Hermes carefully inspected the wrist, pondering what its significance might be and why he would find it right here. Nevertheless, the teenager couldn't formulate a single hypothesis that connected everything he had experienced in this dream with this doll, and it was bothering him. Trying to uncover the truth behind this mysterious object, Hermes scrutinized the doll more closely and realized that it seemed to have a stone inside its belly.

Hermes tried to touch this stone to make it do something, but no matter how hard he pressed it, it didn't seem to react strangely. Tired of trying and failing, Hermes opened the doll's belly with a small flame that emerged from his finger, revealing that the stone inside the doll was actually a brown-colored crystal. Recognizing the crystal, Hermes rubbed it while commanding:

—Doll, sing your song.

The brown crystal emitted a faint glow, but despite that, the doll did not sing any song. Instead, the dry and monotonous voice of a much older man could be heard speaking from the crystal, as if what he was recounting was a meaningless routine, and the man was already quite tired of recording the same message over and over.

—Recording start. Recording 1423 by Acolyte F-24: another day, another successful experiment, another failed result. Clearly, Acolyte F-24 is experiencing the usual consequences of having merged his mind with that of his brother, but delving into his consciousness, the only noticeable thing this time was memory X-44, also known as "The Dinner". As always, during the memory, no abnormalities were observed, showing a clear conflict between what should happen and what actually happens. The only difference from the neutral X-44 memory is that during dinner, horse soup was eaten, responding subtly to the stimulations provided in the laboratory: too subtly to be considered a successful result. End of recording.

As he listened to the emotionless message, Hermes slowly turned around to observe with wide eyes the practically infinite corridor he had been running through all this time, while some drops of sweat fell from his forehead, staining his silver mask. However, before Hermes could snap out of it, another message began to emanate from the crystal. Unlike the previous message, this one was full of excitement, and from the background noises, it seemed that a party was happening while the message was being recorded.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

—Recording start! Recording 2523 by Acolyte F-24: another day, another successful experiment: another successful result to decorate my biography, long live life! Finally, after exactly 2523 days, we managed to understand the problem in Acolyte F-24's dreams, and the answer was given by none other than the guard who cleaned the room: "If everything is normal, then it's abnormal". Wasn't it obvious? Why didn't Acolyte F-24, who was subjected to different tortures every day to develop multiple traumas, exhibit any of those irregularities in his dreams? Easy, precisely because he couldn't! Since Acolyte F-24 merged his mind with that of his brother, he was deprived of experiencing a "normal" dream. Therefore, his dreams never represented what was happening in the laboratory. Instead, they were a continuous copy of events that had already occurred or a repetitive distortion of them, over and over again, with few variations, showing a slight influence from our laboratory stimulations. So, what was the common denominator of all these dreams? Firstly, the lack of coherence with the traumas currently experienced by the subject. Secondly, the inability to explain themselves. These dreams completely lack meaning because they are the product of two subconscious minds battling each other to give meaning to the dream, completely erasing any individuality and leading to a constant, repetitive, neutral, and interpretation-free state. However, the weak traces of this struggle are still detectable, and the subject still responds to stimuli, although those traces are too weak to consider that he is dreaming about the trauma he experienced. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that the fusion of minds caused by Minos's curse is not the responsibility of the fused minds in question but because the subconscious minds of the two individuals never fully merge, they always remain in a constant state of conflict. So, the question arises: Why are there two subconscious minds in Acolyte F-24 if we have already destroyed his brother's subconscious? And the answer, as mentioned at the beginning of the experiment, is that the destroyed subconscious of his brother is reborn from Acolyte F-24 himself. Is it identical to the original? No, of course not, but that subconscious imagined by Acolyte F-24 is as valid as that of any normal human being. From all of this, it is also deduced that Minos's "failed" method ultimately succeeded in "reviving" Acolyte F-24's brother, killing himself and his real brother in the process.