The silence after the Neural Phantom's unraveling was a fragile, wounded thing. The glowing dendrites overhead pulsed in a pained, arrhythmic flicker, a god's mind recoiling from the conceptual nullification Aryan had inflicted.
The low hum of thought returned, but it was now tinged with a new, sharp quality: [Agitation].
Aryan stood braced, the void within him a coiled spring, disappointed by his messy, emotional solution. But the counter-attack wasn't physical. It was a deluge.
Jaya was at Elian's side. The healer was on his knees, vomiting onto the fibrous ground, his body convulsing not from illness, but from the violent expulsion of a foreign psychic signature. If his mind had been a clean room; the Phantom's essence was a toxic spill.
"Don't touch him with your energy," Jaya ordered Aryan, her voice a blade of focused tension. She gripped a mend-blade, its tip hovering over Elian's spine. A faint, sickly yellow energy—the residue of the psychic trauma—was drawn out of him and into the blade, which glowed with a nauseating, feverish light. She wasn't just healing tissue; she was performing an exorcism on his soul. "Your null-field disrupts the process. It might… unmake part of him."
The warning was a cold shiver in Aryan's ribs. He was a hazard. A destabilizing element too dangerous to be near his own friends in their moment of vulnerability. The void whispered that their caution was just another form of [Betrayal].
He turned away, his senses forcibly turning outward. His perception, a cursed gift, dissected the Neural Jungle not as a place of wonder, but as a catastrophic engine of consciousness. He saw the concepts now as raw, psychic emissions.
A wave of [Primordial Dread] washed through, the entity's base-level fear of the parasite consuming it from within. It felt like drowning in cold, heavy oil.
It was followed by a shard of [Xenocidal Defiance], a razor-sharp memory from a warrior species that had chosen self-annihilation over consumption.
Then, a crushing wave of [Cosmic Loneliness], a sensation so vast and ancient it could only belong to the Primordial itself, a solitary predator in an infinite, silent sea.
Each psychic emission battered the compromised architecture of his own mind. The void seductively proposed the simplest solution: open his consciousness fully. Let the storm in and be scoured clean, becoming a perfect, empty vessel.
The memory of [Connection] felt like a single, frayed thread.
An hour bled by. Jaya, sweating and pale, managed to stabilize Elian. He was left gaunt and hollow-eyed, his own calming aura dimmed to a faint ember. Rohan was the greater concern. His aborted lunge had shattered the temporary mend. The leg was a ruin of misaligned bone and swelling tissue. He was unconscious, his system shutting down from the compounded trauma of injury and the Jungle's psychic pressure.
"We cannot remain here," Elian rasped, his voice a ghost of itself. "This place… it resonates with every hidden fear. It amplifies every weakness."
"He can't be moved," Jaya stated flatly, gesturing to Rohan. "Not like this. We need a null-point. A dead zone in the psychic field."
Aryan, who had been silently mapping the torrential flows of thought, spoke without turning. "There." He pointed towards a region where the dendritic glow was dim, the pathways gnarled and narrowed. The psychic flow there was stagnant, clogged with a looping, broken concept: [Recognition Failure].
"A corrupted sector," he explained, his tone that of a technician diagnosing a faulty machine. "The cognitive engine cannot write new data there. It's a buffer error. A scrap of short-term memory caught in an infinite loop. The emissions should be… repetitive. Less volatile."
It was their only hope. The journey to the dead zone was a nightmare of navigation. Jaya and a spectral Elian dragged the sled while Aryan scouted ahead, his void-tuned perception a Geiger counter for psychic radiation. He led them through treacherous conceptual terrain, skirting a caldera of pure, screaming [Fury] and diverting around a swamp of clinging, addictive [Nostalgia].
They finally staggered into the dead zone. The light was a dull, monotonous grey. The whispering resolved into a maddening, broken record of a single thought: …input error… data stream corrupted… rebooting… input error… The air was thick with the smell of ozone and what smelt like the residue of an electrical accident
It was a sanctuary built inside a malfunction.
As Jaya and Elian began the grim, painstaking process of surgically re-breaking and re-mending Rohan's leg with a combination of brutal physical manipulation and focused healing energy, Aryan stood sentinel at the border.
He watched the vibrant, lethal data streams of the healthy Jungle just beyond. He saw a glittering cascade of [Quantum Computation] and, adjacent to it, a seething firewall of [Species-Specific Aggression].
This was the mind they were trapped in: a dying but living, breathing psychic engine of unimaginable complexity, now riddled with parasitic malware.
The void whispered that it was all just noise. Chaotic, inefficient data. The only true resolution was a system-wide format.
But as Aryan glanced back at the desperate, focused struggle of his companions—Jaya's face a mask of determined agony as she worked, Elian pushing past his own trauma to guide her—he saw a different process. In the heart of a corrupted system, they were painstakingly debugging an entity. It was the hardest, most illogical path imaginable.
He turned back to the storm of the god's thoughts, the void's cold logic in his heart and the fragile, illogical warmth of that single thread in his hand. The Neural Jungles stretched before them, a labyrinth of living thought and psychic engineering. They were wounded, exhausted, and mentally compromised. But they had found a corrupted room in which to hide.
The journey to the nexus would require them to navigate the very code of the Primordial's consciousness, and Aryan knew the system's defenses were now fully aware of the null-virus in its midst.