“So pretty! Brother Saul... slurp slurp... it looks so delicious!”
The moment the “galaxy” appeared, the Nightmare Butterfly flew straight back to Saul. Her usually sweet and charming voice now held a husky, obsessive tone.
Saul found it strange.
Wasn’t the Nightmare Butterfly supposed to feed on dreams?
After raising one, Saul had studied Haywood’s research notes on Nightmare Butterflies.
Sure enough, as Gorsa’s most accomplished apprentice, Haywood’s conclusions were mostly spot-on according to Penny.
One of them stated that a Nightmare Butterfly’s diet wasn’t what Saul had initially assumed—souls.
It fed on dreams, with a particular fondness for memories.
The more emotionally charged the dream or memory, the more power it offered to the butterfly.
Thus, those who encountered a Nightmare Butterfly rarely met a good end.
The more tragic the past, the deeper the fear—the more the Nightmare Butterfly could grow.
By that logic, Penny was born for a villain’s script. Had it not been for escaping Kismet’s pursuit, she probably wouldn’t have stayed obediently in a small town for so many years.
“Penny’s stuck with me ever since the Diary caught her. So has she eaten during this time?”
Now that he thought back to Penny’s voice... Was she starving?
Saul glanced at the silver wings of the butterfly, deciding to ask her about it later. For now, he continued toward the starlight-like soul fragments.
He still didn’t understand why these soul fragments glowed. That only made him more curious about what lay hidden beneath the sea.
Behind the starlight was a faintly illuminated arched structure.
Using the glow, Saul saw massive dragon bones and an overturned hull.
This must be the sunken ship Byron had mentioned.
As he moved closer, he brushed shoulders with the “galaxy.”
Romantic notions were lost on Saul. He opened both arms, instantly transforming them into enormous transparent tentacles lined with suckers.
He was embracing the galaxy—
Or rather, devouring it.
The white light, normally intangible, was swallowed the instant it touched the tentacles.
The suckers transformed into greedy mouths, tongues flicking hungrily as they sucked in every soul fragment they could reach.
No one had ever dared absorb soul fragments so crudely. Even the mad Byron had only dared analyze them cautiously. Direct absorption? Out of the question.
Unrefined soul fragments still contained remnants of their original owners’ memories from life and death.
Fragmented, sparse, but clinging like rot—impossible to scrape off. Unless one spent great resources to purify them, the fragments were useless.
That’s why so many fragments had piled up in the Wizard Tower’s candle channels.
Like a landfill—they could be recycled, but at tremendous cost and effort.
The gains didn’t match the expense.
But Saul was different. With the Diary’s purification ability, he could devour like a whale gulping plankton indiscriminately.
The white soul fragments, once swallowed by his tentacles, became pure energy flooding his body.
But with them came impurities.
And this time, the Diary didn’t clean them up as usual.
Before Saul realized what was happening, a violent shock locked him in place.
It felt like someone had peeled back his skull and poured in heaps of shattered imagery.
Countless jagged visions came with harsh, jarring sounds.
Despair, sorrow, pain, rage, fear...
To make matters worse, the visuals and sounds didn’t even match. Like a ghost film with gunfight music.
It was chaos.
The dissonance made Saul dizzy and nauseous.
In an instant, he forgot where he was, what he was doing, what he had just been thinking, what he was looking forward to...
After the initial daze came a surge of overwhelming fear but even that barely brushed his mind before vanishing.
What finally took over was a soul-wrenching loneliness.
Loneliness. Deathly silence.
Even more intense than when he had flown over the sea’s surface, surrounded by only black, white, and gray.
Saul’s descent halted completely.
The transparent tentacles, having absorbed the glowing fragments, began to glow themselves.
But his soul armor, previously trembling under the water pressure, suddenly solidified.
The surge of energy came with a crisis of consciousness.
In the light, Saul faintly sensed the soul fragments were beginning to burrow into him on their own—amplifying the chaos in his mind.
Image after image, sound after sound—cutting each other off. Saul’s body froze like a statue, while his mind churned violently.
The madness of this massive soul fragment ingestion surpassed even his first reckless experiment in physical transformation.
And yet, amid the growing pain, Saul gradually regained clarity.
He should have been in agony. But strangely, his brain blocked out the worst of it.
His eyes suddenly rolled back—visually detaching him from the world around him.
Now, he saw only the impurities from the soul fragments in his mind.
The audio-visual chaos intensified!
Seconds felt like centuries.
Yet in that sharp clarity, Saul began to see a thread within the jumbled mess.
A thread that connected it all.
This line linked all the fragments together.
In some deep, inexplicable way, Saul felt that if he could find the beginning of the thread and tug it lightly—he’d realize it was all part of an ordered pattern. The chaos was only a result of limited perspective.
The sounds, the visions—the experiences of the dead—were all laid out in sequence.
And if Saul shook the thread, the things connected to it would play out as he wished.
Now, amid the chaos, one thread became clearer and clearer before his eyes.
Saul reached out—at least, in his mind he reached out—to touch that thread hidden within the tangled consciousness.
He could almost grasp it.
But just one millimeter from his fingertip, the sounds, the images, and the thread itself vanished in a blink.
Saul snapped back to reality, finding himself still in the deep sea.
His foot rested on the hull of the sunken ship, and one hand was reaching forward.
All around him, glowing soul fragments still drifted like fireflies.
“Brother Saul! Brother Saul! Are you okay?!”
The silver butterfly flitted before his eyes, a note of concern in her voice.
Little Algae, in its thruster form, also poked its head toward him and gently nibbled at his arm with its shark-like teeth.
It, too, was trying to wake him up.
Just as Saul was about to reassure the two little companions, he felt like his lungs were about to explode!
The suffocating sensation hit him like a sledgehammer, drowning his mind in sheer panic.
He had to surface!
Wizard apprentices could hold their breath for a long time, but that didn’t mean they didn’t need to breathe.
In fact, with their high energy consumption, they needed air even more.
And now Saul, thrown into crisis, had reached the very limits of his endurance.
He had to surface. Now.
Again, the thought burned in his mind.
But just as he prepared to kick off the ship and ascend, he felt an unusual magical fluctuation from beneath his feet.
Saul looked down.
In a single glance, he locked onto a few gray stones nestled between the rotting planks.
They looked just like any other sea-bottom rocks but Saul, with his keen mental senses, quickly identified the magical wave as coming from them.
He pointed at the crevice.
The Nightmare Butterfly looked confused, but Little Algae immediately darted over.
Its earlier concern now turned into raw biting power—crunch! It swallowed the gray stones along with the surrounding decayed wood in one gulp.
Then, without waiting for instructions, it transformed back into a thruster and shot Saul toward the surface.
“Cough cough cough cough...”
Though he had surfaced as fast as his body allowed, Saul still didn’t make it in time.
He choked hard on the bitter, salty seawater, a burning pain searing his throat and nose.
At that moment, a beam of white light hit him—a Zero Rank spell: Minor Healing.
While treading water, Saul looked up to see Byron standing on a reef, frowning and watching him with concern.
“Pfft.” Saul wiped the water from his face and gave an awkward smile. “Lost focus for a second. Almost got myself killed…”
(End of Chapter)