The Gamer's POV-Chapter 215: A Familiar Stranger

Leon’s eyes slowly fluttered open, after which a small smile tugged at his lips. He slowly began to lift himself up from where he had been resting, while also looking around.

That was when he saw Celeste sitting beside him with her legs folded. With the others busy organizing the hunt, she had been asked by Ino to look after him.

"Hey," Leon said, while offering a bright smile that caused her to squint and lean back a bit.

"You are finally awake," Celeste replied with a small, relieved sigh. She then leaned in a bit and looked at him more closely. Then, with her eyes still fixed on his, she added, "Congratulations on the advancement."

Leon felt his cheeks grow warm at her praise, and he quickly looked away from her blue eyes, then scratched the back of his neck with a sheepish grin. "Thanks. I just... I am glad I could evolve. It means I have a bit more power to help people out."

Celeste didn’t say anything to that and just bobbed her head back, while also letting out a quiet, amused huff at his modesty.

Leon looked back at her after looking around briefly, then asked. "By the way, where are our party members?"

Celeste finally looked away and pointed to a small distance where lots of cadets were gathered.

"Somewhere among that group planning tomorrow’s hunt," she replied exhaustedly.

"Tomorrow’s hunt?" Leon arched a brow. "Is Cedric already out of food?"

Celeste hugged her legs tighter, then lowered her gaze to the ground. After a few seconds, she sighed and replied. "We don’t know why, but... yesterday, all of Cedric’s feathers suddenly vanished."

Leon frowned as Celeste added, "We believe something bad may have happened to Cedric."

Leon opened his mouth to speak. However, right at that moment, a piercing headache suddenly seized his mind, causing him to groan.

"Ack!" He clutched his temples with both hands as a series of blurred, fragmented images began to flash behind his eyes.

Celeste snapped her head to him, then reached out and placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

Leon squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the pulsing pain to subside before he finally let out a shaky breath. "Yes... uh... I think I’m..."

He was still in the middle of trying to reassure her when the pain came back again, hitting him with twice the intensity of the first wave.

"Ack!"

As he held his head, the tattoo on his right arm shone brightly as Uriel began to take form beside him. After which, she quickly reached out to support his weight and cried out in a voice filled with both panic and concern. "Leon! What’s happening?!"

Leon didn’t answer as the pain continued to hammer through his skull, growing even more unbearable as the seconds passed.

Then, the fragmented images in his mind began to piece themselves together until he saw a memory he did not recognize.

In this memory, he could see a young man in his twenties wearing a long, black trench coat. The man had black hair, black eyes and a perfect build, and he also had an enigmatic smile on his face.

The most unsettling thing was that the man possessed the same face as Kim Min-jun.

Of course, Leon did not know who Kim Min-jun was, and so, didn’t know who this man was.

However, for some reason that he couldn’t put into words or logically explain, the man felt familiar to him. So familiar that the sight of him caused a strange, aching pressure to build within his chest, as if his very soul were trying to reach out and bridge the gap between them.

’Who is this man? Why do I feel like I have known him all my life?’ Leon wondered, his thoughts swirling in a chaotic storm of confusion and recognition that he could not quite grasp.

But that was not even the most disturbing part of this strange memory.

The man was standing beside a stone bridge that arched gracefully over a crystal-clear stream in the center of a beautiful garden. He had one hand in the pocket of his coat while he kept throwing pebbles into the water with a rhythmic, almost mechanical motion. The garden around him was filled with vivid, blooming flowers that seemed to sway in the gentle, warm breeze and the air was thick with the sweet, heavy scent of jasmine.

As Leon watched the scene unfold, he couldn’t help but grow even more disturbed and unsettled because this garden looked eerily familiar to the garden in his inner sanctuary.

’What the hell is happening? Make it stop!’ Leon screamed inside his mind as he clutched his head with both hands. He was now rolling on the ground in agony. It felt like his head would explode at any moment from the sheer volume of information and foreign sensations that were being forced into his consciousness.

"It’s happening again, Uriel. The strange memory."

Uriel’s eyes widened in even more panic. "What? Wh.. why?"

This was not the first time Leon was encountering this memory or vision or whatever it was. The first time it happened was a few months ago here in the first ring, and now, it was happening again.

Why? Why was this happening?

The worst part of the entire experience was although Leon knew that the influx of these foreign thoughts was dangerous, he had no way of stopping the process.

The memory grew more vivid and the sounds of the garden began to fill his ears, drowning out the real world.

He could see that the man throwing the pebbles into the water seemed to be talking to someone. However, Leon could not recognize the person because the person was shrouded in a blinding, ethereal light that blurred their features.

Suddenly, the man throwing the pebbles ran out of stones. He paused and pocketed his hands. But almost immediately, a cold and detached expression began to replace the calm, enigmatic smile he had been wearing only moments before.

Turning to the man shrouded in light, he spoke in a calm voice. "Do you trust me?"

The man shrouded in light replied, "What silly question is that? You know I trust you more than anyone in all our worlds, so get on with it."

A small smile returned to lips of the man dressed in black. He let out a long exhale, then eventually spoke. "I have a plan." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

At this point, blood began to seep and trickle out of Leon’s eyes, nose, and mouth as the sheer pressure from the memory reached its breaking point.

He could tell that if this went on, he would definitely die.

Fortunately for Leon, just as the man in black was about to speak again, the memory suddenly shattered like a broken mirror and began to collapse into the dark depths where it had emerged from.

The reason for the abrupt interruption was because unbeknownst to him, somewhere far away, a notification had popped up in Cedric’s consciousness.

[Resuming Gamer Privileges...]