Chapter 262: The Life They Gave Him
It was not hypnosis itself that made Elias's body suffer.
The technique worked by giving him a place to fall into. Yvonne's voice had built the setting around him piece by piece: a black-blue ocean without a surface, water pressing in from every direction, a depth so immense that the idea of escape became meaningless.
For people who feared the deep sea, a short video could be enough. A diver's light vanishing into darkness. The shadow of something huge moving where it should not be. A view of the seabed so far below that the human mind had nothing to compare it to.
Elias was not watching a video.
In the drugged, half-awake state Yvonne had created, the body believed it was there.
The cold closed over him. Water crushed against his chest. His lungs burned with the certainty that no air remained. The dark was not empty. It crowded him, a vast locked room with no walls he could touch and no direction that promised a way out.
