“Happy Mother’s Day.
“We are grateful to mother for bringing us to this world; thankful to mother for pouring everything she has into us; and appreciative of mother for making us pretty clothes, playing games with us, and teaching us words and numbers. We will work our hardest to repay mother, to train our hearts to listen to the voices in our dreams, to study and strive for the height of heaven.
“We wish for mother to always be healthy and happy. Mother, I love you!”
This was the content of the article Gu Jun got from Wu Siyu when she was in the illusion of the classroom. She said that she saw it clearly.
“Those kids were kidnapped?” Wu Siyu shared her thoughts. “It feels like they were trapped somewhere isolated from the world.”
That was Gu Jun’s suspicion too. “They appear to have been misled since they were toddlers…”
He thought back to his fragmented childhood. As unwilling as he was, he had to accept that perhaps the ‘mother’ in question was his own mother. There was another curious point about this whole statement—’to train our hearts to listen to the voices in our dreams’. Considering these were all children with ESP talent…
“It should be some kind of secret evil cult,” Gu Jun said darkly. “Those people in the black were making use of these children’s talents to receive some kind of message in their dreams, and it was the same message that the kids assaulted Elder Tong with…”
“If the kids were the receivers, who was the transmitter?” Wu Siyu asked. Gu Jun was equally in the dark about that. Where was that classroom? How would one receive information while dreaming? Who sent the messages? If those children survived, they would be around thirty to forty, so where were they now? What were they doing? He thought about the seemingly loving greetings in the articles, but his heart was chilled.
From the day after, the physical training for Gu Jun and Wu Siyu increased because a healthier body could provide a firmer mind. Gu Jun threw himself into every training activity, especially field fighting; he did not want to be rendered useless after he had lost his gun and pepper spray. At night, they would start mental power training. He and Wu Siyu first participated in an assessment regarding their mental power.
“This is just a reference value,” Prof Shen explained to them clearly. “Even a normal person can find superhuman strength at critical moments, like how a mother can lift a small car to save her child. At that moment, her mental power would be over the roof.”
Therefore, the number that they got would be during a normal situation, and it was influenced by other factors like stamina and emotions. Mental power was not inherently good or bad; the number did not suggest normalcy or madness. Even a madman could have high mental power, and that was usually the case.
The method of assessment was not that complicated. Gu Jun was brought into an extremely quiet, soundproof room. He was equipped with devices like a heart rate monitor, brain wave monitor, and so on. To reduce the noise, the devices were placed on the other room. He felt like he was deprived of his hearing, which felt off. Since the activity of the cerebral cortex was suppressed, the brain searched for other signals more actively. The activity of his neurons was increasing. Many people would start experiencing acoasm after staying in this kind of room for over half an hour. Some even reported hearing the sound of their blood flowing in their bodies.
At this moment, Gu Jun trained his focus on the monitor on the wall. Pictures kept changing on it. They were all featureless lines of shadow and light. He was requested to pay full attention to it so that his brain would be under constant visual assault. The brain would instinctively try to fill in these blanks with information, providing a fertile land for illusions to flourish. Gu Jun wanted to suppress those instincts, to try to stay in the real world.
During the whole process, his biological data would be recorded, and it formed the basis to calculate his mental power. The value was a standard used in the parapsychological field. The value was around thirty for a normal person, people who meditated constantly would reach forty, and most Special Mobile Force members could reach fifty.
Gu Jun scored sixty-five, and Wu Siyu got sixty, both much higher than normal. This meant that if a normal person was placed in their shoes, they would suffer from issues like sleeplessness, headaches, and aggression, and some would even see their S value fall to zero. Elder Tong was quite satisfied with this result, but he added, “When this special training is over, I need both of your mental power values to be over seventy!”
After that, the official training began.
“The human brain appears to be unable to resist permanent resting status, it will be constantly receiving and creating information.” Prof Shen explained, “You can say that we are always under the influence of illusion. Even if you keep blinking, the image before your eyes will not become intermittent. This is because the brain retains existing information. If not, the brain would overload and implode. The brain will not only supply missing information, it will also choose information. Even if your brain does not order your body to breathe, you will still breathe. That unnecessary information will be filtered by your brain. Therefore, what you need to learn is how to selectively keep information consciously and control your senses to control the illusions.”
Inside the spacious lab, Gu Jun and Wu Siyu were seated on two chairs in the middle. The radios around them were playing one hundred different voices at the same time. Gu Jun felt his head spinning from the surfeit of audio cues. It was even worse for Wu Siyu. The one hundred voices meant that she was experiencing one hundred different sensory experiences; she was tasting, seeing, and touching different things.
“Now I need you to train your focus on the sound of a baby crying,” Prof Shen ordered. The sound of children crying was one of the voices that could attract an adult’s attention the most. It had a more obvious effect at raising an adult’s heart rate and blood pressure than even the sound of an explosion. It would trigger a human adult instantly into a highly alert mode. This was a biological system, or else human beings would have gone extinct. Therefore, the two managed to zoom in on the sound of crying among the chaos, but they were then asked to find the sound of a young chimp crying, a kitten crying, children laughing, talking, water rushing, and knocking…
As the days passed, the training continued. The types of sound grew from one hundred to five hundred to a thousand. The sound that they needed to trace became more inconspicuous, like the sound of scratching or light breathing…
Gu Jun gradually felt drained. It was much too chaotic. He did not have the talent gifted to Wu Siyu. After she mastered the skill, she swiftly adapted to the exercise.
“To be honest I have no idea what ‘normal world’ means,” Wu Siyu explained to him. “This world has always been chaotic to me. For me, this is what normal is.”
But he was more stable in terms of ESP training. They stopped using the pictures. The two sat inside the little red room, put on the ping pong ball goggles and white noise headphones, and tried to get used to the sensation of the illusions, attempting to communicate mentally. The days blurred by in full training. It slowly made Gu Jun forget about the world outside.
Still, he kept some brief concern about the situation in the Eastern State. When he chatted with Cai Zixuan and the rest, it would make him miss his days at the hospital. Gu Jun knew that he could not lag behind on his medical training. He requested the base to provide him with some medical tools to help him complete the normal mission given by the system. He was always missing elements to complete the difficult missions. He did request Elder Tong to supply him with some carcasses of abnormal creatures.
That got him scolded by Elder Tong. “There is a sequence to how we do things here! The headquarters had me bring you all here in the context of an experiment. If I am unable to provide them with any results after the resources and people they have given us, then I will be kicked out again, and you will all be sent back to prison. So, you’d all better pass the exam after this special training, you hear me‽”
Gu Jun knew he was not lying, so he trained harder. He trained his physique, fighting ability, mental power, and ESP.
“I need to leave because I have gone mad…” Wu Siyu groaned day in and day out, but she was only kidding. She was quite serious about her training. The month passed by quietly, and soon, it was the middle of November. During this period, the two had done many ESP experiments, with the difficulty constantly increasing. From five sets of pictures to ten sets to thirty sets; every picture was extremely complicated, and they were made to move physically further away from each other, from ten meters to twenty meters, fifty meters to one hundred meters…
The two’s bond was slowly built. They had maintained an over sixty percent accuracy through all the experiments, but they still had ways to go with regards to having mental communication. It appeared to be a skill on a completely different level. The illusion during the first ESP experiment also did not reoccur, even when Gu Jun intentionally tried to trigger it. After a whole month of spending every day together, Gu Jun familiarized himself with Wu Siyu. He even started to have implicit trust in her. Xiao Xu had also started to accept them, and so, the mismatched group formed a kind of friendship. Xiao Xu might act childish at times, but his super intelligence provided him with a maturity that was no less than an adult.
However, Gu Jun still would not say he had gotten to know Elder Tong better. On the surface, this old man spent every day kidding and joking with them like they were close buddies, but Gu Jun could not see through Elder Tong at all.
In any case, inside the soundproof room, he and Wu Siyu were about to conduct the mental power assessment again, to see how much they had improved after a month of training. The anticipation on Elder Tong’s face could not be hidden. He tossed the alcohol down his throat mouthful after mouthful. He was like a nervous husband waiting for his wife to give birth.