Chapter 487: The Puppet Core
After clearing out the dolls in the room, Lin Ye kept a wary eye on those Black Threads. Maybe because they were still maintaining human forms, this time the Black Threads did not appear on the surfaces of their bodies.
With Kalin's help, the Doll opened the door, and beyond it stood the same giant spliced doll, with the Parasitic Gate looming behind the doll.
Lin Ye swung his kitchen knife at the giant spliced doll. Invisible blades left a very shallow wound on the doll's surface.
The giant spliced doll did not attack Lin Ye, but after he launched his strike, a mild dollification phenomenon appeared on his body.
The invisible blades were not an attack Lin Ye emitted himself. They were an effect granted to the kitchen knife by the ritual, which was why when Lin Ye had killed those parasitized dolls earlier, he had not become a doll.
In theory, attacking the giant spliced doll with the kitchen knife should not cause dollification either, but the giant spliced doll's mass far exceeded that of the small parasitized dolls. Each time Lin Ye struck the giant spliced doll, he felt the repercussions.
Once the body began dollifying, even if there were no Black Threads inside, Lin Ye would struggle to handle the giant spliced doll's tendril attacks.
'Too bad there's no spiritual energy here, otherwise this would be much easier.'
If Lin Ye had to name what he admired most about the Organization, it would be their spiritual energy suppression technology. The Organization's bases were like places where the concept of spiritual energy had been deleted; even while involved in this kind of ritual incident, Lin Ye could barely sense any spiritual energy in the environment.
When those parasitic dolls were hacked to death, they did release a small amount of spiritual energy, but that energy quickly dissipated, as if something had sucked it away. In such an environment, Lin Ye's mental energy was restricted to its limit; he could hardly use any psychic power.
Lin Ye approached the giant spliced doll. He passed through the doll's body and, without touching the doll, managed to get close to its core.
'Only one choice left.'
Lin Ye swung his kitchen knife at the doll's core. Invisible blades sliced into the core, leaving a mark that grew deeper and deeper.
Each cut followed almost exactly the same trajectory, because Lin Ye was repeating the exact same motion.
Lin Ye's body began to dollify. The giant spliced doll trembled slightly, and he adjusted his knife angle to ensure every cut landed on the identical spot.
Countless eyeballs from different individuals gathered near Lin Ye. Once he finished turning into a doll, attacks would come at him from all directions.
That was the price of infiltrating the enemy's belly.
Lin Ye showed no panic. He just kept attacking the doll core as if he hadn't noticed his surroundings.
The Doll waddled over on its short legs and leaned against Lin Ye's calf, helping to reduce the degree of his dollification.
But Lin Ye had attacked too many times; his body began to transform into a doll. Fortunately, the kitchen knife remained unaffected.
Finally, Lin Ye cut open the doll's core. His body had almost completely turned into a doll.
Before the giant spliced doll could strike him, Lin Ye grabbed the Doll and squeezed into the core through the incision.
The moment he touched the giant spliced doll from the inside, Lin Ye's body finished the dollification process. Tendrils stabbed toward his body from all sides, but by then he was already inside the doll core.
This spot was not the creature's weak point. Such a massive parasitic organism would never have such an obvious vulnerability, but the core was saturated with spiritual energy.
No matter how domineering the Organization's technology, they couldn't, while keeping a creature alive, drain all the spiritual energy from its body.
Lin Ye frantically absorbed the surrounding spiritual energy. Tendrils that tried to approach were cut by invisible spiritual energy blades before they could get close. In an environment devoid of spiritual energy, spiritual energy was everything; in that respect, this truly was the giant spliced doll's weak point.
As the core opened and a breach formed, its spiritual energy began to rapidly leak out. Coupled with Lin Ye's continuous forcible extraction, the core's energy was soon sucked dry.
But the giant spliced doll did not operate solely from its core. A large number of tendrils burst through its body and began to swarm the Lin Ye trapped in the core.
Lin Ye calmly crawled out of the core. He glanced at those tendrils and merely sliced to shreds every one that approached him. This was the crushing dominance spiritual-energy lifeforms held over mundane things.
At this level, strength and speed were meaningless when faced with the cutting concept.
Lin Ye felt the spiritual energy inside his body slowly depleting. After all, this energy had been forcibly absorbed into him, and this body was only an ordinary, dollified body, so it couldn't retain spiritual energy for long.
Before the energy ran out, Lin Ye moved toward the Parasitic Gate. It was his first time approaching so close to the Parasitic Gate... its dollified version.
If circumstances had been different, Lin Ye wouldn't have dared get this close.
"Heh heh heh, we're all dolls now. You wouldn't still be able to parasitize me, would you?"
Lin Ye extended his right hand and touched the Parasitic Gate. Upon contact, a torrent of parasitism-related knowledge flooded into his mind through the Gate.
But Lin Ye did not linger in the sensation of being bathed in knowledge. He drew a collapse rune on the surface of the Parasitic Gate, and soon the dollified Parasitic Gate crumbled.
Parasitic Gates and dollification were very incompatible, and given this was a no-spiritual-energy environment, Lin Ye could easily dismantle the Parasitic Gate.
After the Parasitic Gate collapsed, fragments of mental energy remained on the ground. Those fragments contained a large amount of parasitism-related knowledge.
Touching those mental-energy fragments with mental energy would let someone obtain the parasitism knowledge within.
Lin Ye did not touch those fragments with mental energy. Instead, he quickly moved away from them.
The parasitism knowledge that had flooded into Lin Ye's head, he gathered together using mental energy. The gathered knowledge formed half of a mental parasitic creature; the other half presumably remained within the mental-energy fragments.
Lin Ye used a parasitic rune to control that half mental parasitic creature and stored it inside his mental world.
This half-origin mental parasitic creature that came from the Parasitic Gate had considerable research value. Lin Ye planned to raise it inside his mental world for some time.
Whether that would cause issues in the mental world, he would have to ask the Divine Seat and Little Red, who were connected to his mind.
After dealing with the Parasitic Gate, the Doll walked to Lin Ye's side. Three options appeared on its body, respectively:
Base.
Substitute.
Dollification.
This time Lin Ye did not choose Base. He opted for the highly aggressive Dollification.
Damon's ritual had made him misjudge the situation. Even if the other two D-Class personnel did not have rituals as extreme as his, they were not pawns Damon could exploit.