Chapter 577 - 574: Poke’s Memories

"Wake up, Poke! Wake up!"

Inside the maze, Xi shook Poke's body relentlessly.

"Where... is this?" Poke's weak voice suddenly sounded. He had finally awakened from the looping nightmare and fully returned to reality.

He tried to move, only to find himself buried up to his waist in the dirt. A thick, black chain pierced his chest, and the ground around him was littered with withered hallucinogenic herbs. Staring at the massive black wall, Poke felt a sense of familiarity, but he couldn't quite remember why.

"I'll get you out of there first."

Xi placed his hands on the ground around Poke. As his healing power activated, the earth melted into a puddle. With a heave, Xi pulled Poke out of the mire.

"And this chain..." Xi frowned, looking at the thick chain. He didn't know its structure. Without a "pathogen," he couldn't activate his healing.

However, at that very moment, the chain piercing Poke's body began to disintegrate on its own, dissolving into countless particles that vanished into the air.

This was, of course, Mo Ling's doing. After leaving Poke's Healing Space, he had extended his vision into the chain. Just as he'd expected, the chain had instantly collapsed.

'It seems these black orb aggregates all share the same property, and these chains are no exception.'

Xi stared, stunned, at the crumbling chain. He didn't hesitate for long, however, and immediately began to examine Poke's body.

Soon, Xi extracted a glob of viscous black sludge from Poke's chest. This sludge was also composed of a cluster of small black orbs. It seemed to have been stuck within the chain, only becoming fully visible after the chain disappeared.

"Loneliness."

Xi instantly sensed an intense loneliness from the black sludge. But Poke, staring blankly at the black orb, murmured, "Fear. It's fear."

The negative emotions they sensed from the sludge were different. It seemed the black substance could draw out the most vulnerable emotions from the depths of their hearts.

After the black sludge was removed from his body, Poke fell into a daze again before coming to his senses a moment later.

"I remember now. I remember everything..."

The chain and the black sludge seemed to be the culprits suppressing Poke's memories. Once they were removed, his missing memories came flooding back, and his emotional state instantly returned to normal.

Big Eye, who was beside Xi, nudged up to Poke and rubbed against him affectionately.

"What happened?" Xi asked with concern.

Poke pondered for a moment, stroking Big Eye's head, and haltingly began to explain...

「...」

After Xi fell into a deep sleep, Poke had been constantly thinking about how to wake him up.

But just then, the Elders found Poke and told him to return with them to the Central Island to treat a rare disease.

"What kind of disease is it?" Poke asked.

"We don't know the cause yet, but the situation is critical," the Elders answered honestly.

Torn between the Elders' command and his slumbering companion, Poke had no choice but to return to the Central Island with the Elders first to deal with the more urgent situation.

However, when he arrived at the Central Island, he discovered the entire Sky Island had changed.

Black orb polymers were everywhere. Sky-high walls divided the entire Central Island into many sections, and these walls were generating strange mazes, seemingly to seal the island off.

Before Poke could even figure out what was happening, he was seized by a giant made of black orbs. None of the healers knew what these black orbs were, and without a "pathogen," they couldn't use their powers. They could only be captured by the giants, dragged into the mazes, and separated.

After being thrown into the maze, he was imprisoned here with some of his companions. The Elders, however, were taken somewhere else. This was when Poke and Big Eye were separated.

At first, the giants didn't pierce them with chains; they just buried them in the dirt.

If any of them tried to escape, the giants would just recapture them. At the same time, they noticed the maze was growing more and more complex, making escape increasingly difficult. So, the healers temporarily gave up on the idea of running.

While imprisoned, a voice would echo from the surrounding high walls at regular intervals.

The voice would ask them: "What is the essence of healing power?"

Under repeated questioning, the healers all stated their own opinions. The question had no single correct answer, but the voice didn't seem to care about correctness; it just wanted to hear the healers' responses.

After all the healers had answered, the voice began asking new questions:

"How do you use healing power to create medicine?"

"How do you determine a pathogen?"

"What is the definition of disease?"

"How is the Healing Space used?"

Later on, the voice's questions became more and more specific, delving into finer details. It asked about different prescriptions for specific diseases, the difference between aggressive and conservative medicines, and applications of healing power in non-disease-related fields. Sometimes, the voice would even ask exceptionally strange questions.

"How to identify medicinal herbs."

"The evolutionary lines and extinction causes of protected animals on Senluo Island."

"The distribution of flowers on Hundred Flowers Island."

These questions left the healers completely bewildered as to the voice's purpose.

Could it be that the voice had occupied the entire Central Island and captured the healers just to ask these strange questions?

Moreover, the healers gradually discovered that even if they couldn't answer, the voice wouldn't press the issue. After a few days of repetition, it would simply move on to the next question.

After realizing this, the healers stopped answering any of the voice's questions.

But soon, finding that it couldn't get answers by asking, the voice had the giants bring hallucinogenic herbs, intending to use them to extract the answers from the healers' minds.

The healers themselves had been the ones to tell the voice about this herb's application. They never expected it would be used against them.

Under the influence of the hallucinogenic herbs, the healers had no more secrets. As long as the voice kept asking questions and using the herbs to make them see illusions, it would always get the answers it wanted.

Faced with this situation, the healers came up with a solution. As soon as the hallucinogenic herbs began to take effect, they would start healing their own bodies to make the effects recede. This way, the voice could no longer get answers from them.

However, what the healers didn't expect was that after discovering the hallucinogenic herbs were no longer effective, the voice adopted a new method.

A chain grew out of the black wall and pierced through all the healers. After being impaled by the chain, they all fell into a state of continuous memory loss. Their power was also siphoned away by the chain, forming a chaotic medicine within the maze.

Once the healers realized their memories were disappearing, they tried to use their healing power to cure the amnesia. But they still couldn't find the pathogen and could only watch helplessly as their memories continued to fade.

The voice also stopped its questioning. The healers guessed that it must have found a way to steal their "memories." As long as it could read their memories, it would know all the answers and naturally wouldn't need to ask anymore.

At first, it was the memories of the last few days, then it went further and further back... Slowly, they even forgot why they were trapped there in the first place.

Realizing they couldn't let this continue, the healers all entered their own Healing Spaces to investigate the pathogen causing the memory loss. However, under the interference of their fading memories and the medicine, they gradually became lost within their Healing Spaces.

Most of the healers' memories regressed to a time when they were treating a particular patient, and their Healing Spaces regressed along with them.

Poke, however, was the most deeply lost among them. Because he had accidentally used a root healing method, he fell into a loop. Under the combined effects of amnesia and the medicine, he became trapped in the deepest layer of the endless cycle...