Published at 5th of November 2026 9:33 am

Chapter 217. In the head

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We reached out into Josh’s mind. Depending on how much consciousness one used, one of two things might happen. If only a simple thread was extended, the experience was like feeling one’s way through a space in the dark, probing with an instinctive sense of the layout to move half-blind.

This was the safe approach, but to fully navigate, one would have to use over half of one’s consciousness. That was enough to carry many other senses and change where the sense of “I” came from, whether one felt they were in their own flesh or outside of it.

I felt as though I was in free fall for a second before we arrived. And the strangeness of the space hit me immediately. I had invaded a few minds before, rarely using as much consciousness as I did here, but none had been like this. There was no sea of consciousness with a mansion in the middle.

Instead, we saw another kind of sea—one of grass. Yet it didn’t seem to obey any laws of physics or even imagination. The ground warped and rose, creating hills stretching toward the sky, only to sink back into puddles of reflective water. Even stranger were the structures built throughout the place. They formed a maddening labyrinth of crooked buildings, caves, spires, and anything else one could imagine. I couldn’t even look at some of them, as they seemed to tangle and scratch at nonexistent parts of my brain like nails scraping a chalkboard, sending a sensation of wrongness from my imagined flesh back to my consciousness. The worst one was the gate between two mountains with something incomprehensible visible beyond it. I guessed it was the labyrinth of memories, its four-dimensional space appearing on the horizon in a headache-inducing form.

“Stunning,” I whispered.

I noticed Myhur and Ophelia take form beside me as well. The mental energy naturally took the form of one’s body. You could twist your form, but it was rarely useful unless you trained to fight in a form different from your physical one.

“Uuugh,” Myhur grunted while looking around.

“At least we don’t have to look for where he went,” Ophelia commented.

She was right. I followed her gaze up to the sky—the thin tapestry that served as the ceiling of the empath’s mind—where a massive black vortex could be seen. It seemed to merge with, or maybe even suck in, parts of the land around it, creating an effect similar to light twisting around a black hole.

Funnily enough, it was easy to look at. The space merged with the mind seamlessly, making it feel natural despite how foreign it was.

“Amazing,” I said, looking up at the vortex. “You could write a grimoire just studying this sight.”

“Not the words I would use,” Ophelia commented, looking up too. “What do you think?” she asked, turning to Myhur.

The mushroom didn’t answer.

“You good?” I asked, turning to look at him.

“Iii…” he began slowly, his eyes still glued to the break in the sky. “I hear its call. Her call.”

“When you say ‘her,’ do you mean the queen?” I tried to clarify.

“Yeees.”

Ophelia and I shared a quick look, unsure what to make of his fascination. At least he didn’t bolt for it, but stayed with us… for now.

“Okay,” I finally broke the silence. “We should get our familiars here.”

“How do we do that exactly?” Ophelia asked.

I shrugged. I had never actually dragged Sally’s consciousness anywhere. I wasn’t sure I could separate it from her form, but I could control her materialization to an extent, meaning I should be able to materialize part of her, assuming the creature cooperated.

“Try to pull your familiar in here. It’s a mental space, so you should instinctively be able to pull their mental form here,” I said.

At my words, Ophelia concentrated, her face settling into a mask of deep focus. I did the same, focusing on the link with Sally. I could pull her along that thread, make her materialize, and fill her form with my power, but right now I wanted to pull only her consciousness. The process turned out to be much easier than I thought it would. Sally actually liked taking form, any form, really, and if her control over it didn’t sometimes fail, I would have her walking around all the time.

I could feel the energy making up her consciousness flow, and something came into existence in front of me. I expected a goat, or some variation of that, but apparently the formless energy instinctively stayed, well… somewhat formless. What appeared before me was a massive black sphere filled with eyes and tentacles. The creature had exactly seventy-two tentacles and seventy-three eyes, and I knew the numbers the moment I laid eyes on her, as they screamed themselves into my mind.

Sally looked around curiously through her many eyes for a few seconds before deciding to bounce around, apparently happy about the materialization and not bothered by the spherical form in the slightest. To my growing fascination, the dog-like mannerisms persisted.

“Well, that’s a sight,” I commented, watching the dark sphere move around with the joy of a puppy.

Right after, Ophelia managed the same thing, and her creature came into existence. Instead of the small black snake I was used to, a massive serpent formed, its dark scales dotted with light reminiscent of the night sky, complete with a white crescent moon on its forehead.

Ophelia looked at me, about to ask something, but her mouth froze half-open as she laid eyes on Sally, who was… sniffing one of the mental constructs. I think? Or looking at it very closely. I couldn't really tell the difference in her current form.

“Look at her go,” I said with a smile.

“I’d rather not.”

“Caaan we go now?” Myhur asked, an unusual note of irritation in his voice.

I nodded, not wanting to keep him any longer.

“You lead the way,” I said, commanding Sally to come closer.

“How do we get to it?” my apprentice asked.

Her confusion made me smile. This was a common trick the mind played on you. When you extend consciousness as a thread, it’s obvious that it can be moved around like a limb, but once you extend enough of it for your senses to feel like they’re in a different place, you forget that it’s still the same mental energy.

This effect was even stronger inside mental spaces. Normally, consciousness could perceive only metaphysical things like auras, mana, and attunements. But mental spaces had colors, feelings, and sights it could perceive. That made it easy to forget we were still just energy, not necessarily bound by physical laws.

I simply began to levitate off the ground. I didn’t have to explain any details to Ophelia, as she raised herself into the air with a simple flex of her mind, realizing her mistake. Myhur did the same as we began floating toward the vortex in the sky alongside our familiars.

Approaching it felt weirdly… normal. Almost like approaching an old friend. That, however, only lasted until we crossed the threshold. What assaulted our senses on the other side was indescribable. As much as I enjoyed the unknowable, this wasn’t it. This was sensory overload, a hurricane of sensations that crashed into our consciousnesses, threatening to shatter our mental energy.

I immediately shut out most of the sensations, leaving myself adrift in darkness with vertigo still gripping me. It felt like floating in a dark, sticky fluid constantly stirred in random jerky motions.

“Aaaagh!” Ophelia screamed.

“Close your eyes!” I shouted back into the void, hoping my voice would reach her.

Of course, there were no eyes to close, but the action mattered. Closing the eyes told the consciousness to stop perceiving its surroundings, cutting off the flow of information back into the body, where our mental spaces were.

Silence descended around us.

“Sam?” Ophelia finally asked, her voice now calmer and more even.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Where is here?”

Each time she spoke, her voice came from a different direction, making it impossible to tell where she was. I swore in my mind. So this was why normal people couldn’t read singularities. Finding out the lost piece of knowledge was almost exciting, despite the situation we found ourselves in. For us, it felt like a hailstorm bombarding our mind’s spaces, bruising our consciousness as the sensations shattered against the walls of our mind palaces. But for an empath, instead of a bombardment of sensation, those stimuli fell onto the open field, most likely registering as real feelings, not just an attack on the mind.

“Myhur?” I called. No answer came. “You there?” I shouted louder.

“Myhur?” Ophelia’s call came once again from a random place.

Her voice stayed at roughly the same volume. I couldn’t tell the direction, but at least she didn’t seem to be getting closer or farther away.

‘Is he not there? Or is he injured? Is…’ I could feel something akin to anger rise inside me. ‘Did I just drag him into his death?’

As I thought about my friend, Sally reminded me she existed. I had almost forgotten about her, since not much was coming from her mind. I reached through our connection to check on her and found that she was fine. Weirdly fine.

“Ophelia?” I asked into the void.

“Yes?”

“Is your familiar feeling okay?”

“Yes, it’s not injured.”

“No, I mean, does it seem confused?” I asked.

A pause came before a surprised answer. “No.”

So it was the same for the snake. Familiars were creatures closely tied to mana, with their bodies technically made of it, and while my familiar also had a good share of the eldritch in her, Ophelia’s snake was a classic example. Yet it, too, was all right.

‘Why is that?’ I wondered.

I had never seen Sally’s mental palace, mainly because I didn’t know what it would be like for her. For normal mages, it was a painful invasion of privacy. But apparently, whatever a familiar’s mental space was, it was structured so the creatures could perceive something about our surroundings.

“I think they can see,” Ophelia said, slightly confused.

“Well, never thought I’d be getting a guide dog at my age,” I said, commanding Sally to roll, float, or whatever she was doing, toward me.

After that, I felt her extend a tentacle toward me and grabbed it. The creature placed me on top of her mass. She then began using her many black tendrils to crawl along the floor without rolling, like a turtle pushing itself forward with its fins.

Even without looking, I could imagine Ophelia’s ride looking much more dignified, but oh well, who was I to whine?

Once secured, I asked Sally what she was seeing and where we were. In reply, I was bombarded with brief impressions: a tunnel, metal, light, and tension.

I sighed. Was there any symbolism she wasn’t interested in, or was she simply incapable of perceiving it because she wasn't an empath? I had no idea.

“We’re in a metal corridor, I think,” Ophelia commented. “And there is blood in the air,” she added after a while.

“Blood?” I frowned. “You sure?”

“Yeah, my familiar senses it around us.”

“Oh, fuck,” I swore in irritation. “I think our creatures sense different things. I sensed tension, but no blood.” I paused. “Your familiar doesn’t see Myhur, does it?”

“No,” Ophelia answered shortly.

I clicked my tongues.

“Let’s find Josh and the mushroom and get out of here.”

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