Chapter 34: In One’s Life, One Must Always Be Exposed for a Few Dark Pasts
“Mmhm wuaaaah~”
Ishta couldn’t help but let out a scream.
As a third-tier Hermit, the consumption of spiritual energy when she activated her avatar wasn’t high, and the collapse of her spiritual avatar just now only cost her some mental power, causing no real harm.
But though the damage was minimal, the humiliation was immense.
As an embodiment mixed with her own spirituality, that avatar was essentially no different from Ishta herself, and she could feel everything it experienced in real-time.
Because of that, she had fully experienced every single detail of her avatar being swallowed whole by the tentacle creature.
Rather than painful… it was actually a little pleasurable.
So much so that her initial scream gradually morphed into a moan.
Thankfully, the soundproofing on both sides of the interrogation room and the one-way mirror was good enough.
And Ishta had the foresight to turn off the interrogation mic when she launched Nightblade earlier, or else she would have suffered social death in front of Rast by now.
Her cheeks were flushed red, hair in disarray, and she gasped heavily for a long while before recovering.
She gripped the corner of the table with her fingers, staring deathly at the other side of the one-way mirror, where Rast was standing idle due to the psychological profiler’s sudden silence.
“Very good.”
“Man, you’ve successfully caught my attention.”
The blush on Ishta’s fair face deepened further, and even her thighs trembled with excitement.
“As a reward for drawing my attention… I’ll dig out the darkest, filthiest, most shameful secrets buried in your heart—”
“Then let you experience the helplessness of watching your so-called deepest secrets being dragged into the sunlight while you can do nothing but rage in vain.”
Just as Shiltina had once said—every Night Traveler who dwelled in madness and corruption appeared as a paranoid and a freak to outsiders, all somewhat psychologically twisted.
Even Ishta, a third-tier ranked highly at Starfall University and serving as a psychological profiler, was no exception.
Her greatest fetish was peeping.
Of course, not the stalker-type peeping at people’s bodies…
As the only daughter of Count Julian’s household, Ishta despised that sort of perverted behavior from the bottom of her heart.
What she sought was a deeper, spiritual kind of voyeurism.
Uncovering people’s dirt, grasping their deadliest secrets, rendering them powerless despite their strength or influence, forcing them to obey her every word… that intoxicating, unparalleled sense of control.
Nightblade's “Eye of Secrets” was the very manifestation of Ishta’s twisted mindscape.
And the reason she chose the thankless and offense-prone job of psychological profiler was so she could satisfy her hobby of probing secrets under the academy’s official identity.
Naturally, in front of Ishta’s “Eye of Secrets,” the average person’s petty thoughts were effortlessly laid bare with just a glance.
For example, a handsome, wealthy bachelor viscount in the royal capital who sneaked into a brawny military instructor’s dorm every night.
Or the girl ranked ninth in the Starfall Daily’s 97th issue “Top Girls Everyone Wants to Date,” who received mountains of love letters daily, but was in private a girl who longed to roll around and gasp with other girls.
Or an official of Granwell Kingdom colluding with the enemy, a young noble getting it on with his beautiful young stepmother, or a seemingly refined priest who ran naked through the streets every midnight with a covered face…
These commonplace scandals were far too low-tier in Ishta’s eyes, too easily obtained, and even when blatantly placed before her, she couldn’t be bothered to care.
Only the truly strong, those with impenetrably resilient minds—whose secrets couldn’t be seen through even by the Eye of Secrets—had secrets worth prying into.
She had encountered instances before where her eye was blocked and unable to see through, but that was mostly due to the difference in tier, a suppression from higher-ranked beings.
To be humiliated like this in front of a newcomer clearly of lower tier—having her spiritual avatar swallowed whole—was a first for Ishta.
Her thighs clenched involuntarily, an unnatural blush staining her face.
From past experience, the greater the obstacles and difficulty encountered during her probing, the more valuable the secrets buried within…
Such secrets to Ishta were like gemstones and gold to a dragon—impossibly irresistible.
She didn’t hesitate for even a second.
The moment she sensed her spiritual energy recovering from earlier, Ishta immediately activated the “Eye of Secrets” once more.
Her spiritual avatar swiftly reformed, entering the spiritual ocean built from collective unconscious.
This time, Ishta cautiously hid to the side, no longer daring to provoke that seemingly harmless, even somewhat cute, little black cat.
Instead, she directly used the Eye’s second-tier ability—
“Memory Reading.”
She felt her mental energy draining rapidly, reaching the brink of collapse in an instant.
At the same time, countless fragmented flashes of light and shadow flickered through her mind—
Ishta saw blood and fire.
She saw storms of bullets.
She saw maniacal grins.
She saw endless dark, filthy crimes committed under the cover of night…
The fragments kept alternating, never fully forming into a clear picture.
I knew it…
Someone like you must have some unspeakable, light-shunning secret buried deep inside.
Ishta licked her rosy lips with her pink tongue, her pretty face flushed like she was drunk, even her breath turning hot.
“Come now, let me see!”
“Deep in your soul, that memory you’d give everything to hide—just how ugly, how dark, how sinful could it be!”
She could already imagine the scene.
The boy before her, now pretending to be calm, would gradually reveal a look of shock, fear, panic, and despair upon hearing his supposedly hidden secret exposed.
In the end, he would shrink back and crawl to her feet, trembling all over as he begged for mercy, only to be kicked away by her.
Just imagining it made Ishta’s heart itch with anticipation.
She bit down hard on her tongue, using the last of her mental energy to drive it into the Eye of Secrets.
In the next moment, all those fragmented memories vanished.
Only a single stable image remained.
…
It was an abandoned factory shrouded in night.
A boy wearing a pitch-black cloak and a bat-shaped mask slowly stood up from a pile of wanted criminals’ corpses.
He glanced toward the approaching police, who led dogs and carried lanterns in search of him, then staggered onto his prototype motorcycle in the darkness.
Ignoring the warning shots and the barking hounds behind him, he started the motorcycle and rode away from the abandoned factory, toward the light of the city.
Only a final few words drifted off into the darkness.
“Either die as a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
“I am vengeance, I am the night, I am…”
“Batman.”