Chapter 230: The So-called Cognitive Blind Spot
Translator: Pluto Editor: Vermillion
"So that's why! This was the purpose of wearing such noisy boots and acting like she didn't care. Hannie used it to create a misimpression. She could actually move around without making a sound!" Mrs. Manas exclaimed.
When a person is used to a sound, it would create a sort of associative biases, making it impossible to consider the possibility that she could move soundlessly. In other words, it created a cognitive blind spot.
Lin Sanjiu was shocked by what Mrs. Manas said and quietly regretted letting her guard down for a moment. She should have kept her higher consciousness scanning at a wider range. Being too anxious to recover her body, she had become overly frugal with using her higher consciousness.
After that sound disappeared, Reno rushed over and grabbed the door handle. He pushed down the handle and shook the door violently. Unfortunately, much to the siblings' chagrin as their faces turned pale, the door would not open despite the door creaking from Reno's strength. They had been locked in.
Logically, a normal man-made office door should not be this strong. The siblings squinted and peeped through the crack of the door before finally stopping and dropping their heads, disheartened.
"It's no use. They must have used some item manufactured in Twelve Worlds Centrum," Rena sighed and turned to Lin Sanjiu. She found the words Lin Sanjiu had created in mid-air, "Hannie is outside? How did you know? Let me see… Hey, can you go out?"
Rena's face lit up when she remembered this. "That's right! How could I've forgotten that! You can go out!" Rena's voice rose with excitement. Even though the gap between the door was very narrow and Lin Sanjiu's body had grown significantly, Lin Sanjiu could slowly squeeze through that gap and escape from the room as long as she stretched and flattened herself.
"Great! Go outside and remove that item from the door!" Reno said urgently.
Without making any sound, Lin Sanjiu lowered her body. Her white bones, muscles, and blood gradually fused together and she stretched herself out. She was now a gruesome color, as if someone had mashed a person's body and put it in a mixer. Rena averted her gaze as she was too afraid to look at Lin Sanjiu. She could only hear her brother cheering Lin Sanjiu, "Yes, you're halfway. You're out!"
Rena quickly looked and saw the last bit of reddish splodge disappearing through the gap under the door. Lin Sanjiu had disappeared from the room. She took 40 seconds to slip out from under the door. To a normal person, that isn't much time. However, 40 seconds was enough to climb one floor, so it felt like an unusually long time to Lin Sanjiu.
Once Lin Sanjiu relaxed, her body immediately reverted back to original form with a half side made of muscles and the other half of organs. She examined the weird thing on the door. Before she came out of the room, Lin Sanjiu would never have imagined that the thing reinforcing the door would actually be alive.
A black scorpion about the size of a little girl's upper body was on the door. It had pierced its two long pincers into the door frame. A dull light shone off its black, patterned exoskeleton. As incredulous as it sounded, Lin Sanjiu could sense the scorpion's "muscles".
Lin Sanjiu carefully avoided the poisonous stinger on the scorpion's waving tail and grabbed its body. She exerted her strength before it could react with its stinger. However, she was shocked that she couldn't pull that scorpion off even with her current strength. The scorpion did not budge even an inch.
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Unwilling to give up, she tried it a couple more times but found that it was still stuck to the door. Lin Sanjiu was starting to get anxious.
Apparently, Hannie had overheard their plans using some method and decided to seal the door with this scorpion. Lin Sanjiu didn't know when Hannie would bring the others over. Lin Sanjiu knew she needed to get the siblings out before they became easy targets for them.
"How is it?" Rena asked impatiently from behind the door, "You can't open it?"
Lin Sanjiu thought for a moment and knocked once on the door to reply to Rena.
As the office they were in was on the top floor, it was too high for them to jump out of the window even if they wanted to escape that way. Just when Reno and Rena were discussing what to do next, Lin Sanjiu suddenly had an idea.
"Wait for me," Lin Sanjiu wrote after squeezing part of her body through the gap under the door. Then, with some difficulty, she added, "I will chase Han—."
Naturally, she was referring to Hannie. In fact, it had only been two minutes since they heard the sound from Hannie's boots. If Derik and Zhu Mingchun were on the first floor, it was possible that Hannie had not reached them.
" If I can catch that woman, getting information from her and dealing with the locked door wouldn't be a problem ," Lin Sanjiu's heart pounded. Before the two children could respond, she flew toward stairs heading down.
Even though a large part of her body was already completed, it was still just a body made of higher consciousness. In front of others, she tried to maintain the illusion that she was walking with her feet. However, Lin Sanjiu could easily lift her legs and make her entire body float like before.
Considering that she could fly, Lin Sanjiu thought that she should probably be faster than Hannie. With this in mind, Lin Sanjiu used her maximum speed and flew down ten floors before rushing into the stairway. She flew down the stairways floor by floor but she couldn't catch a single glimpse of Hannie. When she finally saw the ground floor, she found that was totally quiet and there was no one around. Lin Sanjiu didn't see Derik or Zhu Mingchun around, let alone Hannie.
"This is weird. They were here previously…" Lin Sanjiu circled the lobby of the bank anxiously. She tried to retrace her steps and wondered if she made a mistake. When she moved to the corridor, she wanted to slap herself. The elevator display showed that the elevator was current on the top floor (which was where the siblings were). Lin Sanjiu had no idea how long it had already been there.
"They took the elevator up!" Shocked, Lin Sanjiu didn't even have the time to rebuke herself for her stupidity. Lin Sanjiu rushed out of the building and flew upward immediately. "I hope the kids are okay…"
Before Lin Sanjiu even muttered these words in her heart, she was badly startled by a loud boom from above. The top floor exploded with flames. The blast was so strong that the force swept Lin Sanjiu for a distance. At the same time, shattered glass and broken window frames fell from the air like rain.
Amidst the destruction and debris, two people were also falling down like ragdolls.