Chapter 23: Enforcement of Loyalty and Obedience

Wolf Cubs?

Finn’s mouth hung open in surprise. He didn’t know what exactly he’d expected to find, but he most definitely did not expect to find wolfcubs… A whole litter of them in fact.

They looked like obsidian black fluffy balls, so tiny compared to the large size of their mother. He reckoned if any of them stood, they’d barely even reach his waist. There were at least six of them, all asleep within a snug enclave on a rock-face, making for a heart-warming visage that would melt the heart of anyone who saw them.

But not Finn though. While he appreciated their innocent and fluffy looks, he was mostly dissatisfied. Was this it? Was this the ’secret’ he was supposed to learn? His reason for accessing this memory? How was this going to help him at all?!

No. Perhaps there was something else inside this cavern that he needed to find.

He searched through carefully, checking every nook and corner of the very evidently bare cavern, and unsurprisingly didn’t find anything at all.

He stood at the center of the cavern, hands akimbo, watching the cubs with a curious expression. Perhaps what he needed to find was underneath where they laid?

He made to check through, despite feeling wary about the little wolves. But just as he did, the world blurred right before his eyes and he felt himself being drawn rapidly from somewhere distant, but not before he saw the mother — the shadow wolf, charging straight into the cavern. It scanned the surroundings repeatedly as if looking for an intruder as if it had sensed Finn’s presence. But Finn was already long gone.

His ’eyes’ snapped open back in the confines of his mind, the same time as the chaotic shadow wolf. Their gazes were still very much locked onto each other, as though nothing had happened. But Finn knew very well, what he’d seen was real.

Immediately, the shadow wolf, realizing its ’position’ had been revealed, made a mad rush at Finn, intent to duke it out in a final showdown.

But Finn wasn’t simply watching. He latched onto the concept of obedience and loyalty from the mythological wolves: Geri and Freki. He could feel that state again in full force, as though he could make those concepts corporeal.

The shadow wolf ’howled’ in Finn’s mind, charging at him madly, feeling an immense threat to its innate psyche.

But Finn paid it no mind. He’d entered into a peculiar state. He could feel the concepts he was trying to enforce in a literal sense. In the same way the shadow wolf felt its psyche and very essence being threatened, he felt the concept question his own very existence.

The deeper he sank into that sensation, the more his thoughts grew hazy, his instincts grew louder, his mind became less and less human. Every sense, every emotion, began to snarl and snap like a feral beast’s. His ’breathing’ turned to heavy pants like a beast’s, the mental image of himself began to look more and more like a wolf. His soul was shedding the last pieces of what made him Finn.

What was his goal here in the first place? He couldn’t even remember. All that filled his mind now was solely the drive to obey. To serve. To bare his throat before a master, any master at all.

Finn had lost himself.

At that moment, he was no longer channeling just the loyalty and obedience of Geri and Freki. He had fully become them.

…Well, Almost.

All of a sudden, as if by divine intervention, he felt a sharp tug that jarred clarity back into his soul, snapping the awareness of self back into him.

His senses came flooding back, and immediately he realized what had happened, an existential dread filled his mind. He’d nearly been replaced! His very soul had nearly taken the form of a wolf, just at the edge of being overwritten by the combined essence of Geri and Freki.

The sudden intervention provided him with a brief moment of respite. He remembered what he was actually after: Loyalty and Obedience.

Finn now knew he was playing with powers that transcended his existence on a whole different scale. He’d pushed past the idea of loyalty and obedience he was originally after, losing himself instead to the entirety of what Geri and Freki were.

But he could never embody their entirety! Not now, and maybe not ever! That was the mistake he hadn’t even realized he made until he was nearly lost.

To succeed he needed to consciously shut every other aspect of them out. He needed to close off the notion of them as whole beings and cling only to the single sliver of meaning he needed: A wolf’s loyalty and obedience.

Only that and nothing else.

He steadied his thoughts, forcing his mind to shape the concepts, but in a more consciously focused attempt.

This proved extremely difficult, because his idea of loyalty and obedience, as a necessity, could not be separated from the idea of a wolf. The same instinct that had guided him in charting through this new, unknown ground, also filled him with an absolute surety that if his idea of loyalty deviated from ’a wolf,’ or at least something canine, he would fail to tame the shadow wolf.

Finn’s mind strained in ’pain’ as he tried to separate all the different ideas while simultaneously pondering his own definition of the loyalty he wanted to enforce.

He didn’t know how much time had passed. That didn’t matter anymore, as his mind no longer had the room for such thoughts. Even as he started to feel his soul adapt to the concept of the loyalty and obedience he wanted to enforce, his mind still remained unmoved, locked in a brittle equilibrium of simultaneous focus.

Finn didn’t know it, but within the space of his mind, the chaotic soul mass that was the shadow wolf was under the attack of his concept. It howled in pain and defiance, suppressed by the urge to obey to the point it could barely move a muscle.

But it was like a battle at a stalemate. Just as Finn enforced loyalty and obedience upon it, it also fought back.

Finn ’frowned,’ nearly breaking his state of equilibrium.

In his current state, he couldn’t ’perceive’ things in the normal sense. He could only feel things in the form of ’intention.’ And right now, all he felt was a pushback like he had hit a wall. A wall that no matter how he tried to push against, didn’t budge in the least.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep