Chapter 24: Mind Reading I

Faust's consciousness probed into the mayor's mind like tentacles, and this ability was not any ability, but a special ability of a psychic mancer.

It only takes a psychic sorcerer to meditate deeply to be able to peer into the minds of others—of course, who can be spied on depends on how strong the psychic is.

At first, it was a bit like remote sensing was applied to the inside of the human cranial cavity, but Faust clearly "saw" every detail of the mayor's brain, and he could even get an idea of the location of important parts of the brain, such as the temporal lobes and thalamus.

But as the meditation continued, the reality in these people's minds began to blur.

The brain in Faust's eyes is constantly enlarged, and the sulcus becomes like mountains and valleys, and the gray matter of the brain is the thick earth. As his brain continued to enlarge, he saw that it was not smooth, but had clusters of nerves connected to each other.

When those nerves were enlarged to the thickness of the road, Faust got a glimpse of it—a glimpse of what it really was.

It was a constant stream of information, and the complex touch was far beyond human comprehension, even for a psychic warlock who was proficient in the arts, to see only a drop in the bucket. A large amount of indescribable information is like an undercurrent in the sea, flowing in the human brain, and like isolated islands, connected in the depths of the ocean, forming a dark and thick earth.

Faust had never heard of a psychic seeker ever seeing such a sight, but the sight of grandeur and horror did not last long, but only disappeared in a flash. Faust didn't care either—psychic sorcerers are always hallucinating, especially when reading minds.

What Faust didn't know was that the moment he saw this strange sight was the moment the eyes of the dusk beast on his face opened.

In a trance, Faust seemed to fall rapidly, but his landing point was not somewhere flat, but a dazzling light. The light shrank like a frightened animal, shrank into a point in the blink of an eye, and then vanished without a trace.

As the light faded, the surrounding things that were obscured by the bright light finally revealed their true faces. It's a marvellous gallery with no end to the front and back, surrounded by snow-white walls and ceilings, where light comes out of nowhere, evenly distributed in every inch of space.

On the walls of the corridor are paintings of large and small, square and round, and various irregular shapes, each with a different style of border.

This is the corridor of memory.

Contrary to Faust's imagination, he thought that he would participate in the adventures of the mayor when he was young, but he did not expect that it would be such a scene.

In fact, Faust had never read other people's minds before, otherwise he would have known that this kind of gallery was a relatively common sight, and that kind of immersive scene was very rare. That requires the mind reader to have some kind of special talent.

You must know that ordinary people's memories are not static, and with the passage of time, they are often distorted and distorted, and even graft together two unrelated memories. Even if the memory is not confused or wrong, it is inevitable that the details will be blurred, so it is often difficult to be as clear as if you were there.

The immersive picture is simple, but the scene contains a lot of detail – for example, one may remember being in a dark forest, but it may be difficult to remember how many leaves have grown on the grass at their feet, and what insect crawls on it.

What people themselves are vague about, naturally blur in their memories. Moreover, people's memories are originally strung together with important events, and it is reasonable to express them into paintings.

Faust looked at the paintings on the wall carefully, looked at them for a while, and roughly figured out the order - roughly speaking, the closer he is to his own memory, and the farther away he is, the closer the picture is to the present time.

The place where he came was just right, and the nearby was the memory of the mayor when he was young. Faust skips over some of the daily routines that have nothing to do with the trip and soon finds the mayor's nightmarish adventure.

The first painting is large, almost half a man tall, square, framed by a log with tree bark, revealing a lively wildness.

The brush is delicate, with only the key points of the characters in the painting outlined through lines, and the rest of the paintings are often impasto painted with bright and intense colors, and the background is hastily patched together with various light color blocks.

There are a total of five people in the painting, and the shortest one of them has the clearest face, which is eight points similar to the mayor, probably the mayor of the town when he was younger. All four of them were unrecognizable, but each had distinct characteristics. The leader was the tallest, his complexion painted red, and the three men behind him were about the same height, one with gray hair, one missing an eye, and one with a scar on his face.

The background is a thick green with intricate brown strips, presumably a forest. Around the five figures, the trees are bright emerald green, and even a few small flowers are painted, but the farther away from the figures, the more the trees appear to show their teeth and claws, and finally the canopy of the trees is connected to a dark green, and even painted black at the edge of the painting. Only a goose yellow stretched from the feet of the five people into the distance, getting thinner and thinner, and finally disappeared into the dark green.

Faust skimmed through the previous footage, and roughly knew that the town of Marula was still a nameless lumberjack's camp, and the five of them were supposed to be a team exploring the new woods.

The person at the head has red skin, he should be a native of the dense forest, but in the painting, he is dressed like the person behind him, and he still looks like a leader, it seems that they had a good relationship with the lumberjack at the beginning, and can even be said to be as close as one, but now they are strangers?

Faust continued to watch. The next few paintings are much the same, still square, except that the corners of the border have been rounded, the bark has been stripped away, and the wood has taken on a shiny color that seems to have been rubbed many times—which means that this memory is often remembered by the owner.

The style of these paintings is the same as before, and the five of them occasionally joke along the way, which is quite pleasant, as if this trip is not to find a forest farm, but to enjoy the mountains and rivers. The yellow lines under the feet are sometimes thick and sometimes thin, but they are always there.

Due to the zooming out, the background has been confined to the emerald green range, with only one or two branches showing at the edges, or twisted and withered vines.

But the good times didn't last long, and after these paintings, the next picture suddenly mutated - the emerald green dissipated without a trace, the pure land still disappeared, and the five of them faced the dark green forest. At this time, all the branches and rattans were connected, and the dark green leaves seemed to be a dark cloud, suspended above the heads of the five people.

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.