Chapter 235: Regret has a tendency to…haunt a person
Kaijin Ability: [Spirit Amplification]
By combining the natural [Chaos] in their cores with the aether they have gathered from their cultivation, the kaijin is able to produce a special energy that can inflame the same desires as what composes their core in a subject.
Unlike drug induced emotional states which can be countered with an antidote, or hypnosis who can be broken by sufficient will, the energy produced by a kaijin works on a spiritual level.
Unfortunately, the kaijin’s influence can only work on what is present inside a person, or to put it in more understandable terms, it can only work off a person’s most recent memories and emotions, or off of truly memorable events.
But if this desire can be latched onto and amplified by kaijin influence…the effect can be mathematically calculated by exponentials, not multiplication.
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“Bah! What? When did I get into bed?,” Telana asked herself as she suddenly shot awake in her bedroom.
Telana attempted to recall what had happened the night prior to this moment, but strangely enough, everything was unusually fuzzy.
“I walked into the garden, I made myself some tea and…that’s it? No, that can’t be right…,” she muttered to herself.
However, when she attempted to think harder about that night, all she got was a splitting headache, accompanied by the sound of a cruel, laughing voice and the sight of a crueler smile.
‘Try not to lose yourself in the madness of [Regret]…’ the voice echoed in her mind.
Telana rubbed her temples in annoyance at the statement before deciding it’d be wiser to wash up while doing so.
‘Flowing water to wash away the pain…old folk wisdom…,’ Telana thought to herself as she made her way to her private bathroom.
Running water and indoor plumbing was a bit of a privilege, especially in the frontier, so the fact that the Corrada Family had the money for private bathrooms in the manor, each with a custom sink, bath tub and a mirror, was possibly the biggest flex of wealth one could have out here.
Telana made her way over to her personal sink and proceeded to plug the drain so that she may fill it with clean water.
‘It’s a pity I can’t make and sell soaps out here too often,” Telana thought to herself as she watched the water level increase, ‘I could slip in all sorts of tox…huh?’
As the basin of water began to fill, Telana noticed something…unusual in the mirror above the sink.
Namely, that her face in the mirror appeared… distorted.
At a quick glance, the reflection it showed was clearly hers, from the eye shape, to the size of her nose and the curvature of the lips, it was all her features. But when she took a closer look, some of the details looked…wrong.
“What’s wrong with this mirror?,” Telana muttered as she took a closer look.
The eyes looked older, tired and were rounder as opposed to being sharp like her own, the nose seemed a tad bigger than her own and the mouth shape seemed off, but she couldn’t put her finger on what. If anything, the woman in the mirror looked like her-
“Lady Corrada?”
“Huh? Ahh!”
Evidently, Telana was so engrossed by the strangeness in the mirror she failed to notice that the sink was overflowing at this point, and that someone was knocking at her bathroom door. Normally, she’d be able to sense such movement. Judging from the voice, it was her secretary, Hugo.
“Yes Hugo, what is it?”
“Just wanted to remind you ma’am, the Zhen Clan will be coming over for meeting in an hour from now,” he reported.
A few days after the Zhen Clan had kicked the everloving shit out of the Wolfe Family, many of the other powers in Stone Claw proceeded to try and curry favor, open dialogue and/or send apology gifts to the Zhen Clan. Following suit, the Corrada Family found it prudent to also send an olive branch, especially since they were given the rights to three of the Wolfe Family’s lucrative mines.
“Meeting? Oh right, of course. Thank you, Hugo.”
“Any time, ma’am.”
Telana quietly listened as Hugo walked away from her bathroom door, waiting until he was completely gone before turning her attention back to the mirror.
“Huh?”
When she looked back, all she saw was her own face with no distortions.
Perhaps it was just accumulated stress getting to her?
Regardless, she decided to file the incident as nothing more than her mind playing tricks on her, and moved on to washing her face.
Splash.
Splash.
Grab.
“Huh?”
As Telana was trying to retract her hands from sink, she felt on her wrists an inexplicable force grabbing onto them. Looking down to see what had a grabbed her, she noticed a pair of bloodied, viciously injured and weathered hands reaching from the sink and holding her wrists in place.
Instinctively, Telana attempted to circulate aether into her arms in an attempt to break the hold using sheer force. She wasn’t an Aether Grandmaster for nothing. However, no matter how much power she used, she couldn’t break the lock.
“What?!”
She could understand why if she felt that the hands holding her in place were stronger than she was, or perhaps draining her aether,blocking the flow of it but the issue was that she couldn’t detect…anything.
There was no aether.
No anima.
No…anything.
This was worst than doing nothing in the face of danger, this was doing everything they could do, but nothing was changing.
Once it had dawned on her that she couldn’t brute force her way out of this lock, Telana stopped exerting so much aether into her arms. As she did, the hands around her wrist suddenly pulled against them.
It wasn’t in an effort to drown Telana in the sink though, rather, whatever was inside the sink was using her as a means to pull itself out.
{Telana…why…}
As the figure attached to the hands pulled itself out, Telana noticed even more details about the figure.
Firstly, that the figure was actually a woman.
Secondly, it wasn’t just the hands that were bloody and bruised, it was her entire body.
Long and bloody cuts covered her from head to toe, bruises that could only originate from immense blunt force dotted her body like a demented constellation.
Viscera could be seen poking out from orifices on her stomach, not completely spilled, but just enough to see what even that was bruised and torn.
When the woman had managed to pull herself to be eye level with Telana, the latter froze.
While she couldn’t see the woman’s face, it was covered by long, bloodied hair matted with dirt and stone, she recognized almost immediately who it was.
“M-mother?”
{Telana…why…?,} the disheveled corpse of a woman repeated.
This corpse was none other than Marianna Corrada, the former matriarch of the Corrada Family, the mother of Telana. The woman who’s life she exchanged for power and prestige.
{Why…did…you…kill me?,} Marianna asked her daughter again.
As the corpse woman moved her head to get a better look at her daughter, Telana expected to see rage, hatered, vengeance in the eyes of the woman she had indirectly murdered.
Instead, all she saw was…disappointment.
{Telana…why…?}
CREATORS’ THOUGHTS
Mizako
for reading this far… behold.
Frog
https://twitter.com/sweetenerdx/status/1522319826441715714?t=-iQ8z11-o08wHou85uOtXA&s=19
and anyone confused about the bathroom thing as an anachronism, turns out toilets are as old as Ancient Rome…also magic
