The Mind-Devouring Jellyfish burned its remaining life force, that wasn't much as its body was being cooked alive by the head and radiation of the room, to force its way to the mind of the dragon that was now being held in place by his [Parallel Processing] that was meshed together as s net of thought. The time it had left was enough to try to understand what was happening but it didn't care, as long as it could pull back the mind of the dragon to its place and cause him go be killed by that other creature that he was fighting it would have done its part in protecting the dungeon, and that’s all that mattered to it.
Its life would end in a moment's notice, but it had just started doing this task and would not let death stop it from it. The leftover energy from burning its life force was enough to power its [Thought Acceleration] skill and push it to beyond its normal limits. Normally doing this would begin to crack someone's mind to pieces and they would instinctively avoid such outcome, but the nature of its species' hive mind properties and being a dungeon born it could ignore those natural instincts and keep going.
After using enough energy to power an entire house for a day, the jellyfish managed to enter the dragon's real mind and discovered something interesting. The mental resistance skill the dragon had that disappeared during the trial didn't actually disappear as it thought, no. Mental resistance skills protect the mind of the user from any manipulation attempt, and the dragon's one wasn't different in that core part, the difference, though, was that while most of the mental resistance skills would only protect the user from external mental manipulations, this one was protecting the user from an internal manipulation. It didn’t know what exactly was trying to damage his mind, but it didn’t really care about it.
Burning its life force to power through the surface layers of the dragon’s mind, it got inside the core of the dragon’s mind. Differently from a mental landscape that exists on the surface layers of the mind, the deep layers of the mind cannot be changed only using one’s imagination. It is the foundation of someone’s emotions, personality, desires, fears… It’s the foundation of what makes someone themselves. The shape of the place is also a result of the mind’s owner and can’t be changed unless the person experiences something that changes themselves or have their mind broken, as the jellyfish was planning to do. This deep inside someone’s mind goes beyond the body and right into their souls, and a soul without an ego is just a super complex energy battery that can’t even control its body.
The jellyfish takes a look around. It’s inside a room that looks like the inside of a “spaceship”, as it is called in the dragon’s memories the jellyfish saw. The room had a king size bed next to the outer wall, right below a window that went from wall to wall. Looking through the window it could see what looked like static two massive energy masses, one golden and the other a pale blue, in the distance. The jellyfish ignored it and continued looking around the room. It found a desk with a computer terminal on it where an image of a human woman, the dragon’s mother in his past life, repeated the lines it used on its trial of the dragon.
“You’re a monster” She said.
The image then changed to a pair of young humans, a man and a woman.
“We were waiting for you to find a way back, but you never even tried to look for one” The man said.
“You got those awesome magical powers and don’t even try to use them right. Remember when you laughed at me for making a character with powers I didn’t know how to use in that game?” The woman said.
If the jellyfish remembers correctly, as a lot of its memories were lost when its species were killed, they were Leo and Alex, the dragon’s friends. The image changed again, this time to a Pantherino in a pitiful state, bound by what looked like a magic circle inside a cave with a crystal in the background that reminded the jellyfish of the dungeon core of its home dungeon.
“I called you hero for freeing me from this place, yet you don’t even know my name. If it weren’t by the fact you can shapeshift into a young version of me I think you wouldn’t even remember me. You’re not a hero, I regret having ever called you that” He said.
The image went back to his mother.
“If it wasn’t for you, your father would still be alive” She said, before the image looped back to the beginning and repeated everything again and again for a few moments before the jellyfish lost interest in the terminal and continued looking around.
In the far corner of the room it found a sliding door. Opening it revealed a corridor with various doors and computer terminals on the walls, all repeatedly playing the messages it already saw. It didn't had much time, as even if it was accelerating its mind to the limit, it body wouldn't last for more than two seconds in the real world, it needed to find the control core of this place and fast, and so it began floating through the corridor at the same pace a human would when they're walking fast.
The corridor soon became two, then four and there were multiple layers of corridors as the presence of an elevator in one of the walls indicated. The jellyfish found doors marked with symbols it didn't recognize, because they were from a language of another world, but their meaning was conveyed into its own mind, a quirk of being so deep inside someone’s mind, it had found the doors leading to "Happy Memories", "Sad Memories", "Exam Subjects", etc. It was so deep inside the dragon's mind now and the place was a giant maze with a multitude of corridors, some of the corridors twisted into loops or had stairs to several layers. Some areas of the giant maze that was a mind of a being the jellyfish found were being blocked by a golden or pale blue force field, meaning that it couldn’t go through them, which was already odd considering that the force fields didn’t had the feeling of a mental resistance skill, what was even odder was that it didn’t looked like it just cut access to it to those areas, the very walls of the place were being cut through by those force fields, like the dragon’s mind itself was being denied access to it.
The jellyfish was growing more and more frustrated and anxious as time went on. Frustrated because it couldn't find the control core, anxious because the time it still had to live was coming to a close, it had already used one of his two seconds to find absolutely nothing. It eventually tried one of the elevators, only to sense that it would work by saying where it wanted to go, a mental smirk formed on its mind as it said.
"Control core" it said with a relief as the door closed behind it and the elevator began to move, its time was ending, but it would be able to bring the dragon with it.
When the doors opened again the jellyfish got confused as to what it was seeing. It was a room full of controls, the ceiling was transparent and one could see the static being followed by the pale blue and gold energy masses in the distance, in the middle of the room there was a chair with controls on the armrests, and floating on top of the cair was a white mass with tendrils that were latched in every control in the room. The jellyfish floated towards the inside of the room and felt the presence of the dragon’s mental resistance skill, it was all concentrated inside the room and wrapped around the white mass and its tendrils.
The jellyfish also noticed that where the tendrils touched the controls they were slightly degraded, as if turning to dust, but it didn't care about what was happening, it had only one goal and would complete it. As the jellyfish approached the white mass, a new tendril formed from a free space in the mass and shot towards the jellyfish.
The jellyfish's own mental resistance skill, [Mind Guard], popped up in the right moment to block the tendril from managing a direct hit and instead it wrapped around the shield the resistance skill was projecting around its body, but the white tendril was corroding the shield faster than it could be replenished by the jellyfish’s already low magicules. It took no more than two seconds in the accelerated mental state for the jellyfish’s mental resistance skill to fail and the tendril to warp around it.
“What is-... aaaargh!” It said as the tendril dug through its mental body and began corroding it, turning every part that touched the white mass into a fine dust that fell to the ground.
It tried to grab the tendril with its own tendrils to pull it away from itself, but its tendrils became dust as soon as they touched the white mass, and soon enough, its whole body became dust, the last though from the jellyfish was it apologizing to the dungeon as it failed to protect it.
After the jellyfish was turned to dust and it all fell to the ground, the tendril from the white mass retracted to its original position. The dust began disappearing into thin air as it degraded into pure energy, some of which was being absorbed by the room itself.
As the energy leaked from the room into the outside and then to the real world, the golden energy mass that could be seen from the windows stopped for a moment, and a small piece broke off from the main mass and went towards the room where the jellyfish died.
“If it wasn’t for you, your father would still be alive” My mom’s voice echoed in my mind again and again as her face flashed around me in a circular motion.
“You laughed at me for something you yourself is doing right now” Alex said, suddenly appearing in front of me, before joining my mother in repeating my mistakes to me.
“You thought about us and how we were doing, but the thought of returning didn’t even cross your mind. Were we truly friends or were we just as disposable as trash for you?” Leo appeared as well and joined the others.
I couldn’t look at them, they were around me and speaking to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at them because they were telling the truth. Even if a small part of me tried to deny what they were saying, I couldn’t bring myself to tell them anything.
My friendship with Leo and Alex flashed through my eyes as all the thoughts I’ve had since I came to this world echoed inside my mind, not a single one of them was about trying to find a way to go back. Was my friendship even real to begin with, or did I just use them for my own amusement like a heartless brat? I wasn’t so sure about it any longer.
I remember the day where I convinced my friends to play a new game that had come out a few days prior, and I remember how I laughed at Alex when she created a character with a skill set she had no idea of how to play with. I was doing the same as her, actually I was doing worse, as I have basically Google inside my head and all I was using it was to ask stupid questions, like putting the results I’ve got from appraising grass into it and receiving information about the grass, multiple times, while I could’ve used it for so much more.
The day my dad was killed was still a blur to me, as if my mind was actively trying to forget it, the flashes I remember from that day was that my father was shot while trying to protect me.
"If it wasn’t for you, your father would still be alive" my mother's words repeated in my mind.
My chest was hurting like it was set on fire by molten metal and chopped by a food processor. Why was I like this? Being so pathetic I need someone to say out loud my wrongdoings to me for me to notice them. I was sure everyone I knew would be better if it wasn't for me. If I could just disappear I was sure no one would take notice…
"They are not entirely wrong" a gentle voice appeared behind me as everything was starting to fade to black. "But they aren't right either"
A warm hand touched my shoulders, causing everything to return from the shades of black it had started to become to a room that looked like a computer core room from a sci-fi game. The warmth from the hand spread throughout me as my anxiety began to fade away and the voices of my friends and mother grew distant.
I turned and saw a woman crouching by my side with her hand on my left shoulder. She had a golden dress that almost looked like it was alive, changing and growing yet no actual changes happened with the dress. Her face was adorned by golden marks that went from the side of her eyes down towards her throat as if her tears were made out of gold. Her eyes were the same golden color her dress and the marks on her face had, almost as if they were made out of the same stuff, and considering the warmth her very existence gave off I was inclined to believe they were. She looked like my mother, but she was clearly different, even though I couldn’t name the differences if I wished to, I just knew they were there and that she wasn’t my mother, even though the aura she had made her look like the mother of everything.
“You shouldn’t just give up on your life just because you feel you don’t deserve it. If everything you thought was true crashes comes crashing down on you, you don’t just sit there waiting for it to end, no, you get out of the way and then start building up again” She said as she came closer and sat by my side. “I see the problems me and my sister created for you”
“Who are you?” I asked her, even though I felt as if I already felt her presence before, I don’t remember who she is.
The woman smiled at my question as though she found it amusing someone asking something so basic that everyone should know.
“To simplify, I am Vida, the Goddess of life. Me and my sister found your soul when it came to our universe, it was in a pitiful state, full of Void energy corrupting everything inside you. If we left you be, your soul would crumble under the corrosive energies of the Void, permanently killing you and erasing your very existence. As the Goddess of life, I couldn’t let something so tragic happen to a soul under my gaze and neither could my sister and so we placed a small portion of our divinity on your soul to dispel the Void energies and to heal the damage, but some of it had already made its way to your Ego, the culmination of your memories and personalities, so we sealed the parts affected by the corrosion” She explained as she looked at me before pausing and looking around with sorrow eyes. “But I see it caused you pain and changed your thought process, even if it didn’t changed your personality, resulting in a disharmony that spiraled downwards towards an existential crisis”
My mind was completely blank from the things I was hearing from her, but she kept talking.
“Sincerely, it was good that it happened this soon, if the disharmony in your personality and thoughts kept growing and growing, your Ego would implode as it tried to divide itself in two halves” She said. “I’ll remove the seals me and my sister put in your mind since you’ve come to this universe, but some of the corrosion has already taken effect. The seals were to close any influence this corrosion might have in you, but seeing as the disharmony was leading you to a path of a complete mental breakdown I have no choice but to remove the seals”
With a wave of her hand the world around us changed and I was in what looked like the command bridge of a starship but some of the controls around the room showed signs of erosion.
“One more thing, you’ll have to deal with the effects of the corrosion yourself, but I think you’ll manage it the same way you survived with the amount of Void energy your soul absorbed while passing through the Void behind a summoning ritual, you’re a Nahala after all” She said as she snapped her fingers.
“Wait, how do you kno-” I tried to say, but my mind went dark after the finger snap.
…
My eyes opened sluggishly as my entire body hurt like it was shot by dozens of bullets. I tried looking around, but I couldn’t, my body wasn’t responding right and I was in an unfamiliar place with rocks all around me
forked
u mean formed?
also jellyfish is sometimes "it" and other times "he"
good to have you back
u mean formed?
I have no idea how I managed to write forked instead of formed
probably the autocorrect.
also jellyfish is sometimes "it" and other times "he"
Thanks for letting me know, it should be fixed now
Tftc
