Mediumship

Gallo used his mind to assign 1 attribute point to [Inspiration].

[Inspiration] +1.

The instant the attribute point was assigned, it was as if some invisible barrier had suddenly shattered.

Gallo felt his consciousness spread abruptly, like a drop of ink falling into clear water.

Everything around him seemed bizarre to his senses—the desk before him, the bed to the side, the curtain behind him, even the air—all seemed coated in a viscous, constantly shifting "oil."

The concepts of up and down, left and right, inside and outside, front and back vanished in an instant. Every direction seemed to be directly in front of him. Humans defined as "forward" the direction their eyes could see, but that sense of direction became completely blurred for Gallo.

Faint, inhuman mutterings sounded directly in the depths of his mind, chaotic and carrying a disquieting rhythm.

His perception was spreading outward uncontrollably, piercing the attic's wooden walls. He caught Mrs. Jell's incessant complaints in the grocery store below, the clatter of carriage wheels over the cobblestones in the street, and even faint fluctuations emanating from farther away—not in the current physical world, but in the deeper reaches of Subspace.

Information surged in like a flood bursting through a dam.

Fortunately, he had raised [Learning] and [Memory] to sufficiently high levels beforehand. His brain acted as an efficient information-processing hub, forcibly sorting and archiving the chaotic mass of sensory data, even filtering out useless information!

This kept the flood of information from overwhelming his mind in an instant.

A violent wave of dizziness and nausea swept over him, but he managed to stay conscious.

"Rein it in! I have to rein it in!"

Gallo roared inwardly. His knowledge of Subspace told him that he was on the verge of a psionic outbreak. If he didn't rein in his out-of-control Inspiration, he might end up insane—or even have his soul fall forever into Subspace.

From his extensive memories of Subspace, he found a way to control a psionic loss of control and master a psionic user's Inspiration.

He concentrated with all his might, forcing himself to ignore the streams of incoming information. Instead, he focused his entire will on imagining something concrete, something only he knew: the high-tech creations from his memories of his previous life, which didn't exist in this world—mobile phones, televisions, airplanes, ships, and rockets.

He struggled to recall and reconstruct every detail.

In the end, Gallo, a military enthusiast in his previous life, constructed in his mind a giant liquid-fuel missile capable of striking anywhere on the globe.

As he focused his will, his scattered, uncontrollable Inspiration slowly drew inward, as if gathered by an invisible hand. It retreated from the vast, dangerous outside world and finally stabilized within a limited range around his body.

"Phew... ha..." Gallo gasped for breath, cold sweat covering his forehead and soaking the back of his clothes.

The feeling of his Inspiration spreading chaotically, directions becoming jumbled, mutterings filling the air, and streams of information pouring in gradually faded. The familiar scene in the attic once again became clear and stable.

With a thought, he focused his contained Inspiration on his vision.

In an instant, a faint glow imperceptible to ordinary people covered his eyes.

He looked at Lily, who was busy in the kitchen area on the balcony. His sight even pierced through the curtain partitioning the attic, letting him see the warm, orange-yellow Spirituality radiating from the little girl, like a leaping flame, brimming with energy and simple joy.

Meanwhile, his mother Aisha was sewing a doll on the bed. Her Spirituality seemed faint and grayish, with several dark patches that signified illness scattered through it. This showed that she was still under the influence of her sickness and had not fully recovered.

In Gallo's vision, Spirituality was complex and unique. It contained a person's thoughts, emotions, state of health, and even deeper information about their consciousness. It was a signal constantly emitted by the soul into the real world.

Then his gaze fell on the brown leather notebook on the desk.

The notebook itself radiated an extremely ominous, dark-red Spirituality, like a dense, twisted cloud of blood.

In the real world, living things possessed souls and could produce Spirituality. Ordinary objects could also develop Spirituality if they had been affected by Subspace or had absorbed some of a psionic user's traits.

But such objects could no longer be classified as ordinary.

What startled him even more was the extremely fine yet powerful and icy "residue" of Physical energy from Subspace coiled around the notebook's cover, like some kind of mark.

Gallo took a deep breath, gathered and contained his Inspiration, then cautiously touched the notebook on the desk. Before, he hadn't activated the psionic path and wasn't yet a true psionic user, so touching the notebook didn't seem to affect him.

At most, his perception had been beyond that of ordinary people. But now that his Inspiration had grown stronger, Gallo had to treat this notebook, which possessed Spirituality, with caution.

"Fortunately, there's one thing in my favor: with my powerful Inspiration, I can use mediumship to trace the origin of this notebook's Spirituality. Maybe then I'll understand what Sacia Taylor and the people—or organization—behind her are trying to accomplish by having me translate it."

Gallo closed his eyes and placed his hand on the notebook's leather cover. He focused on extending his Inspiration over it, intertwining with its Spirituality.

The scene exploded into view—not through his eyes, but projected directly into his consciousness:

He saw a familiar acquaintance sitting on a sofa in the living room of an apartment. It was Professor Vanason.

An unfamiliar young man was threatening Professor Vanason and demanding that he translate the notebook. When Professor Vanason revealed that Gallo could translate it, Gallo was left speechless. The man had sold him out under threat just like that. But was this young man a member of "Clovin"?

Clovin seemed to be some government department of the Empire, but Gallo didn't know much about it.

So was Sacia also a member of Clovin?

But the next scene made him realize that the man was impersonating a Clovin member. Sacia had obtained the notebook and planned to visit him on Lubo Lane the following day to ask him to translate it. So this scene had taken place yesterday, and the man with Sacia was named "Malcolm"!

Gallo tried to focus his Inspiration further and trace the notebook's origin. He was certain that Sacia's claim to have found it at a market somewhere in the Southern Continent was a lie.

The scene blurred, then gradually sharpened. He saw a haggard man with sunken eyes and disheveled hair, leaning on a desk with both hands. The desktop was piled high with papers and books.

His face twisted in terror as he wept and let out a defiant, low growl.

But it was useless. His resistance had no effect. Red lines appeared beneath his skin, as though the veins all over his body had been branded onto his flesh and come to life, worming their way out through his skin. Amid his agonized cries, the lines twisted together, forming the same dark-red hieroglyphs found in the notebook!

Then the man's body suddenly stiffened. He immediately grabbed the paper-cutting knife on the desk and plunged it into his neck, his eyes pleading for release.

His skin was torn apart by an invisible force. It began at his head and was peeled off intact, little by little. Blood spraying from his neck carried a terrifying heat.

Like burning oil, it ignited everything around him. The sheet of skin printed with vivid red hieroglyphs began to twist and shrink inward under the heat, eventually turning into... this notebook.

Next, the flames engulfed everything. Even though the scene was projected into his consciousness, Gallo could feel a trace of their terrifying heat.

The man's body was reduced to charcoal in a matter of seconds. The flames that had filled the room receded, leaving everything carbonized by the heat.

But the notebook remained intact, its dark-red Spirituality growing even more sinister.

After an unknown amount of time had passed, he saw Sacia Taylor and Malcolm enter the study, now reduced to a charred ruin.

Sacia picked up the notebook expressionlessly, while Malcolm warily surveyed their surroundings. Once he was sure there was no danger, he said excitedly in a low voice, "Looks like Jeffrey must have succeeded, though something went wrong in the end. At least we didn't come away empty-handed this time!"

The vision abruptly ended.

Gallo was wrenched out of the mediumistic vision. His face pale and his heart pounding, he realized that the notebook in his hand was actually the "Human Skin Notebook."