"Aii, that's painful. Pity me a bit," Leon muttered, rubbing his arm.
"So, how do you feel?" he asked.
He had researched extensively and practiced multiple times to create this sigil, but since he had never used it on himself, he had no way of predicting the exact effect.
"I don't know. Just… better," Grace replied with a small frown. She didn't feel physically stronger or faster. Nothing obvious.
"Did it not work? The sigil is designed to stabilize your Telepa… Can you still hear that extra noise you always complain about?" Leon pressed.
There was no easy way to measure the sigil's effectiveness. It was subtle by nature.
"Now that you mention it… no. It's gone. That's what this thing does?" she asked, genuinely surprised.
"Not its main function, but definitely one of the benefits," Leon said with a satisfied smile.
It worked. Which meant the others would work too. In his research, he learned that the greatest power wasn't always something added, but something that removed the limits already restricting a person.
That was the core of this sigil. It removed the shackles holding her back. She would grow faster, stronger and far more steadily from here on.
"So that's what you meant by supportive. It doesn't boost my power directly; it patches the weak points," Grace said, understanding dawning.
"Exactly. Now, try focusing," Leon urged.
"Everything is… clearer." Her smile vanished. "Leon, we should leave the moment the auction ends."
His chest tightened. He didn't need telepathy to guess what triggered that shift.
Grace found herself in a world more precise than anything she'd known. Her mind, once a raging storm of other people's thoughts, was tranquil. It was like standing on a mountain peak, the chaos below reduced to a panoramic view she could observe without being swallowed by it.
Emotion was still there. Humanity intact. But now her feelings were organized, refined, purified.
Every mind in the room was open to her. She could listen. She could dissect. She could understand all of them at once if she wanted.
"Are you crying?" a familiar voice asked.
She blinked and turned. Leon watched her closely. For all this clarity, he remained impossible to categorize. She could read him, but she couldn't follow him.
"How is your mind so different? I can access it, but I can't keep up," she whispered.
"It'd be a miracle if you could. What does it seem like?" Leon asked.
"It feels like… hundreds of you are racing around in there. Every time I try to follow one, it disappears and is replaced by another," Grace explained.
Leon chuckled and rolled up his sleeve. The tattoo etched into his skin wasn't visible to the eye, but he knew exactly where it rested.
"This tattoo made my brain into a pseudo-quantum computer. My thoughts don't work in linear steps. It's not 'X then A.' It's 'if A, then all the alphabets from A to Z, then onto B.'"
"…I still don't understand," she admitted.
"Every idea I have is processed from every possible angle before I choose the most viable one. And it all happens near-instantly," he said.
"Then why didn't you give me that tattoo instead of the sigil?"
"You're still developing as a telepath. It would break you as much as it helped you," Leon replied instantly.
A telepath with a quantum-branching mind would be disaster incarnate. Those hundreds of "mini-Leons" she sensed could evolve into fully independent personas, tearing her psyche apart.
She swallowed.
"Wait… if your mind works like that, doesn't that mean you already know what's going to happen next?"