CH460

There was nothing pleasant about reaching into the mind of a dying beast, feeling the pain of its crushed body or its desperate struggle for life, but Ben pushed that away as well as he could to focus on what really mattered, touching the monster’s memories to learn its history, wanting to find whatever he could with whatever time it had left.

He could feel it wasn’t long so he threw himself in, seeing its most recent experiences and the feelings that came with it, so much dirt as it burrowed through the earth, the feeling of a call, an order, both making it want to keep the land clear while joining up with others, both keeping it in that area as it dug down ever deeper to the cavern below.

Fuck.

He was seeing hundreds of them in its memories, swarming the vast space as bodies climbed over one another to get in and out, along with the subtle force keeping them all in line just enough that they wouldn’t kill each other, even if the instinct was still there. How a species so filled with an innate bloodlust could have conquered the stars would always be a mystery to him but he ignored it and kept probing, wanting to find whatever it was that was keeping them all in line and coming up short.

Damn it, okay, if I can’t see that then maybe if I just keep going back farther…

He could feel the beast growing weaker with each moment as he went farther back, seeing its travels through the forest, its escape from those who hunted it until it found traces of its kind, working back farther till he got to it coming out of the gate it had come through, feeling it tearing through people in its rush until he was finally back far enough to go past that interstellar gate network.

Since he was limited to the memories of a creature that in that stage of its life was really no more than a wild animal, he hadn’t been able to take in the surroundings to the extent he would have liked. He could tell the gate was operating on different principles compared to the one his world had, but it was hard to tell beyond a series of fractals and splits passing by faster than the demon that had traveled through it could be bothered to process. It only cared about getting to its destination.

But let’s see what was before it for myself, shall we?

After watching the thing’s life in reverse order, he was finally about to see where it had come from and braced himself for the reveal, unable to deny his interest in the world these things called home, only to be unable to take in any of it the moment he got there for the feeling it contained. A violent, oppressive force that had weighed on the demon right until the creature had passed through the gate, making it hard to move or breathe as it struggled to fight the feeling enough to keep itself alive and functional.

A small part of Ben that wasn’t being crushed by the experience was able to pick up on the sheer number of others around it but not much else, nothing to denote any real level of civilization from the sapient members of its race, only a desolate landscape that was filled with the strange bodies of its kind.

He wanted to take in more, wanted to understand it on a deeper level, to push back even farther into its memories to see whatever he could but felt it slipping further and further away.

He wasn’t going to give up, wrapping his minds with the beast to make the connection stronger, wanting to see what that oppressive feeling could possibly be but came up short. As the last dregs of life left it the demon died, breaking the connection with it.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

<MENTAL SYMBIOSIS LEVEL INCREASED>