Merchant Of Yliaster

Maxwell was not surprised to feel his platform moving. This was the semifinals now, and he and the woman with mental abilities were the only two contestants remaining apart from the guy with the weird abilities. He was a bit excited to see the abilities of a foreign mental practitioner. Maxwell hadn't been exactly developing his mental abilities in these recent weeks, and seeing how others worked with them would help him craft a better foundation when he came around to creating a proper mindscape.

His platform landed in the arena with a thud, and he glanced at the woman before him. For once, the woman was unnaturally beautiful, but Maxwell had been the richest man alive back on Zephyr, so beauty wouldn't really faze him.

The woman seemed to realize this, too, as Maxwell felt that the surrounding mental energy was monitored in a special way. It was probably a skill. He observed her in her class.

Ella - Psychologist - Level 50

Well, that's unexpected. He thought as he stared at the notification absentmindedly. Considering the woman before him was probably the strongest mentalist in this universe, it made sense that her first class would be about the mind, but Maxwell never expected it to be a mundane class.

Nesha is a cook, and this woman is a psychologist. What's wrong with these people? He questioned exasperatedly. Sometimes it felt like he was the only person taken by the mage class's allure.

Soon, Ella seemed to decide on her action plan. Maxwell felt an observation try to pierce his metaphysical resistance, but it unsurprisingly failed. In his domain, not many things like this would be able to touch Maxwell.

If Ella knew who she was fighting against, she would probably immediately forfeit, but Maxwell would humor her with the price of examining her mental technique.

Mental techniques were mainly about visualizing your mind and doing things using your visualization, but Maxwell had always been gifted enough to think about things more metaphysically. While people built palaces and libraries inside their minds, Maxwell liked it more to think of his mind as an expanse with hanging orbs of liquid in the air.

This made his mind a nightmare to invade, as no one could understand how it worked. In this universe, Maxwell didn't really use complicated mental techniques apart from the time when he was fighting Drakhabgar as his old self, but this didn't mean that he was not interested. It was just that his advantages in other fields had been too interesting until now.

He felt the woman's mental energy approach him, and he didn't try to block the energy. He was pretty sure that there would be a need for a medium in the future to transfer mental energy for attacks like this, as dispersing the energy when you had a skill to control energy was pretty easy. Maxwell, with his soul space, wouldn't have many problems, but this woman would definitely face some.

He felt the mental energy and tried to understand what it tried to invoke. He had seen her use lust and envy before, so he was curious what the woman would choose to use against him.

Next moment, though, the soft smile on his face disappeared as he deciphered the intention behind the skill. His time perception made things awfully slow, but he watched the approaching skill with a cold face.

Trauma? How cruel. Let me let you experience some of them. Maxwell thought coldly. This was a tournament where people suffered no damage, yet this woman was using a skill with the potential of completely ruining someone's mental state. It was a tasteless thing to do, and while Maxwell had a very loose moral compass, he was still from a culture where telepathy and mental skills were respected very much.

Harming someone mentally without a proper reason was one of the worst things someone could do, as the person wouldn't die, yet they wouldn't remain as themselves either. They would live a hollow existence filled with psychological problems. And in severe cases, their lives would become their prisons.

He opened his mind and found himself standing in a familiar space he hadn't entered in this life. Orbs of differently colored liquid floated in the air, oddly organized, yet they had no markings or any indication on them. The feelings had always been enough for Maxwell when he was organizing this place.

The floor was covered with a rainbow colored liquid, indicating the memories Maxwell created after he came to this world. There was something different about the place, though, as all around him, the glow of etherium shone. The place also felt incomparably real. Back in Zephyr, he could only imagine himself being here, yet now, he felt like he was truly inside this space.

He waved his hand, and the liquid on the ground floated upwards, forming various spheres with distinct colors. He was surprised to see that some knowledge types formed their own spheres. He laughed as he saw the sphere belonging to math. He had spent a lot of relative time working on the skill, so the sphere for it was incomparably large.

I should probably connect the knowledge skills, he thought, and once more concentrated. His knowledge about magic, technology, science, the occult, and the divine slowly closed in on each other. Next, small streams of liquid flowed outwards, connecting the orbs together like a web.

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It was a beautiful sight, streams turning into a gradient of color in the middle, and he smiled. He was quite satisfied.

With a sigh, he tuned behind, as he could feel the woman's mental presence getting closer. He walked in the mental scape, coming before a specific place. Even a person without any knowledge of mental abilities would understand where he was, as before him, a black or dwarfing all the other orbs stood, covered with yellow shackles made of liquid.

Maxwell gazed at the behemoth before him thoughtfully. Experiencing others' memories had been his way to see how the war was going back on Zephyr, and he had amassed a great amount of traumatic memories from his dabbling. Creating a mental shackle around the whole thing made of shackles made out of joyful memories had been his only solution, as he couldn't exactly go to therapy or someone else's memories.

This was the reason why entering other people's minds was not recommended, as you would inherit the negative parts much more easily than the joy and happiness. Bad was bad for everyone, while joy created jealousy and envy as you saw them. Any other person with a subpar mental ability would have gone insane a long time ago, and Maxwell had been in a bad situation himself for a while.

He glanced at the shackles, a small smile grazing his lips as a person's face appeared in his mind. His smile turned a little sad as he felt the intrusion come to a stop, and a figure appeared before him. In the mental world, Ella looked a lot more normal.

That was one of the features of mental battles. Changing the way you see yourself wasn't very easy.

"Welcome," Maxwell said, not turning to look at the woman. She seemed a bit surprised that Maxwell could enter his own mental world, but that was obviously dwarfed by her incomprehension as she stared around her.

This was a common response to Maxwell's mental world, as it just didn't make sense. Mental worlds usually took the shape of the comfort zones of people, yet Maxwell's was completely unnatural. It was a world crafted by himself over the years, and over a thousand orbs with random colors could be seen.

"Why is this place so weird?" Ella asked. Her voice was smooth, and she would probably be good at singing, yet Maxwell was pretty sure that this wouldn't be her real voice. In mental worlds, people sounded as they hear themselves,

"A lot of hard work," Maxwell said, as he kept staring at the black orb, his mind elsewhere. Being inside one's mentalscape was something that made you much more connected to your memories, and that was exactly why Maxwell didn't like to be here. He had an unbelievable amount of traumatic memories he wouldn't like to relive.

Maxwell waved his hand, and the world trembled. An orb in the distance shot to them, and morphed with a great sphere, turning into chains before they entangled the form of the surprised woman.

"Wha-" the woman started to speak, but the chains were just a symbol. Soon, she lost all function of her body inside the mental world, and stared at Maxwell with horror in her eyes.

"Mental attacks of your level should be exclusive to your enemies. Let me show you why," He said, and waved, making a small part of the black or detach, and fly towards Ella.

It was around 2 meters in width, and the woman was soon swallowed by it without a sound under the emotionless eyes of Maxwell.

Clementine woke up on a Saturday morning, her head feeling a bit groggy after all the drinking last night. Fortunately for her, her daughter had slept through the night without interruptions, or she would be in a worse situation now. She was not sure if she would be able to wake up even if she tried to wake her up, though. Last night had been a bit wild.

She pushed herself out of the bed and started browsing the news in her mind as he started brushing her teeth. Her husband was away in a distant city working, and they decided with her friends that it was a good time to meet up for an all-girls night.

Why are there so many wild animal attacks? She thought as she browsed through a ridiculous amount of news with the same premise. All around the world, people had been getting injured or hideously killed by randomly appearing wild animals, and it was starting to become a trend.

Authorities suspected a terrorist organization knowingly releasing a beast, but everything was too inexplicable.

She spat out the toothpaste, but she couldn't help but feel a bit uneasy. It was as if something was deeply wrong, but she couldn't find the problem. Everything was as always; her home was a bit untidy, but it was nothing too bad. She would go get a coffee and maybe go to an immersive movie with Sophie.

Sophie? Suddenly, she realized the source of her unease. Sophie would have been awake usually, and whenever she woke up on weekends, she would hear the buzzing of the poorly calibrated EV in her mind. Clementine never understood why her child was such a morning person when she was not, but that had been the norm for a year now.

Her telepathy was still subpar, as he was yet to receive proper training, so she couldn't isolate the EV waves properly, making Clementine hear a part of everything going on inside the children's shows Sophie was watching as soon as she woke up.

She hurriedly walked towards her room, and the door was closed without a sign of anything wrong. She knocked on the door, and she could swear that she heard a few weird stepping sounds as if Sophie was once more crawling, but there were no sounds afterwards.

"Sophe! Did you finally learn how to calibrate-" she spoke as she opened the door, but froze as soon as she could inside the room.

Before her, a completely unfamiliar sight awaited her, and she even ignored the weird crack in the middle of the room, floating in the air for a moment, taking it all in dazedly.

The room, which was once a children's room with colorful decoration, was now dominated by only a single color, as thick red fluid covered everything. A metallic smell was in the air, accompanied by the smell of excrement.

Clementine's eyes finally focused on a single place, and they went wide, reality settling like a hammer in her mind. On the couch where Sophie always stood, a figure was sitting, its size similar to Sophie's, but it was impossible to identify who it was.

The figure's stomach was open, and her intestines were piled up on the floor. Her face was replaced with a mushy blend of meat and fluid as if something took a bite quite forcefully, and most of her body was skinnless, as if something took its time and tasted everything before finally settling on the head.

Clementine screamed.