The instant the green mist merged with his consciousness, Louis paused for a fraction of a second.
Not from pain, but from an intensely grating distortion of his senses.
An aura so sour and bitter it set his teeth on edge exploded deep within his mind, like countless invisible needles probing frantically.
They probed every minute crevice of his soul, searching for any point that might give way.
At the same time, whispers began to emerge, endlessly overlapping and repeating.
"Why... that should have been mine..."
"You were just lucky..."
"You're only a chosen vessel..."
"Drag him down..."
"Let him taste what it's like to rot in the mud..."
Amid that cacophony, the sea of consciousness itself began to change.
Emerald-green poison mist spread out of the void like wildly growing thorns.
Rather than lunging straight at the platinum-white Primordial Heart in the center of the sea of consciousness, they skirted around it.
They seemed to be imitating it. The green mist twisted and reshaped itself frantically, trying to construct an island of similar structure within the sea of consciousness.
Its outline was adjusted over and over, its layers continually stacked, and even the rhythm of its energy circulation was crudely brought into alignment with the Primordial Heart's rotational frequency.
Just as that false island was about to stabilize...
The Primordial Heart stopped rotating, and the sea of consciousness fell briefly silent.
Then platinum-white starlight sliced along the structural edges of the false island like a scalpel of absolute precision.
It stripped away every layer of the luster used to disguise it.
The facade constructed by the green mist collapsed instantly.
All it revealed was a hollow, chaotic core of thorns.
Crimson power pressed down next, becoming an enormous, slowly rotating millstone that swept up the thorn roots trying to