Chapter 384

Pupils sharply contracted, a sense of danger stabbed into his mind like a cold, blinding light, and chill crept down his spine, spreading through his torso and limbs.

His body instinctively reacted—muscles contracted, neck arched back—then he realized the disturbance originated within himself, impossible to evade by spatial movement.

His spirit body tensed abruptly—he struggled to describe this innate reflex, gripping countless tendons deep in his consciousness like a struggle, sensory fragments coalescing, intangible limbs retracting.

What had been soft and drifting now curled tightly, hardening into a dull, dense texture.

The disturbance labored forward its final stretch, like water spilled on sand, fading and seeping away in an instant, completely erased, halting just before the hypothalamus.

Sweat mixed with raindrops on his face, streaming down. He hadn’t experienced this in so long—not merely a threat to life, but a fear rising from a higher plane.

Uncomprehensible. Unresistible. Even the subterranean active lakebeds of Dunling could be explained as an extraordinarily advanced biological miracle; but what, then, was this thing in the clouds?

It could not possibly be a creature of flesh. No known or imaginable material could account for its existence.

He closed his dry eyelids, savoring the brief, self-deceiving darkness, then forced his eyes open, gazing into the depths of the rain clouds.

A flash of lightning revealed a sinuous, undulating arc; its immense size created an illusion of sluggish motion—only by comparing it to the mountain peaks standing like reefs amid mist and sea could one see that even the Priel Basin could not contain even a single curve of its body.

Even now, his consciousness could not judge whether the sensory input was real or not. Or rather, his consciousness refused to be convinced by sight and sound that a living mountain floated in the sky, while those dwelling beneath its shadow had, countless times, looked up and seen nothing.

Watching his emotions spiral uncontrollably, reason made the most rational choice—denial.

He reached out, gripping the window shutter swaying in wind and rain, fingers tightening inch by inch, the hinge creaking until the shutter slammed shut and locked tight with a metal bolt.

Violent air currents pounded irregularly against the window, forcing rain and thunder through the cracks. The room’s occupant had moved far from the window, eyes closed, cotton balls stuffed in his ears.

His spirit body, curled to its maximum, was heavy and dense, rejecting change, quietly savoring the disturbance that had been halted, using it to distract himself.

He chose to convince himself: what he had seen and heard was merely a sophisticated illusion creating a cognitive bias, like a sudden downpour—vast and thunderous in arrival, but vanishing even faster.

“Just an illusion.”

His lips repeated it silently, quickly, as if instinctively fearing interruption.

This viewpoint was clearly far more credible than any other. Memory dredged up images, comparing them to ordinary rainy days, explaining them as cloud shadows shaped by high-altitude storms, coincidentally outlined by lightning.

Surprisingly, countless parallels could indeed be found in past memories—similar cloud shadows had appeared frequently before, yet never considered unusual, let alone as living beings.

This seemed to strongly support the theory of cognitive polarization.

He took a deep breath of the room’s mild air, imagining the clouds squeezing out their moisture, scattered and carried away by the wind, the colossal silhouette dissolving at the horizon into a faint gray shadow.

His heartbeat still pounded like a drum, but gradually slowed, his emotions receding with it.

His thoughts returned to simpler things: the warm hearth, the damp sleeve, his fingers brushing the fresh paint on the wooden chair back.

His consciousness had tamed his emotions—he pulled himself back from the cliff’s edge.

But the cognition already formed had not dissipated; instead, it began to flow upstream through memory, staining past rainy days with suspicious traces.

He recalled his first rainy day here, when they had rushed to unload cargo from the cart and move it to dry ground, too hurried to glance upward—only remembering the churning ripples in puddles and the sound of water splashing under his shoes.

Yet now, reviewing that moment, he saw in the fractured reflections of the puddle a strange long shadow gliding across the water’s surface, slipping into the ripples of the cloud-sea’s reflection, vanishing without trace.

It was as if he had gained new insight from a book he had read—the words remained unchanged, but the perspective had shifted, yielding an entirely different result.

More memories were being embellished. The night before his successful drug formulation, before his thoughts had been disrupted, he had vaguely sensed something hard yet light fall past the window, then transform into a slender, writhing thing that entered the room—or deeper still.

He had chased the intruder halfway across the monastery, never seeing its form, yet instinctively called it a “snake.”

These details were embedded so naturally, fitting seamlessly into the past, as if they had always been there—like a painting covered in dust, now lightly blown upon, revealing the crucial details beneath.

The most firmly held truths in his mind now seemed unreliable.

He was unsure whether to trust memory, or reason and logic. But if even the most basic memory could be altered, the entire edifice of thought built upon it would collapse in an instant—what, then, could be trusted?

Fortunately, he had guessed at least one thing correctly: this was indeed just an ordinary rain.

Before self-doubt triggered a second uncontrollable emotional surge, the patter of raindrops outside grew sparse; when he noticed, only isolated drips remained at the eaves, gathering in the belly of the gargoyle, then striking the courtyard basin from its mouth.

Mountain showers came quickly and left quickly.

He removed the cotton from his ears; thunder had retreated into the distant mountains, leaving only a low resonance trembling within the stone walls.

Moments later, even the echoes faded. Birdsong and voices emerged from every corner, scattered and interwoven, filling the silence.

The experience had left him unnerved by the window—he chose not to open it, instead pushing open the door and following habit into the long corridor, letting his feet carry him aimlessly.

When he came to his senses again, he stood before the monastery’s long reception room. Raymond stared at him in astonishment, as if encountering a rare animal; behind him stood Field, holding a stack of documents up to his brow.

“You finally finished?”

“Maybe,” Kraft replied. He was indeed calming down, like having struggled through a fluctuation, broken through a membrane, and found nothing ahead but emptiness, no further obstruction.

According to his initial hypothesis, once fully synchronized with that cognition, if something substantial lay behind it, it might come knocking.

Now it seemed clear—it was merely cognitive bias and illusion.

He cautiously glanced outside: the sky after rain was a deep, clear blue, thin clouds drifting slowly high above, their edges frayed by wind into fine, delicate filaments.

Not even a shadow, let alone some terrifying, sprawling, undulating creature.

“Should be fine,” Kraft’s tense shoulders finally relaxed as he admired the rare good weather.

He opened the reception room window, gazing at the unobstructed expanse of sky. The clouds were not twisted into any horrifying shapes—looking utterly reassuring.

Yet one thing was peculiar.

The clouds he had just seen reappeared on the opposite side, replicated as if traced or copied.

As if a row of perfectly aligned giant mirrors had appeared there, reflecting the heavens.