楼上的上瘾女士

Hal started his information sharing from the very beginning and from the very foundation and very start of the formation of all things.

He started showing the Empress the jumbled and incomprehensible visions of the state in which both Order and Chaos had been at the start and he only got to the point where they both got bored with the monotony of their existences and came together to create the spark of creation.

That was as far as he could go and as much as he could reveal to the Empress before she reached the limit her mortal brain could handle.

Hal had actually reduced the impact the information would have on her mind by retelling the tale in a much more mortal manner and that was why she had been able to handle as much as she had.

That said, he had not actually attempted to take away all harmful impact by telling her the tale orally because straining her mind was the point of the whole thing in the first place.

For the Empress... Her feelings at the moment were a tad bit conflicted...

On one hand, she was excited and felt that she had never been more alive all her life except for this precise moment, and on the other hand, she was experiencing a massive ache in her head, an ache which had her pleading for the sweet release of death.

She had just witnessed the birth of all things...

She believed all she had seen to be true and for reasons she would not reveal to Hal, she was very sure he had not manipulated her because he could not possibly do so... He was not powerful enough to do so.

The fact that his cultivation was hidden from her senses did not change this. She was quite confident in how safe she was.

Her mind was her strongest resource and the part of her that was least prone to manipulations.

She even had a defense mechanism that would kick at the moment Hal went too far with his passing of information into her head. The moment it reached the threshold where it could cause her irreversible damage, her defenses would kick in.

It had actually been a good thing that Hal stopped feeding her head with information when he did.

Hal took his fingers away from her head and watched with incredulity as the Empress' mind healed from the strain it had been put through.

She healed almost instantly but then bowed her head and held pressed her fingers to her temples not in pain but in marvel at what she had just witnessed.

When she looked up at Hal, she was smiling which told Hal that his experiment had been a success... Even before she spoke,

"No words are enough to describe how incredible that was."

,m Hal smiled in return and took a bow before walking back to his seat,

"I thought you might find it interesting," he said as he sat back down.

"Interesting? That was beyond interesting" The Empress said.

With how much she sought out knowledge, it is easy to guess that somewhere, somehow, she had seen reports on how all things had come to be. She had read explanations and knew full well what the Primordial concepts were.

She knew of Order and Chaos and was one of the very few mortals who knew about the Great Catastrophe while also knowing that Order and Chaos had caused it.

She had read scripts and scrolls that took her into the consciousness of gods in Paradise and through them, learned things that should have been unknown to her as a mortal.

How the world saw her (An information junkie) was not enough to express just how much of her life and lifestyle was tied to the sourcing of information.

She was a bit of an enigma...

Her interest in the gathering of information went past simple interest... It was a drug she fed and proved her greatest trump card in case of an altercation.

Many times, Harlyn Haron, the Empress of the Haron Empire had found herself at death's door due to how far she had gone with her vision trips into the heads of gods.

She had violated the minds of quite a few gods in paradise and even then, none of her victims succeeded in striking her down.

She would get in, always guided by Divine scripts, get what she wanted, and be done before they could act against her.

There had been many close shaves but her survival was almost always guaranteed.

She considered herself quite a lucky individual and considered herself to be very wealthy with the only currency that truly mattered; Knowledge.

When she looked at Hal, she wondered how he had come about knowing what he knew.

How was his mind so powerful to hold something so massive while she had been incapable of handing a mere silver of it.

What was he? She wondered.

"I want to know more," she said.

When she said those words, Hal saw even better how successful he had been... He had gotten the Empress excited... In all forms of the word.

He had suspected that what got the Empress off was to be mind-blown and he had been right.

Many aspects of the Empress' life had even tied with information sourcing and information gathering. It was not to say that she was incapable of living normally, but the secrets to getting absolutely close to her lay in telling her something that she really did not know.

The Empress seemed to quickly note the tone of her words and better rearranged her expression as she said,

"What you have shown is merely a glimpse. A glimpse that is already invaluable. Not even the knowledge I possess could possibly be good enough as compensation. And yet, I wish to know more."

Hal shrugged,

"If you want to know, then I, of course, will tell you. You don't need to pay me. There need not be an exchange." he said and shook his head slowly.

Why would he ask for anything when he could use this to score some good points with the Empress and lay the groundwork for maybe taking away one of the biggest support systems the Haron Empire possesses.

There was a very earnest need to look at the bigger picture...

***

Hal left the Empress's office soon after that to her smiling at him as he left.

He knew that she knew that he was being insidious.

He knew the Empress did not consider him to truly be willing to share information with her for free and Hal also knew that while the Empress had claimed to not be as extreme as many others he would meet, she was not totally above using underhanded means to get what she wants.

While she might mean well, Hal was sure she had skeletons in her closet and had done a good deal for the things she considered to be important.

He, of course, knew that he had revealed a massive aspect of what made him the enigma he was but it was all going to be worth it in the end.

Besides, the Empress could rack her brain all she wants, but Hal highly doubted she would successfully come up with a solid explanation for what he was capable of.

He was curious tho as to what theories she would come up with and as he distanced himself from her office building, Hal found himself wondering if Melinda would be brought into the theorizing process.