Chapter 25: Mind Reading (Part II)
The yellow line that symbolized the road beneath their feet had disappeared – they were lost, lost in the depths of the lonely, dim and mysterious jungle.
This is a very bad situation, the forest outside the city stretches for thousands of miles, and if you get lost and enter the depths of the jungle, it will be very bad. But the five people in the painting are no different from before, and even have a fearless smile on their faces, as if getting lost did not hit their morale, but inspired the fighting spirit of these people.
In the next few paintings, the borders begin to change - the texture of the logs gradually becomes rougher, the color becomes grayish and black, and there are always some small branches popping up, some of which are so natural that the canopy of the trees in the painting almost makes one suspect that the world in the painting is about to appear in reality.
It is a symbol of extraordinarily clear memory, highlighting each branch as a symbol of a perilous experience. The jungle in the painting becomes more and more hideous, and other creatures finally appear in the picture.
It was a large ape, looking much like the one domesticated by the Toad People, but this one was noticeably much larger and untamable. Behind the apes, there are countless black twisted shapes, which look more like people than monkeys, but most of them only have a pitch-black outline, and occasionally a few have red eyes, completely unable to distinguish the species.
The monkey was almost as tall as two people, but in the world of memory, height does not necessarily mean the size of the world, and it is likely that the mayor of the town harbored a deep fear of the monkey, which magnified its size. The same goes for the Mayor's team, the natives weren't necessarily tall - the red-skinned natives tended to be short in stature as far as Faust knew - and his tall stature probably came from the mayor's respect.
The native led a five-man squad to fight the monkeys. The battle scene is very messy, and the scene changes from third person to first person, and the mayor seems to be hiding, only occasionally glimpsing the battle through the dense foliage.
The mayor was shivering, and it seemed to be raining cold, and the four tough guys were fighting the crazy monkeys in the rain. Of the four, only the native, who knew a little about the art of fighting, but all of them had iron weapons and had an advantage over the monkeys.
But these mad monkeys were not afraid of death, and they pounced on the four warriors with all their might, just to leave a trace of scratches, and some of the emaciated monkeys deliberately pounced on the swords, using their flesh and blood to win the opportunity to injure the stronger companions.
From the mayor's point of view, the four men have been guarding like a wall in front of the bushes where he is hiding. This may not be the case, it's just that the mayor has formed the impression that they are protecting themselves.
This battle was expressed in seven or eight pictures, and the more the frame became more and more hideous, the square was no longer standard, some of the borders were outsourced, some of the lines were not straight, and the frames were also decorated with animal teeth and bones in the wood material. And, not only the murals, but the entire wall was sprayed with blood.
The last picture of this group of paintings is the aboriginal leader stabbing the ape twice his size in the chest with a knife, the red light like a flame in the monkey's eyes has dimmed, the four people behind the aboriginal leader are scarred, supporting each other, the cold rain has stopped, the mayor has a deep hand, brushing away the branches and leaves in front of him.
The painting is framed by a huge ape head with blood on its hair. Its mouth grew to the point of a python, and it bites the painting in its mouth.
The wall behind it went blank, and it seemed that the mayor's memories ended there.
That's it? Faust was stunned, but he immediately realized that it was impossible. Even if this is the end of the matter, it is impossible for the mayor to have no memories of the aftermath - he has lived peacefully for decades after this incident.
Where, then, was his memory hidden? Faust turned and looked at the wall he had been facing away from. There are only a handful of paintings hanging on the wall on this side, and they are often spaced far apart, and there may not be one in a few dozen steps.
Therefore, the series of paintings is particularly eye-catching.
In this non-shown-up scene, Faust is able to understand a lot of information without a teacher, such as the fact that he now understands that the two walls of the gallery record different memories.
The side he had been looking at recorded most of the memories of people—ordinary memories. The joy, the sadness, the fear, the pride.
On the other hand, there is another kind of memory, which is not a special memory that no one has. Although they are precious, they are often completely sealed in the minds of their owners.
No one wants to think of these things, they are forbidden beings, nightmares within nightmares, and the mighty gods don't talk about them.
It was a memory of a visitor from a different scene.
Faust knew about the strange visitors, and in the old world, ghost stories about the strange visitors were very popular, nothing more than replacing the villains of the traditional ghost stories with these strange freaks - but people forgot one thing, these dream ghosts were once the personal experience of their ancestors.
It seems that human beings have no way to accept these grotesque memories, they are sealed in the depths of the brain, and once these dusty memories are opened, the strange sights and hears will completely destroy the minds of these people.
At this moment, Faust understood why the mayor couldn't tell him about his past - it wasn't a curse, it was a taboo. Not by a command, but by a curse from the human body itself, and he himself was preventing himself from proclaiming that terrible experience.
Faust didn't know if he should continue watching, and the mayor's safety was left to rest for now. Do you really want to see this kind of terrifying memory? Do you really want to bring it back to the world?
Faust could not make up his mind, he had always been cautious, but now there was a force in his bosom urging him, urging him to explore the mysteries, the truths contained in these forbidden memories.
At last, Faust's sanity had fallen—and this was the first thing that had ever happened—and he came up with innumerable reasons to justify his abominable curiosity.
"I have the protection of Regba's father, how can anything happen? besides, besides Regba, I have a system ......" Faust felt that his thoughts had never been clearer, "this matter was provoked by Pacian, he needs me, besides, even if he wants to harm me, why use such a detouring method?"
There was a fatal flaw in his reasoning, but Faust, who had lost his mind at the moment, did not notice it at all.
Suddenly, he screamed and pounced on the series of abominable paintings like a hungry ghost who had been hungry for hundreds of years.
I don't know if the first painting is framed, it's a large thorn that crawls over a large wall. One of the thorns is sparse, revealing a painting.
No, it's not so much a painting as a photograph, which is extremely realistic, but lacks color, like Faust's black-and-white photographs in his previous life.
It was the ruins of an ancient city.