Though most side effects were minor, there were rumours that a small number of soldiers went mad. In feral states, they massacred villages, impaling the populace on bayonets, leaving them hanging from trees. There were no official reports on the subject, and Talbot refused to blame himself for what could only be exaggerated war stories. Though his callous brilliance seemed unflappable, he was ignorant to the enemies his questionable work had amassed. The realisation struck him quite literally-with a steel pipe to the back of his head during a trip to Mangalore. When his blindfold was removed, a sickly man showed him a mass grave filled with hundreds of bodies. Unbeknownst to Talbot, his productivity-increasing drug had killed nearly an entire factory's worth of workers.
He knew he couldn't defend himself against the anger and accusations of his abductor-all he could do was curl up as the blows from the steel pipe rained down. His body was thrown into the grave and left for dead. Shifting between consciousness and the darkest black, he crawled for an escape, fingers sinking into rotting flesh.
Black flies feasted on his uncovered skin, the sensation of a hundred pin pricks stabbing into him. As he collapsed, he came face to face with a dead woman's dazzling hazel eyes. Too weak to pull away, he could do nothing but witness his life's work. Then, from the edge of death, he was brought back. He found himself on a small bed as a kindly, wrinkled face looked over him. With each pained breath, he was nursed back to health in an ancient mystery school posing as a monastery. In verdant gardens behind tall, unassuming walls, monks studied forbidden texts, striving to expand the human mind in the search for other dimensions-believing one to be connected to the other. Talbot's knowledge proved indispensable, his mind-altering chemicals integrating seamlessly with theories of neural expansion. He realised then that his salvation was no coincidence-he was plucked from the pit specifically to advance the school's knowledge. He agreed to help until his recovery was complete, being tasked with researching what the monks called the soul chemical, a compound derived from the pineal gland that could open the mind's eye.
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