STS Chapter 93: Into Madness (Patreon)

(A/N1: We do a little trolling.)

This felt... weird.

It's too easy.

Currently, I was laying down on one of the many tall roofs of Yharman in the Cathedral Ward. I was holding an ornate gold chalice in my hand.

I had a feeling I could rest and take it easy but at the same time, some things just nagged at me. I found a few more refugees like a prostitute and a skeptical fellow but other than that no one was willing to leave.

Not a single person.

No one.

This world shifts and warps around itself. Things that aren't meant to be there are there and things that are supposed to be there aren't. These people dont just act mad. They act like their minds are destroyed. All coherent thought left.

And the more insight I get the more I can understand it. And also the more I understand why I wasnt going mad.

Since I had all the time in the world I went around and grabbed as many books as I could and rifled through them.

Now I had an idea why I wasn't completely broken by here.

As tough as they may be these were just fragile humans with fragile minds. Their minds are like stiff machines. Written by old inflexible code.

Insight by nature conflicts with the human mind. Because it is in in of itself is what humans are not meant to be able to know. A glimpse into a world beyond comprehension. The burden is simply too heavy for the mind.

From the research I compiled I am fairly certain the human mind can only handle insight in these conditions.

1: A solid grasp of reality and yourself.

Without it the very world around you will start to crumble and lose all sense. You will forget who you even are. You will forget what you are. Like if the System 32 of your brain was overwritten by garbage code.

2: Flexibility and openness to change.

If you aren't open to change and your brain is very flexible you will struggle to accept the insight in your mind. Instead of meshing together the reality of the insight and the reality you once knew will start clashing with each other, slowly flaying your mind as the contradictions in your world drive you mad.

3: Willpower and drive.

If you can't resist the interaction between the Insight and your mind it will start to overwrite your grasp on reality. Without enough willpower to maintain your mind, it will start to get more and more "errors" like a computer running out of ram.

4: Intelligence.

You have to be able to make sense of the Insight that has entered your mind to make use of it and integrate it into your mind. If not, your mind will be like a computer without enough processing power to run the application. But you can't close that application, it will always keep trying to run and the more you fail to run it the more problems it will cause until your melts from trying to process the information.

5: Madness.

Simply, a sane mind cannot stay sane after comprehending insight, the information will be so incomprehensible to the human mind that you won't be able to make sense of it. So it is usually only the madmen that stay functional after comprehending insight.

So why am I still functional exactly? Simple, I am just built different.

My mind has already been torn to shreds and reassembled so many times. So it is incredibly flexible.

I have already accepted who I am and know what I am.

I have Invictus so no need to speak about willpower.

My madness speaks for itself.

As for intelligence. From my old earth, I am smarter than the smartest human possible. As I am the apotheosis of humanity and its root. My brain calculates at speeds close to that of a modern computer.

I just refuse to act smart. Why try to outsmart stuff when it's far more cathartic to just smash it apart like a monkey? So with my beyond-human mind and unique mentality, I can handle insight like no human can.

Which basically makes me the absolute nightmare of this world. I am already at a point where no Mundame beast could hope to pose a challenge beyond a dozen deaths.

So why am I so uneasy?

This world simply doesn't feel organic.

Why do things that shouldn't happen in this world happen anyway? The rules of this world don't make sense. I tried talking to an insane man for 24 hours straight trying to convince him to join the safe zone but it didn't work.

As if he is forcefully held in that position. Why doesn't time pass until some things happen? Why does insanity drive people insane almost instantly?

It's simple. This world simply isn't organic. It is fabricated. It didn't just naturally reach this conclusion. In theory, this blood moon meant nothing, this night meant nothing, and these people meant nothing.

This world isn't a world, it is a stage for the outer gods. It didn't naturally get here, always, always there were invisible hands tugging the strings to make the actors dance. The blood moon is simply here because an outer god wanted it to be here.

So what does my "patron" want from me exactly?

I dont want to find that out. At least I know something, the Bloodborne gods aren't absurdly strong. As long as I manage to recover my previous status I should be safe. So how do I recover my powers exactly?

According to the system, it may be possible to do this by hunting down notable beasts. I got rather unlucky with the first but that could've been just because of it being the first boss.

Closing my eyes I pulled on my insight before opening my eyes, I could see multiple marks on the horizon. Insight is so broken it is ridiculous. Because it doesn't simply operate as one of my abilities.

No, it is more like the right to know. The ability to peek into the shroud of the cosmos and gather information from it. If I want to know where the boss monsters are I can just find them.

It is like having the cosmos as a Google, as long as your insight is high enough you can just look up whatever you want. For example.

I pulled out a roof tile from next to me and peered into it while pulling on my insight.

...This roof tile was manufactured 2 streets over by a man called Alfredo Everboor.

Getting up from the roof I stretched, all I needed to do was eviscerate those little beasts and I have a chance of reclaiming something like Umbra or Armageddon Blade. Maybe even reclaim one of my other divinities such as flame, life, death, entropy, time, space, dark, light, thunder just about anything really.

But I assume with my luck I will probably get something like riding back. But that was fine, it wasnt like I had many useless skills in my arsenal, After a few bosses it would be forced to give me my actual weaponry.

I looked at the boss markers once more before...

"Eeny"

"Meeny"

"Miny"

"You."

My finger landed on one spot of light before my legs got way more muscular and bulged out of my clothes. The roof below me creaked from the strain before I shot off like a rocket, decimating the roof below me as I did so.

I whipped out my cane blade whip before transforming it and swinging it toward a chimney and tugging on it.  That's right, I was spidermanning this bitch.

A great thing about a hunter's body is that it seems more attuned to the strain. For example, I could execute deadman style without crippling myself in this body. So as I was flying across the streets of Gothic London I swung my whip.

With deadman style enhanced by the power in my blood, a single swing from me can take out a dozen beasts as the heavy-bladed whip cleaves them in half at the speed of sound. The sound of it sent shivers up the spine of beasts.

The scenery while spidermanning was actually pretty good all things considered. Though I would deduct some points from the view due to the sheer amount of coffins and tombstones just haphazardly placed.

You can try going anywhere and still bump into a rogue tombstone. I wonder if it would be more accurate to consider Yharman a giant sewer graveyard than a city country or whatever.

Seriously, have these people not heard of cremation before? You can just burn corpses instead of being forced to bury them and having them end up somewhere like next to Michael's front door or something.

Eventually, I reached a chapel as it said the boss was inside but all I saw after going inside was a young woman in robes kneeling over a pendant. Was this really the boss?

"Uhh- mam? Are you okay?" I had to voice out my concern as he started straining for breath and started panting painfully. Human decency told me I should go up to her and check on her but the honed instincts of a warrior told me to stay away.

And then the body under the baggy robes started twisting and malforming at a rapid pace inflating her body as it turned beastlike. Before long she had fully transformed into a giant wendigo wolf-like beast covered in shredded robes and bandages that still held the pendant.

Oh, so this really was the boss.

A/N: It seems like it has been quite a while since I released a Soulsborne chapter huh? Let's change that. Dont worry the Necromantic chapter is tmr before it becomes Soulsborner week on Sunday.