Isaac understood. "My sanity dropped from 20 to 17, but I don't seem to feel anything, just a slight headache."
"With your 20 points of rationality, losing 3 points is no big deal; you have a high margin for error. But if your Sanity Points is already low, losing even more won't cause a complete breakdown, but it will lead to panic, running around aimlessly, and talking nonsense—you name it."
Isaac rubbed his temples; the sharp pain had subsided, and his mind had cleared.
With the Sanity Save clarifying what had happened, the next question naturally became the strange presence in that room.
Isaac felt a bit scared about that thing; if Carlo hadn't intervened, he wouldn't have known how to deal with this sudden appearance.
This thing is far more bizarre than vengeful spirits or zombies. Even Isaac felt that Mary the Shepherd was less terrifying than this thing.
"Boss, what is that monster in the room?"
"That thing? It's not a big problem. You came out completely unharmed."
"You call this a minor issue?" Isaac smirked. "When I saw it just now, I had this contradictory feeling that it was both present and absent at the same time. It even affected my memory; I almost thought I'd seen it the moment I walked in."
"Interfering with cognition and memory is one of its abilities, making people doubt their own judgment. If you weren't so Sanity Points, that just now would have left you dazed for a long time."
"As for what to call that thing, let's be a bit vulgar and call it a demon."
Isaac paused, a demon?
The word "devil" mainly exists in folk beliefs. In orthodox churches, at least in the churches that Isaac is aware of, there is no place for the devil.
In the Church of the Golden Bough, the only beings opposed to Vicania are the "fallen alien gods," such as the Ancient God of Decay modeled after Morzul. The same is true of the scriptures of the Blackthorn Church; there are no entries for demons in the canon, commentaries, or biographies of saints.
Demons exist more in folk tales. Some say demons are servants summoned by evil people, while others say they are monsters left over from ancient times; some say demons only think of destruction and slaughter, while others say they make deals with humans, wanting human souls, and are very cunning.
These statements contradict each other, but they all point to the same impression: demons are not gods, and they are bypassed by the church system. In the Joint Investigation Bureau's files, nothing is directly called a demon.
However, recalling the experience just now, that face hanging down from the ceiling, if it was a demon, Isaac felt it at least fit his imagination.
"Tsk tsk, judging from your expression, I know you have a lot of questions. Let's take it one at a time. I'll probably answer you in a way that's not so simple and straightforward, but rather a bit roundabout."
"What the hell?" Isaac sorted out his thoughts. "The first question is, is that demon in the room the perpetrator of this massacre?"
"The marks I saw in the corridor, the distribution of the dead, the massacre that swept through the corridor seemed to have erupted from that room, as if something had come out of the room and was chasing and tearing the people outside apart one by one."
"But when I came into contact with it in the room, it was more of a mental disturbance than a direct physical harm to me. It didn't even try to stop me from leaving. In that respect, it was almost too mild, a complete contrast to the torn wreckage in the hallway."
Carlo clicked his tongue. "Yeah, if it really was that thing that killed it, it didn't run away after it killed it, but obediently squatted back in its room, waiting for you to push open the door and come in for a visit. That would be quite interesting. As for the later questions, let's talk about them first."
Isaac continued, "The second question is, was this demon always there, or did it only appear recently? If the former, why did it suddenly start killing people at this particular time? If the latter, what brought it here?"
"The third problem is that the City Police Force don't seem to know what's in that room. If they knew there was this level of threat at the scene, they would have been much more vigilant, and certainly wouldn't have just assigned two people to stand in the hallway taking records."
After he finished speaking, he waited a moment, and then Carlo's voice rang out again. "These three questions boil down to the same point: what is a demon, and what is its form of existence? Once you understand this, the answers to the other questions will naturally be clear."
Isaac thought to himself that this was indeed the case. If they didn't know what that thing was, why it was there, why it killed people, and why the City Police Force knew nothing about it, then there was no point in discussing these questions. And Carlo seemed to know the answer.
"Then what exactly is this demon you're talking about?" he asked.
"Demons, too, can be defined in a broad or narrow sense. In a broad sense, they are very common in folk tales and are used to represent things that are difficult to categorize, explain, or openly acknowledge their existence."
"This word is overused now. It's used to call any weird or strange thing that you don't like a devil. If you get robbed, you call the robber a devil. You can also call your opponent a devil in a fight. By this standard, the thing in that room is a devil, the thing that touches the windowsill at night is a devil, and the potatoes in the Joint Investigation Bureau cafeteria are devils too."
What about in a narrow sense?
"In a narrower sense, the definition is much narrower. Within the framework of mysticism, demons specifically refer to a type of being that cannot descend to the mortal world on its own and must be summoned to arrive."
"Summoning alone is not enough. If you don't know the demon's true name, you can't effectively control it. Even if you know its true name, you need to give it clear instructions, order it to do something, and make a wish to it to do something for you."
Otherwise, once the demon descends, it will not have a clear objective; it will simply "exist," and then—everything around it will begin to change in its own way.
"Most of the time, it manifests as cognitive interference. Just like what you just experienced, different people might describe completely different characteristics of a demon when they encounter it. But when you start to doubt your own memories and perceptions, that's basically it. That contradictory feeling of 'it exists at the same time and doesn't exist' that you described is the core characteristic of a demon."
Isaac recalled the experience of being torn between clearly "seeing" and "knowing it wasn't there," a feeling completely different from that of a vengeful spirit or a walking corpse.
But when he heard these descriptions of demons, he always felt that something was amiss.
Carlo continued, "As for the relationship between demons and slaughter, you noticed a point: it interferes with cognition and memory, it doesn't directly tear people apart. Just like I said, after a demon descends, it doesn't have a clear behavioral goal, nor does it have clear malice."
"Then this massacre—" Isaac paused, "Either it wasn't it, or someone gave it a clear order, a wish made to it to kill these people."