though she didn’t know why.
With her current intelligence, she couldn’t clearly discern how this discomfort arose, yet she felt restless, as if… she had lost something that should have belonged to her, as if… she should have evolved faster.
This feeling had initially improved after her master found her and asked for help, but the waste of this drop of blood of evolution reignited her anger.
Suddenly, Red Hair opened her mouth and emitted a silent roar.
A tremendous sound wave, invisible to humans, erupted across the battlefield, expanding outward from Red Hair and almost instantly sweeping through most of the zombie horde.
At the same time, the spirit woman also made a similar move.
Two powerful mutated lifeforms unleashed their innate skill of mental evolution together, the Mental Storm.
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t considered a gifted skill; with their current strength, the spirit woman and Red Hair couldn’t truly utilize a real Mental Storm; they merely possessed a primitive form of this ability.
Mental lifeforms have their strength in using mental power to achieve what other lifeforms cannot. High-level zombies could use their strength and instincts to force other zombies into submission.
The spirit woman and Red Hair weren’t adept at this.
However, the Mental Storm could compensate for this shortcoming, as the essence of this ability is a form of neural invasion that imposes the user’s thoughts onto others’ minds.
Whether one deems this ability malicious or powerful, it is a rare innate skill for any mental-type evolved entity, one that can only be used a few times throughout their lives based on their capacity, with some even able to use it only once, demonstrating the rarity and power of this skill.
Yet this time, both the psychologically unsettled Red Hair and the spirit woman, who had finalized a deal, chose to use this precious skill in unison.
They knew they had to do this to achieve their goals.
The zombie horde, which had become somewhat aimless due to the disappearance of the blood of evolution, had almost no chance of escaping under the dual Mental Storms; those nearest to Red Hair fell prostrate before her, acknowledging her as their new king.
Those nearer to the spirit woman bowed their heads and bodies, pledging to obey her commands henceforth.
This was the effect of the Mental Storm.
If the spirit woman and Red Hair had to control the zombies one by one to achieve such an effect, it would take an indeterminate amount of time.
Of course, this kind of control wasn’t absolute; as time passed and the efficacy of the Mental Storm’s coercive invasion diminished, this control would gradually fade, and most of the zombies would revert to their original states, no longer under constraint.