"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking... After careful assessment, I regret to inform you that this flight will be turning back..."
Yuchuan Yingjie sat sideways in his seat, most of his legs jutting into the aisle, his body slack as he struggled to process everything that had happened before and after he lost consciousness.
He was in truly poor condition. The aftereffects of being forcibly "Soul Hosted" had yet to fade, leaving his skull buzzing and occasionally pierced by sharp tinnitus. Under those circumstances, he automatically filtered out most of the flight announcement, retaining only the most critical word:
Turning back!
His eyeballs shifted, and he glanced sideways from the corner of his eye. The key factors behind all this lay right before him.
Less than three meters away, the puppet controlled by the Pope sat sideways in its seat just like Yuchuan Yingjie, facing the aisle with its elbows braced on its knees and its body leaning slightly forward. Its posture had remained unchanged for quite some time.
But compared to when Yuchuan Yingjie had opened his eyes, this puppet body, which had looked like a business elite, now seemed as though someone had drained away all its flesh, blood, and moisture. Only a gaunt, skin-wrapped skeleton remained, like a dried corpse, with barely any aura passing through its nose and mouth.
With its physical form damaged to such an extent, maintaining even the most basic spark of life was already a miracle. It could hardly manage anything more.
Yet for the Pope, this was no problem at all.
The Pope's consciousness still lingered here, calculating coolly and rationing resources carefully. He kept the puppet's last breath from dispersing, while ensuring that everyone in first class still had to live at his mercy.
Precisely because that breath