It was as though a thousand peals of thunder were roaring beside his ears, and as though a thousand bolts of lightning were tearing open the sky.
Ian stepped forward with his sword raised. In a drifting intoxication and burning heat, he entered a darkness filled with light.
The intoxication came from his brain, the heat from his body. To the boy, the world had completely become a radiant ocean of mist, yet the deeper he went, the more it felt as though he were stepping into a bottomless Abyss.
—Is this a feeling I've never experienced before?
At this moment, Ian felt the shackles on his thoughts slowly shattering. Things he had never imagined or considered before emerged in his mind. The intense stimulation and toxins brought by the Soma Wine Tree's fruit seeped through his mucous membranes into his blood, then traveled to his brain, forcibly unlocking one bodily restraint and mental shackle after another.
It was not that he had been numbed into being unable to think—it was that the impact of far, far too much information had made thought impossible.
If it had been an ordinary person, even a native warrior trained since childhood, they would have become a bloodthirsty beast by now, able only to charge the enemy ranks on instinct and turn into a berserker who slaughtered friend and foe alike.
But Ian felt that everything was very good.
Very good.
"So this is what death is like, slowly walking into selfless destruction..."
Having only just suppressed the backlash from his psychic ability and raised his head, Weges heard the White Folk boy mutter to himself. "This is a completely unknown sensation... entirely different from the darkness and unknown of the starry sky, but the darkness and unknown of death feel rather good too..."