Looking around me, I was trying to come to an understanding of what I was seeing in this place. Alternating between my normal vision, energy vision and the version of the last one upgraded by Bonger to see through aura related things, I still had troubles to understand what the hell were those objects that filled this entire underground floor.
When looking at it with normal vision, it had the appearance of a simple vial filled with a translucent liquid. All the pedestals at which those vials were standing had some kind of backlight allowing the light to shine through the liquid, making one's believe that there was some kind of projection above the bottle, made up by the light diffracted by the liquid.
But the true shenanigans appeared when I looked at those items with my normal energy vision. Starting with the bottles, they looked like a bottomless abyss of chaotic energy, capable of completely sealing the content inside from the rest of the world. Even when I attempted to probe this barrier with a tiny wisp of my energy, it lost all its intent the moment it entered said barrier only to end up reinforcing it even more.
As for the liquid stored inside, I could tell that only by looking through the cork that locked in inside the bottle would allow me to take a proper look at it. Yet even this roundabout way of learning about this stuff was impossible, as the beam of light produced by the vial was simply too light for me to see anything hidden underneath it!
But the worst part appeared when I finally switched to the aura affected energy vision. In this spectrum, those beam of lights took the form of incorporeal girls, that looked exactly as one would imagine souls to look like.
All of those characters that were hanging above the vials had grief written all over the face as if being stuck in a said vial made them unable to feel anything but the pain of their existence being torn off any meaning to it.
Pulled by my curiosity, I couldn't help but reach forward with my hand, in an attempt to grab the hand of one of those uncorporeal projections, yet just like I imagined it to be, my physical hand simply passed through the projection without causing any reaction in it.
Yet no matter how eerie and scary this room looked to me, the worst has yet to strike me. As I moved through the entire room, looking for any clues that could help me understand what this place was, I suddenly saw a familiar face in one of the ghosty projections.
"Gevva?"
Unable to hold myself back from whispering the name associated in my mind with the face, I finally managed to force any reaction from any of the ghostly forms.
With her head raising, the girl with features akin to the girl that I saw dying with my own eyes showed a look of panic, only to open her mouth in a mute scream. Even if I never felt any attachment to her, especially after she attempted over and over again to get rid of me, seeing her in the current state where her soul was imprisoned in this strange vial, I couldn't help but feel chills on my skin.
Yet after a few moments, her face suddenly calmed down and returned to her previous state of calm anguish. Curious about what was causing the reaction, I moved a bit closer to the vial but refrained from picking it up.
"Gevva."
Maybe due to the repeated offence or due to how much closer I was to the projection now than I was before, the ghostly figure in front of me turned insanely ugly. As if her entire face melted down, her bottom jaw separated and hanged only at what looked like a strained piece of her throat as this entire projection reached forward in hopes of grabbing me.
Despite how I already tested that I couldn't touch or interact with the projections in any feasible way, when this sight, aking to top-grade horrors from the modern-day earth entered my eyes, I couldn't help but stumble back while covering myself in a dense layer of entropy!
Yet that's when something unexpected happened.
When this monstrous projection came into contact with the outer layer of my entropic barrier, I felt a small tug on my energy, only to see a small bit of entropy suddenly separating from the rest of my barrier only to melt the entire projection down!
Indiscriminating towards any specific part, I could see how the entire character in front of my eyes that I was scared by just a moment ago started turning into nothing more than a liquid as if someone threw a body into a pool filled with a strong acid!
As more and more of its initial figure was turning into nothing more than a simple fluid, the entire character continued to get smaller and smaller to the point where it finally condensed all back into a single, golden droplet that penetrated through the cork of the vial and landed down in its liquid, forming something akin to a golden sesame seed.
With how the projection was now completely gone, I couldn't hold my curiosity and picked the vial from its stand. Yet as if there weren't enough trills for me today, the moment my fingers came into contact with this strange matter, I felt something suddenly pulling at my energy with might greater than I ever experienced in my life!
Yet it didn't mean that it was capable of overcoming my own will!
But since it wanted to feed on my energy so much, rather than cruelly pulling all my stops to prevent it from doing so, I simply reshuffled the way in which the magic flowed through my core and body so that the only thing that this vial could feed on would be the entropy!
"Hey, can you see what I'm seeing, partner?"