Chapter 384

Pupils sharply contracted, a sense of danger stabbed into his mind like a cold, brilliant light, icy dread traveling down his spine and surging through his torso and limbs.

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

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

What had been soft and drifting now curled tightly, seamless and rigid, 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 stinging his face, streaming down continuously. He hadn't experienced this in so long—not merely a threat to life, but a fear emanating from a higher plane.

Uncomprehensible, unresistible. Even the subterranean activity lakes beneath Dunling could be explained as an extraordinarily advanced biological miracle; but what, then, was the thing in the clouds?

It could not possibly be a biological entity composed of flesh; no known or imaginable material could make its existence plausible.

He closed his dry eyelids, savoring the brief, self-deceptive darkness, then forced himself to open his eyes and gaze into the depths of the rain clouds.

A flash of lightning revealed an undulating arc; its immense size created the illusion of sluggish motion, and only by comparing it to Shanfeng, a mountain-like rock amid mist and clouds, could one perceive that even the Priyel Basin could not accommodate 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 persuaded by sight and sound that a living mountain hovered in the sky, while those dwelling in its shadow had, countless times, looked upward and seen nothing.

Watching his emotional turmoil escalate uncontrollably, reason made the most rational choice—denial.

He reached out, gripping the window shutter swaying in the storm, fingers tightening inch by inch, the hinge creaking until it slammed shut against the frame, locked by a metal bolt.

Violent air currents pounded irregularly against the window, forcing rain and thunder through the cracks. The homeowner had moved away from the window, closed his eyes, and stuffed cotton balls into his ears.

His spiritual form, curled to its maximum, was dull 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 downpour—intense and thunderous upon arrival, but vanishing even faster.

"Just an illusion."

His lips repeated it internally, swiftly, as if instinctively preventing something from interrupting him.

This viewpoint was clearly far more credible than any other. Memory retrieved the images, contrasting them with ordinary rainy days, explaining them as cloud shadows shaped by high-altitude storms, coincidentally outlined by lightning.

Surprisingly, he could indeed find countless parallels in past memories—similar cloud shadows had appeared frequently before, yet had never been considered unusual, let alone regarded 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 drifted back to simpler things: the warm hearth, damp sleeves, fingers brushing against the fresh paint on the wooden chair back.

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

But the cognition already formed had not dissipated; instead, it began to surge upward 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 even once, remembering only the churning ripples in puddles and the sound of water splashing under his soles.

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

It was as if he had gained a 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 pharmaceutical success, before his thoughts were disrupted, he had vaguely sensed something hard yet light fall past the window, then transform into a slender, writhing thing that infiltrated the room—or deeper.

He had chased the intruder halfway across the monastery, never seeing its form, yet instinctively described it as a "snake."

These details were embedded so naturally, fitting seamlessly into the past, as if they had always been there, merely obscured like dust on a painting—now, a gentle breath revealed the crucial details beneath.

The most firmly held truths in his mind no longer seemed reliable.

He was unsure whether to trust memory, or reason and logic. But if even the most basic memories could be altered, the entire edifice of thought built upon them 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 against the window grew sparse; when he noticed, only isolated drips remained along the eaves, gathering in the belly of the water-spout beast, then striking the courtyard basin from its mouth.

Mountain downpours came quickly and departed quickly.

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

Moments later, the echoes faded too; birdcalls 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. Lei Mengde 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, as if having broken through a membrane after a struggle, finding emptiness ahead, 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 post-rain sky was washed 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, sinuous creature.

"Probably no issue," Kraft's tense shoulders finally relaxed as he admired the rare good weather.

He opened the reception room window, gazing at the unobstructed, open sky. The clouds were not twisted into any terrifying shapes—looking at them brought unexpected peace.

Yet one thing was especially strange.

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

As if a series of perfectly aligned giant mirrors had appeared at that location, reflecting the heavens within them.