Silence.
The tunnel was filled only with Shi Lei's heavy breathing, ragged from extreme fear. He stared blankly at the bottomless hole on the ground, still emitting a wisp of smoke, feeling as if his soul had been sucked out by that incandescent beam of light.
That wasn't a weapon.
That was... the thunderbolt of a god, meant to punish mortals.
"...How... how did they do that?" Shi Lei's voice was as dry as two rusty iron plates scraping against each other. "We're underground... fifty meters underground!"
Ling Feng didn't answer immediately.
He was still on the ground, but in the first moments after the crisis, his spiritual energy had already extended like the most sensitive tentacles, frantically spreading outwards. He wasn't looking for the enemy; he was... analyzing.
Analyzing the trajectory of the attack, the residual energy, and the unbelievable path it had followed through the thick layers of earth.
In his mind, the theoretical knowledge of "pre-civilization era" weaponry that the Regulator had infused into him was being compared and modeled at an astonishing rate of millions of calculations per second.
"...Not penetration."
After a long while, Ling Feng slowly got up from the ground. His face was pale, but his eyes held no fear, only the kind of extreme focus, mixed with awe and trepidation, that comes from facing the unknown.
"It wasn't 'penetration,'" he repeated, as if speaking to Shi Lei, and also to himself. "It was... 'spatial warping.' The moment that weapon fired, it projected a beam of high-energy particles directly to a pre-locked coordinate point through a short-range spatial transfer. Rock layers, metal... they simply don't exist for it."
Shi Lei didn't understand the complex terms, but he understood the most crucial and despairing point.
"So you're saying..." he trembled, "no matter where we run, they can... hit us with one of those... whenever they want?"
"Yes," Ling Feng's answer was cruel and direct.
Despair, like a cold ocean, completely submerged Shi Lei. He sat down on the ground with a thud, all the color drained from his face.
How could they escape this?
This was a cat-and-mouse game with a foregone conclusion. They were just two rats trapped in a cage, waiting to be tortured and killed at any moment.
However, Ling Feng did not despair.
His rapidly processing brain, after confirming the enemy's attack method, immediately seized upon its single, most crucial flaw.
"Any attack requires a 'lock-on,'" Ling Feng walked over to Shi Lei, crouched down, and looked directly into his friend's dazed eyes with an unquestionable, powerful gaze. "They can hit us, not because they're omnipotent, but because... they can 'see' us!"
"See us?" Shi Lei asked blankly. "With what? We're underground!"
"With our 'signal'!" Ling Feng said, word by word. "Shi Lei, remember this, in this world, anything that's alive emits energy. Our body heat, our heartbeats, and especially... my spiritual energy fluctuations, are like a torch in the night to their professional detection equipment—clear, bright, and with nowhere to hide!"
"They're not tracking our bodies; they're tracking our 'torch'!"
Shi Lei's mind finally caught up with Ling Feng's train of thought.
"You mean... if we can put out this 'torch,' they won't be able to find us?!"
"Exactly!"
Ling Feng stood up, his eyes shining with a startling light.
This was an unequal war between technology and mystical power. And he had to defeat them in a way they couldn't understand!
He looked into the dark, bottomless tunnel ahead. In his mental map, a new destination clearly emerged.
"We can't keep running forward. The end of this tunnel is undoubtedly a dragnet they've set up. We're going somewhere else."
"A place... that can completely hide our 'torch.'"
He had no time for detailed explanations.
He immediately sat down cross-legged and pressed the jade pendant on his chest tightly to his forehead.
The "Stellar Transformation" technique circulated madly within him.
But this time, he wasn't absorbing energy, nor was he gathering power.
He was... controlling.
Controlling the "Pneuma" energy particles that were constantly escaping from his body!
In his mind's eye, he saw his body as a faintly glowing human silhouette. And now, what he had to do was to forcibly pull all this light back into his body, bit by bit!
This process was a hundred times more difficult and painful than cultivation. It was equivalent to forcibly violating the laws of physics, fighting against the most fundamental law of entropy in the universe!
Ling Feng's body began to tremble violently.
Large beads of sweat rolled down from his forehead.
Shi Lei stood by, so nervous he didn't dare to breathe. He saw the air around Ling Feng seem to distort in a strange way.
After an unknown amount of time, Ling Feng's eyes shot open.
The outward-radiating, oppressive aura around him vanished.
Completely and utterly vanished.
At this moment, if you closed your eyes to sense him, he was like a cold, lifeless stone.
"Success..." he said weakly. "I've used the technique to temporarily 'seal' both of our energy signals. Now, on their radar, we should have disappeared from our original position."
He looked at Shi Lei and issued a new order in an unquestionable tone:
"Go! Follow me to the 'Geothermal Core'! It's the entire city's abandoned underground power station! The violent energy radiation there is our only natural shield that can block all detection!"
The words had barely left his mouth.
ZZZZZ—!!!
Another incandescent beam of energy shot down from the roof of the tunnel!
But this time, it was no longer precise. It missed, hitting the tunnel wall a dozen meters away from them and melting a huge hole.
The enemy was resorting to indiscriminate saturation attacks! They were using this method to force their "disappeared" prey to show themselves again!
Ling Feng pulled up the still-dazed Shi Lei and sprinted towards an abandoned maintenance fork, in the opposite direction of their original route.
The hunt continued.
But this time, the roles of hunter and prey had quietly begun to reverse.