Chapter 258 Half a Smile

Ravian kept his hand pressed against the lid, but the meaning taking shape in his mind did not stop where he had looked away from the inscriptions. The connections between the symbols were completing themselves, and whenever he tried to break them off and turn to another thought, he found some part of them connected to whatever he turned to.

He called on Absolute Focus and identified what he remembered of the text without interpreting it again. He wanted to isolate that memory from the rest of his thoughts, but something within it responded to his attention before he could.

[Untouched Soul: Foreign spiritual signature detected.]

[Warning: Attempted soul possession.]

Ravian lifted his hand from the lid, but his fingers remained curled for a moment after he tried to straighten them. He watched them without repeating the command.

‘How the hell do I stop this?’

[Reading the Golden Scriptures and attempting to comprehend their contents are forbidden to any being below the Fourth Rank.]

[Before reaching the Fourth Rank, a being possesses no Law capable of protecting its soul from the powers of Prohibition within them.]

The spaces between the words before him narrowed, then returned to normal. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he found he could read the window but could not remember any part of the tent behind it.

‘I have the Law of Void, don’t I?’

[Law comprehension: 0.001%.]

[This trace allows limited resistance. It does not equal the protection acquired by a Law wielder at the Fourth Rank.]

Ravian absorbed the answer, then withdrew his attention from the tent into his soul before he lost the ability to determine where he was going. The sensation of his hand on the table remained somewhere distant, while a space unfolded before him that had not taken this form when he had explored his consciousness before.

Gray ground bore the trace of his presence, and dark lines were beginning to carve paths along its edges, between areas he knew he could still control. Narrow gateways opened along those paths, topped with writing he refused to read. Behind one of them, something moved that was long enough for its body to pass through several openings at once.

A dragon’s head emerged, bearing two branching horns, with white threads hanging from either side of its jaw, knotted around small faces. Those faces had no eyes, but they all turned toward him when he noticed them, and he felt something pressing against the place where he kept his name.

The dragon’s scales resembled pieces of ancient porcelain, each bearing the image of a kneeling person. As its body extended through the gateway, the figures on its scales slowly rose and tilted their heads toward Ravian, though their bodies remained facing the other way.

‘This is ridiculous, man…’

He did not know whether he was looking at a being that actually existed or a form the power had taken so he could perceive it. What he did know was that the ground it passed over lost the familiar sensation that connected it to him, and something else began responding whenever he tried to move it.

He activated Void Shadow and drew his spiritual signature away from the path along which the head advanced. His presence vanished from the place the dragon targeted, sending the pressure into empty ground, but a thin trace still connected that ground to him. The text had entered through his comprehension, and concealing his presence did not seem to erase the path it had made.

Untouched Soul’s warning flared again at another edge of his consciousness.

That meant there was another intruder!

Ravian turned and saw a broad staircase descending from a height whose end he could not see. A figure clad in bronze plates stood on its steps, its face covered by a mask with thick brows and bulging eyes. Twisted horns rose behind its head, some resembling the handles of ancient ritual vessels.

Its chest opened onto a hollow containing a hanging bell with no clapper. The bell moved once, and though Ravian heard no sound, he felt he had forgotten why he was standing there.

‘What kind of damned creatures are these?!’

Ravian could not even muster enough awareness to feel dread.

‘I’m resisting attempts to possess my soul. Several of them.’ That was the only thing he knew for certain amid everything circling him and drawing closer.

The bell shuddered again.

He sharpened his attention and drew on the trace of the Law of Void he possessed, his only shield amid these monsters. Instead of trying to spread it across the entire space, he concentrated it at the boundary the contamination had reached, specifying what he wanted to erase without touching the part of his soul that had been infiltrated.

The dark path receded a short distance, leaving an empty patch of gray ground where the bell had tried to impose its influence. But he felt the effort required to reclaim even that small amount of ground.

The bronze figure leaned over the steps as though inspecting the void he had left.

Behind it, long hands appeared, carrying stone masks on their palms.

The hands were not connected to any bodies he could see. They reached up from beneath the steps, placed the masks on the ground, then withdrew. Each mask rose on a slender neck and joined a procession of figures wrapped in dry cloth.

This was the third.

The pressure of Sovereign Pride intensified within his soul, and the gray crown steadied above the center of his consciousness, bearing its two crimson gems. The dragon advanced beside the figures as the bell shuddered a third time.

The attack no longer came from a single direction.

Untouched Soul alerted him to each foreign trace approaching the point of settling within him. He directed Void Shadow toward it and tried to sever its connection to his presence, then used his trace of the Law of Void wherever the contamination overcame that concealment.

Ravian found himself retreating into a smaller area, the crown following him as the ground he abandoned became lines of writing connected to the gateways.

Those forms were not fighting one another for territory. They approached the same boundary from different directions, and as the inscriptions spread behind them, he felt the consciousness of the Golden Scriptures settle into the places from which he had withdrawn.

Ravian held the remaining boundaries and let Void Shadow conceal the center of his presence rather than pursue each figure individually. He needed to preserve a place from which he could think and prevent the pressure from the bell from breaking the connections between his thoughts.

Outside, his left hand clenched.

He felt the movement despite his distance from his body, then heard his fingernail scrape across the tabletop. His finger was moving without his command, slowly and deliberately, as though whoever moved it was testing whether he could hear the sound.

…

Ravian’s body remained seated before the closed box, but his features no longer held a single expression.

The right half of his face retained its natural color and the calm of its crimson eye, while the muscles in the other half tightened in ways that did not match their counterparts. The left corner of his mouth rose, fell, then rose again. At the same time, his left eye widened until its crimson color vanished beneath blackness that spread across the white.

Nothing remained in that eye to indicate where it was looking. It was completely black, and the face around it seemed familiar in shape, yet anyone looking at it would struggle to hold their gaze without feeling that something in its features had changed since the moment before.

The left half of his mouth opened, releasing a brief laugh that stopped abruptly.

“A closed box and shut eyes… You’ve worked hard to pretend you haven’t read anything.”

Ravian heard the voice through his right ear. The part of his body that still belonged to him retained its connection to his consciousness, and he used that connection to steady his sensation of his tongue and the right side of his mouth.

“Get out of my soul,” Ravian said, sensing the entity speaking to him within his consciousness.

The words came slowly, and as they did, the left side of his face moved into a smile that was not his.

“I liked that request. Polite, brief, and so confident it’s pitiful.”

His left hand moved across the table and rested its fingertips on the lid. It began tapping at irregular intervals, then stopped midway through one tap, as though the hand had forgotten what it was doing.

“You could have screamed. I’ll help if you like. We have a mouth perfectly suited to it, even if you insist on keeping half,” the entity said in a deep, rough voice.

“Who are you?” Ravian asked, keeping his composure.

His head turned slightly, but his right hand stopped the movement by gripping the edge of the table. The black eye remained fixed toward the entrance while the crimson eye stayed directed at the box.

“You want a name? Now? Really?”

The laughter rose again, then the voice sank almost to a whisper.

“All right. Try calling me by your name. We’ll see which of us turns first.”

Ravian did not answer. At that same moment, one of the masked figures within his consciousness moved what it carried toward the gray boundary. The face beneath the covering no longer remained still; its left eye opened, revealing the same blackness that had settled into the eye of his body.

He directed his trace of the Law toward it, eroding the neck extending from the mask toward the protected area.

Outside, the left corner of his mouth tilted.

“I was wondering when you’d realize that. You can hurt what comes in, but you can’t stay awake forever defending your consciousness,” the entity said through half of Ravian’s mouth, before continuing in a deeper tone. “You’re human, after all.”

“Kikikiki!”