I am an Eldritch Entity-Chapter 76: Horrifying black smoke

When Eryndor had targeted Liliana and activated his Cognitive Scrying, his Mind Palace trembled.

The enormous structure shook once, then twice, and thrice, before it continued at a higher frequency, eventually vibrating violently.

It felt the structure was suppressing something, but was finding it increasingly difficult to do so.

The huge lustrous structure continued vibrating intensely before it eventually stopped.

Immediately after, a crack appeared in one of the pillars of the Golden Mind Palace.

A minuscule trace of thin, black smoke gently drifted out of the crack, barely visible even against the shiny golden surrounding.

Around the crack though, the golden lustre of the palace seemed to have dimmed.

Nothing else happened later, with everything returning to silence as it had always been.

After Eryndor used his Eldritch ability of Cognitive Scrying by going against his human based beliefs, the gap of Cognitive Dissonance between his belief as a human and the action of using his Eldritch abilities became wide enough to end up in a calamitous result.

*****

Seeing that there was no way he could access the memories of Liliana, Eryndor gave up, and retreated back to his body.

He couldn’t afford to attract her attention. What if she massacred everyone on the spaceship to keep the matter under wraps?

Not possessing any killing intent towards him didn’t mean that she would continue to hold no desire to kill him if she became alerted to the fact that her mental defense treasure broke down, and someone on the aircraft might know her secrets.

The safest option then would be to kill everyone, and he was pretty sure no one, including himself could resist a Stage Seven Qi Condensation realm cultivator.

As soon as he retreated, he witnessed a trace of thin, black smoke inside his body. It was extremely faint, and not even the length of one of his fingers.

Eryndor didn’t have the ability to gaze inside his body yet, but he could somehow set sight upon the black smoke existing inside his body.

It was as if the smoke demanded his attention, breaking limits of what was possible and what was not, to allow Eryndor to gaze inside his body to witness its form.

That wasn’t the only thing, Eryndor felt pure dread from the smoke.

The moment his gaze fell upon the wisp of black smoke, a terror beyond words gripped him.

It was not fear as humans understood it—it was deeper, more primal, as if his very existence was an offense in its presence.

His thoughts crumbled, his sense of self began eroding.

Time lost meaning.

His body was still there, but his mind was drowning in the unbearable weight of something vast, something infinite.

It was the feeling of a puny mortal standing before an Eldritch Entity—of being seen, not as a person, but as an imperfection that should not be.

What followed was the greatest pain he had ever experienced.

It wasn’t physical at all, not even one bit.

It didn’t feel like his mind was being attacked either.

Eryndor just felt he was being erased.

His very existence felt at threat.

"Arghhhhh."

He clutched his head, and began wriggling on the bed like when an earthworm was sprinkled in salt.

It brought an unimaginable level of pain.

He couldn’t remember anything, everytime he tried to ’think’, nothing came up.

In fact, he didn’t know if he was even attempting to think. Everything felt blank.

He couldn’t recollect any kind of memory.

He couldn’t even so much as think that something had gone wrong. He could just passively resist the onslaught.

There were no memories, no thoughts, no feelings, no sensation, literally nothing.

Everything felt like it had been erased.

Only pain remained. The pain of vanishing from existence.

At some point though, the big circuit of the practice technique of his cultivation lit up.

One wouldn’t be able to gaze at it from the outside, unless they possessed some kind of clairvoyance.

All the meridians which made up the big circuit lit up in golden light. The Qi in them automatically began moving through the circuit.

Was it really automatic? Or was it Eryndor’s subconscious which was fighting back the erosion? Or was it the law of the universe of how things should be? No one knew.

As Qi continued circulating through the route of the practice technique, the erosion slowed down.

His entire fourth stage Qi Gathering realm cultivation seemed to be fighting back against the influence of a minuscule strand of smoke.

Were the power systems a counterpart of anomalistic abilities?

No one knew.

Eryndor gradually felt his ’memory’ reappearing. He suddenly remembered how his parents, how his friends looked, and how insanely handsome he looked.

He remembered the Human Federation, the Eight Outer Domains, the Anomalies.

He remembered his first mission. How he had been intelligent, smart, brave, cautious, resourceful, and hard carried his own team and literally a professor’s team, all by himself.

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He remembered how amazing he was.

Eryndor had no idea how long it went on for. He also had no idea when he regained consciousness.

There was no period of blankness where he could gather his thoughts.

One moment he gazed at the black smoke.

Next moment its presence weighed down on him.

Then the pain arrived with extreme intensity.

And finally, he opened his eyes.

The first thing he did was inhale deeply, as if he suddenly felt extremely blessed to have lived.

Did convincing myself not work?

Or was this just a lesser consequence—muted by whatever gap in cognitive dissonance he had managed to close through the process he had gone through to convince himself?

At a certain point, he had fallen flat on the bed.

Gathering himself, he sat up and looked at the ceiling.

A truly horrifying experience. One which I went through for nothing.

He hadn’t managed to gain any kind of information from Liliana’s mind at all, but ended up returning to his body to go through the excruciating pain.

I should check out my Mind Palace.

He knew that Mind Palace was a mystical location in his consciousness which was the focal point of all his abilities.

Since something like this took place, could his Mind Palace have undergone changes?