First, Let's Test the Power
I may have glossed over the demonic tool's mechanics earlier, but our little artifact friend was actually far more intricate and delicate than a crude toy.
Take hypnosis, for instance. It came with virtually zero resource cost, but its potency was entirely determined by the target's psychological resistance. The stronger their internal reluctance, the less effective the command.
Suggestions, on the other hand, allowed me to rewrite the target's subconscious at will, yet they devoured massive quantities of mental power. Moreover, their stability and performance hinged heavily on the subject's innate personality and disposition.
And finally, plunging someone into a trance state required fulfilling several prerequisites beforehand.
First: converse with the target for a certain duration.
Second: the target must not harbor suspicion, vigilance, or open hostility toward me.
Third: the target's mental state must remain relatively stable.
"I-I'm really busy right now... If that's what you need, perhaps you could ask one of the other staff members...?"
In other words, if someone was already shivering with tension and scheming to bolt before we had even exchanged three proper sentences, the ability was completely off the table.
Still, no need to panic.
Anticipating this very hurdle, the brilliant Victor of the past had meticulously prepared every detail. It was not as though I had wandered in aimless circles through this colossal library just to waste my afternoon.
"Ah, about that," I replied, sounding genuinely crestfallen. "I ran into a few other librarians before coming over to you, miss, but every single one of them said they had no clue."
"In that case... could it be that we simply don't have it...?"
Good grief. Our poor librarian, busy twiddling her trembling fingers into nervous knots, seemed so utterly terrified of interacting with another human being that she went straight for 'well, maybe it doesn't exist' without a second thought.
Even I was momentarily taken aback by that sheer level of social evasion.
"Well, I wondered the same thing, so I double-checked with him several times. My friend swore he borrowed it straight from this library. Besides, I haven't even told you the title yet, so declaring it doesn't exist right off the bat is a bit much, don't you think...?"
"A-Ah! Y-You're right... Ah, ahaha..."
I let my brow furrow ever so slightly, trailing off with an injured air. Caught red-handed in her dereliction of duty, cold sweat beaded along her hairline as she guiltily averted her gaze.
"S-So... what was the title... of the book you're looking for...?"
Defeat was written all over her face as she timidly inquired about the volume. Attagirl. If you'd just done your job from the start, wouldn't this be so much smoother? A diligent professional is such a lovely sight.
"It's called Everything About Othello," I said with a bright, easy smile. "Do you happen to know it?"
"Ah... If it's that one... Uh, well..."
She started to answer, only to falter. Her pupils darted about in frantic circles, making her inner turmoil painfully transparent, but I waited patiently without pressing her. To her credit, our darling librarian was a responsible working adult who placed professional ethics above her crippling social phobia. Letting out a quiet, defeated sigh, she began stumbling through directions to the shelf.
As a courtesy, I nodded along, putting on an earnest display of listening intently. Then, wearing the most innocently cheerful expression I could muster, I dropped the very request she was dreading most.
"Hmm... It's a little hard to picture just from the description. Would you mind guiding me there in person?"
After endless renovations and expansions, this library had mutated into a convoluted labyrinth. Trying to verbally explain a nondescript alcove tucked between two sprawling wings was an exercise in pure confusion. I had planned this maneuver all along, of course, but even with prior knowledge of the book's location, her directions sounded like a baffling riddle.
"Eep... That's..."
Her eyes darted frantically between the book cart before her, the looming bookshelves, me, and the empty hallway behind me. Her expression twisted in agony, lips pursing and twitching as she hesitated.
Seizing the moment, I activated the demonic tool and slipped my voice beneath her guard.
"[I have a terrible sense of direction, you see. Could you please help me out?]"
"Ah, well... Uh, nnngh... Yes... I'll guide you..."
Washed over by the hypnotic resonance, her lips flapped dumbly for a heartbeat before she gave a limp, resigned nod. Setting down the stack of books in her arms onto the cart, she shuffled past me with her head ducked, gesturing for me to follow.
Watching her back, I felt a spark of genuine moved emotion. It was nothing grandiose, but unlike those two thick-skulled thugs in the alley who had brushed off my earlier attempts, this command had taken root cleanly.
By Victor's metric, this was an absolute triumph.
Falling into step behind her, I decided to test the waters with another nudge.
"[Ah! By the way, how should I address you? Calling you 'Librarian' feels a bit impersonal and stiff on the tongue. What's your name, miss?]"
"Pardon? Oh... U-Um, m-my name is Reya... Reya Bennet..."
Hot damn, it works! It really works!
"[Oh, what a lovely name. I'm Victor Haust. I plan on dropping by often, so let's be good friends from now on.]"
"Guh. I'd rather not..."
Welp, that one bounced right off.
"[Haha, what a pity, I was really hoping we'd get along. Ah, Miss Reya, since I'm younger than you, please feel free to drop the honorifics and speak casually.]"
"Huh? N-No... I'm fine."
"[Come now, don't be so stiff. Just speak comfortably.]"
"N-No, really. I'm much more comfortable using polite speech... Thank you for the thought, though..."
Hmm. Struck out on that one too.
Drawing on the conversational dexterity I had honed back home while buttering up noble daughters in rural salons, I steered the dialogue with effortless charm while aggressively probing the boundaries of the demonic tool.
Clack, clack. Scuff, scuff.
Our footsteps echoed rhythmically down the quiet aisle. When the conversation naturally drifted into a lull, I took the opportunity to sort through my findings.
First and foremost, I realized that 'psychological resistance' was not merely a matter of common sense or societal logic. If it were, there would have been no reason for my perfectly reasonable, everyday suggestions to fail so miserably, both in the alleyway and just now.
Connecting the dots with the instructions on suggestions, it seemed that hypnosis was governed by the individual's deeply personal values, habits, and ingrained temperament. To a reclusive homebody like Reya, commands like 'speak casually' or 'let's be close friends' triggered an internal alarm on par with 'shall we make out right here?' Her subconscious rejected the premise outright, neutralizing the spell.
On the flip side, guiding a patron or introducing herself aligned naturally with her professional duty and conditioned reflexes, so they slipped right through.
Following that logic, commanding a painfully shy shut-in to speak casually would meet stubborn defiance, whereas whispering to a loose streetwalker, 'Hey gorgeous, my hands are terribly chapped, mind if I warm them on your wet cunt?' might just land with miraculous, jaw-dropping ease. Quite the absurd thought experiment, really.
While I would need more trial and error to map out the exact mechanics, one truth was already crystal clear: the efficacy of a hypnotic command depended entirely on the individual standing before me.
Having wrapped up my mental notes, I glanced up, only to lock eyes directly with Reya.
Swish!
She snapped her gaze away at lightning speed, cheeks flushing with panic.
"H-Here... This is the book you were looking for..."
She pulled a volume from the shelf and held it out with both hands. I had been so lost in thought that I hadn't even realized we had reached our destination. Accepting the tome with practiced ease, I flashed her a radiant, boyish grin.
"Wow, thank you so much! If I knew it would be this quick, I wouldn't have wasted all that time wandering around—I should have just asked you from the start, Miss Reya~."
Her shoulders hitched at the sound of her name, her whole frame trembling like a startled rabbit. But the tremor was fleeting; the moment the book settled into my grip, her face visibly brightened, flooded with relief that this grueling social ordeal was finally over.
"W-Well then, I'll be on my way..."
As she began sliding sideways, preparing to flee with that relieved glow on her face, I trusted my instincts and engaged the demonic tool's secondary function.
"......"
Mid-bow, she froze in place, her entire body locking up like a wound-down clockwork doll.
I observed her vacant posture for several seconds before a slow, thoroughly satisfied smirk spread across my lips.
"Well, look at that. The conditions aren't nearly as strict as I feared."
Given how notoriously weak demonic tools were in their base form, I had harbored private anxieties that inducing a trance might demand an agonizingly tedious setup, much like hypnosis. The manual had stipulated 'conversing for a certain duration,' but without a precise timetable, 'a certain duration' could have meant anything from two minutes to half an hour.
Furthermore, regarding the second and third conditions, Reya had turned out to be far more skittish and defensive than I anticipated. I had quietly worried whether I could truly bypass her vigilance without blowing my cover.
And yet, look at the result.
A flawless, pristine success.
Having braced myself for an uphill battle, the sheer ease of the outcome left me in remarkably high spirits. Stepping closer to the catatonic librarian, I waved a hand back and forth before her glassy eyes.
"......"
Unsurprisingly, she offered no reaction whatsoever. Her pupils were wide and unblinking, consciousness completely suspended. Splendid. With the trance firmly established, it's time to move on to the main course.
"Now then, let's have a look..."
Following the instinctive knowledge etched into my brain by the demonic bracelet, I placed both hands lightly upon Reya's temples and concentrated my awareness.
Fwooooosh.
Glittering grains of luminescence began drifting softly from her head like spilled stardust. Swirling in breathtaking hues of violet, gold, and azure, they resembled a miniature night sky threaded with multiple streams of the Milky Way, drifting lazily around her brow.
"Whoa... Wow... This is genuinely gorgeous."
Rendered speechless by the spectacle, I let out a low whistle and reached out a curious hand. Yet, just as expected, the particles were purely ethereal, slipping through my fingers without physical contact. Nor did they scatter like a cloud of dust; even as I fanned my palm through the air, the cosmic light merely rippled before returning to its serene orbit.
The manual described this phenomenon as the external visualization of a human's inner mental realm. Seeing it with my own eyes—as though an entire, infinite universe of stars resided within a single mortal soul—stirred an unexpected reverence within my chest.
"Oh, Demon God, how utterly magnificent... To think You could encapsulate such a poetic hymn to humanity inside a demonic tool..."
Since the surrounding stacks were entirely deserted, I took a quiet moment to admire the scenery in pious contemplation.
"And thank You from the bottom of my heart for granting me the privilege to knead this gorgeous little universe however I damn well please...!"
With my devout prayers concluded, I prepared to dive into the core phase of her hypnotic conditioning via suggestions.
Rule of thumb: start light.
Visualizing the desired command in my mind's eye, I curved my palms toward each other and focused my intent. The bracelet rattled with a fine, rhythmic vibration, and between my cupped hands, a faint, seductive cluster of light gradually took shape.
In that same breath, an instinctual comprehension blossomed in my thoughts, whispered directly by my trusty neighborhood hypnotic tool.
That was the exact meaning encoded into this newborn starlight.
Guided by intuition, I gently pressed the glowing sphere toward a corner of the radiant galaxy drifting around her head. The moment it breached the perimeter, her mental realm recoiled as if shocked by an invasive foreign body. The swirling starlight churned violently, unleashing a fierce repelling force that attempted to push my hand and the suggestion straight back out.
It didn't take a genius to realize that if I yielded to this rebound, the implantation would end in failure.
But who am I? The chosen owner of a demonic tool, handpicked by the Demon God Himself.
I was hardly pathetic enough to be shoved around by a bit of subconscious resistance. Gritting my teeth, I shoved back against the psychic pressure, thrusting my hand deep into the cosmic stream and lodging the seed of light with firm, unyielding pressure.
Snap.
With a faint resonance, a charming little star of my own making anchored itself securely within Reya's celestial sea.
Twitch.
It must have felt profoundly alien to her subconscious; her entire frame shuddered violently the moment the suggestion took root.
"Whoa, careful now. Thought she woke up for a second."
Fortunately, she only trembled without snapping out of the trance, but my heart still skipped a beat. I wasn't some seasoned, veteran hypnotherapist with dozens of mind-break campaigns under my belt—this was my maiden voyage. Sprinkling jump-scares like that into my very first trial was enough to rattle even a bold man like Victor.
Whew. Still, this definitely isn't the baseline. Just like with raw hypnosis, the efficacy and resistance of a suggestion are clearly dictated by her personality and mental makeup.
Brushing off the lingering tension, I inspected the newly implanted star with a critical eye. Unlike the native clusters of light orbiting within her mental realm, my artificial star flickered with noticeable instability, wobbling precariously as though ready to be ejected at the slightest disturbance.
This had nothing to do with my force of will overcoming the initial rebound; rather, the content of the suggestion—feeling warm and familiar toward a virtual stranger—ran diametrically counter to her deeply ingrained avoidance of people.
Of course, with my current lack of sample data, I couldn't be entirely certain.
Even so, a little turbulence was hardly a dealbreaker. We weren't meeting just this once, nor was there any arbitrary rule stating I could only plant a single suggestion per subject. If anything, a moderate degree of difficulty only made the taming process far more thrilling.
Now that I had a solid grasp on how suggestions operated, it was time to kick off the real conditioning.
"Now then... what kind of training would our darling Miss Reya enjoy most, I wonder?"
I hummed a merry tune as I indulged in pleasant deliberation. In truth, from the very instant I laid eyes on her, I had felt something akin to love at first sight—or more accurately, I had already mapped out the exact direction of her corruption. There was zero hesitation in my fingers.
First, lay the foundational groundwork to smooth out future interactions.
Next, to help our painfully introverted Miss Reya blossom into a much bolder, more adventurous woman...
Stagger.
A sudden, crushing wave of vertigo hit me like a physical blow, sending me stumbling backward several paces. My vision swam with dark spots. Clasping both hands over my throbbing temples, I let out a ragged groan.
"Nnnngh... Ah, fuck, this hurts... Feels worse than a total mana dry-out..."
The cause of the agony registered instantly. The user manual had spelled it out in plain imperial script: crafting and implanting suggestions burned a corresponding toll of mental power. Anyone who failed to anticipate the consequence after spamming them like cheap candy would have to be an absolute moron.
And lo and behold, intoxicated by the thrill of editing a living human mind to my personal tastes, I had fired off suggestions recklessly until my skull threatened to split open. I really am a hopeless bastard sometimes.
"Uh, u-um...? Ah! A-Are you all right?!"
As I doubled over, grimacing and clutching my pounding head, Reya's panicked, flustered voice broke through the haze. She had evidently come to her senses the moment my connection severed.
"Huh? Ah, I'm fine. Just... a sudden bout of dizziness, that's all..."
"T-That doesn't look like just dizziness...! Y-Your nose is bleeding...!"
"What? Oh, shit. When did that happen...?"
No wonder my upper lip felt suspiciously warm and damp. The severe backlash from overdrawing my mental power had ruptured the capillaries in my nose. Flustered to the point of hysteria, Reya patted her pockets frantically before pulling out—not a handkerchief, but a crumpled, messy fistful of paper tissues, extending them toward me with trembling hands.
"P-Please, use this for now...!"
"Aha, such a precious offering... I'll remember this kindness for the rest of my days."
Offering a casual joke of gratitude, I split the wad of tissues in half. I used one portion to dab the blood off my collar and chin, then pinched the remaining clump tightly over my nostrils. Meanwhile, Reya fished out another crinkled wad from her apron and hurriedly wiped away the stray droplets of blood that had splattered onto the parquet floor.
"You helped me find my book, and now you're saving me with tissues... Next time I visit, I really should bring you a treat as a proper thank-you."
"F-Food and drinks aren't allowed inside the library..."
"Oh dear, what a shame. Regardless, thank you for all your help while you were so busy. In my current state, I think I'd better head back to rest. See you next time~..."
"Ah, w-well, yes..."
Leaving behind the visibly conflicted librarian—who looked torn between genuine worry and her customary urge to hide—I clutched the very ordinary book under my arm and stumbled unsteadily toward the exit.
To be perfectly blunt, my head felt as heavy as lead, exhaustion dragging at my limbs like wet sandbags. It felt as though I had pulled three consecutive all-nighters without a single wink of sleep. In fact, I was so utterly drained that I couldn't even muster the energy to test the monumental fruits of my very first hypnotic conditioning session.
And so, as I dragged my sluggish feet all the way back to the dormitories, I carved a single resolution deep into my aching skull.
From this day forward: never, under any circumstances, spam suggestions without a brain.