‘Changes in their way of thinking?’ Gu Jun was alerted immediately. “What do you mean?”
“Mainly it comprises changes to their personal preference.” Wu Siyu stared at the cotton candy cloud on stage. “For example, they used to like cotton candy but now they favor rock candy. As a member of the Recreational Department, I notice this quite easily. Oh, there is another curious change, they all have adopted a preference for the color yellow.”
“Yellow? The color of earth?” He asked. Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan was suspected to originate from the teaching of the earth’s gods so could that be the reason why?
“That was the same hypothesis that Phecda came up with as well, yellow earth. In fact when I was close to them, I could sense the smell of dirt on them. However, there did not appear any change to their personality.”
“Are there signs of thought disorder?” Gu Jun pressed, “Like thought deprivation or thought insertion?” These were both terms from psychiatry. Thought deprivation was having one’s thought pulled away by an external force while thought internal was having thoughts that did not originate from one’s mind forcibly injected into one’s brain. Neither could be controlled by the subject, they were most common among victims of schizophrenia. Gu Jun had questioned Tom, and Kathlyn about it before. After that fated birthday party, other than illusory hearing, they occasionally suffered from these symptoms of thought disorder. And Gu Jun himself had experienced thought insertion when he travelled between the two worlds. He wondered if any of these were related.
“I have no clue but I heard the psychiatrists from the Medical Department have decided to treat these as signs of mild and unobstructive schizophrenia.” Wu Siyu answered. “This was because the members are still highly functional, and they do not suffer from other symptoms. Other than these few minor curious changes to their individual preferences, they are perfectly healthy. To prevent the stigma, Phecda temporarily names this as ‘Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan training syndrome,’ and for now there appears to be no negative effect. Oh, right. There’s one more thing. According to the members, they have experienced more vibrant dreams. Based on this situation, the Spell Department and the Angell’s Order had done more research on it but they could not find any similarity among the dreams, so temporarily the diagnosis was it was due to the overactivity of the subconscious.”
“Hmm...” Gu Jun murmured darkly. Other than way of thinking, the physical body should have transmuted as well, he had mastered the first chapter so he knew that to be the truth. Then again the change to one’s nervous system was harder to detect.
“Dirty-minded Yu, where are you in your training?” He asked.
“Hmm, around the second chapter.” Wu Siyu shrugged. “I’m still far away from the 3rd chapter.”
“That might be a blessing in disguise.” Gu Jun announced glumly. “Learning spells come with side effects, Phecda still has no idea what they’re dealing with...”
“For the record, I am not being lazy, I just simply dislike the book, it feels like it has caused your death.”
“No, without it, we wouldn’t have won that house of nightmare.” From Gu Jun’s point of view, the spell book was like a double-edged sword, it would defeat the enemy but at a price. At the time, he was so determined to bring the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan back with him, but he was only going to allow Phecda to reveal it to the other members after doing much detailed research on it. For the very least they had to understand the risk from using the book first, but from what Wu Siyu claimed, it appeared like Phecda had jumped headfirst into the study of spells.
According to Wu Siyu, over the past year, Phecda had been going non-stop researching the spell book, from its material, its font and their meaning. Their research revealed that if any picture was taken of the book, the words on it would turn into meaningless black blobs, but when viewed through the human eye, the content would surface, reminiscent of the symptom for pressure of thought. Pressure of thought was another type of thought disorder, it was most common in patients of multiple personality disorder, it referred to the sudden addition of connections inside the brain that did not belong to oneself. This was categorized as another symptom of Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan training syndrome.
“This phenomenon is not only limited to literal words.” She continued, “To clarify, all the members reported a feeling of connection with the book whenever they studied it. It was as if the book was bonding with them. To test this out, the department organized a control study. They had the contents from the same chapter copied onto a normal paper, and handed them to the members. The members said the feeling they felt from directly handling the book was missing and they could no longer understand the content of the copied chapter anymore. Therefore, the organization concluded that the book is spiritual, it cannot be communicated through words alone, one has to personally read the book to understand it.” The tome was thus categorized as a unique relic, it could not be copied, not even with the best photocopy machine.
Every Spell Department member had to read the book at least once before they started training for a new chapter or they would not be able to start their training. The Spell Department had done a sample study on this, a group was given the copy while the other was given the original, the former showed no progress in their training. Currently, the Spell Department only managed to decipher the content of the tome until its fifth chapter because that was where the progress made by the department’s brightest member stopped. It was worth noting that the understanding of the book was directly correlated to one’s mastery of it. For example, for Wu Siyu, she was unable to understand the content of the third chapter because she had not finished the second chapter.
That was all Wu Siyu knew about the experiments, there had to be more but she had limited clearance to find out about them. Gu Jun knew that with her talent and potential, if she was willing, she would easily be leading the Spell Department now. Wu Siyu then updated Gu Jun on the status of his friends. Cai Zixuan probably did not have much talent in something like this, like her, he too was stuck in the second chapter; It was the same for Elder Tong, he too was stuck in the second chapter, it probably had to do with his age. Xue Ba was in the third chapter, Lou Xiaoning the fourth; but the most talented among them was Wang Ruoxiang. With her talent and hard work, she was now at fifth chapter and apparently she was close to mastering it already. But talent alone was not enough, every member had to go through a series of applications and assessment before they could progress to unlock the . The process was strict and rigorous, currently there were less than 10 people who were allowed to study the fourth and fifth chapter.
“In fact it was Ruoxiang who was the first to break through to the fifth chapter. From that, everyone speculated that doctors probably do have affinity with spell learning.” Wu Siyu commented.
Gu Jun’s heart sank. Monitor was such a studious person and she would never lose to others in terms of learning but now...
“Has any changes occurred to the monitor?”
“Yes, the taste I have whenever I’m around her has changed. The smell of formalin has lightened tremendously, and it has been replaced by the taste of dirt.” Gu Jun asked about the other 2 members who were at the fifth chapters, they were neither new recruits nor from the angell’s order. They did not seem suspicious but if no one seemed suspicious then everyone was suspicious. His anxiety deepened.... There was only one Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, making it a precious artifact, could the uprising be related to it?
He then asked about the function of the few deciphered chapters, had the spell department experimented on them?
“This problem has been a thorn in Elder Tong’s side.” She sighed. Gu Jun had reported to Phecda about concepts like sacrifice and mental corruption before, and the experiments by the Spell Department had proven that his warning was well justified. The 10 members who participated in the experiment of casting the spell from chapter 1 had shown varying rates of S value depletion. Some even reported headache and convulsions. The first chapter was about summoning. “The summoned creatures are the giant bats that Chen Defa had summoned inside the cave. Currently Phecda has named them as Nightgaunt. They supposedly adopt some kind of mental existence, and they can be controlled. The nightgaunts are heavily aggressive and should be great in battle. Many experimental animals were scared witless in their presence.”
Wu Siyu continued, the second and third chapters were about communication with the land and strengthening of mental power. The fourth chapter apparently was about a deeper communication and the fifth chapter was another one on summoning but no one had tested it before. There was no outstanding experiment scheduled for it. This was because Elder Tong was worried that the experiment might cause the members to go crazy...
“That is entirely possible...” Gu Jun concurred. A price had to be paid to gain the power. For example, his mental corruption rose to 10 percent after he casted the spell from the first chapter. But he had not trained the second, third and fourth chapters before, would they make spell casting less draining? He would need to ask Peacock and the rest.
Gu Jun then contemplated why the traitorous party had not made any move yet. Then it hit him. Phecda was armed not only with spells but also heavy firearms. Even with a band of Phecda Warriors, the land’s travellers were no match for the Ossarians so it meant that spell casters could still be overwhelmed by brute force. Therefore, without outside intervention, the traitorous party within Phecda would not dare to show their hands so soon, it was probably why they had used his name as bait instead. He wondered what kind of goal they were going for...
Different thoughts muddled Gu Jun’s mind. Wi Siyu had limited information but she had been of great help already.
“Siyu.” Gu Jun could not appear in person so he stressed his tone. “Do not trust anyone too easily, keep a low profile when you return to the headquarters. If you’re asked, just act dumb and allow the suspected party to make a mistake. Try to gather information in the meantime, like who has received the message, who has passed the training for chapter 3 and beyond... Make a list. If Elder Tong pushes forward with the experiment for Chapter 5 or they insist on going into the Dreamlands, just stand your ground and deny it, just say you have a bad feeling about it... Later, I will try to summon you into this place without using the phone as a medium, but in any case, I will talk to you again tonight.”
“Okay.” Wu Siyu nodded. She replied seriously. “Understood, does this mean that the Problematic Team is officially back in business?”
“It was never off the business in the first place.” Gu Jun said, “That’s all for now.”
“Hey, wait.” Wu Siyu called after him. Her eyes looked around the theatre and smiled brightly, “Dirty-minded Jun, I am really glad that you’re still alive.”
Gu Jun’s heart warmed. “You know... me too.”
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