"Fuck!"
Morien cried out and blinked.
The eyelashless eye before him blinked as well.
The next moment, a vast amount of knowledge was poured into Morien's mind.
Mystery Pryers could master all manner of mystical knowledge, including magic, witchcraft, astrology, and Ritual Magic.
Beyond the portion inherently granted by the Potion itself, Mystery Pryers could often suddenly acquire techniques, magic, or witchcraft they had never encountered before.
That was why.
Knowledge Pursuer.
The Hidden Sage, the sentient Uniqueness of the Mystery Pryer Pathway, had one greatest hobby: packaging up all the knowledge it knew and stuffing it into Mystery Pryers' heads.
That sounded pretty good, but reality was not so kind.
The Hidden Sage never cared whether Mystery Pryers could withstand its knowledge. It simply uploaded the entire package in one go.
Mystery Pryers were often bloated with so much knowledge that their heads nearly exploded, yet after it was over, they struggled to remember much of anything.
Before Morien could react, all kinds of information were crammed into his brain in one overwhelming rush.
Everything from witchcraft and magic to postpartum care for sows.
Useful and useless information alike was stuffed into Morien's mind in enormous quantities.
Morien's brain crashed in an instant, and his head felt like it was splitting apart.
However, what had appeared before Morien did not seem to be a data backup of the Hidden Sage, but merely an avatar.
That was normal too. Faced with a Sequence 9, no matter how idle the Hidden Sage was, it would not send its true body.
It probably did not even know Morien existed. As a Uniqueness, it had merely noticed that another "Mystery Pryer" had appeared in the world, then casually tossed over a couple installation packages.
What a magnificent open-source spirit.
Praise open source.
After standing frozen for a few seconds, Morien quickly recovered. Other than the headache making him want to ram his head into a wall, he was basically fine.
Having synchronized once before, his brain processed information more than three times as fast as an ordinary person's. Thus, he recovered far faster than a normal Sequence 9 and came to his senses before the eye before him vanished.
"You're stuffing information into me?"
"What gives you the right to stuff information into me? You don't even know how many ways there are to write the fennel character in fennel beans!"
"I really need to teach you a lesson!"
Staring at the eye before him, Morien tore off the mask that had shifted to the side of his face from drinking the Potion and slapped it toward the eye.
Give and take was the only way to make things last. I'll toss a couple installation packages at you too.
The illusory eye neither dodged nor moved.
Because it was a data construct, it had no physical body.
Physical attacks were meaningless against it...
Smack!
The mask struck one of the eyes.
The eye recoiled in pain, swiftly shut, and vanished.
"Hmph!" Watching the Hidden Sage disappear, Morien snorted and put his mask back on.
His mask could not be too far from his body. After all, he still needed its protection to keep from drawing the attention of Outer Deities.
He was basically at the point where his true body would automatically explode if it got more than a hundred meters away from the mask.
"Whoo..."
He exhaled hard and closed his somewhat dry eyes.
The Mystery Pryer's Eyes of Mystery Prying were a passive skill that could not normally be turned off, making it especially easy to see things one should not see.
Fortunately, that did not affect him much.
With the mask on, most forms of contamination, aside from Wish Power, could hardly harm him.
The biggest problem was probably that seeing too much could easily keep his brain under a heavy load all day long. It was exhausting.
"I wonder if other worlds have a solution." Morien muttered to himself as he looked toward the mirror.
Well, nearly ten hours had passed since he left that strange space.
By all rights, the Shibuya Incident over in the Jujutsu World should have ended already, right?
Morien recalled that his self in the Jujutsu World was currently in the time period of the Shibuya Incident.
However, based on his experience reading novels, in most "simultaneous transmigration" stories, the flow of time differed between worlds.
So Morien was not sure how his other self was doing right now.
A major reason he had been so eager to find Alger and trade for the formula was to gain more Beyonder Abilities sooner, so that his self who could only "send messages from afar" would not be treated as a speed bump by the Four Calamities.
Even without counting what he had received from Knowledge Pursuer, the Mystery Pryer's own abilities were quite decent.
They understood plenty of magic, witchcraft, astrology, and Ritual Magic. They could easily sense certain existences hidden behind things. They could even quickly complete Ritual Magic, accomplishing with ease, without much material or assistance, what other Beyonders needed several hours to achieve.
They also possessed Eyes of Mystery Prying, which allowed them to see more than Beyonders of the same Sequence from most other Pathways. They could observe a target's astral body, etheric body, and mental body; inspect all manner of details in an astral body; and see things around them that normally could not—or should not—be seen.
Put simply, they had incredibly powerful perception. With only their naked eyes, they could see spirit bodies, judge a person's emotions, and even achieve something akin to a Spectator's "mind reading." To a certain extent, they could very easily discern someone's thoughts and physical condition, tell whether someone was ill, and identify flaws in their body.
Other than being unable to turn off the Eyes of Mystery Prying and the risk of suddenly dying from looking around too much, they had basically no weaknesses.
Morien patted his own face and sensed his condition.
Just as he had expected, the "Mystery Pryer" Potion had dissolved the moment it entered his mouth.
He was now at the perfect peak of Sequence 9.
That was perfectly reasonable.
He was a man who had seen the third Blasphemy Slate, a walking "Blasphemer."
The secrets he knew might not have been particularly numerous, but their quality and level were certainly high.
If he let the Hidden Sage eat him, perhaps the Sage would immediately pull an "Original Creator revives within me" and make a huge move against this universe.
Morien casually walked to the bedside, sat down, and tried to mobilize the power within him, issuing the command to "Return Space."
The next moment, profound darkness surged in from all around and wrapped around him.
When he opened his eyes again, Morien had returned to the space that made him feel incomparably safe.
"Ah, this place is still the best." He spread his arms with a smile.
Then he noticed another version of himself crouching in the corner.
As Moriens, they shared a special connection and could distinguish one another with ease.
Lord of Mysteries Morien knew that was the Morien from the Honkai: Star Rail World.
"Why... why..." Honkai: Star Rail Morien muttered, his eyes wide and filled with confusion. "What is this... what is this..."
He looked a little frightening.
Lord of Mysteries Morien looked around and quickly found another self not far away.
"What's wrong with him?" Lord of Mysteries Morien carefully avoided Honkai: Star Rail Morien and walked over to Jujutsu Morien. "Don't tell me he saw Cthulhu?"
"Come to think of it, does the Honkai: Star Rail World have Cthulhu?"
"Will I get contaminated if I touch him and synchronize our memories?"
"Oh, no, it isn't that." Jujutsu Morien replied. "He just synchronized with my memories."
"Huh?" Lord of Mysteries Morien jumped to the side and pulled away. "What did you do?"
"Nothing much." Jujutsu Morien looked at Lord of Mysteries Morien with a somewhat strange expression. "You'll understand once you take a look."
He extended his hand toward Lord of Mysteries Morien.
Lord of Mysteries Morien hesitated for a moment before taking it.
Only then did Jujutsu Morien's explanation finally arrive.
He grinned.
"Nothing much."
"I just ate sweet strawberry mapo tofu at a convenience store in Japan."
Something even more terrifying than Cthulhu had appeared!