Chapter 297: Clairvoyance: Shelly’s Transformation
In fact, Remia and Gregory were not the first SAI agents assigned to investigate the Posthumous Works gallery case.
The United States was home to countless cults and sinister organizations. At SAI headquarters, agents were typically divided into many specialized teams, with each team responsible for tracking only a fixed number of specific cults or organizations.
The totem depicted in Shelly’s Self-Portrait was enough to reveal the cult he had become involved with: the Order of Dagon, an evil sect that pledged its loyalty to the fish-monster Dagon in exchange for wealth and eternal life.
According to rumor, the Order of Dagon’s ultimate goal was to awaken an ancient deity slumbering beneath the sea. Everly didn’t know which god it was. Every SAI agent she had met became extremely guarded whenever the subject came up, as though merely learning that being’s true name was enough to taint one’s mind.
Throughout his pursuit of Everly, Shelly had repeatedly muttered phrases like, “Become the Door,” and, “Offer yourself for the awakening of our Great Master.” Those words certainly aligned with the cult’s ultimate objective.
The Order of Dagon was not on Remia’s team’s watchlist.
Another team at SAI headquarters was responsible for tracking the cult—for convenience, let’s simply call them Team A.
On the day of the exhibition, after Shelly’s final painting, Self-Portrait, was unveiled before the public, the guests and staff inside the small gallery were suddenly attacked, and screams erupted throughout the hall.
The shrill cries pierced through the gallery walls, drawing the attention of reporters and security personnel waiting outside.
The security guards stationed around the building tried to contact their colleagues inside, only to discover that every one of them had gone silent. Realizing something was terribly wrong, they immediately called the police.
The police of New Alder City were the first to arrive. At the time, they still believed it was an ordinary criminal incident. Following standard procedure, they called into the gallery, ordering anyone inside to come out, before dispatching a SWAT team to enter and investigate.
There was some unknown form of signal interference inside the gallery. Not long after the team entered, all communication with the outside world was cut off.
During that time, those waiting outside heard a barrage of gunfire and agonized screams, mixed with frantic shouts of, “Monster!” and “Demon!”
But the chaos lasted for only about thirty seconds before falling completely silent.
The gallery became deathly quiet.
The police officers outside looked at one another, equally frozen in an oppressive silence.
As the police department of a major city, the New Alder City Police responded quickly and possessed a certain level of knowledge about the supernatural. Because the SWAT team had mentioned “demons” and “monsters,” the department concluded that the incident might involve paranormal forces and requested assistance from the SAI Ascamona State Investigation Branch.
The branch investigators who arrived afterward used detection artifacts to survey the gallery. The results were deeply alarming.
The entire building was saturated with an extremely high concentration of corruption. The small exhibition room housing Self-Portrait was littered with corpses and writhing tent*cles, resembling a living hell.
Suspecting that the case was connected to the Order of Dagon, the branch immediately contacted SAI headquarters while simultaneously moving to suppress information about the incident, preventing news of the case from spreading widely.
A day later, two members of Team A arrived in haste and officially took over the investigation.
It was while Team A was clearing the monsters from the small exhibition room that Everly fell out of Self-Portrait.
During the Golden Anchor incident, Team A had also been dispatched to the SAI investigation branch in Yalijifu State to assist with the investigation. Strictly speaking, Everly had met Team A’s investigators before.
However, for reasons that were all too well known, SAI investigators had an exceptionally high turnover rate.
Only three years had passed, yet the two Team A investigators now standing before Everly were both completely new faces.
Everly had no basic trust in these two investigators she had never met before. Likewise, the investigators scrutinized her from head to toe with suspicion, finding it highly questionable that an ordinary person like her had managed to escape alive.
They treated her as though she were a detained suspect and even attempted to confiscate the items she carried, including her dog fang bracelet and the Sacred Tree bracelet.
Their first meeting could hardly have gone worse.
Unfortunately, unless she cooperated with their questioning, Everly had no way to clear herself of suspicion and regain her freedom.
After giving it some thought, she decided to ask for Remia and Gregory instead.
Thanks to their previous cooperation during the Cabin in the Woods incident, she had formed a favorable impression of the two investigators. Besides, Shelly’s case was also connected to the Megan Biotech Group, so Everly told Team A that she wanted Remia and Gregory to be the ones conducting her interviews.
If they refused, she would remain silent forever.
Shelly’s Posthumous Works exhibition had attracted enormous public attention, with a large number of reporters attending on opening day. Even though SAI had used its influence to suppress the news, rumors still inevitably spread throughout society. Both the police and SAI were eager to close the case as quickly as possible.
After considerable back-and-forth negotiations, Everly finally got her wish and was reunited with her two investigator friends.
In total, Everly went through three rounds of questioning.
The first round focused mainly on her experiences inside the world of the painting.
By the second round, SAI had already gathered additional information through other channels and completed a preliminary examination of the crime scene. Based on those findings, they asked Everly a series of follow-up questions about specific details of the case.
During the third round, SAI compiled all of the information they had collected, identified contradictions and inconsistencies within it, and asked Everly to explain them.
Before the three rounds of questioning were over, Everly wasn’t treated as a criminal and formally detained—but her treatment was hardly pleasant.
After all, she was the only survivor of the Posthumous Works exhibition incident, and Shelly’s biological daughter besides. No matter how one looked at it, she was an extremely suspicious figure.
Everly was confined to a luxurious hospital room.
Around the clock, SAI civilian support personnel were assigned to watch over her. She was not allowed to leave the room, watch television, read newspapers, or use a mobile phone. (Her own phone had been lost inside the world of the painting, so she didn’t have one anyway.) She was also forbidden from contacting anyone outside.
Under those circumstances, the three interrogation sessions became Everly’s only source of information about the outside world.
From the information Remia and Gregory shared with her, Everly learned that Shelly’s transformation had probably begun at the start of the previous year.
“Shelly’s psychiatrist told us that he’d been under tremendous pressure because he couldn’t create a painting that surpassed Under the Moon. His mental state kept deteriorating. At some point, he became obsessed with attending various supernatural societies and occult gatherings, hoping that close contact with paranormal entities would inspire his next masterpiece.”
The outcome was exactly what one would expect.
People with genuine supernatural abilities generally kept a low profile. The overwhelming majority of so-called psychics and miracle workers active in public were smooth-talking frauds. Not only did Shelly fail to find the inspiration he sought, but he was swindled out of a great deal of money, leaving him even more depressed than before.
Then, beginning early last year, he suddenly underwent a complete change.
The dejection and listlessness that had once defined him vanished, replaced by overwhelming enthusiasm and almost manic excitement.
His psychiatrist found the change extremely curious and asked what had happened. Shelly offered no detailed explanation. He merely said that he had discovered a way to glimpse the truth of the world and was on the verge of finding the true meaning of life.
That was also the last time Shelly ever met with his psychiatrist.
From that day onward, he never sought psychological counseling again.
SAI investigated what Shelly had been doing around the time his personality changed and discovered that he had been actively undergoing something called “clairvoyant hypnosis” under the guidance of a renowned hypnotist.
“What is clairvoyant hypnosis?”
Everly was familiar with the concept of clairvoyance. In the occult, it referred to a special method of perception. Simply put, it involved extending one’s mental power outward to observe the world in place of the eyes, allowing the user to perceive information that ordinary people could never see.
It was said that clairvoyance relied heavily on innate talent, a gift known within occult circles as spiritual sensitivity.
Those with low spiritual sensitivity could perceive only things such as spirits, emotional afterimages, or energy fields. The vast majority of clairvoyants fell into this category. Truly gifted clairvoyants with exceptionally high spiritual sensitivity were exceedingly rare. The tendrils of their consciousness could extend in every direction, transcending the barriers of time and space, allowing them to witness the past, foresee the future, or even glimpse certain beings that were meant to remain hidden.
However, possessing high spiritual sensitivity was hardly a blessing.
Once they saw too many things that should never be seen, such individuals were highly prone to losing their sanity, often meeting tragic ends.
Having acquaintances within the organization certainly had its advantages. Even though the interrogation was still in progress, Remia had no objection to satisfying Everly’s curiosity.
“Clairvoyant hypnosis is a specialized form of hypnosis developed by that hypnotist. Through verbal guidance, psychological suggestion, fixation techniques, and similar methods, he stimulates the subject’s latent potential, guiding their consciousness into a trance state. While in that state, participants can briefly experience what clairvoyance feels like.”
Under normal circumstances, the procedure was quite safe.
After all, most people’s spiritual sensitivity was extremely low. Even if they entered a clairvoyant state, at most they would see a few translucent apparitions and patches of color representing various energy fields.
Shelly, however, was different.
According to the hypnotist’s testimony, Shelly possessed exceptionally high spiritual sensitivity. During his very first experience with clairvoyant hypnosis, he was already able to clearly perceive wandering spirits and the energy fields surrounding people’s bodies.
After that first session, Shelly became utterly fascinated by the experience of clairvoyance.
It wasn’t long before he returned, requesting a second session.
The second hypnosis session, however, went terribly wrong.
The ritual was only halfway complete when Shelly suddenly bolted upright from the bed. His eyes were wide open, his face twisted with manic ecstasy, and he began shouting meaningless gibberish without pause.
Blood streamed freely from his nose, running over his chin and soaking into his clothes, making him look like a patient who had escaped from a psychiatric hospital.
The hypnotist had no idea what Shelly had seen.
He assumed the horrifying experience would frighten Shelly enough to give up.
Instead, Shelly soon returned and demanded a third hypnosis session.
The hypnotist refused.
Shelly’s condition was obviously abnormal. He radiated an unhealthy excitement. His eyes bulged unnaturally from their sockets, and he kept chewing on his fingertips. Even after biting them until they bled, he refused to stop. Anyone who saw him couldn’t help but feel a chill run down their spine.
Shelly came back several more times to plead with him, but seeing that the hypnotist would not change his mind, he finally stopped asking.
He had not, however, abandoned his pursuit of clairvoyance.
SAI discovered a large collection of books and DVDs on clairvoyance, meditation, and mental cultivation in Shelly’s home. Purchase records showed that he had bought them all after the disastrous second hypnosis session.
Using those materials as references, Shelly began teaching himself clairvoyance.
To any genuine psychic, the idea was laughable: an amateur trying to master clairvoyance by studying books and videos written by other amateurs looking to make money.
Yet Shelly somehow succeeded.
After only a few months of self-study, he successfully entered a clairvoyant state during one of his meditation sessions.
Perhaps because the experience was so extraordinary, Shelly did something completely out of character that day.
For the first time in his life, he wrote a diary entry.
In his diary, Shelly wrote that his consciousness had “descended to depths never before reached.”
After passing through a chaotic, swirling vortex, he found himself in an endless abyss of darkness beneath the sea.
There, Shelly came into contact with an ancient existence that transcended human understanding.
From that being, he received what he described as a “revelation.”
