Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 2989: Possessions

Emery opened his eyes.

Violet mist drifted around him in slow, lazy spirals, lit faintly from below by a sickly purple glow that did not seem to come from anywhere in particular. The air was thick, almost gelatinous. There was no horizon. No sound. No sky.

”...Where am I?”

The words came out of his mouth and felt wrong almost immediately — not heard, not echoed, but absorbed by the mist as soon as they left him.

He frowned.

”Didn’t I just kill it?”

A pause.

”...what is going on?”

The mist began to swirl. Slowly at first, then faster — and as it cleared, a place revealed itself around him. Not a sky. Not a battlefield. A cave.

Vast.

Curved walls of glistening living tissue rose around him in every direction, dripping with thick translucent goo that ran in slow rivulets down to a floor he could not see. Embedded throughout those walls — hundreds, perhaps thousands of them — were cocoons. Pale, fleshy pods of varying sizes, each pulsing faintly with a yellow inner light, each holding a vague humanoid silhouette curled within.

Emery’s chest tightened.

He tried to take a step backward.

He couldn’t.

That was when he realized he was also inside one of the cocoons. Sticky, fleshy strands had grown across his arms and legs and chest, binding him in place against the cave wall like an insect pinned to a corkboard. He could move his head. His eyes. Nothing else.

Panic tried to claw up his throat.

He forced it back down.

He closed his eyes for a moment, steadied his breathing, and reached with his divine sense.

It came back to him — but slowly, and thinly, as though he were trying to feel the world through a wet blanket. Whatever this place was, his senses did not move freely here.

Then he sensed a presence approaching.

He turned his head toward it.

And froze.

The figure walking out of the mist toward him was himself.

Same height. Same face. Same easy carriage.

But his skin was traced with creeping purple veins, and his eyes burned a soft, malevolent yellow.

The corrupted Emery smirked.

[There is no need to resist.]

The voice was not spoken. It pressed itself into his mind directly, in the same chittering layered tone that the parasite had used on the battlefield.

[Become part of the hive.]

And in that single sentence, Emery understood everything.

This was not death.

This was not unconsciousness.

This most likely was the parasite’s own sea of consciousness, and the corrupted version of him standing there in his own face was the parasite’s possession attempt, given form.

He was inside the abomination.

It was trying to wear him.

Emery did not waste another heartbeat.

His will surged upward through his body, and his seven-layer pagoda blazed into being behind him in a sudden cascade of color — pillars of multi-hued spirit light stacked into the heavens of his inner sky. Primal energy crackled along their tiers. The cave around him flinched in response, the fleshy walls drawing back, the cocoons humming with low alarm.

The corrupted Emery dispersed into purple smoke — and re-condensed a dozen steps away, smirk unchanged.

[Good,] the chittering hissed, layered over its own laughter. [Your mind... is even more powerful than the others. Excellent. Open up to me and join us.]

Then the yellow eyes opened.

Not on the corrupted figure.

Across the cave.

Every cocoon flared at once. Yellow eyes split open across the pulsing pods in every direction — dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of them, every one of them fixing on Emery’s exposed pagoda. The pressure that descended on him was instantaneous and enormous, a layered psychic weight that pressed inward from every angle at once.

The pagoda shuddered.

Emery clenched his teeth and pushed back.

The light of his seven layers brightened in defiance. The pressure could not crack him on the first wave — his mental defenses were too dense for that — but he felt the cracks beginning to form on the second wave, hairline fractures spreading along the outer surface of his pagoda walls like frost crawling across glass.

Kikikiki—

[It is inevitable. You will be part of us.]

The pressure intensified.

Emery’s breath grew ragged.

He thought of Duke Damien. The Spirit Champion. One of the strongest soul cultivators in the entire Alpha Quadrant. The parasite had nearly broken him — had only failed because the others had intervened in time. And here, inside the creature itself, Emery was alone in a sea owned by his enemy.

He reached for Khaos.

He could feel the great primordial domain — but the moment he tried to pull it into himself, the cave walls seized around him like a closed fist, and his connection went thin. The Elysian Tree’s roots brushed his fingertips and slid away. The familiar warmth of his own domain flickered just out of his reach.

This was not his sea.

It was the parasite’s.

Time stretched strangely.

He could not tell how long he had been holding. Seconds? Minutes? It felt longer — as though the weight had been on him for years, as though the corruption was sliding in around the edges of his thoughts faster than he could push it back. Stray images began to slip into his head that did not belong to him — images of cities aflame, of small bodies in pods, of countless faces wearing yellow.

The first crack on his pagoda widened.

He realized, with the cold clarity of a man at the end of his rope, that his pagoda would break eventually. Maybe in hours, maybe in minutes, but eventually.

Unless he did something.

Then something clicked within him.

A connection.

A realization.

He looked at the corrupted version of himself standing across the cave and let out a small, strange laugh.

”You know,” he said, ”I just realized why I hate your ugly face so much.”

The corrupted Emery tilted its head, the chittering pausing for a moment in confusion.

”I’ve been putting up with the other two for years,” Emery continued. ”I can’t handle a third.”

The entire sea of consciousness shook.

The cave walls trembled violently. Cocoons swayed on their fleshy stems. Thousands of yellow eyes flickered in unison as a foreign presence forced its way into the parasite’s domain.

The corrupted Emery’s expression finally changed.

It turned sharply.

Two figures were emerging from the swirling mist behind it.

”What is this place?”

”So this is where you ended up.”

The voices came from Emery’s own throats — two of them.

Yet neither belonged to him.

One figure was wrapped in living shadow.

The other radiated pale golden light.

His dark avatar.

His light avatar.

The two stood at the edge of the cavern, staring at the endless rows of cocoons, their expressions identical with mild disgust.

They had felt the damage to the pagoda.

The bond between Emery and his split souls had guided them here, allowing them to follow the trail through the soul connection and force their way into the parasite’s consciousness.

This was the one thing the creature had failed to anticipate.

Every victim before had been alone.

Emery was three.

Emery’s true soul let out a short, sharp breath of relief.

”Give me a hand, will you?”

The two avatars did not need to be asked twice.

They charged the corrupt figure.