Chapter 297: Killing Two Birds with One Stone, Actually Saving Her the Trouble

Chapter 297: Chapter 297: Killing Two Birds with One Stone, Actually Saving Her the Trouble

Wisps of gentle spiritual power slowly approached Lin Hao on the hospital bed. Those originally highly aggressive strands of spiritual power instantly lost all their hostility, retreating steadily like dud artillery shells. They even faintly revealed a trace of dependence, showing a tendency to proactively approach Yun Sheng’s spiritual power.

Yun Sheng raised an eyebrow slightly, a flash of astonishment crossing her eyes. However, she didn’t show it on her face. She continued to pretend she was struggling, her footsteps slowly shifting toward the bed. Before long, she steadily reached his bedside.

Looking down, she saw that Lin Hao’s face was so pale it was almost transparent. His brows were tightly knit, and his lips carried a faint grayish-blue hue. His breathing was feeble, making him look as if he could collapse at any moment. His condition was indeed quite critical.

Yun Sheng twitched her fingertips, splitting off a wisp of spiritual power and carefully approaching the center of Lin Hao’s forehead. She wanted to tentatively touch his spiritual landscape first to see if she would encounter any resistance. But the moment that wisp of spiritual power touched his forehead, it seamlessly seeped into his spiritual landscape like a drop of water merging into the ocean.

Yun Sheng’s fingertips suddenly paused, her eyes filled with shock. It went so abnormally smoothly that it actually made her more vigilant. However, this surprise was fleeting. She immediately gathered her focus, maintaining a strained expression to feign the illusion of being violently pushed back. The monitoring devices on her wrist and forehead also reflected chaotic spiritual power fluctuations, as if she had truly suffered a spiritual attack from Lin Hao. At the same time, she secretly manipulated a faint trace of spiritual power to stimulate Lin Hao, causing his spiritual power to briefly fall into disorder. It made it look as though he was desperately rejecting her approach.

In the observation room, the previously slightly relaxed atmosphere grew tense once more.

Su Wan’s heart leapt to her throat again. Her hands clasped tightly together, she stared unblinkingly at the chaotic curves on the monitoring screen, not even daring to breathe loudly. Her lips trembled as she silently prayed for the safety of both Yun Sheng and Lin Hao.

Beside her, Lin Yueyao appeared just like the others, with her gaze fixed on the screen. In reality, her eyes were shifting, and her fingertips were quietly and rapidly swiping across her terminal’s screen. A new message was prominently displayed on the screen.

[Arriving in half an hour.]

Her expression darkened as her fingers typed furiously.

[Hurry up! If she finishes the pacification quickly and takes the opportunity to leave the hospital, it won’t be so easy to uncover the secret of her spiritual power!]

[We will hurry. You must find a way to stall her and prevent her from leaving early!]

Seeing this message, Lin Yueyao’s hand suddenly gripped the edge of her terminal tightly, her gaze turning instantly gloomy and ruthless.

[Understood.]

At the exact moment she sent this message, a black hovercar was parked quietly in a remote corner of the hospital’s underground parking lot.

The interior of the vehicle was dim. Bai Ye leaned back in his seat as a message from Luo Cheng popped up on his terminal screen.

[General, we have tracked the signal source and locked onto the target.]

Bai Ye: [Keep a close eye on them. Report immediately if there is any movement.]

Luo Cheng: [Yes, General!]

Exiting the chat with Luo Cheng, Bai Ye’s gaze slowly shifted to the pinned profile picture, and he tapped it open. The screen displayed a message from five minutes ago, sent by Yun Sheng just before she entered the emergency room.

[I deliberately tested Lin Yueyao’s attitude just now. She insisted on me performing pacification for Lin Hao, and she seemed overly eager. I suspect her motives are impure. I’m going into the emergency room now. Keep an eye on her for me; we might get an unexpected harvest.]

Bai Ye’s fingertips gently traced over Yun Sheng’s message on the terminal screen, the corners of his lips curling up slightly.

"Yun Sheng, just as you expected, she indeed made a move. Now, let’s see just how big of a fish we can catch," he murmured.

The atmosphere inside the car was tranquil. Only the faint glow of the terminal screen reflected in his deep eyes, concealing an inevitable calmness. He had already laid an inescapable net, just waiting for Lin Yueyao and the people behind her to walk right into it.

Lin Hao’s spiritual landscape was far better than Yun Sheng had anticipated. Unlike Si Jin and the others, it wasn’t covered in cracks of varying sizes and depths, nor did it possess the gloom and ruin that followed contamination. The entire spiritual landscape was clean and clear. Even though there were wandering strands of spiritual power carrying a bit of a tyrannical aura, that ferocity was incomparable to the violent auras of the SSS-level Sentinels she had encountered previously during their rampages.

An even greater sense of doubt surfaced in Yun Sheng’s heart. With such a clean and intact spiritual landscape, even if he had been injured by a High Order contaminant attack earlier, he shouldn’t have suddenly fallen into such a violent spiritual power rampage. This entirely defied logic!

Suppressing her surprise, she immediately mobilized her spiritual power to roam through every corner of Lin Hao’s spiritual landscape, meticulously probing for the root of the anomaly. It wasn’t long before she caught a strange aura. The aura wasn’t strong, but it made her heart skip a beat.

This aura felt very familiar to Yun Sheng. It bore a striking resemblance to the scent of the Sentinel Induction Agent she had smelled back in Zone 10. It was just that the concentration was relatively faint. Without entering Lin Hao’s spiritual landscape to investigate thoroughly, it would be impossible to detect.

She concluded that Lin Hao’s accident this time was no accident at all—someone had deliberately used a Sentinel Induction Agent on him!

A thought subsequently welled up in Yun Sheng’s mind. She wondered, "Could this be the work of Dark Nest, the organization behind those men in gray again?"

But Bai Ye had told her before that Dark Nest’s targets had always been High-level Sentinels and guides. Lin Hao was just a recently awakened B-level Sentinel with weak spiritual power. He possessed neither the formidable strength of a High-level Sentinel nor any special spiritual power traits that could be exploited. Blatantly using an induction agent on him in a place like a hospital, which was heavily monitored, carried extreme risks. The slightest carelessness would lead to exposure. Why would Dark Nest take the risk to do something so unrewarding?

Questions swirled in her mind. Following this line of deduction, an even more shocking speculation gradually took shape in Yun Sheng’s heart. She wondered if this whole incident wasn’t aimed at Lin Hao at all, but rather at her. Lin Hao was nothing more than a pawn they used to lure her into acting!

As soon as this speculation emerged, all the previous anomalies instantly had a logical explanation. Lin Hao unexpectedly going on a rampage and fighting for his life, followed by Lin Yueyao’s manipulation of Su Wan to force Yun Sheng’s hand—this gave them a justifiable opportunity to probe her spiritual power. If so, regardless of whether her pacification of Lin Hao succeeded or failed, Dark Nest’s next move would likely be targeted at her!

Yun Sheng abruptly clenched her fists. She had been targeted by them after all!

She hadn’t expected Lin Yueyao to be involved with Dark Nest, nor was this mentioned in the original book. But it didn’t matter. Killing two birds with one stone would actually save her a lot of trouble!