The two of us sat in silence as we did roughly the same thing, with Xilia analyzing all the images I had planted in her Brain and me working through whether or not they aligned with any of the millions of images I had seen before.
After around 20 minutes, movement from the other side of the bed drew my attention, and I opened my eyes to find Xilia staring at me with a scrunched-up face.
"When you compared these, what did you find?" she asked, clearly fishing for an answer that would lead me in the correct direction.
"They appear to be exact photocopies of one another, down to the finest micro fissure in the paint, indicating they were either stamped instead of sprayed on the surface of the boulder or that the person drawing them has such an eye for fine detail that they are able to replicate an image perfectly." Blinking twice, I answered robotically, suddenly feeling I was missing something important.
The sensation threw up alarms in my head because It was clear I was trying to remember something I had seen or witnessed before, but the information had been, well, for lack of a better word, deleted from my memory.
Yet, at the same time, I was given such a sense of Deja Vu that I knew without a shred of doubt that I had figured this very puzzle out once, maybe even more times before.
Seeing the change in my demeanor, Xilia instantly went on high alert, too, because she rarely saw me so startled.
"What’s wrong? What did you find out?" Acting on impulse, I quickly went on overdrive, leaning forward and tapping Xilia’s forehead a second time. Instead of planting, I removed all the images I had given her earlier because I understood that there was something tied to them.
"AHH, WHAT THE HELL MAN?" Flinching out of surprise and then falling backward off the bed, Xilia howled as she rolled around, clutching at her head in pain.
I admit I was a bit heavy-handed, but that’s what happens when I find something bad enough to spook me truly.
And that something was something unknown, something powerful, tampering with my Memories, my mind.
Ignoring the angry girl pouting on the floor not far away, I pulled out several sheets of paper and the pen I always used to sign contracts and went to work.
"Listen carefully to me, Xilia; the situation has changed drastically; whatever is executing these killings is no mere Returner," while I spoke, I sliced my palm open with the tip of the quill-like pen, drawing particle-infused blood and started scribbling out perfect replications of the smiley faces, starting with all the ones from the Origin Timeline.
Soon enough, scattered across the bed were 45 sheets with bloodied smiley faces lined up in order of their appearance, and by the time the final one was placed on the bed, Xilia was standing up and watching me work.
"Ok…so you drew them all out…what now."
Crossing my arms and standing up on the bed to get a better view of the drawings as a whole, I got as close to the wall as possible, activated my Psy-Kinesis, just in case you know, and soon realized there was a very specific motif on each individual smiley face that seemed to appear in random intervals.
Running with that idea, I soon noticed that each of these motifs, which were in the shape of small chips or dents in the drawings, came in pairs, meaning.
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"It’s a collage," dropping back onto the bed, I started matching all of the markings with their pair until, finally, all the images linked up, and the smiley face was no longer of importance; instead, it was the large mural they joined to create.
**(SO I added the Image multiple times, and it didn’t work; it is now in the author’s note if you want to see it. I will also be posting it on Discord.)**
"So what am I looking at here…A football goalpost with a triangle hanging on it?" Upon finishing my arrangement, I fell still and was so focused that I hadn’t noticed Xilia sneaking up beside me to examine the finished product, and when she spoke out her observation it caught me off guard.
"I wish, no, this is something far worse…" I mumbled while shoving all the papers back into my inventory and starting work on the 80 new smiley faces I had been keeping track of.
Using the same method as before, my particle-enriched blood, mixed with Psy-Kinesis, I swiftly drew out all of the images. As expected, these 80 were able to link together as well. When I started connecting them all together to form a larger picture, the first 45 formed the same symbol as the one from the Origin Timeline, but then, the remaining 35 created an incomplete image, this one if im being totally honest, it looked kind of like the Eye of Sauron from LOTR; however it was incomplete.
Still, given that there was more than 60% of the picture formed, I could roughly formulate the finalized image, and that was when I forced myself to shove everything back into my inventory just before a splitting headache assaulted my skull half a second later.
"GAHH," It was a pain unlike any other. I had felt as if something had cracked my skull open and was attempting to scoop my Brain out like ice cream. To say the least, it wasn’t very pleasant, but the signs were all there that something like this would happen, and I was as prepared as I could be.
"Not...ugghhh….this….time…!" I Spat through clenched teeth as I tasted blood and felt fluid trickling down my nose, ears, and eyes.
With eyes radiating Icy-Blue light, I moved all of my PC toward my head, more importantly, my Brain, enveloping it in a netting of protection, and no sooner than I completed this meta-physical helmet then did I hear a strange and whispy voice in my mind.
"Berniukas, neturėtum kišti nosies ten, kur ji nedera," the mysterious voice spoke slowly and with regality.