Everyone's attention, including my own, was on the goblin's dead body in the cage. People were glancing at the cage in between their conversations. It successfully shifted their attention from the speech.
My father handed me back to my mother just as I was about to cry. I felt helpless; witnessing the goblin's death had invoked a violent confluence of feelings and memories regarding my own death in my previous world. It appeared that the memories of both lives were blending. I became detached from my surroundings as a dam of repressed emotions finally broke.
I was crying without controlling my body. For the first time, my adult consciousness lost control. I surrendered to the natural instincts of the body and mind of a one-year-old. It was as if my past memories had never been transferred to this vessel at all. My body was reacting like that of a one-year-old processing his emotions. Then suddenly, the chaos stopped. A warm, refreshing sensation spread through my body, and my mind became clear again.
Something deep inside me had become quiet. I opened my eyes and felt my mother's hand over my heart. She had a look of pain mixed with relief on her face. An emerald-green coating enveloped us both. Her pupils dilated slightly, and as the intensity increased, my mother's pained expression deepened. She was clenching her jaw against an agony I couldn't yet understand.
"Zeni, stop! There's no need for you to use magic," my father said, embracing her in his arms, but she ignored his words. I quickly figured out what my mother was doing. I felt that my natural body-mind instinctively and subconsciously was resisting her magic after the initial effect. She was masking another type of magic within the emerald shroud, which was reaching for the essence buried deep within me. I closed my eyes and concentrated to help her; I consciously reduced my resistance to absolute zero, as my body's natural subconscious was very weak compared to my mind's subconscious, let alone my consciousness. The essence became dormant again—even more so than before. I opened my eyes and saw her relaxed face. She then ended the magic.
Father let go, and Mother sat in her chair with a thud, holding me in her arms. The crowd was staring at us. I saw the steward, Olford; he had a worried expression. Then, I saw Lady Auri Cle coming towards the platform. She stopped right in front of my mother. Father was in a slight defensive stance, but he seemed to have guessed her intentions.
"You should be careful," she warned. "I know you are worried about the child, but your mana channels are burned and sealed. If you force them open again, death would be a blessing compared to the curse of surviving it. You've experienced it before, right?" said the Adept.
The words hit me like a physical blow; I hadn't realized the level of danger my mother had courted just to protect me.
"It is good that you didn't reach that threshold. You will only experience pain for a couple of months at most for your stupid act. You know I am here, right?" the Adept said.
She then closed her eyes and touched both Mother and me, and once again, an emerald coating covered us. I sensed a different type of magic within this shroud—it felt as if it were searching for something within my body, though I couldn't tell what.
Mother's gamble had paid off. The Adept's magic sensed my mind, but the residue of my previous chaotic breakdown remained, acting as a perfect smokescreen that masked my adult consciousness from her scan.
"All is well. I cast a total restorative spell, much like your own, on you both. Now you should rest. I have checked the boy's mind; it is a bit overwhelmed, but fine. His constitution is strong; he will be a fine fighter one day," the Adept told my mother.
"Thank you very much, Lady Auri Cle," Mother whispered. It was clear that both my parents were deeply unhappy about the mind scan and the body check, even if she had found nothing.
After declaring us healthy, Lady Auri turned toward the crowd. Her voice dropped into a subtle, aggressive register. "I am aware that some speculate the Hatar heir was born of an evil ritual. I, Lady Auri Cle, in the name of Goddess Ava, declare that I have personally examined the heir of House Hatar and the matriarch. With Goddess's power, I did not find a trace of evil in either."
She produced a divine pendant from her robes that brightened the hall with a celestial radiance. "This pendant is a divine object that scans both the mental and physical aspects of the body," she announced.
The revelation shocked everyone, from the nobles to Healer Kal. My mother's mouth hung open; she hadn't realized the Adept had scanned her as well. But as she relaxed, a small smile appeared on her face. It led me to conclude that her effort to use a different type of magic simultaneously with the healing spell had successfully hidden the essence buried within me. Of course, my putting zero resistance, also helped.
I watched the Royal guest. While others were genuinely stunned, his facial muscles suggested he had anticipated this move. The games of politics were beginning to give me a headache, so I withdrew myself to my mind as I wanted to inspect and study the residue of my breakdown, determined never to lose control like that again. I left the rest of the affair to my parents.
I closed my eyes and initiated Box Breathing to stabilize my nervous system. I felt a unique presence of divine energy in me. My focus shifted to the trace amounts of it and I managed to salvage some.
Had I not been hyper-vigilant in monitoring my own physiology after Mother's casting, I would have missed it entirely. Lady Auri had unintentionally aided me; her first spell was so divine in nature that even Mother couldn't detect it.
I sensed the divine energy flood my body and I traced its path as it began to dissipate. In the narrow window between Lady Auri's first and second spells, I scrambled to harvest the vanishing particles by using my will.
I nearly failed in my effort of holding such volatile energy and got my exhausted will close to be shattered but her second refreshing spell, which mirrored Mother's emerald shroud, provided the surge of mental clarity I needed to bind the particles to my core. Even now, I could feel them struggling to escape my grasp, yearning to vanish.
I began to map the Neural Pathways of my recent collapse. I identified the breakdown as a Limbic Hijack, where the fear center of my infant brain—the Amygdala—had completely bypassed my adult thinking center.
I realized that while my explicit memory was intact, the raw, physical trauma of death had been triggered by the goblin's sacrifice, causing a response I couldn't control. The "Emerald Residue" from my mother's magic acted like a blocker, dampening my adrenal surge and allowing my adult mind to regain the steering wheel.
Further monitoring revealed that my Hippocampus was under extreme stress. In Earth biology, the Hippocampus is crucial for consolidating short-term information into long-term memory, spatial navigation, and emotional regulation. It is most vulnerable during early development, and I feared that frequent emotional floods would lead to reduced hippocampal volume.
After my assessment, I reached the conclusion that my thoughts were affecting my underdeveloped brain, causing it to react on instinct—as happened when I lost control and started to cry uncontrollably like a one-year-old.
This occurred because the parts of my brain that controlled logic, planning, impulse control, and emotional regulation, which is mainly the prefrontal cortex, were immature. My brain was still developing and could not withstand the shock of my past-life memories triggered by the death of the goblin.
To counter this permanently, I decided to utilize the dwindling divine particles. I directed the struggling energy toward my trauma-scarred sectors and watched—internally—as the golden light didn't just wash over the 'residue' of my breakdown but bonded at a molecular level with it. I was forging a biological firewall out of my own suffering.
Each divine particle became a jagged, microscopic rivet, bolting shut the doors between the man from my past and the child of my present. My hardware was no longer merely native; it was being systematically upgraded.
The divine particles had inherently processed the complex information from my earth-side memories, meticulously engineering the firewall to ensure it would not interfere with the natural growth of my neural pathways and become one with me in time.
It functioned as a parallel system—a silent guardian that remained dormant unless the biological 'hardware' was under direct threat. Now, when a scary event or trauma happens, the firewall holds the image for a few microseconds, allowing my adult mind to decide: "Should I cry to keep my cover or stay calm to observe?"
Following this upgrade, the biological firewall would act as an artificial extension of my prefrontal cortex. It was designed to catch any incoming trauma from the limbic system and process the surge before it could flood my immature brain.
Divine energy is truly profound; acting as a bridge between my conscious intent and my biological reality, it inherently understood my objective. Instead of letting the metabolic heat from my neural upgrade dissipate dangerously, the particles harnessed it.
They directed the thermal energy toward the stagnant waste products clogging my infant brain—the cellular "trash" left behind by my intense cognitive processing.
I watched internally as my neural pathways were scrubbed clean, though the process was only seventy-five percent effective. With cleaning my waste, it would take longer for my mind to get tired normally as well as from the brain fog.
My storage of divine particles was already exhausted. They really had miraculous properties. I truly wished to have more of them.
The guests' reactions to Lady Auri Cle's pendant was enough for me to know such items were exceptionally rare. It led me to question why she had it.
Generally, only those with high authority would possess them given their rarity. An Adept-in-training should not possess one at all, unless permission was given. It was as if a civilian was walking through a crowded market brandishing a firearm instead of an authorized officer.
After seeing her sacrifice, I knew I should find something imbued with divine power or something else to treat my mother's mana burn condition. I made it a mission of my life.
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