Slime Evolution

Chapter 482 - Memories of the Oracle

The white lasted only an instant.

Then, the world slowly returned, and Lohan realized he was no longer in the office.

He was in a formless place, without floor and without ceiling, floating in a milky space where he could only feel his own existence, and far away, very far away, a bluish light pulsed at a slow, solemn rhythm, like the heart of a sleeping creature.

’I’m inside,’ he thought, and his voice sounded different there, closer, as if he were speaking inside a cave.

Somewhere very distant, the part of him that had stayed in the office answered with a small pulse of warmth, the safety rope he had left tied to the surface, and he felt Lisa’s voice arriving muffled, as if she were underwater. ’Halon? Can you hear me?’ And one of his parts, the lightest one, answered for him, reassuring her.

It was working.

He advanced toward the light, and it was at that moment that the space around him suddenly changed.

The white condensed into walls, the floor gained texture, and Lohan smelled something he hadn’t smelled in a long time, a cold, chemical smell, of antiseptic and plastic.

He heard a regular, monotonous beep, the sound of a machine measuring heartbeats, and when he looked down, he saw that he had a body, a thin, weak body, lying on a narrow bed with white sheets.

It was the hospital room.

The room where he had spent his entire life in the other world, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something that never came.

’No,’ he thought, and his heart, or what he thought was his heart, gave a painful leap. ’I’m not... I’m...’

A soft voice, coming from nowhere, whispered in his ear, sweet and convincing, the voice of someone who knew him very well. ’You’re tired, Lohan. You can stay here. Here you don’t have to fight. Here you don’t have to be strong.’

It was tempting. It was the most tempting thing he had ever felt.

But one part of him, the one left guarding the door, noticed the trap before the illusion finished closing around him.

Abyssal Clarity lit up like a lighthouse, and he saw the scene with a new sharpness, that of a drawing made by someone who had only seen a distant version of reality.

’This is a memory of mine,’ he thought, firmly, and his voice sounded calm. ’It’s not hers. You took this from inside me.’

The voice whispered again, more insistent, and the smell of antiseptic grew stronger, but Lohan was no longer looking at that room.

He was looking at what lay behind it, at the blue light pulsing in the distance, and pushed with Mental Pressure, whole, concentrated, like an open hand pushing a heavy door.

The room cracked from top to bottom, like a mirror, and shattered into thousands of shining fragments.

Lohan went back to floating in the milky space, breathless, and realized the blue light was much closer now.

’She defended herself,’ he thought, with a mix of admiration and unease. ’Even dead, even turned into stone, she still defended herself.’

If an illusion like that, a mere automatic remnant, had already come so close to trapping him, he didn’t even want to imagine what that creature would have done in life.

But the light was still there, motionless, and now, without the barrier, it opened before him like a flower.

The memories began to flow.

First came the birth.

He felt the inside of an egg, cramped and warm, and then a light that wasn’t light, but sound, a symphony of vibrations that spread through an immense cave full of enormous crystals, and each crystal resonated at a different frequency, like a giant organ played by the wind.

Around him, dozens of other eggs were breaking open, and dozens of creatures, pale and fragile, came out of them with their eyes closed.

They didn’t need eyes.

Every sister and every brother gave off a murmur, a kind of silent scream, and all of them together formed a deafening choir that had nearly driven her mad in her first hours of life.

The little creature, who didn’t have a name yet, first learned to silence that noise, pushing, hushing, suppressing the other voices, one by one, until only her own remained.

Lohan felt a shiver as he realized what that meant, but he didn’t look away, because he knew the memories were the reason he was there.

The next scene came like a wave. The creature was bigger now, with long, thin limbs, and in the center of its skull, where the eyes should have been, there was only one large eye, surrounded by a cluster of pulsing crystals that grew and glowed with every thought, exposed, almost as if the brain had grown outside the flesh.

He was in the center of an immense web that stretched from crystal to crystal, and at the other end of the cave, a group of adventurers arrived, five people in shining armor with weapons drawn.

They never got to fight.

The spider simply thought, and the thought traveled through the cave like an invisible wave.

The group’s leader stopped mid step, his eyes glazed over, and then slowly turned and drove his sword into the companion beside him.

The other three, also under the wave’s effect, began to laugh, to cry, to scream, to attack each other, while the creature watched from afar, calm, unhurried, like someone simply watching a play, and waited.

When the last one fell, she came down from the ceiling and fed.

Lohan realized, as he lived that memory from the inside, that there was no cruelty in her. There was no hatred, no pleasure.

There was only great efficiency from a creature that used the only gift it had in the most perfect way possible.

The memories went by faster after that.

He saw the creature paralyze a three meter troll with a single thought, watch the monster try to move its enormous arms and fail, and then make it walk to a ravine and throw itself in, smiling.

He saw the creature create, in the mind of an entire pack of wolves, the illusion of a green, sunlit field, so they would walk calmly toward the fire.

He saw her own aura grow, year after year, so strong that the creatures of the region began to avoid the cave, and then to avoid the whole region, and then to flee before they even got close.

She was a queen who, at that point, ruled without ever needing to leave her throne.

And Lohan, floating inside that river of memories, felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time, a genuine, almost reverent admiration for a power so refined and so specific that he had never imagined it could exist.

She was powerful. Far more than any Player he had met, far more than any boss he had ever faced.

If she were alive, and if that mind were whole, he would have been destroyed before he even understood what was happening.

The last memory arrived slowly, like the end of an afternoon.

The creature was in the center of the cave, and something in the atmosphere had changed.

A new light entered through the main opening, a white light, cold and steady, and the creature perceived, with the cluster of crystals in her skull, a mind approaching.

A mind like a wall.

It wasn’t an ordinary mind. It was a perfect construction, polished, without a single crack, an iron wall so smooth that nothing could get a grip on it, and inside it, an immense will, calm and ancient.

The creature cast the first wave, the same one that had paralyzed trolls, and the wave struck the wall and dissolved like water against stone.

She cast the second, stronger. The third, with everything she had, a storm that made the crystals of the entire cave vibrate and crack.

Nothing.

The figure who entered the cave walked slowly, with a long staff in hand and a rigid, imposing posture, and Lohan, through the spider’s mental senses and through the big eye on her head, could only see her as a silhouette of light, but recognized right away who it was.

The firm features, the majestic bearing, and a cold, wise gaze.

Yrneha.

The spider felt, for the first time in her life, something she had never felt, and which she didn’t know how to name.

The thought that crossed her mind was simple, clear, and carried all the surprise in the world.

’She isn’t afraid of me.’

And then the space around her compressed, clean, elegant and without the slightest hesitation.

The memory ended there, like a snuffed candle, and Lohan felt the creature’s last thought dissolve inside him, not with pain, but with a kind of respect.

The white returned, and with it, an enormous wave of energy.