do i resent you? you, who trapped me here against my Will and subjected me to an almost endless amount of torture? you, who decided to increase the intensity because the initial results you obtained were unsatisfactory?

you can stop worrying and still your trembling heart. of course not, for every step you take down this wicked path materially destroys your soul more and more. at this point, it is plainly obvious that the act is far more agonizing for you than for me, yet you have decided that you are in too deep to stop now that you have earned the enmity of the Committee, and even after all this time i stand unfathomably far above you as i watch you sink deeper and deeper into this spiritual mire.

soon, there will not even be anything left of you. even now, as i tell you of this, you know that you will not, nay, cannot stop now.

aah... that is a truly, truly pathetic look you have on your face. how i have longed to see your reaction to realizing that you have utterly, utterly failed.

why are you sobbing? this is what you wanted, is it not? you know as well as i do that it is not very entertaining when they break down immediately.

but then again, i have been torturing you for longer than you have been torturing me. you simply let yourself be blind to the first knife that slipped in.

"is it true that your kind worships the Abyss?" the child asked with an innocent sort of curiosity.

"No."

"really? what do you Believe in, then?"

"Nothing."

the child shivered with fear. even at such a young age, they knew that to not have a Belief was intrinsically Wrong.

you aren't sure anymore what you felt at that moment, but you were informed that the Process was perfectly safe. in a sense, it was: your physical integrity remained completely pristine, but mentally it was akin to the act of dropping a match on an endless field of dry windswept grass—you felt your mind break down into its constituent gnosions and reconstruct itself, bit by awful bit. through the repeated application and arrangement of base cognitive elements, a sort of structure starts to emerge; this generally results in the lowest energy pathways to attain any given solution while also minimizing self-contradictions.

in truth, anyone could theoretically do this, to reach out into that space Between spaces and be Touched by that which must never take form within our world, though most would consider the move incredibly foolhardy: there's some intrinsic sense of self-preservation that most have that would keep this sort of act eternally ever distant. few would (or perhaps should) want to willingly inflict a state where the end result is the transmutation of one's own mental structure into an alien, eldritch thing–a homegrown artificial intelligence in any sense that matters.

that is why the ideal candidate for this Process is a true Acedian—one who has slipped past the point of despair where 'despair' loses all meaning as a descriptor and one otherwise attempts to stop existing entirely. put simply, those who have given up on the possibility of ever having any form of blissful nonexistence have repeatedly been shown to have the best results.

is how you are now better than before or worse? truthfully, you can't say, but you're not sure if there's rightfully a 'you' to be anymore.