Academic gathering with a lich-Chapter 810 - 751: Stabbing Oneself in the Back

I had a nightmare.

It may sound a bit funny, but every terrifying detail in the nightmare seemed to be vividly replaying before my eyes, as noticeable as the cracks on a mirror. The result of my self-analysis was that I needed to vent those horrors, even if I was talking to myself. To avoid affecting subsequent research work, I will recreate the nightmare word by word.

There will be no record, for it is just a nightmare.

"I dreamt of moving forward in a darkness where I could not see my own hands, wearing everyday clothes, perhaps with a plague doctor mask on, perhaps not. The expression was close to idiocy, or a state of spiritual abnormality. My body swung naturally as I progressed, and even though my sensory abilities were practically nil, the me in the dream experienced no emotional fluctuations..."

"I advanced in the dark, slowly, aimlessly... I was certain there was no destination ahead. Or perhaps the process of moving was what mattered most. In hindsight, with a clear head, I think of how terrifying the dreaming self was..."

"Like a sponge being wrung dry, I vaguely became aware in the dream that my reason was being drained away. My body seemed to be controlled in its march, and my spirit, or more precisely in my deeper senses, I felt my brain shrinking into a dried walnut. A sense of weakness, fatigue, and a foreign feeling towards my own body constantly flowed out from the emptiness of my mind."

"I heard a sound, it lingered on my fingers, on every joint, as my hands slightly swung with my forward movement and grabbed all my attention—I registered the subtle influence of gravity on my fingers and the sound of tearing."

"As ripe fruit hits the ground, I vividly felt the bones in my fingers detach, falling piece by piece like a string of pearls snapping. The sharp tapping of nails against the ground traveled through my bones, up my spine, to my brain. When my chaotic mind developed the cognition of ’fingers falling off,’ the freshly red cross-sections of the stumps, like an out-of-control water pipe, stained my shoe soles red."

"In the dream, I kept moving forward, and ’falling apart’ was just a beginning. My skin, my blood, my tissues, like unrestrained small cubes, fell one after another, feeling like a set of dominoes starting to collapse."

"I crumbled, from a well-defined form into a puddle of mush... um, tiny chunks of flesh."

Lyle covered his face, leaning against the dimly lit laboratory wall, with Nia sitting on the only chair. The chaotically cluttered lab desk clearly wasn’t a good place to rest either. It was then that Lyle realized the smell of blood merged with the stench of death and it was very uncomfortable for his nostrils.

The faint light from the magic stone did not change, the lingering shadows twisted on their own, and the dark silhouette on the wall bent down, leaning on Lyle’s left shoulder like a lover, listening to Lyle’s self-dialogue.

"Have I been staying up too much lately?" Lyle reasoned with himself, his tone as indifferent as that of the Dissolver in the dreamscape.

"When was the last time you slept?" The bad omen did not contradict Lyle’s conclusion, following his train of thought to engage in conversation.

"Fifteen days ago. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact time. A drunk Alianna was a bit excited, and her enthusiastic singing caused my mind to go blank."

"Do you think this is a result of exhaustion?"

"Not sure. I feel full of vitality from my body, and after ascending to the Fourth Tier, my need for sleep is no longer urgent. Maybe long periods without sleep do indeed cause some mental issues, even for someone like me."

Lyle and the bad omen are one and the same, both actually quite aware of the real reason. Turning a blind eye to the emperor’s new clothes is simply the brain’s instinct at play. He needed comfort, needed to be sufficiently mentally prepared, to act out the ending already written at the conclusion of the script, just like a drama.

[Susanna’s mental dreamscape, the erosion of the Intangible Son legion, the assimilation of the Nightmare. With so much external interference, your mental state has already leaned towards the other side.]

Lyle, Nia, the harbinger each constituting each other’s half. Nia connects to Lyle’s body, the harbinger connects to the spirit. Nia’s distortion maintains the purity of the human body, the harbinger’s madness isolates the corruption of the Evil God. But lately, the pathogen exposure has been too much, these two protective mechanisms are somewhat strained.

[Just as the most comfortable posture for humans is lying down, the most content posture for the Evil God, however, is... "a puddle of mud".]

"So that’s why last night I had a dream about transforming into the fleshly Evil God... imagining the chaotic disintegration of my body..."

The harbinger’s words made the temperature of the laboratory drop a few degrees.

[Dreams? Think harder. Ever since we came back from the Dreamwood, we only made a brief stay at Naslan Castle, then you locked yourself in the laboratory, always, listening, always conducting research on the Evil God and Spirit summoning creations. You didn’t sleep at all last night, you were self-analyzing all night; that wasn’t a dream...]

Lyle’s face turned deathly pale, contrasting starkly against the harbinger’s dark shadow.

"Are you saying that last night I was mentally disordered, my fingers actually fell off, and after my body disintegrated it went through a process of decomposition and reassembly..."

[Of course...]

"He’s lying to you, silly Lyle!" A youthful, energetic female voice pushed into Lyle’s conversation, Nia climbed down from the chair, her writhing tendrils slipping back into Lyle’s collar. The morphing Nia still maintained her puffed-up baozi face, somewhat angrily pounding on Lyle’s shoulder, hitting the spot where the harbinger’s shadow lay.

"Yesterday, Nia felt so bored, she went out to play. Silly Lyle just stood there all night, staring off into space!"

Lyle turned his head, the harbinger’s shadow revealing a mischievous grin.

Organizing his thoughts, Lyle did indeed enter a state of mental standby last night, while the active Nia did not want to accompany Lyle standing all night long. She detached a part of herself, which in Lyle’s spirit domain was recorded as a physical separation, Nia and Lyle are one in body, thus producing in Lyle the false memory of his fingers detaching, only feeling like he had been taken apart.

The chaos in the spirit domain is the work of the harbinger, as the commanding tower of the Evil God’s young form, he doesn’t mind causing trouble for the foundation and body.

Lyle condemned the harbinger’s taste for mischief, but there’s not much he could do; after all, he couldn’t punish the harbinger by subjecting himself to a bit of mental anguish.

[But there is one thing I didn’t lie to you about, your proximity to the Power of the Evil God during this period has begun to destabilize the part of you that is human. If you want to retain your self, as a human named Lyle in control of us, you need to become even more powerful.]

The allegiance of the Intangible Son legion, the control over the Nightmare boss, to some extent, affected Lyle’s senses, the balance inside of him is tilting, Lyle needs sharper and more effective self-control.

That is, an ascension to Five Locks, to become Divine Corpse.