Second chapter of the week! Reason why I was even able to get this out was because I wrote about half of it after I finished last chapter. I'll be starting the next chapter right now too, so that's good. Hopefully I'm able to get it up before Saturday. So, Friday hopefully. Please don't forget to leave a comment and review (if possible). I know how hard it is to click down in that box and leave a few words for me. It's almost world-changing how difficult that is. I'm joking.

Edit: I guess it is hard.

Anyway, enjoy the chapter.

Immediately, Kyte’s soul subconsciousness reacted. A black, primordial cloud surged outward to encompass the entirety of Kyte’s mind. It trapped and secluded those foreign memories, causing his physical body to suddenly drop to the ground. It lay there amidst the destruction and mayhem that it caused. A deathly silence filled the entire area, leaving the Gifted shocked without knowing how to react.

Back inside Kyte’s soul, that black cloud suddenly stopped moving. The subconsciousness carefully let Kyte take control once again as it remained cautious of any dangers. That clump of memories detained by the black cloud struggled to be free, however, all its efforts were futile.

Kyte slowly regained focus. He was currently within his mind, looking around for those memories that threatened to end his existence. He was intrigued by the black energy surrounding the area he was positioned, but he knew it came from the black figure he absorbed during his breakthrough. He assumed it was ‘controlled’ by his subconscious, so he didn’t have to worry about it revolting or anything. If it could, anyway. However, Kyte wanted to know how to consciously control that black energy. That black figure had existed within him even before he obtained the Bloodrage technique and he still doesn’t know what it is. Or what it was capable of.

Because he was inside his own mind, Kyte had the ability to perfectly sense everything within it. He strode toward a certain region that housed the foreign memories and proceeded to look through the black cloud surrounding them. What he saw were just lumps of light that had differentiating colors. He kept the black cloud in place surrounding the memories and, due to the fact that Kyte was within his own mind, he was able to see through it.

He carefully observed the memories, searching for a way to at least order the memories. He didn’t want to reach in because that would most certainly backfire immediately. The only other thing he could think of at the moment was…

“Separate the memories into emotions.”

Kyte’s voice echoed out like an omnipotent God. It spread throughout the entire realm and seemed to continue on forever. What he did was more of an experiment rather than a command. He was speaking to the black energy so he was a bit skeptical whether or not anything would happen.

Surprisingly, something did happen. The black energy instantly pierced into the lump of memories, ripping it apart and spreading throughout the contents to give order to the chaos. The memories seemed to be struggling against the black energy, however, it was no match. They were quickly spread apart into a line in-front of Kyte and the black energy displayed the memories in order.

Kyte noticed the first color was white, the second yellow, third orange, fourth pink, fifth blue, sixth red, so on and so forth. He moved in-front of the white clump and peered into it, trying to discover anything. He saw indistinct images that displayed two large people looking down at something. Kyte immediately thought of that white clump to be the Gifted’s earliest memories, which are to be during the time he was a baby. Kyte named the white Innocence and continued toward the next clump.

He named the other colors, but this isn’t a list of about naming colors, right? Anyway, Kyte discovered that this Gifted and his sister had been kidnapped and tortured because their powers were discovered. The Gifted was forced to watch the assailants take turns raping his sister and cutting off small pieces of flesh every new round. There were several D rank Guardians around, and the Gifted and his sister were about twelve at the time. The Gifted did not have sufficient experience to defend him or his sister. However, after seeing his sister mercilessly raped and tortured before being beheaded, his mind snapped and he lost control of his power. He wiped out everyone and thing there, turning everything into ash. He even disintegrated his sister’s corpse, though it was for the better.

Most of that was contained within a deep red clump. The part when the Gifted lost control was within a black clump instead of the red clump. He appropriately named the black clump Insanity, though Kyte created the criteria for Insanity to be quite wide. It contains several emotions into one which breaks a person’s mind…

Wait...did….did I just figure it out?! The way the unsealing makes the creatures behave the way they do. It’s because the unsealing doesn’t disorder the memories, it let’s them run rampant within the subject’s mind! It’s up to the victim to order their memories themselves. I see...but that still doesn’t explain how to seal or unseal. Maybe the seal just wears off after a certain amount of time? I should experiment on the sealed Gifted to find out...

Kyte went along the Gifted’s memories and searched for specific scenes. He was mainly looking for anything that involved training techniques or other skills pertaining to fighting. Since Kyte himself has limited time and hasn’t had a lot of experience, he looked for a possible alternative. Adding the memories of fighting techniques to his own could potentially help solve this problem. Of course, if the experiment was a failure then there’s nothing he could do about it.

He found several memories that involved years of training with swords and hand-to-hand combat. There were many memories that held the secrets to the Gifted’s power, but those weren’t interesting to Kyte whatsoever.

“Find any memories specifically pertaining to fighting techniques.”

The black energy instantly surged forth and searched through each clump to find what Kyte ordered. After a split second, several clumps appeared in-front of Kyte. He searched each one and discovered that the Gifted’s ability with swords was rather lacking but his hand combat was better than Kyte’s. Therefore, Kyte reached out and…

Wait. What if...

“Take out the emotion.”

The color of that one clump disappeared, leaving behind faint images surrounded by a delicate distortion. Seeing this, Kyte reached out and touched it. Nothing happened.

Hm? Oh, maybe because it’s now under my control it can’t act all willy-nilly?

Kyte willed the memories to enter him. Instantly, the clump disappeared and Kyte suddenly gained years worth of memories about hand combat. It wasn’t much since the Gifted didn’t actually practice it in real combat but it was better than nothing.

Kye stood up and punched out exactly how he ‘remembered’. The punch came out perfectly, just like in the memory. There were no detrimental side affects to his experiment from what he could see, so he came to a conclusion. If there are no emotions within a memory, there can be no influence on the person. If a memory filled with rage suddenly lost that emotion, could it still influence a person? No.

Hmm, so emotions are the reasons why memories can influence people. It wasn’t that the memories were in disarray. It was the emotions that were in chaos. The emotions are the reason why those creatures and the two Gifted went insane. I see. My previous conclusion was incorrect. This is why it’s always important for more than one experiment.

Kyte breathed out a sigh, which was technically a mental sigh.

“Destroy the memories. If foreign memories ever invade my mind again, detain them.”

The black energy responded by surrounding each clump and crushing them. Loud wails of anguish echoed out around Kyte before they disappeared without a sound. Kyte watched the entire process but was still unable to comprehend what and how it happened. Destroying memories seemed like a dangerous thing to do, but Kyte was gambling on whether or not the memories he received were a copy. Kyte didn’t think he would steal memories from someone by merely touching whatever the ball of light was, so he assumed they were copies. He hoped they were.

Kyte willed himself to be brought back to the physical reality. His vision went black before all of his senses were suddenly returned to him. He felt the rough burnt dirt below him as he opened his eyes. He found himself on the side of a small crater next to a tree that had a few roots protruding out from the ground.

“Ugh…”

Kyte put one hand on his face as pain assaulted his head. He wondered if the pain was a side effect of either returning to the physical realm or the manipulation of memories. Either way it was a result of what had occurred, although the pain was bearable. He stood up and looked around, taking in the destruction surrounding him.

Yikes.

He then turned his gaze toward the group of Gifted. He saw several expressions of fear that stared back at him, as if they were unable to look away. Taking a few steps in their direction, Kyte watched their reactions as he got closer. A few took a couple steps back as they almost fell on their butts. He got a sudden idea, so Kyte decided to use Windwalker to quickly traverse the distance between him and the group.

For the group, it seemed like Kyte disappeared and reappeared in-front of them. Several of the Gifted fell backwards and screamed in despair as they closed their eyes and tightly held their heads. Kyte turned his head to look over his shoulder before...

“Pffft...hahaha.”

“Eh?”

A few of the Gift abruptly stopped screaming as a couple others slowly stopped.

“Y-...you tricked us?!”

“Hahahahaha! Oh man, that was great! I haven’t had a good laugh like that in a while. You should’ve seen your faces!”

“You, you, you...asshole!”

The Gifted that spoke turned around and walked away several feet before stopping just on the inside perimeter of the formation. A few of the Gifted let out sighs of relief and fell to the ground as if they grew weak in their legs. The rest either had blank expressions or faces of annoyance. Kyte couldn’t help but laugh a bit more to let out the rest of his steam.

“Alright you guys, we’ll leave right now. Don’t worry about those five over there, I’ll be transporting them. Let’s go!”

Kyte used Internal energy to lift those five’s bodies into the air and began to walk forward after destroying the formation. The Gifted had tired expressions on even though they had several hours of rest. It was getting dark but they still had a few hours remaining. Kyte wanted to get the Hell out of the forest as quickly as possible. Mostly because they ran out of food and water. He didn’t want to try eating the creature meat because it had different blood than normal. Also, their blood would just destroy the body from the inside because of its destructive properties.

Despite being able to sustain himself, although it has its limits, the other Gifted don’t have that ability. Kyte could try to use that ability on them but he doesn’t have much hope. If he doesn’t leave the forest in a few days, Kyte assumes most of them will die. His reputation would already be horrible as is so adding even more to it may not do anything, however, Kyte would rather not make it any worse. He would’ve rationed the supplies but due to the memory sealing that wasn’t exactly possible. Besides, Kyte doesn’t even know the real amount of time that passed. Although his memories were unsealed he still had fuzzy recollections of the time spent inside the forest.

The Gifted had already been deprived of food and water for almost a full day from what Kyte could remember. The only things he found in the forest were trees, bushes, grass, and more trees. He hadn’t found a single water source, and, since the creatures weren’t consumption-friendly, he couldn’t find any food source either.

With all these factors, Kyte couldn’t find a solution to the problem. As long as he found a water source everyone would be able to survive a bit longer than they would have originally. The chances of that happening? Not very high. However, Kyte didn’t expect for that very thing to happen.

Two days later, while the Gifted were about to collapse from dehydration, they chanced upon a large lake with a gigantic, oddly-shaped tree right in the center of it.