Chapter 737: Faith is the Bane of Intellect

Jason rejoined the team as they were passing by a worship square. The temples surrounding it were in better condition than most of the city's buildings, but not through any respect for the gods. The messengers had no compunction about defiling temples but their objective had been mass casualties by breaching the bunkers shielding the city populace. The bunkers were not situated near the worship squares, leaving them relatively intact, although no part of the city had gone entirely unscathed.

All of the temples showed signs of damage, but it did not stop the gods from showing themselves in force to offer solace and inspiration. This was backed up by their various clergy, found pitching in with recovery efforts throughout the city. The square was thronged with people and a half-dozen gods were present, their aura glorious but diminished so as to not be harmful.

Of Jason's many instances of soul damage, the first significant one came from a group of gods imposing their presence on him without such care. After he recovered, the result had been a toughening of his soul and an echo of divinity that had helped make his aura more intimidating. Realising that was their intention had not made the experience any more pleasant, and he had been a magical being. To normal-rankers, the uncontrolled aura of a gold-ranker could kill them, let alone that of a god.

As they moved past the worship square without going in, Melody, still under Sophie’s careful watch, started muttering incoherently to herself. It was something happening more and more often as the dissonance between her magically brainwashed beliefs and the obviousness of their falsehood impacted her mental stability.

Jason and his companions continued through the city, taking in the misery of destruction and the optimism of unity. Old rivalries and grudges were put aside, at least for the moment, in a near-universal display of solidarity. Reaching the city walls, the group passed through a diligent security check at the gate. Their prisoner, Melody, caused questions, but their status as adventurers and the fact that they were leaving, not entering, smoothed things out swiftly enough. The checks upon their airborne entry had been far more rigorous.

Outside of the city, they quickly found the other adventurers set up. Along with the adventurers foreign to Yaresh, many of the local ones had set up camp. There was a temporary Adventure Society outpost as it was much easier to deploy from outside the city under current conditions.

A huge area of rainforest had been cleared out and tiled over using magic, essentially recreating the parking lot for giant vehicular homes that was now the city’s logistics hub. This version was a lot nicer, being fully tiled rather than stone slabs set into mud. There were also patches of rainforest left intact and even cultivated, making it more like a pleasant park with tiled pathways winding between massive parking spots and tropical garden beds. It made Jason think of a trailer park for the super-rich with people with multi-million dollar recreation vehicles.

It was impossible to miss Emir’s place, his cloud palace at full sprawl. Its five domed towers rose above all the other vehicles in glorious sunset colours. The group made their way through the park, nodding greetings to the many adventurers they passed.

***

Sophie, Jason, Arabelle and Carlos sat in armchairs made of clouds on a terrace, high on one of Emir’s palace towers. Despite the excellent view over the rainforest, their expressions were grim as they discussed Melody.

“My concern is that my attempts to bring out Melody’s original personality have done more harm than good,” Arabelle said. “My success has only served to pit Melody’s mind against itself.”

“No amount of therapy can break down magically enforced indoctrination,” Jason said. “We need to deal with that before we can move forward.”

“For ongoing treatment, yes,” Arabelle said. “But in the immediacy, we need to resolve the dissonance before it causes permanent harm.”

“What we’re dealing with is difficult,” Carlos said, “but this disassociation between the baseline mentality and the influenced one may well be an important step. I suspect that it will be a standard stage in the finalised treatment methodology.”

“You think that isolating the influenced mentality will assist in eliminating that influence?” Arabelle asked.

“I do,” Carlos said with a firm nod. “Especially given that our initial treatment regime will almost certainly rely on Jason as a shortcut. From what Jason has described, his power is near-infinite inside his soul domain. But to make changes that will hold up outside of his domain, he requires a certain amount of knowledge for delicate processes.”

“Inorganics are easy,” Jason said. “I’ve been cranking out metals for Gary to play with for a while now. Living things are harder. I’ve been running some experiments with pot plants and things… haven’t gone well. I’ve been studying a lot since then, but you’re both healers. You know how much work it will take to get even the fundamentals down properly.”

“I gave him material to go through,” Carlos said. “In the meantime, I’ve been working on isolating the physical aspects of the mind manipulation, the way you’ve been isolating the mental, Arabelle. I believe that all of our efforts will be required to get this done.”

“But for now,” Jason said, “we want to take Melody into my soul space. I believe that I can suppress the effects of the brainwashing without harm, at least while she’s in there.”

“That’s all well and good,” Sophie said, “but how do we get her into your soul space? The old restrictions on entering the portal might be gone, but it's still a portal. You can't force anyone through one."

“A not inconsiderable concern,” Arabelle agreed. “I can tell you now that Melody is likely to resist any active attempt to overcome her…”

She glanced at Jason.

“…I still don’t like the term brainwashing.”

“It’s inaccurate since she no longer has one,” Carlos pointed out. “Like any well-trained silver-ranker, her body has removed it and taken over its functions more holistically to remove a critical weakness.”

“If you’ve got a better term, go for it,” Jason said. “I just think that ‘influence’ is too vague and ‘the physiological and mental effects of the Flames of Redemption’ is too wordy.”

“Thus, my use of your inaccurate but illustrative term,” Arabelle said. “As I was saying, any attempt by Melody to actively overcome her brainwashing triggers what amounts to a defensive response from Flames of Redemption’s influence. This triggers the episodes that we’ve all witnessed.”

"They're becoming more and more frequent," Sophie said.

"Yes," Arabelle agreed. "I believe that any attempt to get Melody into Jason's soul space for treatment will trigger an episode and her refusal to use the portal. This leaves us with two potential approaches that I can see. One is to simply lie. We've moved Melody through portals before and she's gone willingly. The problem is that she's smart and Jason's soul realm portal is visually distinct from his shadow portals. At the very least, she’ll ask questions. If we don’t have very convincing answers, I think she’ll go on the defensive.”

“If that goes wrong, the odds of ever getting her through shrink considerably,” Jason said.

“That’s unacceptable,” Carlos said, sitting forward in his chair, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Your soul realm offers us the chance to circumvent problems that have stopped research like mine dead for centuries. The number of people who could be helped by—”

“I know, Carlos,” Arabelle said, cutting him off. “I wanted to put that option forward, but it’s not the approach I’m advocating.”

“Then what is?” Sophie asked.

“Playing to the weakness of the brainwashing,” Arabelle said.

“Which is what?” Carlos asked. “I’ve been studying this for months and—”

“Carlos,” Jason said. “Maybe give her a chance to answer before interrupting to ask why she hasn’t?”

Carlos turned a glare on Jason before visibly relaxing, sitting back in his chair with a nod.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No worries,” Jason said. “Passion is good. Just make sure you use it rather than it using you, yeah?”

Neither mentioned the incident where Carlos harangued Jason to be an experimental subject when Jason had barely woken from a coma. Compared to Jason throwing Carlos across the room with his aura, Carlos backing down was considerable progress.

“What is the weakness in the brainwashing you’re talking about?” Sophie asked Arabelle.

“The Flames of Redemption, the magical substance used to alter people by the Order of Redeeming Light, works differently than other, comparable processes,” Arabelle explained. “Carlos, this is your area.”

Carlos nodded.

“While the Order of Redeeming Light holds that the flames are divinely sourced, that is only partially true. The flames are an extreme modification of lesser vampirism, and I believe that part of that modification comes from Disguise, the god who was pretending to be Purity.”

“The best information we have is that the order was founded within the Church of Purity only after Disguise took on Purity’s mantle,” Arabelle said. “Whitewashing vampirism and masking it as the power of redemption falls right into the methodology of Disguise.”

“The Flames of Redemption are distinct from vampirism and other similar transformation curses and effects,” Carlos said. “Most of those cause such fundamental transformations that any essence abilities are no longer useable. The conversion process the Builder cult uses is much the same. They tend to trade off the loss of essence abilities with a rank increase, but it is still usually an overall loss in power. Essence abilities are just too strong and too versatile.”

“My mother still has her essence abilities,” Sophie pointed out.

“Exactly,” Carlos said. “That’s what makes the Flames of Redemption different. The process to instil them is a lengthy and complex ritual, and the final result is a simultaneously lighter touch while also comprehensively altering the body. There are significant physiological changes — your mother is a human now, instead of her original celestine ancestry — but the primary change is in mentality. In many ways, it’s a subtle change. It essentially plants one idea and everything else stems from that. It’s almost elegant.”

Sophie’s face darkened and Arabelle winced.

“Bloke, maybe don’t praise the craftsmanship of the evil god who brainwashed Sophie’s mum.”

Carlos also winced, realising what he’d said.

“My apologies, Miss Wexler. I’ll just carry on with my explanation. I mentioned that mid-to-high rankers don’t have brains and that their whole bodies take over the brain’s function. The flames can’t invade the soul to cause an inside-out, fundamental change in belief, so the mind must be changed by changing the body. And with no neatly contained brain to work on, a complex full-body alteration is required. Thus, the sophisticated nature of the change and the elaborate process to carry it out.”

“I still don’t see the weakness we’re going to exploit,” Sophie said.

“I think I do,” Jason said. “Fundamentally, the Flames of Redemption alter the mind in one way: They instil an absolute and unshakeable faith in Purity. We’ve seen that. Purity not being Purity is common knowledge now and we’ve exposed Melody to that. But she always denies the truth, however apparent it becomes. We’ve even had to stop doing it because it keeps triggering her episodes.”

“Yes,” Arabelle said. “That absolutism is a safety mechanism against the kind of treatment I have been carrying out. It means that when a victim’s reasoning comes into conflict with the brainwashing, the brainwashing goes from subtle to overt. A wall no amount of critical thought can overcome. The resulting dissonance causes the outbursts that we’ve all seen. Her faith is forced to override her normal sensibilities, almost to the point of having two minds.”

“The brainwashing mostly employs Melody’s normal mind,” Jason said. “It just adds that one inviolable absolute: faith in a false god. But as any devout religious follower can tell you, their faith informs every part of their lives, from values to behaviour. Arabelle’s therapy has effectively isolated the two aspects of her mind: the part that can examine things critically, and the one with blind faith. The dissonance between them as the faith shuts down Melody’s rational mind is the cause of Melody’s episodes. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Arabelle said. “Keep going.”

Jason tried to avoid thinking of Rufus’ mother — his own magical therapist — as a stern-but-sexy professor and continued.

"That means that hopefully, the brainwashed portions of Melody's mind are less able to rely on the rest of her when they’re forced to freeze them out. We just need to get her faith response all riled up. If the only thing going through her head is ‘Purity is real, Purity is real’ on a loop it will override the critical thought she would otherwise apply to any manipulation on our part. We don’t try to sneak Melody through the portal by tricking the brainwashing to not pay attention. We get the brainwashing to send her through by challenging her faith.”

“And how do we do that?” Carlos asked.

“That’s all me,” Jason said. “Annoying the deeply faithful is kind of my thing.”

“I was hoping for something a little more specific,” Carlos said.

“It’s easy,” Jason assured him. “We just have to tell her that I’m more powerful than her god.”

“And you think that’s plausible enough that she’ll go for it?” Carlos asked.

“Why wouldn’t it?” Jason asked. “It’s true. Kind of. In the right circumstances. From a certain perspective. Okay, it’s not true, but I can probably fake it enough that it will trigger her need to demonstrate her faith. And that need…”

He nodded at Sophie.

“…is the weakness of her brainwashing. Its very nature is that one fundamental value, faith, overrides her intelligence. Faith is the bane of intellect. We use that.”

"Jason, the gods can hear you," Carlos said. "You may want to clarify that you're speaking within this specific context."

Jason thought it over for a moment.

"No, I'll stand by it."

"How is it that the gods haven't struck you down yet?" Carlos asked.

“My working theory is that I’m too sexy.”

***

Sophie went off to return to Melody while Carlos left to gather his research notes, leaving Arabelle and Jason alone. Jason got up from his chair and moved to the balustrade, leaning on it with both hands. Arabelle moved to stand next to him.

“You looked troubled,” she said. “That’s not just concern over Sophie’s mother.”

“No,” he said. “I saw something, back in Rimaros. Someone tried to tell me something but they were stopped. The way it happened confused me at the time, but this conversation made me realise at least part of what they wanted to tell me. It’s not the same, but I have an inkling of something.”

“You’re talking around it, Jason. I can’t help you if you don’t let me in.”

He shook his head.

"Not this. I don't know enough; just guesses, really. Sufficient to do damage but not to do any good. Dawn might be the only person I could talk about this with, but she may know already. I'm pretty certain her boss won't let her tell me."

“That suggests you’re talking about something on a dangerous scale, Jason.”

“Oh, yes. I can’t even imagine the ramifications if what I’m thinking is true, but I strongly suspect at least some version of it is. It explains so many things that didn’t make sense to me before.”

“What will you do about it?”

“Nothing. Not yet. I’m not even sure it matters anymore, and I don’t have close to the power to keep looking into it. I might not until I’ve left diamond rank behind.”

Arabelle let out a chortle.

“You know, when I’m treating people, talking about achieving diamond-rank as if it’s a given is usually a bad sign.”

“We call it delusions of grandeur, back on Earth.”

He frowned, looking down.

“Are delusions of normalcy a thing?” he asked.

Arabelle narrowed her eyes.

“Where is that coming from?” she asked.

“You know I was roaming around under my false identity when we first came to Yaresh.”

“I do.”

“I saw someone today that I first met as John Miller. She got to see Jason Asano, dimension-hopping superhero warlock ninja. It’s something I’ve done a bunch of times, but this felt different. Like I’d lost something. It used to be fun, you know? ‘Hey, I’ve died a bunch of times.’ ‘Yeah, there’s princesses everywhere and I got in a knife fight with a super god.’ Why isn’t it fun anymore?”

“Because it was only fun when you were an ordinary person surrounded by ridiculousness. Now you are the ridiculousness. Ordinary people now have crazy stories about the time they met Jason Asano.”

Jason turned and looked at her, not speaking for a long time. Eventually, he turned his gaze back out off the balcony.

“Oh,” he said quietly.

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