Chapter 154 The Power Of The Eye
His eyes especially glowed like lamps, making anyone who looked into them feel like they were being dragged into another world altogether. Dante blinked once, twice, and three times to see how he looked, then turned his head around at different angles.
How to say this? There was nothing special about the design of the eye itself. It didn't have the detailed styles and sigils of eyes like the All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods, the Alpha Stigma, or the Sharingan. It was actually very simple.
Dante was satisfied. He immediately left the lobby of the World of Myriad Eyes with his true body and left his virtual body behind. He then opened his eyes in reality and realized that he still possessed the same power, which made him sigh with relief.
Beatrice, seeing that he was back so soon, looked up with interest. When she saw Dante's eyes, which were now the same color as hers but possessed a certain magnetic glow that gave him a divine as well as godly feeling, she was immediately excited.
She immediately walked over and gently gripped his face, bringing it into focus as she tilted it left and right to get a better look at him.
"Wow, Dante, you look so good! I really like this design you chose! Which eye did you settle for?" Beatrice asked with satisfaction as she sat on his lap.
Dante curled his arms over her torso and brought her closer into his embrace. "It's called the Eye of Illusions. It's a custom-made eye by the world creator that I based off the Sharingan that Itachi possessed, but it enhances the illusion effects even beyond that as the various other powers like tracking, copying, energy flow sense, Amaterasu, Susanoo, and co have been sacrificed."
"Oh? Use it on me and let me see. I want to see if a person with my level of power can resist it." Beatrice's eyes lit up as she moved to sit opposite Dante.
Dante was also itching to try it out, so he glanced at Beatrice in the eye and activated his ability. Immediately, Dante felt a wave of mental fatigue, and his temples became veiny as they visibly throbbed.
Meanwhile, Beatrice's eyes dilated slightly, but they returned to normal quickly. Her expression was full of shock and a hint of excitement.
"My god, Dante, I actually fell for your illusion for a split second! Do you know what this means?!" She couldn't help but exclaim.
Dante rubbed his temples and breathed out lightly as he nodded. "Even though it taxed me to the limit, being able to affect someone with more than 20 times my stats, even for a split second.. these eyes are beyond godly."
Beatrice glanced at Dante with disdain. "It's not just 20 times your stats. Even if I don't activate my enhancements, I have 20,000 in all fields while you only have 1,000. You are trying to say that the gap between a person with an SDI of 1 in all fields and one with 20 in all fields is the same as the gap between 1,000 and 20,000?!"
Dante's face changed greatly as he realized his mistake. He, more than anyone else thanks to his growing stats, understood the gap in power with every increment. Every single stat was theoretically a linear increment from the last, but when it reached a certain point, what was objectively linear became exponential.
A person with 1 point in all fields, for example, could easily have sex with a person with 20 points in all fields and not experience the problem Dante faced with Beatrice. However, he with 1,000 did not dare to try lest he be crushed to death.
"Try it with your Psionics on at max." Beatrice suggested.
Dante agreed and activated his level 1 student Psionics to the maximum, yielding a 10x boost that increased his 1,000 Intelligence to 10,000. Dante immediately felt like his brain had been injected with some sort of booster as his thoughts escaped his control.
He activated his eyes on Beatrice using his full power, but this time he did not feel taxed, only a little strained. However, Beatrice's eyes glazed over and did not return to normal this time. She was clearly fully under the illusive effect and could not extricate herself.
What surprised Dante was that unlike what he expected, using the basic illusion ability did not require 'continuous casting'. It was a 'one-time cast' that could theoretically run forever, and its energy came from the victim.
In other words, your own brain was powering the illusion spell whether you liked it or not, so unless you had the skill or power to break out of it, Dante could glance at you once and leave you in an illusion for the rest of your life.
How tyrannical!
Dante glanced at Beatrice and then canceled his entry into the World of Myriad Eyes. His eyes gleamed as he entered the world of Myriad Eyes once more, entering a brand new lobby and instance with fewer than 20 people at the time of his joining.
He opened the marketplace, and to his delight, he had a fresh set of 100 EC. Immediately, he called up the upgrade menu and tried to upgrade his Eyes of Illusion. The first upgrade only cost 15 EC, and Dante felt a strange energy emerge from the world and surge into his body, heading toward his eyes.
Just in case, he switched off his sensory abilities so that he wouldn't have to feel any weird pain, but his face changed when he felt that familiar feeling of the strange energy being expelled from his body like it was trash.
He could only sigh and glance at the marketplace. He contemplated checking whether he could transplant new eyes or layer eyes over each other, but that was even riskier than his initial attempt to try and get an eye.
The system would not allow a player to have more than one eye, but Dante could technically bypass that by entering a new instance and trying to buy an eye. However, he did not fancy trying it with his real body and decided against it.
"My next power system or superpower should hopefully be something that can allow me to create realistic clones. That way I can test these things out and be certain without risking my life." Dante muttered to himself thoughtfully then logged out.
When he returned to reality, he saw that Beatrice still had not escaped the illusion, which shocked him a little. He sent a message to her AI chip, and it claimed that it did not detect any problems with Beatrice.
She was in a similar state to the act of daydreaming, which was non-fatal to the human body. The fact shocked Dante because what he and Beatrice assumed was that her AI chip would trigger a shock to her brain to jolt her out or activate her Psionics, which would raise her Intelligence to levels that Dante's illusion could not suppress.
But if it bypassed the warning of even AI chips, then anyone with less than 20,000 Intelligence even in the Eternal Universe was susceptible to Dante's mercy!
This was huge! It meant that now, for the first time since he arrived here, Dante posed a genuine threat to everyone in this universe, even Headmistress Lara! historical
One of the reasons he had not chosen those Abyssal Eyes that could control time or even the Eyes of the Soul that could directly attack souls was because Headmistress Lara
had seven publicly known superpowers, of which time control and spirit body were part.
One allowed her to freely manipulate time in any way, and the other allowed her to enter the spirit realm to destroy the spirits of her enemies. Against a person who had a time-based superpower for years, Dante did not fancy using time-based eyes that had a huge price to use.
But now that the Eyes of Illusion had proven its power, and the reason why the creator eliminated everything else to focus on one thing, it was truly worth the price. When one added the fact that Dante's SDI will continue to grow in the future, this power had scary implications.
Dante snapped out of his thoughts and sent Beatrice's AI chip a command to activate her Psionics. As they were partners, he could make small, non-harmful commands like this, left to the discretion of the AI chip in consideration of Beatrice's safety, of course.
The AI chip proceeded with Dante's command for a bit before scanning Beatrice up and down to see if there would be any problems before slightly activating her Psionics. It was only a mere 2x increase, but her 40,000 Intelligence immediately allowed her to snap out of the illusion as her eyes came into focus.
"Hm? What's going on? Didn't you return to the Apocalypse World?" Beatrice asked with confusion as she sized Dante up strangely.