Chapter 402: Chapter 402 Deep Personality_1
"I notice she only has such a strong reaction to you. Are you sure you didnât do anything to her while her mind was unclear?" Presia said suspiciously.
Before Aiden could speak, Fille cut in,"How could that be? Would someone like Lord Aiden do such a thing? That lunatic is average-looking, her body is nothing special, and her skills canât possibly compare to mine. Why would you be interested in her and not me, right Lord Aiden? You must be more interested in me, arenât you?"
"I appreciate your defense, but please donât bring your personal biases into this," Aiden said expressionlessly.
"Well, you never know, some men do have... such tastes," Presia commented.
"What exactly do you suspect I did to you that day?" Aiden said coldly, glancing at Presia. "Thatâs enough. Sometimes, I even feel that sticking to my principles puts me at a disadvantage. Didnât you hear what that lunatic just screamed? Use your brain a little. If I wanted to do something to you, what could you possibly do to resist? When I talk to you about principles, donât push your luck. Know your place. When I really stop being nice, you wonât have a chance to regret it."
Presia felt the pressure and instinctively shrank her head,"I was just... joking around."
And Fille, still heartlessly joking, said,"Lord Aiden, you donât have to stick to your principles with me, I definitely wonât let you down!"
"I was talking about overstepping boundaries just like what youâre doing now... And stop trying to cling to my arm!" Aiden stepped slightly away from Fille, "Isabella, put this one back in her room. Iâll handle things here."
Several minutes later, in the medical office.
Aiden stood with Presia beside the bed where Halo was tied up in ropes, already snoring away.
"Youâve already probed her spirit once before. If you have any recollection, pay attention this time to see if thereâs anything different from before," Aiden instructed.
Presia nodded and began to cast a spell. This time the incantation she recited was long, and she coupled it with some hand gesturesâshe was reinforcing her Mental Spells with a ritual.
Reading someone elseâs spirit is not an easy task. Everyone has a significant home-field advantage in their own spiritual world when it comes to privacy. If a person is on guard, the chance of success for this kind of psychic investigation is virtually nil. The magic must be done either with the subjectâs willing acceptance or when they are completely unguarded... like when they are asleep.
To forcibly unfold anotherâs spirit like a scroll, accessing their mental state, inner thoughts, even hidden memoriesâthat realm is entirely under the dominion of Mental Spells.
After a while, Presia finally felt she had submerged into Haloâs consciousness. Administering a psychic investigation to a hypnotized person is much like Filleâs ability to delve into dreamsâthough they reach the same ends by different means; one employs magic while the other relies on natural-born talents and special abilities.
Within Haloâs consciousness, Presia sensed a wasteland beyond description. Memory fragments, impossible to piece together, scattered like shards of glass, drifting in a chaotic space.
A personâs spirit is intangible. These visions are constructed using dark magic, encoded into hallucinatory images that the caster can comprehend. The imagery that the vision represents often signifies the true condition of the spirit.
Just like the last time, a completely shattered spiritual world, barely able to maintain a normal personality and cognition, absolutely irreversible.
Ordinary psychological issues or emotional trauma typically donât result in such severe outcomes. Mental Spells alone have a hard time producing such effects. Unless someone used a necromancy spell to separate her spirit from her flesh and then tore her soul apart with necromancy. But if her spirit was separated from her flesh, she would become undead. Generally, only severe trauma or disease in the brain can make a spiritual issue this grave and irreversible.
To find the reason within this jumbled mess of a spirit for her manic episodes directed at a particular person? Itâs practically impossible.
Presia almost immediately entertained the idea of giving up.
But just at that moment, she suddenly felt as if someone was staring at her inexplicably.
Presia immediately became alert, this kind of intuition arising during psychic intrusion often meant that another consciousness had appeared in this spiritual world and had noticed her presence.
In most cases, this consciousness came from the owner of the spiritual world. In other words, the person being psychically probed had realized someone was reading their mind, or had awoken from their sleep.
But Presia was quite confident in her hypnosis skills; that twice-chanted spell to strengthen hypnosis was conservatively said to make one sleep until the next morning.
Was it possible that someone else had also infiltrated this madmanâs spiritual world? That was impossible, mental spells required strict casting range, and the warden was watching right beside her, not to mention there was an Anti-Magic Barrier in place.
She could feel that this bizarre "gaze" came from a deeper level of consciousness.
Last time she had probed this madman, such a thing hadnât occurredâcould this be the reason she suddenly started raving at the warden?
Following this intuition, she continued to delve deeper into Haloâs subconscious.
The memories and shattered cognitions of the conscious mind receded, and at last, she arrived at a pitch-black area of deep consciousness, where she only "saw" a broken mirror that was left with only a few fragments.
Presia knew this was the entrance to the deep memories and self-recognition. If it was locked, it indicated that a memory-sealing spell had been cast; a shattered state like this meant that the mental damage had seriously affected the personality and memory.
In this shattered mirror, she saw the blurry figure of a woman.
The image that appears in this mirror represents what a person sees of themselves, which means Haloâs self-recognition. The blurred image signified that her self-recognition was so poor she could not even recognize herselfâan effect Presia had once caused to Rebecca with a mental block.
This time, Presia finally discovered the source of the "gaze." Although she could not see the face clearly, she could distinctly feel the person in the broken mirror staring at her.
This was very unusual; Halo was supposedly in deep sleep and should be unconscious and not aware of her intrusion.
It was as if... another independent personality lurking deep within Haloâs consciousness had woken up and fixed its attention on the intruding Presia.
Presia observed the person in the mirror, pondering whether to conduct further probing or to withdraw now.
She wasnât all that concerned about the additional task Aiden had entrusted her with, but such a rare case was a first for her, arousing a bit of interest in her, who specialized in studying mental spells.
The multiple personalities so rare in the world that they are only described in legends and books... Could they truly exist?
While Presia was still hesitating, the figure in the mirror unexpectedly "spoke," uttering fragmented language that humans could neither produce nor understand.
Presia was greatly shockedâalthough not complete, this pronunciation... was unmistakably Divine Decrees!