The glass house remained intact, a transparent and seemingly impenetrable prison. Elara stared at its smooth, gleaming surface, desperately searching for a crack, a fissure, any weak spot she could exploit to reach Lisa. The girl's decision, her choice of the "garden," had given her a chance, but time was still ticking against her. Silas, though seemingly resigned to Lisa's decision, still lurked in the shadows, a threatening and volatile presence who could change his mind at any moment.
He had to act quickly and decisively. But how could he break a prison made of glass in a mental world where the laws of physics seemed to dissolve into Silas's dreamlike logic? Brute force was useless. The glass house wasn't a material object that could be broken with a blow. It was a mental construct, a psychic barrier, and it required a different approach, a more… mental strategy.
Elara remembered Silas's words, his obsession with the "purity" and "perfection" of the crystal, his desire to protect Lisa from the "corruption" of the garden. The crystal was his symbol of control, his ideal of unattainable perfection. And perhaps the key to breaking out of the prison lay precisely in challenging that ideal, in introducing "imperfection," "corruption," into the crystal house itself.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, concentrating on the image of the glass house, visualizing it in his mind as clearly as possible. The perfect transparency, the apparent fragility, the sense of immaculate purity emanating from its glass panels… That was its strength, but also its weakness. Perfection, in its extreme, becomes fragility, rigidity, an inability to withstand any… imperfection.
He opened his eyes again, a new determination shining in his gaze. He couldn't break the glass with force, but he could… corrupt it. He could introduce "imperfection" into its very essence, undermining its idealized purity, until the crystal prison cracked and shattered.
He stretched out his hands toward the glass house, and concentrating all his will, he began to visualize… impurity. He visualized dark stains spreading across the transparent panels, fine cracks marring the smooth surface, dust and dirt adhering to the immaculate glass, shadows and murky colors corrupting its perfect transparency.
She visualized the "imperfection" of the doll's garden, its oppressive and sickly atmosphere, seeping into the glass house, contaminating its illusory purity, undermining its crystalline rigidity.
At first, nothing seemed to happen. The glass house remained unchanged, resplendent in its transparent perfection. But Elara didn't give up. She continued to concentrate, intensifying her visualization of the "corruption," sending waves of mental "imperfection" toward the glass prison, undermining its psychic structure with silent and determined persistence.
And then, little by little, almost imperceptibly, the glass began to react. Fine fracture lines began to appear on the smooth surface, like cobwebs of crystal cracking under invisible pressure. Cloudy smears spread across the transparent panes, blurring their pristine clarity, corroding their immaculate purity. The glass house began to vibrate slightly, emitting a faint, high-pitched sound, like a crystalline wail breaking.
Elara intensified her mental attack, visualizing the "corruption" with even greater force and conviction, feeling the crystal prison weaken, fragment, and lose its illusory solidity. The cracks grew larger and deeper, the cloudy stains spread like poison, the vibration intensifying into a violent tremor.
Finally, with a dull, resounding crash, like the wail of breaking glass, the glass house shattered. The transparent panels fragmented into thousands of glittering pieces that dissolved into the reddish gloom, freeing Lisa from her crystal prison. Elara had broken the glass, introduced "imperfection" into Silas's illusory perfection, and undermined his mind control by sheer force of will.
Now, all that remained was to reach Lisa in the freed space, and escape together from Silas Thorne's mental labyrinth before the killer reacted to the destruction of his glass prison.
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