Chapter 331: In Search of the Answer (2)
Chapter 331: In Search of the Answer (2)
Whirrrr.
The mechanical hum of the elevator vibrated as it plunged deep underground.
The sound seeped into my senses, but I accepted it with stoic indifference.
“…It’s quiet.”
I felt nothing else.
Only two sensations enveloped me: the movement and the hum.
If I were to be pedantic, there was also the friction of the metal cables and the slight vibration of the air. But I pushed those trivialities aside for now.
It had been a long while since I’d felt this kind of peace in the silence.
Actually, come to think of it, it hadn't been that long. I had experienced environments devoid of stimuli back in the Otherworld as well.
But the situation was different now.
In the Otherworld, I was always on edge, never knowing what might happen. Here, I was in the Geneva Branch of the Management Bureau, a place teeming with mages.
Naturally, the latter was a place where I could let my guard down, even if only a little.
For someone like me, a reduction in stimuli was a blessing.
An extremely enhanced body is, in its very existence, a curse.
I either feel nothing at all, or I feel far too much.
There is no middle ground for this maddened husk of a body.
The only consolation was that my sense of touch hadn't quite reached that extreme. Or perhaps, I had simply used and trained it so much that I could still distinguish sensations even with this broken body.
Regardless.
The world I perceive now is a far cry from the one I knew before.
My eyes can see the shadows of the world in close proximity.
If I focus, they become vivid. Even when I don't, they flicker past like hazy phantoms.
A vision that can detect cracks in the world, ruptures in magic, and even distortions in reality.
Is that a good thing?
It has its perks, but I suspect the drawbacks are far greater. Seeing such things when they aren't necessary is… a burden.
My sense of smell is the same.
If I shut it off, I can barely smell anything, as if I have a severe case of rhinitis.
But if I turn it on, every fragrance becomes indistinguishable from a foul stench.
It is a sense that proves the proverb "too much is as bad as too little."
The scent of a flower becomes the cloying sweetness of rot.
The scent of a person becomes the odor of a corpse lying in a grave.
I once told my disciple that the stench of Nanjido was bearable.
I was wrong.
I simply couldn't clearly distinguish between a normal scent and a foul one.
Of course, it’s a different story when my senses are dampened, as I can only feel strong stimuli then. But once I dial them up as needed, the world becomes a dead place where everything is decomposing.
The reason I describe this overwhelming decay as the smell of burning or oil is simply because I know what those smells are from my past experiences.
And, transcending all of that…
The thing that torments me most is my hearing.
My ears capture everything within range.
The voices of people, the buzzing of insects, and even the omens of collapse that an ordinary person could never hear.
My ears take it all in.
And they deliver it to my brain without discrimination.
It is a sense I cannot even shut off.
Well, technically, I can.
But unlike the other senses, turning off my hearing causes severe problems.
If I turn off my vision, I’m still slightly better off than an ordinary person. If I turn off my smell, it doesn't hinder my daily life much.
But the moment I turn off my hearing, everything goes wrong.
Touch and hearing are fundamental to gauging one's surroundings. Without hearing, I wouldn't even be able to respond when someone spoke to me.
Furthermore, turning off my hearing narrows my audible range so drastically that, unlike other senses that merely dull, I only perceive sounds in a very specific frequency. It’s effectively the same as being deaf.
So, I simply live my life, endlessly enduring the sounds that flood into my ears.
When necessary, I perform the soul-eroding task of pushing these already maddened senses into an even greater frenzy to expand their range.
There was a time when this almost drove me insane.
I would shove my fingers into my ears, begging for the sensations to stop.
I once resented my own power.
I wondered why I had become like this.
Why did becoming stronger have to result in my own undoing?
Well, that’s an old story now.
Today, I can endure such experiences with nothing more than a bit of stress.
I didn't stand back up on my own, though.
I had the support of many comrades before I could find my footing again.
From the Heavenly Sword’s transition from infinity to a single point.
The Thunder God’s electrical signals.
Oxymoron’s brain adjustment.
Prohibition’s mental interference.
Macbeth’s magic formulas.
The Librarian’s algorithmization.
There were countless other forms of help.
All of those combined to form an extremely enhanced Selective Perception Ability, rooted in a form of paranoia, that now resides in my mind.
It doesn't mean I’m mentally ill.
It’s just that such a protocol is embedded in a corner of my mind.
And that Selective Perception Ability has guided me to keep at least the most essential sensations within my inner self, allowing me to filter out a vast amount of noise.
Even if it isn't a perfect Selective Perception Ability.
That much is unavoidable.
A perfect Selective Perception Ability is synonymous with madness. Reaching that point would mean falling into a world of my own, refusing to even perceive information other than what I deemed necessary.
To put it a bit cynically, you could say my comrades forcibly granted me a mild mental illness to help regulate my senses.
Of course, even if that were the case, my gratitude wouldn't diminish.
Thanks to that support…
I, who might have spent my entire life in a void if things had gone wrong…
Can now walk beneath the light again, at the cost of a little stress.
Just as that thought concluded.
Ding.
The elevator chime rang, and the doors slid open.
Snap, crackle.
The noise of old-fashioned lighting fixtures spread out immediately.
I wondered for a moment why such poorly maintained lights were hanging in a place like this, but it was likely due to budget cuts.
The important thing here was the laboratory further inside, not the hallway I was passing through.
With that thought, I walked down the illuminated corridor.
There were doors on either side, but most were labeled as maintenance rooms or emergency exits—a straight hallway with no use for anyone other than authorized personnel.
The hallway, built solely for the laboratory at the end, was so short it almost seemed pointless.
Standing before the metal door at the end of the hall, I completed my authentication using a terminal. I then passed through the door, which opened with a heavy metallic groan, and stepped into the laboratory.
The laboratory was shrouded in darkness.
The moment I realized I had stepped inside.
Thud.
Behind me, the metal door sealed shut, having fulfilled its duty of letting in the authorized individual.
Feeling the void of a total lack of stimuli, I reached out toward The Wall.
It should be around here.
The act of fumbling for a switch in pitch-black darkness.
Normally, my night vision is excellent, and I could easily find a switch even in this situation.
But this was a sealed laboratory, completely cut off from the outside.
No matter how good my night vision was, seeing in a place with absolutely zero light was impossible even for me.
After fumbling along The Wall for another two or three seconds—just as I was considering summoning a hammer if I didn't find it soon—
I found it.
I felt the tactile sensation of a bumpy switch under my fingertips.
I moved my finger and flipped the switch up.
Click.
With the sound of the switch, the room brightened.
Only then was I able to take in the entire room.
The walls, ceiling, and floor were all a uniform deep gray. The space was about the size of a living room.
Since it wasn't a particularly large place, I started walking toward the center to lie down.
But a strange sense of dissonance soon enveloped my body.
No stimuli returned to me.
The only new stimulus was the light from the fixtures illuminating the room.
The sound of my footsteps as I walked did not echo back.
The counter-pressure that should naturally travel up my legs from walking on the floor did not return.
The only sounds in this place were the ones vibrating within my own body.
The sound of muscles. The sound of my heart. The sound of blood vessels.
I was the sole source of stimuli in this room.
The Librarian, who had once been in a room like this with me, called it a form of torture.
He said that because humans always harbor doubts about their own existence, they constantly redefine themselves through external stimuli.
But this place lacked that, and he claimed the void of nothingness was a deadly poison to the human psyche.
It was a plausible theory.
Even I would suffer extreme stress if I stayed in a place like this for a long time.
But for a short while, it was fine.
I looked toward the only connection to the outside world in this room.
Since it would be a major problem if I couldn't even be contacted in an emergency, a method of communication remained.
I pulled out a cable that provided both charging and a wired communication link, plugged it into my phone, and then threw myself onto the center of the floor.
My hands perceived the material as hard when I touched it, yet when I threw my body down, no counter-pressure returned. It was a floor made of a bizarre material.
In this Sensory Deprivation Room, I closed my eyes.
I sought to reclaim a moment of the peace I had felt back when I wasn't a Hero.
Here, there was no information pouring into me.
There was none of the Otherworldly Power that usually felt like air against my skin.
Because of that, I felt a bit suffocated.
All my senses felt dull, as if a thin film had formed over them.
Any other Hero would have panicked.
If a mage tried to manifest magic by squeezing out their inner power, there would be no resonance because there was no surrounding Otherworldly Power. They would have to rely purely on the mana within themselves.
A Martial Artist would feel suffocated because they couldn't feel the Otherworldly Power that usually flowed into their Dantian, and they would feel their body gradually weakening.
For espers, well, it was case by case.
Someone like the Thunder God would be fine normally, but would feel uncomfortable when using Thunder God Descent, which turned them into Otherworldly Power itself.
Someone like the Lord of Infinite Castles would probably be able to use his power normally. The source of that man's power was a Pseudo-Otherworld he created himself.
For transformation Type S, it depended on the method.
If they had self-generation technology like the Librarian, they’d be fine as long as the summoning succeeded.
But someone like Hyun-seok, who always relied on the surrounding Otherworldly Power, would become extremely weak.
The worst case, as the staff member mentioned earlier, would be the Magical Girls.
Their very bodies were made of magic.
They were living beings of materialized mana.
Anyone who hadn't refined the flow of their mana would feel their body rapidly evaporating. After a while, they would fall into a state similar to respiratory distress, collapsing as they exhausted all the power that formed their most fundamental physical form.
Of course, they could simply deactivate their transformation.
But then, what about someone like me, who cannot undo their transformation?
By all rights, this should be an extremely lethal place for me.
And yet, I had no problems.
My body was a husk where mana itself had become physical matter existing in reality.
Therefore, even if the Otherworldly Power was stripped away from me, I might weaken slightly, but my massive physical form remained intact.
I now possessed a body that could ignore the very shackles the old government had tried to place on me using the base technology applied to this room, a body that could smash through walls to escape.
“Because that’s just how my body is,” I muttered.
My voice hit The Wall, but no echo returned.
I had performed experiments like this many times.
This technology was developed by the Management Bureau to counter Heroes.
To lock a villain in prison, you must strip them of their power.
Unless you strip them of their power, there is no way to restrain those who are essentially walking natural disasters, other than extreme drugging or mental manipulation.
And so, we cooperated without hesitation in the development of such technology.
To place shackles upon ourselves.
We are Heroes.
Those who stand at the very front of the battlefield, possessing the greatest power to protect humanity.
When such a Hero falls from grace…
The ordinary people standing on the other side must always have a means to oppose those with power.
Even if that technology…
Should one day be our end.