Chapter 214: A Gift, or a Curse

Chapter 214: A Gift, or a Curse

The cold potion slid down his throat, bringing Klein a hint of numbness—a numbness that pierced all the way into the depths of his soul.

His dance steps had already stopped. His spirit inexplicably rose, and his entire being seemed to arrive high in the sky, overlooking the ruined Resurrection Square, overlooking Kukwa City thrown into panic by repeated lightning strikes.

At that moment, his emotions inexplicably grew restless. He felt as though every passerby below had an invisible thread connected to his hand. Following his direction, they expressed joy or anger, sorrow or delight, acting out all kinds of behavior.

Over this period, Klein had often experienced similar sensations. He understood this was the “director’s” perspective: viewing all the participants in an event as marionettes, as actors, trying to manipulate or guide them into performing a grand drama.

Grasping that familiar feeling, Klein hurriedly adjusted his state of mind, completely detaching his emotions. With the cold detachment of a bystander, he watched everything without being affected by the feelings within the play.

As a “director,” one ought to follow the script, refer to reality, analyze rationally, make choices, and keep the accumulation of emotion, the progress of events, and the deployment of clues all within one’s own control.

Once his state of mind stabilized, Klein’s spirit immediately settled. Then he felt the potion’s power spread through his body like a net woven from sharp threads.

All at once, Klein felt his spirit body and his flesh being divided into countless tiny parts. Unable to endure it any longer, he let out a scream from the depths of his soul:

“No!”

His thoughts were then split apart as well, becoming fragment after fragment, each combining with different flesh and developing its own consciousness.

Here was Klein in pain. Here was arrogant Klein. Here was cold Klein. Here was gentle Klein. Here was Klein entertaining himself. Here too was Zhou Mingrui, Sherlock Moriarty, Gehrman Sparrow, and Dwayne Dantès.

His entire spirit body seemed to have been thrown into a shredder.

Not far away, tears sliding unconsciously down his cheeks, Leonard first saw the Captain, Dunn, who had been embracing Daly Simone, turn back into Klein Moretti. Immediately after, he noticed pale flesh buds protruding one after another from Klein’s face, neck, the backs of his hands, and other exposed areas. As if possessing life of their own, they constantly grew outward and transformed into transparent worms. Beneath his clothing, similar wriggling traces rose and fell.

Leonard had the feeling that, in the next instant, the other party would disintegrate into a mass of transparent worms, each rushing toward a different place.

He was about to do something when his head suddenly spun. By instinct, he closed his eyes, not daring to look any longer.

Under the sunlight, the transparent worms growing out of Klein’s body shone with one three-dimensional, layered mystical symbol after another. They connected to higher levels, linked to the laws at the bottom of reality, and directly expressed abstract concepts such as strangeness, madness, change, power, and knowledge.

Amid the cold wind, one illusory black thread after another appeared around Klein. They tangled together, forming strange “tentacles.”

As those tentacles spread, Klein’s spirit body, astral body, mind body, and ether body all shattered into pieces, each merging into different worms. His many thoughts became noisy, chaotic, and contradictory. Floating lightly upward, they seemed to be flying toward an infinitely high place, where countless phantoms surrounded enormous, distorted buildings, blowing instruments, delivering speeches, roaring, and murmuring.

In Klein’s countless scattered senses, everything around him overlapped in layers, as though turning into the spirit world, yet there were still living people moving about and a star shining…