The tentacle kept circling him, spinning round and round. After a few laps, a slit opened in the middle of the eyeball perched on its tip.
A mouth filled with sharp teeth suddenly grew out of it, then let out an eerie laugh at him: "Hee-hee, hee-hee, hee-hee!"
At this horrifying sight, Eros felt his face turn green.
Good heavens! What had he just seen? A mouth growing out of the middle of an eyeball? Goosebumps rose all over his body.
Then he heard that eerie laughter echoing endlessly around him. The entire space was filled with low chuckles of "Hee-hee, hee-hee, hee-hee."
Eros lay helplessly on his back on the floor of the Gray Mist Space and covered his ears.
To his dismay, covering his ears did nothing, because the laughter was ringing directly inside his mind. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, he snapped:
"Can you stop laughing? Or just kill me instead."
The laughter stopped abruptly. The tentacle retracted its mouth and went back to staring at him with the eyeball on its tip, swiveling this way and that.
Eros had given up struggling. He lay motionless on the ground, and eventually fell asleep like that.
When he woke again, he was already in the bed in Estelle's room. He stared at the familiar room in a daze. So that tentacle in the Gray Mist Space had been a dream?
Estelle, who had been keeping watch beside him, immediately stepped forward when she saw him wake and asked softly, "Are you thirsty?"
Looking at the affection brimming in those clear, beautiful eyes before him, Eros felt for the first time that it was truly wonderful to be alive.
He immediately held out both arms for a hug. Though Estelle did not understand what he meant, she still bent down to embrace her child.
Feeling how tightly her child's hands clung to her back, Estelle assumed he had suffered some sort of nightmare.
She patted Eros's back and comforted him gently. "Don't be afraid. Mommy's here. There, there. Don't be afraid."
Hearing her soothe him like a child, Eros did not know whether to laugh or cry.
Then he remembered that, at the very end, the brainwashing voice had seemed to torment him until he was about to break apart.
A streak of black light had suddenly shot into his mind and shattered that voice, and only then had he passed out. He could not help asking, "How long was I asleep?"
Estelle answered softly, "You've been asleep for seven days."
Eros was genuinely surprised. He took stock of his refreshed, vigorous body. No matter how he looked at it, he did not feel like someone who had only just woken after sleeping for seven days.
As he examined his body, he suddenly sensed a strange power flowing within him.
Was this the Spirit Dad had mentioned?
His father seemed to have said that anyone who underwent the baptism would gain Spirit, and only those who possessed Spirit could truly step through the doorway into the mystical world.
So that made him a Sequence 9-Mystery Seeker now?
Curious, he immediately wanted to try out his newfound abilities, so he searched his mind for skills he could use.
Divine Art: Eternal Night Judgment and Divine Art: Life Judgment were certainly out of the question, since all the skills within them were offensive.
That left him with something from Divine Art: Chapter of Life.
He casually picked a skill called Divine Art: Prayer of Life and began casting it according to the knowledge in his mind.
But he had overestimated his mana bar. In an instant, he felt completely drained, and the skill that had emptied him out produced only an emerald-green speck of light the size of a soybean at his fingertip.
Then, following the direction of his finger, it sank into Estelle's body, and he promptly passed out again.
After that green speck of light entered her body, Estelle felt all the exhaustion from her days of keeping watch vanish without a trace.
She froze for a moment. Then, after checking Eros and finding that he had fainted from depleting his Spirit, she did not know whether to laugh or cry.
Before you continue