Chapter 177

Chapter 177: madness threshold

After a thunderous bang, the whole world fell quiet.

Morris felt his consciousness drifting, as if it had completely left his body. He did not know where he was. He did not know what year it was. For a moment—or maybe for a long stretch of time—he even forgot his own name. He simply floated in a mindless state in a field of chaotic nothingness, surrounded by streams of light and shadow beyond human understanding and by deathly silence.

Morris spent a very, very long time piecing his shattered thoughts back together, slowly repairing a broken and incomplete sense of self—

He remembered that his name was Morris. He lived in the city-state of Pland. He was a history scholar. Today, he had planned to visit an antique shop in the Lower City to find out what had almost taken his daughter’s life.

He had found out.

It was a warm little Subspace family.

Countless roars and shrill noises like the splitting of the earth finally exploded. In that empty and silent chaos, something appeared again that he could sense. The humanity he had just pieced together almost got shattered again by this noise, but just before he was completely wiped out, he “saw” a layer of hazy fog gather from all directions and wrap around all his senses.

This “fog” protected his mind. Under a protection called the Veil of Ignorance, it cut him off from the noise and the chaotic streams of light and shadow. Morris could think again. Through the fog, he looked into the surroundings and found that he could no longer see those truths and pieces of knowledge that drove people insane. In the endless depths of the mist, only one cluster of flickering light caught his attention.

It was a dim glow formed by many light sources of different sizes. In the center was a red light, roughly the size of a human head. Around it spun dozens of tiny blue, green, and red points of light. They flashed quickly like some kind of matrix, seemingly without any pattern, yet as if they held a certain… “sanity”.

In the middle of countless chaotic light streams, these regularly flickering lights became the anchor that finally steadied Morris’s mind. After his first shock, he quickly realized what those little lights were—

He had faced God of Wisdom Rahm directly.

In every university and laboratory of Truth Academy, there was an image of Rahm. The Rahm Sacred Tome also had matching passages. This deity who held the divine authority of both wisdom and stupidity did not have a human shape. Rahm hid in the fog for long ages. When the silhouette appeared from time to time, it took the form of a flat surface covered in tiny lights, with dozens of points of light circling a round glow.

“My Lord!” Morris shivered and quickly bowed toward the luminous matrix that was sheltering him. “Are you here to guide me?”

Those flickering “lights” did not answer the old scholar. He only felt a deep, muffled vibration. After quite a long time, Rahm’s “voice” finally reached Morris from deep inside his mind—

“Return, contact, understand, transmit…”

“You…”

Morris stared in disbelief at that mass of light. He could not understand Rahm’s will. But this elusive God of Wisdom did not give him the chance to ask anything more. In the next second, a powerful sense of rejection surged up. In an instant, Morris was “pushed” out of that chaotic and terrifying place.

His body swayed. His brain felt as if it were boiling. Information from the mortal world flooded his senses again—the noise of traffic on the street, the distant ringing of bells, the cold wind, and the clear ringing of a bicycle bell.

Then came the sound of quick footsteps and a girl’s worried voice. The voice was very familiar. It was his student.

“Mr. Morris?! Why are you here… Are you alright?”

In a daze, Morris lifted his head and saw Nina standing in front of him. But in the very next second, the girl in front of his eyes turned into a burning arc of flame, with ashes swirling around her that seemed able to cover the whole city-state—then she turned back into human form.

His stiff gaze shifted sideways. He saw a giant covered in starlight looking down at him. Inside the giant’s body flowed maddening streams of light and shadow. Then the giant suddenly became a kind-faced middle-aged man. The man looked at him with concern, his eyes full of the Shadows of Subspace.

The distant street trembled as well. The ground under his feet twisted and writhed. The doors and windows of the shop were sometimes normal and sometimes turned into hollow black holes. The sky hung down at a crooked angle. Rivers of flame and shapeless limbs flickered between the clouds. A passerby on a bicycle rushed past. His body suddenly turned into cracked concrete, then returned to normal in the next second.

Morris lowered his head with great effort and looked at his own wrist.

He was wearing a bracelet woven from colorful stones and thread. Only four stones remained.

But the stones did not keep breaking, and his mind did not keep sliding further into madness. The world in his eyes was still badly twisted, but his ability to think and judge had come back—at least partly.

The old scholar quickly judged his current condition. Under Rahm’s protection, he had entered a briefly balanced madness threshold state.

He had gone mad—but the god had made his madness look like sanity.

He might still recover, but he had to find a way to save himself before Rahm’s protection ended and all the stones broke. Otherwise, this temporary madness threshold might collapse at any time. When that happened, no one would be able to pull his reason back from the chaos.

While Morris’s thoughts crawled along slowly in his mind, Nina and Duncan were also watching the clearly abnormal old man with worried eyes.

They had been practicing with the bicycle when they suddenly saw Morris standing on the empty patch of ground to the side. At first, Nina wanted to run over and greet him, but halfway there she noticed something wrong with the expression on the old man’s face.

His eyes were dull and empty. His mind seemed absent. He did not respond to anything around him, like someone standing there asleep with his eyes open.

“Could he have suddenly gone senile?” Duncan muttered. He waved a hand in front of Morris’s face, then turned his head to look at Nina. “Has your teacher been spacing out like this at school these past two days?”

“No,” Nina said, shaking her head. She stepped forward and held the old man’s arm as she spoke: “Teacher has always been very healthy. How could he suddenly get senile?”

“You never know with people his age,” Duncan said as he took Morris’s other arm. He looked up at the sky. “Don’t talk out here. It’s about to rain. Let’s get the old gentleman inside first.”

Nina answered softly and helped Duncan support the dazed Morris into the shop. Then she jogged back to the open ground outside and pushed the bicycle indoors.

Duncan helped Morris sit down on a chair beside the counter. The old man seemed to have regained a bit of thinking ability by then. He sat down stiffly, his head slowly turning from side to side, and at last his gaze settled on Duncan.

“Return, contact, understand, transmit…”

Rahm’s voice suddenly echoed in his mind.

The small bit of reason still left in Morris seemed to understand these four words a little.

Was this the will of the God of Wisdom? Did Rahm want him to keep interacting with the “being” in front of him?

For the moment, Duncan’s image in Morris’s eyes stabilized into human form again. The scene around him was still trembling and writhing, but at least he could no longer see the starry giant’s true body. That allowed his reason to gain a slight upper hand.

Morris had already realized that this man, who looked like an ordinary antique shop owner, was absolutely not a being that should exist in the Mortal Realm.

Even his “student”, that girl who always smiled gently and stayed sunny and optimistic, was not a normal human.

If he stayed here and kept talking with this “family”, he might soon pass the balance point of the madness threshold and fall from temporary madness into the abyss of permanent madness.

But the God of Wisdom’s voice seemed to have taken root in his mind, making him sit there against his will. At the same time, another, even bolder thought slowly rose up from the bottom of his heart.

In this god-protected madness threshold state, no matter how close his mind drifted toward chaos, it would not completely fall into a runaway state. As long as he did not cross that critical point, he could even face Subspace directly during this brief balance and still keep his self, still keep his humanity…

It was said that in the Critt Kingdom, the greatest and most insane knowledge pursuers would even use this on purpose. After a lifetime of preparation, they would take potions and perform a ritual to actively embrace the madness threshold. In their one and only chance, they would gaze into the truth of Subspace and bring precious knowledge back to the Mortal Realm, then go to their deaths without regret.

Now, he seemed to be standing on the same “battlefield” where those sages of Critt had once stood.

Slowly, the old gentleman’s blank, stiff face changed. A smile appeared. His cloudy eyes looked at Duncan, and he spoke slowly: “Hello, Mr. Duncan.”

Watching the change in the old man’s expression, Duncan suddenly felt a chill.

This old gentleman… why did his smile suddenly look so scary?