Humiliation, fury, and the bitter taste of defeat piled ever thicker within Tomie's heart.
Resist! She absolutely had to resist!
But how could she resist?
This creature had been the first to fuse Hypnosis with what she had learned, even before her. Even if Tomie imitated her, she was already so many steps behind; to walk that same road would mean forever trailing in her dust, eating it, with no hope of ever catching up.
She had to forge her own path! It had to be something different.
Something more direct, more overbearing, harder to guard against—something stronger than this creature's Consciousness Slash!
Tomie lay on the floor, eyes hollow as she stared up at the ceiling, countless thoughts colliding wildly inside her skull.
Sound… Hypnosis could not exist without sound. That creature's Consciousness Slash also relied on kiai to guide and implant its suggestions…
Suddenly, Tomie's scattered pupils contracted ever so slightly.
In her mind, fragments of scattered knowledge flickered past, and a certain concept gradually solidified.
That was it! Infrasound!
Tomie's eyes blazed to life all at once, like a will-o'-the-wisp kindled in the dark.
The sounds a human body could produce had a hard upper limit on their frequency. No matter what technique one employed, it was nearly impossible to attain that uncanny, ghostly repertoire of Murata Yukichi's.
So then, why did she insist on producing sound through her mouth? Why did she insist on using her own voice to create the effect of Hypnosis?
One had to remember: technology was the foremost productive force, and the greatest difference between humans and animals was the ability to use tools.
Why not implant suggestions through some other sound originating outside the human body? Just like those Hypnosis manuals Rin had read, where one wielded some sort of machine and software to implant suggestions into a target?
Tomie decided to start with infrasound.
Infrasound was a mechanical wave with a frequency below 20 Hz, imperceptible to the human ear, possessing the core traits of extremely long propagation distance and extremely strong penetrating power. If it could be used for Hypnosis, its effective range would also be far greater than anyone else's.
Moreover, infrasound could exert influence on the human body far more effectively. Low-intensity infrasound would induce dizziness, nausea, palpitations, anxiety, and other discomforts, while high-intensity infrasound would cause the internal organs to resonate, leading to internal bleeding, loss of consciousness, and in extreme cases, death outright.
She did not need high-intensity infrasound. The higher the intensity, the larger the transducer, the energy supply system, and the cooling apparatus would have to be.
For her purposes, low-intensity infrasound would suffice!
Tomie's eyes grew brighter and brighter.
With the knowledge she possessed, building such an infrasound generator was not an especially difficult matter.
Hadn't there been another Tomie who, following Rin's instructions, had gone to investigate that Noise Research Institute—the one that had produced all that black-tech? The various theories the scholars at that institute had presented to that impostor could also aid her own research.
Seizing an opportunity one night, while the Swordswoman Tomie was resting, Tomie—relying on her heightened resistance to the Consciousness Slash—restored the sensation in her severed legs and quietly slipped away.
In the days that followed, Tomie went to university, spending five years cramming acoustics, electronic engineering, and human neurophysiology.
Once she had thoroughly digested every point of knowledge she had previously only skimmed, she began repeated experiments—and repeated failures.
Gradually, the thing began to take shape.
It was a metal module a little larger than a fist, with a micro-processor, a specially crafted transducer, a motion sensor, and a miniature power unit integrated within.
Through programming, she made the module emit beams of infrasound at different frequencies and modulation patterns, triggered according to different accelerations and changes in angle.
But this was merely the first step into the threshold.
The second step was to return to the foundation of Hypnosis: sound and emotion.
She retrieved the several hundred sound templates she had observed in the past.
A furious roar, a scream of terror, a seductive whisper, the command of absolute authority, a soothing reassurance that put one at ease… Behind every kind of sound lay subtle frequencies, rhythms, and harmonic characteristics, all of which she carefully analyzed and dissected.
Then she began attempting to simulate these traits with the infrasound generator, converting those frequencies capable of triggering specific emotional responses into corresponding infrasound modulation patterns.
The process was tedious and rife with failure, and she would occasionally injure herself by accident. Yet Tomie reined in her temper and adjusted the parameters over and over.
Drawing on theoretical knowledge from neuroscience, she experimented with the effects of infrasound at different frequencies on the brain's limbic system.
At the same time, she did not entirely discard audible sound. Instead, she tried playing extremely low-frequency infrasound in sync with specific timbres or rhythms, guiding the brain to react as she desired to the subsequent, inaudible infrasound suggestions.
Fail, adjust, fail again, adjust again—and at last, the second step was complete. Tomie had successfully built a device capable of producing a Hypnosis effect on others.
Though it could never be as effective as the Hypnosis devices from the manuals, it was already a very fine beginning.
With this breakthrough as her foundation, Tomie's confidence and ambition swelled dramatically.
In the time that followed, she began frantically encoding all sorts of sensations.
The searing agony of being burned, the bone-piercing chill of being frozen, the lingering torture of being sliced by countless tiny blades, the dull ache of being struck by heavy blunt weapons, the suffocation of being unable to breathe, the vertigo of the world spinning and balance failing… Every Sensation Packet corresponded to a complex combination of infrasound frequencies and a modulation sequence.
Only when these Sensation Packets had grown ever richer did Tomie turn her gaze back to her original goal.
Revenge!
Revenge against that Tomie who had treated her as a lab rat!
And the method of revenge? Swordsmanship, of course—or rather, the Consciousness Slash she herself had pioneered.
Using modern industry, Tomie fashioned a great ōdachi.
Of course, calling it an ōdachi was a stretch; it could scarcely be used as a true blade. To her, the ōdachi was merely a tool for replicating the Consciousness Slash.
The hollow blade was forged from titanium alloy, with three parallel airflow channels reserved within. The channels were open at both ends and fitted with sliding tungsten-steel resonance plates, ensuring that the airflow could pass through at high speed while the frequency was adjusted. The guard housed a low-frequency focusing module, a mid-frequency diffusion module, and a high-frequency precision module, further tuning the sound frequencies, while the hilt was set with a mechanical adjustment rotor and a vibration-feedback device for real-time calibration…
Tomie had combined the Hypnosis device with the ōdachi… No—that contraption wasn't really a combination. It was more accurate to say she had built the Hypnosis device in the form of an ōdachi.
Not only that, she meticulously designed the motions of the swing, seamlessly linking the sounds produced by each movement with the various sensations she had encoded.
It took her a full five years or so, but she pioneered a swordsmanship capable of practical parrying and slashing, while also producing the effect of the Consciousness Slash through the sound effects of each swing.
And it was also thanks to Amamiya Rin never once neglecting his swordsmanship training during his earlier dream-incursions that this was possible at all—otherwise, she could never have accomplished anything so absurd.
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