Living, loving, destroying…
I could write endlessly about the mixture of feelings I experienced after Abel's death, but I wouldn't say I want to put it all on display—somehow, I'm not burning with the desire to let everyone in on the absolute mess currently tearing my soul apart.
I understand perfectly well that Eve herself didn't expect Abel to throw himself in front of her attack—I saw her shock, fear, and disbelief when the spear pierced his chest. Hell, all those emotions were written so clearly on her face that only a blind man could miss them!
What did she do after the unknown artifact pulled her into a trap she couldn't escape from, even with her power? She started trying to comfort me. And, as I can see, herself at the same time. Saying things like: "As soon as we kick the crap out of God and the Root of Evil, everything will be fine again!"
I admit, a burning desire to kill her consumed me.
I didn't care what she wanted or didn't want, didn't care about her goals, plans, or aspirations—not only had humanity suffered because of her actions, not only had the inhabitants of Heaven suffered, and thousands of celestial warriors died in our battle, but this bitch had also killed my son.
No, Our son.
The very son whom I genuinely came to love, whom I had long since accepted as part of my family, whom I was proud of and whom I respected.
But all of that was secondary, and so were my feelings.
I had already lost my world once by giving in to hatred and the thirst for revenge, and I had no intention of repeating that mistake. As much as I wanted to snap Eve's neck, she remained a potential ally in the battle against the two creators of our world.
I wasn't entirely sure they were actually the bastards Lilith described them as based on Eve's words, but the probability existed. And it wasn't a small one.
"Haaaa..." I exhaled slowly, rising from my knees, and shifted my deadened gaze to Eve. "Looks like we're the only ones left..." The words came out heavy. Truth be told, I didn't want anything at all, except to fall to the floor and stare at a single point, just like that time in the rain, among the ruins of the home of the girl I once loved.
Shit happens. Right?
"Adam?" Eve asked nervously. The eleven-thousand-year-old "god-killer" shifted from foot to foot and looked at me with panic, fear, and embarrassment...
Light, give me the strength not to lose my mind from the surrealism of what is happening.
"No. A fragment of a god from another world," I joked. Judging by her drawn-out face, which began to contort into some excitedly-fucked-up grimace, it landed pretty poorly. "Joke."
"Ahem, yes!" she nodded hastily, suddenly beaming. "If... When we kill them, we can bring Abel back to life!" On those last words, her joy instantly melted into anxiety. "I'm sorry... I really didn't mean to. I didn't think it would turn out like this! I just wanted to stop your attack!"
Have you ever talked to a crazy ex who, judging by all appearances, is still in love with you? What if that ex possesses power capable of destroying worlds? Yeah, me neither. Until this moment.
I pressed my fingers hard against my temples, trying to get my thoughts in order. Even forcing myself to act, right now I was just drifting, mechanically reacting to what was happening. I closed my eyes.
Pull yourself together, Adam!
You've survived way worse shit than this!
What, you gonna cry next? You softie! You weakling!
Is this what Abel wanted from you?
For him to die a meaningless death, and for you to screw everything up afterward?
The flash of anger helped—feelings returned, as if a dam of numbness had been swept away by a wave of emotion. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes, the familiar golden Light burning in them once again.
"Feel like fighting?" I asked thoughtfully, looking Eve over.
Hey, you never know.
"Hm?" she blinked uncomprehendingly, and then suddenly smiled happily. "No!" Her face literally blossomed with joy, and a second later she was already standing there, staring dejectedly at her feet.
Silence hung in the air.
Okay... How does the saying go? "The lights are on, but nobody's home." Except in Eve's case, it seems the house itself packed up and left.
Violent mood swings, instant topic changes, bizarre behavior, and completely illogical reactions to what was happening.
And I have absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Is this the Darkness affecting her? Highly doubt it. When beings of light are corrupted by Darkness, they usually turn into bloodthirsty monsters or embittered maniacs, not into... this.
Even calling the woman standing before me Eve felt wrong—she was far too different from the person I remembered, and the memories of the past stubbornly refused to align with reality.
It was like visiting a beloved grandmother after years apart, when dementia had already ravaged her mind—you look at a loved one, you recognize their face, their voice, their habits... And at the same time, you realize that something vital inside them is gone.
But if Darkness isn't the cause, what is?
The Fruit of Knowledge? I ate the heavily modified version of the divine apple, the one God and his "rival" had tweaked, and even then, the consequences for me were quite severe.
What if the "raw" divine creation was much more dangerous? Could it have shattered the mind of a kind, naive girl?
Very likely.
But what am I supposed to do about it? I figured she'd have some issues upstairs, but not this severe—I simply won't be able to trust her to watch my back. And negotiating with her is pointless: say we strike a deal, five minutes pass... or five seconds, and she suddenly gets the idea that I'm going to betray her, and that all our agreements are just part of my "cunning plan."
Cure her? Well, I'm not exactly a soul doctor; I'm not really a healer at all—I know a few tricks, but that's not enough. I'm not Sera, and even her chances of fixing this clusterfuck would be approaching zero. Not to mention Eve would never let a Seraph near her sick head.
Alright, assuming I can't cure Eve, I still have to do something, right? Look at her, she's already blushing and making goo-goo eyes at me for no apparent reason.
Well, come to think of it, I've seen something like this before, albeit in a much more... or rather, less neglected state. Well, "seen" isn't quite right—I experienced something similar: constant bouts of who-knows-what, emotional spikes, and intrusive thoughts and ideas. That happened when the God-killer was hiding out somewhere inside me.
Eve, as I understand it, also merged with a fragment of one of the "gods" from another world. Could that have critically affected her? Well, theoretically, yes, but it's impossible to prove, and provoking her into a reaction through conversation and making deductions based on those reactions, like I usually did before...
"Eve, do you mind letting me into your... soul?" Not entirely sure what I even want, I yield to a sudden impulse and ask Eve. I mean, why not? Maybe she'll actually agree!
"Of course!" the woman nodded vigorously... Well, chronologically she's been a woman for a long time, but I still feel a certain dissonance calling her that—Eve looks like an adult, sure, but a young woman, around 20-25, so it's best not to overthink it. "There's always a place for you in my soul!"
So what am I supposed to do with her? How do I react? How do I keep blaming her for things? She's already forgotten she killed someone and is happily looking at me with hearts in her eyes!
Bullshit, absolute bullshit and surrealism happening right now.
Eve had orchestrated all sorts of cunning plans—she recruited angels, completely fucked over human society, sent agents into Hell. And you're telling me she did all that in this state? Not in a million years!
Either she wasn't the one doing it all, simply acting as the figurehead for all this crap (which contradicts Lilith's intel), or her condition used to be much more stable. And honestly, the second option appealed to me way more, because the first meant the existence of another player on the board, and having my understanding of the local power dynamics flipped 180 degrees was already getting seriously old.
Alright, let's say I actually get inside Eve's head, find the remnants of one of those "gods" from another world, and then what? What if I kill it? And can I even pull that off?
"Adam?" Eve called out cautiously.
"What?"
"You look like you're trying to figure out a way to kill someone very unpleasant right now."
"Because I am trying to figure out a way to kill someone very unpleasant right now."
She pondered this.
"Me?"
"No."
"Yay!" And the scariest part? It actually calmed her down!
I groaned internally.
"Fine. Come here."
And Eve was instantly beside me, moving so fast it was as if she had teleported. But concepts shouldn't work inside the territory of the Blue Lock, and neither should any spatial magic—that's the core function of this artifact: to trap any being inside it, and Sar swore up and down that no teleports work in here.
"You..."
"Yes?"
"Never do that again."
"Okay," the girl agreed with a sweet smile and nodded, continuing to stare at me with a strange look.
"You didn't even ask why," I said for some reason.
"If it upset you, then I won't do it," Eve answered seriously.
I looked at her in silence for a few seconds, having no idea how to even react.
Honestly, I didn't understand anything at all anymore. Normal people don't act like this; this is how naive children act, or deeply broken individuals who, for whatever reason, have fixated obsessively on a specific person.
Swallowing nervously, I carefully placed my hand on the top of Eve's head. She immediately squeezed her eyes shut in contentment and began rubbing her head against my palm like a cat.
I exhaled deeply, relaxed, and closed my eyes. Then I artificially tried to summon the same feeling I experienced during my first encounter with the God-killer inside my own mind...
The landscape of my soul looked like an endless darkness, and at first, Eve's soul seemed exactly the same, but that impression proved deceptive.
It was hard to explain what I was seeing—her soul resembled a crudely patched canvas. The familiar darkness felt somehow wrong here: as if it had once been torn into countless pieces and then hastily stitched back together.
Something about it was... incorrect?
It felt as though I was looking not at a whole, fully formed soul, but at a poorly glued mosaic made of various shards, which, moreover, didn't fit each other in size.
Looking around and seeing no one, I initially thought I had just fallen back into my own mind. Only this "wrongness" in the environment confirmed that I had done it right and was indeed inside Eve (God, that sounds wrong...). But I had absolutely no idea what to do next, so I just started wandering aimlessly through her mind.
Honestly, I still don't know the proper term for this space—mind, soul, or subconscious—which is why I keep calling it different things. It doesn't change the essence, but it does confuse even me sometimes.
Every "seam" on this mutilated soul beneath my feet pulsed, as if from phantom pain, which was pretty disgusting—it gave me the distinct sensation that I was walking barefoot on raw, pulsing human flesh that had been flayed alive.
Shudder!
For a while, I just walked in the darkness, having no landmarks or sense of time. The space seemed infinite, until a giant silhouette of a seated person began to emerge from the thick gloom ahead.
Walking closer, I froze, swallowing a nervous gasp and swearing internally.
Before me sat a massive, impossibly huge, naked Eve. She had her arms wrapped around her knees, her head lowered, and her emotionless gaze was fixed on some point in the endless void beneath her. But it wasn't her size or her naked body that scared me; what scared me was that her entire figure was composed of that same horrifying mosaic, woven from hundreds of jagged pieces. It was as if she had been sliced apart with a circular saw and then carelessly stitched back together with black thread.
And the scariest part... looking closely at her eyes, I noticed they were different shades. The left eye was lighter, and I recognized it easily... It was a piece of the soul of the wife of a certain water god from another world, one "very dear" to me.
Slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements (just in case), I walked up to Eve's giant foot.
"Hey..." I called out quietly, but got no reaction—she didn't even blink.
Reaching out cautiously, I touched her scarred skin, and in that same second, the world around me exploded.
I was thrown headlong into a maelstrom of someone else's memories. The sensation was practically identical to when I consumed the Fruit of Knowledge, but this time I wasn't myself, I was Eve...
I (Eve) was looking at a beautiful alien world, shining with life. A world created by God and Roo long before ours. When suddenly, two colossal rifts tore open in the heavens.
The Creators had grown bored with their toy; they deemed this world a "failed experiment."
And then the heavens fell.
Eve's emotions flooded my mind, as if temporarily overwriting my own personality. An all-consuming sorrow, mixed with primal terror, sadness, and a fear so intense it made me want to rip my own heart out, swamped my consciousness.
And then came the PAIN.
It wasn't physical pain, like from a wound, but the death throes of billions of living beings dying in horrific agony all at once. I felt children burning in their mothers' arms, cities melting, oceans boiling away, the planet itself screaming as it was torn apart. This agony of millions of sentient beings, funneled through one fragile human soul, began to shatter my mind....
"AAAAAAH!" I jerked my hand back with a scream and collapsed to my knees, frantically gasping for air. Violent shudders racked my body, tears streamed from my eyes, and the death screams of millions still rang in my ears. "Fuck..." I wheezed, struggling to my trembling feet and wiping my face with the back of my hand. "I think I'm starting to understand why you lost your fucking mind." I looked up at the giant Eve, still sitting listlessly in the dark. "'Sorry, Adam, but your Eve is in another castle,'" I joked nervously, hysterically, to myself, trying to shake off the lingering foreign emotions.
When I was experiencing good and evil, I only extracted 7 "variations of history," but for Eve, it ran so much deeper. So, does that mean the body in front of me isn't Eve? All of this—these are the scars on her soul, which my brain is interpreting in this bizarre way. Eve is literally made of scars, and cramming fragments of an alien soul into her just finished the job, breaking the girl completely.
Fucking Demiurges. And how am I supposed to feel about them after this?
To find the real Eve, I needed to find the specific shard that actually belonged to her.
The problem was, I had absolutely no idea how to do that, unless...
"Well, sorry, honey. Gonna have to grope you a little," I exhaled grimly. "I just hope Lute doesn't hear about this..."
I walked back up to the giant foot and, gritting my teeth, pressed my palm against a different "piece," preparing for another plunge into her memories.
Yeah, I hadn't come up with anything better than diving into every single fucking shard of this mutilated soul until I found the "right" one.
I am a fucking genius!