It was now confirmed. His Untouchable field could be activated in this world as well.
Before this, it wasn't as if he had never tried using it. Nothing had happened. There had been no reaction at all, and he himself hadn't felt anything being released.
But after injecting Fiona's blood, his ability had actually activated.
More precisely, it wasn't her blood itself that caused it, but the D99 virus.
They ran the same test on others who also carried the D99 virus. It worked on them too, and it could trigger the field, but none of them produced an effect as strong as Fiona's.
Put simply, the concentration of D99 in her body was much higher.
Which raised another question.
If he went to other worlds and injected himself with D99 there as well, would that also activate his Untouchable field?
That would have to wait for future testing.
Because he needed to cooperate with further research, Kain spent most of the next two days in Tobioka City.
Over those two days, they specifically refined different concentrations of D99 for use with his Untouchable field.
Different purities and different dosages produced different results in terms of the field's size and the effects it caused.
Most importantly, he wanted to reach the point where he could activate, in one shot, the state that allowed him to shatter a target's soul in an instant.
Now, syringe in hand once more, he arrived at a certain area. There was a human outpost there.
The reason those people had not been brought into Black Label's territory was simple: they did not meet the standards to be taken in.
To put it bluntly, it was a raider stronghold. Using them as test subjects put no pressure on his conscience at all.
As for the zombies, they were completely useless for this purpose. They really were nothing more than living corpses.
"Sorry to drop in."
Descending from the sky, he shrugged at the stunned crowd below.
Then he took out a fifty cc dose of the more highly refined D99 and injected it straight into himself.
The next second, it felt as though something inside him had been unlocked. An invisible pressure burst outward like a wave of formless dominance.
In an instant, nearly all of the hundred or so people around him collapsed to the ground.
Those who did not black out were left writhing in agony.
The sensation seemed to be as though their entire bodies were being carved apart by a thousand blades at once, as though chunks of flesh were about to be torn off piece by piece.
Kain then tried to see whether he could control the Untouchable field through sheer willpower.
For now, it still seemed to be passive. He could not actively direct it.
But this time, the effect was so strong that it felt like he might have just barely touched the edge of control.
Relying on the same sense he had trained before when trying to control that impossible-to-touch field, he slowly tried to grasp it.
He made it contract.
More accurately, he was compressing it.
Contraction and compression were not the same thing.
Compression meant reducing the volume without changing the total mass, which in turn increased density.
And once compressed, the Untouchable effect inside the field became even more intense.
Then, all of a sudden, something happened that broke his concentration and forced him to stop.
One of the men suddenly shattered apart for no apparent reason.
Like brittle porcelain, his body broke into a mass of irregular chunks.
What the hell was that?
Not understanding what had happened, Kain ran several more rounds of testing to increase the sample size.
Sixteen hours later.
"This is the conclusion we came to."
Fiona, now acting in her role as the hospital director, had analyzed the chunks of flesh he brought back and arrived at a theory for why the body had broken apart.
She pointed at one of the torn wounds on a piece of flesh, then compared it with the video footage from the experiment site. On the screen was a freeze-frame of the victim screaming in agony, apparently shouting something.
The result was clear. The target had felt as though some invisible force was interfering with his body, pulling at him chaotically and trying to tear him into pieces.
Especially in this segment. The target suddenly cried out that he could no longer feel his hand, that it was gone, as though it had been severed.
And yet at that moment, there had been nothing wrong with his hand at all.
After that, he kept screaming that parts of his body were being torn away one by one. In the end, he could no longer endure it. His mind collapsed, almost like brain death.
Right before dying, however, his brain emitted an abnormally intense burst of neural activity, and then his body suddenly split apart.
So was the truth that Kain's Untouchable field had physically affected reality and directly damaged the target's body?
No.
That was not what had happened.
The cause was the target's own cognition.
He had become so convinced that his hand had been severed that the neural signals produced by that intense belief were transmitted to the arm itself, causing massive genetic breakdown there and creating the exact kind of severing he imagined.
Put simply, it was like in some ghost stories where a ghost chops off your arm. In reality, the ghost cannot physically touch your flesh at all. The pain you feel, the sensation that your arm has been cut off, comes from the soul.
And once the victim truly believed his arm had been severed, that cognition was converted into reality.
Then the actual flesh-and-blood arm broke off for real.
"Uh... so this is your ability? This power is insanely broken."
After hearing Fiona's explanation, Sayo Hitsugi spoke in stunned disbelief.
As an aside, in order to determine just how wide the invisible mental force field produced by his D99 injection actually was, she had the bad luck of serving as the radar for the test.
She had stayed relatively far away at first, sensing the effect of his field, then gradually moved farther and farther back to determine the exact distance at which the seasick feeling finally disappeared.
The closer she got, the worse the dizziness became.
At the end, it felt as though her body had been turned into dice, thrown into a dice cup, and shaken violently, so dizzying that it felt like her body itself might split apart.
If she got any closer than that, it felt as though her mind, her thoughts, were about to be peeled out of her body.
That was how awful the sensation was.
At first, she had assumed it was simply the feeling of her body being pulled by some invisible force. Later, though, she sharply realized that it was one hundred percent a mental phenomenon.
To put it in less scientific terms, it was as though her soul were being dragged out of her body.
And he was like a black hole of the soul, generating a pull strong enough to tear her spirit apart.
The reason she had been the one helping to test the field's strength was simple: among everyone present, she had the strongest body, so she could endure it the best.
"Sayo, are you sure you want to inject it?"
"Of course."
Sayo Hitsugi was present now because she also wanted to trigger a more complete awakening of her own ability.
Fiona and the doctors had already used his blood, along with additional processing of the D99 virus, to create the first serum specifically aimed at activating abilities.
But the activation process was agonizing.
Not physical pain, but mental pain.
So the reason she had cooperated as a test subject for Mr. Kain's ability was also to acclimate herself to the suffering that came with this serum.
"Don't..."
Fiona had not even finished speaking before she froze in shock.
Sayo had already jammed the needle in and pushed the entire contents in at once.
Doing that was the equivalent of taking medicine that should be administered through a slow IV drip and instead blasting it all into the body in one go. It could be fatal.
The effect arrived in less than five seconds.
She dropped instantly to the floor, her whole body convulsing as a scream tore out of her.
The pain was so severe that, in the end, Sayo Hitsugi lost her mind and blacked out.
(End of Chapter)
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