Samuel reached out his hand, closed it as if gripping an invisible rope.
He put force into his hand, pulled hard, intending to tug the owner of that gaze down along the line of sight.
For a mont, he felt the entire sky pressing down.
That crushing pressure could pin any ordinary person to the ground, pulverize them into at paste.
But Samuel still showed no reaction.
“What, curious why it didn’t work on ?” Samuel tasted so of the thoughts behind the stare from the look itself.
“Of course it’s because we haven’t faced each other directly yet, this is an intro CGI, the boss in an intro CGI is invincible, that’s common sense.”
Samuel was the sneakiest person—if invincibility popped up and he worried about getting banned, he’d just call it an intro CGI.
The sensation of being watched vanished.
The gaze that had been fixed on Samuel lingered for a few seconds, then disappeared without any further sign.
Samuel lifted his head, stared at the ceiling for a long mont, then glanced back at the study whose lights had gone out, and suddenly his body went limp, collapsing onto the floor like a skin without bones or flesh.
The space behind him parted like a curtain, and another Samuel poked his head out and walked through.
“What a pity.” he mumbled, “So close.”
Earlier he had tried to follow that line of sight to project Ethen’s appearance into the other person’s mind, attempting to remotely alter the target’s perception with Illusion Magic, to see if the target’s mind would sprout grass.
So how exactly had they done it?
Samuel wondered in confusion.
That ability to instantly detect whenever soone tampered with their appearance.
He wanted that ability too.
Samuel was certain that, judging by the performance just now, the other party was definitely not stronger than him.
“So, where exactly did it fall short?”
He took his face off and studied it carefully.
…………
At the sa ti, the clone Samuel had arrived at a carriage stop.
There were no buses here, but there were public carriages.
Public carriages were usually pulled by a single horse; their bodies were mostly black or brown, long with several small windows along the side, and the route code was marked on the front and rear, serving the sa function as a bus route.
Samuel stood in front of the carriage stop’s crude route map, which didn’t even show up on maps, searching for the na Althern Street.
He was bored and in urgent need of sothing to pass the ti.
Since Ethen had extended an invitation, he might as well go take a look.
And while he was at it, ask how that thod of counterattacking rely by appearance actually worked.
It couldn’t be that he was just too handso—handso enough that the tissues of his split body betrayed him.
That would be a bit ridiculous.
“Oh, found it,” Samuel found the public carriage’s route code tucked in a corner, “0312.”
He turned his head to the waiting area benches, but there were no empty seats left.
The bench area was packed. People stood and sat, shoulder to shoulder.
They clustered together, appearing to be in the morning rush.
Their clothes were mostly tidy, showing they cared about appearances—this area was far from the slums, surrounded by apartnt complexes, townhouses, restaurants, and shops. People who lived here generally had steady jobs.
Besides, true bottom-tier families and the holess wouldn’t waste their precious sien on public carriages.
Even though these carriages were cheap—riding from south to north of the city cost less than 3 sien, and during off-peak tis as little as half a sien—many still preferred to walk. After all, their daily wages might not even reach 20 sien.
And that’s assuming they could find work at all; often they might need two or three days to get a temporary job.
At that mont, Samuel noticed sothing interesting.
Though people were crowded on the bench, there was actually a lot of empty space around them.
There was no rule that you must stand on the platform to board; standing off the platform didn’t prevent waiting for a carriage. There was no reason for them to jam together like that.
Soon Samuel discovered the key.
They weren’t crowding the carriage stop itself; they were crowding around a man.
He was a man sitting on the bench waiting for a carriage.
He looked in his early twenties, with short, slightly curly brown hair and unremarkable features—soone who would disappear in a crowd. His skin had the coarse, sun-darkened quality of soone used to manual labor, and he appeared accustod to his surroundings.
Although people gathered around him, they seed unaware of their actions.
So read newspapers, so glanced at pocket watches, so stared into space.
If you ignored the fact that everyone was squeezed together, there would be nothing outwardly strange.
They didn’t look bewitched or controlled; they were simply drawn by so sort of attraction, clustering around the man.
Watching them, Samuel relaxed into a smile and blinked, and everything around him instantly shifted.
The colors of his surroundings dimd, beca transparent and slightly warped; passersby on the street took on an illusory quality, dyed with color, turned into twisted humanoid shapes ford from different lines and hues.
It was sowhat like a thermal imaging display, but with richer, fuller colors and more detailed intricacy.
The waiting pedestrians’ bodies varied in color intensity and in how many lines they had. Most fell within a similar range. Only a very small number had deeper colors, richer palettes, and more complex lines.
This was a special vision—colors represented emotion, lines represented essence—presenting life in an abstract, more painterly form.
Samuel called it “painterly perception,” a seventh sense distinct from hearing, sight, sll, taste, touch, and the sixth sense.
Among the crowd of simply colored, simply lined people, one bundle of color stood out abruptly.
It was the man who was attracting the others.
The lines composing his body—the lines representing his “essence”—looked like magnetic field diagrams Samuel had seen in physics textbooks. The lines looped in successive circles, rotated at a steady pace, drawing the surrounding people involuntarily closer.
“Funny coincidence.” Samuel’s smile turned intrigued. In a voice only he could hear he said, “This is the first ti I’ve co here, the first ti I left the house and walked the street, the first ti I rode a public carriage, and I run into sothing this interesting.”
“Hmm…no.” He shook his head after thinking for a mont. “Not a coincidence.”
He looked at the man emitting that strange attraction.
“I actually had no real need to take a public carriage. I have plenty of money, I could have taken a private carriage. No need to squeeze in with others.”
“So… I was drawn here too.”
This wasn’t attraction in the coercive sense. It was closer to so kind of fateful coincidence.
“What is this? Mutual attraction between substitute envoys?”
“Ha, that’s really interesting.”
Co to think of it, eting Ethen on his first day here was already quite a coincidence.
A few minutes earlier he had just bumped into a second extraordinary person across a distance…uh, that one might have been his fault.
Anyway, in less than two hours since arriving in this world, he had run into person after person with extraordinary abilities.
Including the ti he’d just woken up from bed…
“This city is not peaceful at all.”
This was really intriguing.
Samuel felt no instinctive awareness that he himself was also “one of the problems,” and he didn’t say anything. He blinked again, and the scene in his view returned to normal.
Nearby, the street-side shops, the giant storefront windows, the crowded carriage stop, the outdoor seating of the café with a few custors chatting here and there…
All these scenes restored themselves to normal.
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