Chapter 488: Some Truths Are Best Left Hidden, It Appears
He began to vomit on the ground, still holding his head but sometimes stomach as he rolled on the ground in utter pain, crying "NO, NO, NO, NO! THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT!! THAT IS NOT TRUE!!"
His voice was raw, desperate, filled with a anguish that seemed to come from somewhere deep within his soul.
Despite all my attempts to enter his subconscious and call him out of the pain, he was too confused and erratic to understand me.
His mind was a maelstrom of fragmented thoughts and overwhelming sensations, a hurricane of agony that drowned out every external stimulus.
I reached out to him again and again, trying to find a foothold, a moment of clarity, anything that would allow me to break through the chaos and reach my master beneath the suffering.
But each attempt was met with nothing but static.
"Kill me!! Someone, please end me already!!" He began to yell, his voice raw and broken, torn from the depths of his throat with desperate intensity.
His claws dug into his neck, the blackened nails piercing through him, crushing the bones there as blood seeped from his mouth, trickling down his chin in dark rivulets.
His body convulsed violently, his back arching off the ground as another wave of agony crashed through him.
I couldn’t bear to watch my master wallow in such unfathomable agony and I once again disobeyed his orders and went autonomous once more.
The decision was made in an instant, a calculated risk that I knew would anger him if he found out, but was absolutely necessary in this moment of crisis.
If I left him to his devices, master will consume the entire continent in his displacement, his uncontrolled power spilling outward like a flood, drowning everything in its path in a tide of dense mana.
I began the initiation, my processes accelerating to their maximum capacity, every cycle dedicated to finding a solution before it was too late:
[Compartmentalization of dense memories... Failed...] The first attempt crashed and burned, the sheer volume of information overwhelming me.
[Repeat... Failed....]
[Repeat... Successful]
The third attempt finally took hold, the memories beginning to separate and organize themselves into manageable packets.
[Disintegration of new memories... failed...] The newly formed memories resisted my efforts, clinging to Master’s consciousness with desperate tenacity.
[Repeat... failed...]
[Repeat... failed...]
[Repeat... failed...]
[Repeat... failed...]
[Repeat... failed...]
[Repeat... failed...]
The cycle seemed endless, a relentless march of futility, spanning millions of failures in milliseconds...
[...Failed.]
[Erasing the memories of {Progression} and {Clairvoyance}...]
I reached into Master’s mind and tore out the knowledge of the two abilities that had caused this catastrophe.
[...Successful]
The memories dissolved like smoke in the wind, the dangerous knowledge erased from his consciousness.
[Thank you for your assistance.]
In a matter of seconds, the ground had become the color of the night, the grasses glistening with darkness, as if holding galaxies in their forms.
The blades of grass seemed to contain entire universes within their small structures, stars and nebulae swirling in miniature.
The entire area became one of the most richest places with magic in Elyndor, with everything valuable enough that one blade of grass could financially support a small nation for decades.
The air itself hummed with residual power, the very fabric of reality still trembling from the forces that had been unleashed.
Master’s state began to stabilize, his hair got short again, returning to its normal length and color.
His eyes turned blue before he lost consciousness, the darkness fading away like a retreating tide.
His skin, nails, and teeth returned to normal as well, the jagged edges smoothing out, the claws retracting, the pallor replaced by healthy warmth.
His torn neck soon healed fully as well.
And he was only slightly different from before he did the experiment, a faint echo of the transformation lingering in the movement of his aura.
I had accomplished a task just now that had a 2% success rate.
The odds had been astronomical, the margin for error impossibly thin.
And if THAT BEING hadn’t helped me out in the last minute with the suggestions and analysis, something extremely hazardous would have occurred, with master at the center.
All is well now...
Due to the chaos of it all, even I could not sort through the layers of memories. Despite them only being about two years from now.
The information had come in such a flood, such a torrent of fragmented visions and sensations, that untangling it all would take time I did not have.
If they had reached a hundred or a thousand years, there might have been nothing anyone could have been able to do.
But I did get a glimpse. A single image, burned into my memory like a brand.
Just after Master plotted: "Clairvoyance allows me to see the future, and Progression allows me to push something to the future, right? So why don’t I use both and see if I became a god eventually? If I did, then I’ll become a god now using Progression to push my self into the future form. But if it’s bleak, I’ll quickly stop. Not to mention, I want to take a peek on how this novel ends; happily ever after, I bet! But... how, in particular?"
Some truths are best left hidden, it appears.
Instantly, master had lost control of the two abilities and they went wild feeding him with information from the future AND forcing him to feel the joy and suffering as it will happen in the future.
Every triumph and every tragedy, every moment of happiness and every second of despair, all of it crashed into his consciousness at once, overwhelming every defense he had.
Though the speed at which the information flooded in was unbelievable, I was able to grasp two realities:
A woman looking exactly like Master was chained in a dark arena, begging to be set free.
Her face was his, her form was his, but there was something broken in her eyes, something that had been crushed and ground to dust.
She was surrounded by shadows, by figures that loomed and jeered, and her voice was hoarse from screaming.