After dinner, Cattleya returned to the captain's cabin. As usual, she picked up the book she had been reading recently and continued what she had not finished.
Everything happened without the slightest warning.
One second, she had been calmly reading; the next, layers upon layers of maddening, unbearable whispers suddenly filled her ears.
The whispers grew denser and more frenzied, sometimes shrill, sometimes illusory. They also brought vast amounts of knowledge, forcefully pouring it all into Cattleya's mind whether she wished to accept it or not.
The Admiral of Stars let out a pained groan. Her head throbbed violently, as though a red-hot steel rod had been thrust into it and viciously stirred through her brain!
She knew exactly what this was, yet she was powerless to stop it. Even the thought of trying to stop it was interrupted by the torrent of knowledge flooding into her mind.
Before that torrent, an individual's will was so insignificant that it could not even raise a ripple before being washed away and drowned!
At that moment, the muscles in her cheeks began to split apart. Flesh and blood within them writhed and condensed into eyeballs.
Her ears stretched and expanded uncontrollably, like trumpets.
She collapsed onto the floor, her fingers raking one vivid bloody scratch after another across it.
I can't die!
I can't die!
Cattleya knew that she had begun to lose control. She gripped an ordinary-looking astrolabe with all her strength while tightly clutching a short scepter less than a forearm long in her other hand.
With the help of those two items, she barely managed to use a secret technique. It could ease her Loss of Control, heal her body, prevent the mutation from worsening continuously, and leave her locked in a repeated tug-of-war between losing control and returning