Chapter 136: Multitudes
TL;DR
Red wins the psychic battle by becoming a crowd of minds — In Bill’s dark lab, Red survives Rowan’s hive-like mental assault by deploying mirrored partitions of Sabrina, Rey, Leaf, Will, Agatha, Jason, Blue, and even the Dreamer, turning his mind into a coordinated anti-Rowan swarm.
Rowan isn’t just unstable — he’s a three-part amalgam infected by something bigger — Red uncovers that Rowan, a Tulpa called the “lonely one,” and the “hungry one” have fused into a fractured entity after contact with the Unknown, with Rowan’s earlier warning to Red revealed as a last act of resistance.
The episode finally explains Rowan’s descent in vivid detail — A nightmare about an approaching cosmic threat, then a mesmerising encounter with a wild Unknown swarm, led Rowan to believe he was learning from it before realizing too late that it was more like a virus spreading through his mind.
Psychic combat here is framed as identity warfare, not just force-on-force battling — Through earlier training with Sabrina, Rey, and Will, Red learns the real ‘kill shot’ is to find the belief or desire someone’s whole worldview rests on and flip it, which becomes the key to disabling Rowan.
Red’s most brutal move is also the one he least wants to use — Unable to physically secure Rowan and nearing collapse, he projects a reconstructed desire for oblivion borrowed from another mind onto Rowan’s core will to live, effectively ending the fight by making Rowan let go.
The human fallout lands as hard as the lore — After all the abstract psychic complexity, the chapter ends with Red alone on the lab floor, helmet off, body wrecked, radio slipping from numb hands, managing only to tell Looker that it’s over and that Rowan needs help.
The Breakdown
A chase through Bill’s blackout lab
The chapter opens like a thriller: Red stumbling through Bill’s underground lab lit only by scattered red emergency lights, tracking Bill and Rowan through sidear pulses in a game of “cat and mouse where the cat can see through walls.” He realizes Bill isn’t fleeing the facility, which suggests he’s protecting something, and Red heads for the engineering lab at the center to keep a mental connection across the whole complex.
Bill’s mind is slippery, Rowan’s mind is a swarm
When Red merges with Bill, he finds two problems at once: Bill’s thoughts are oddly hard to grab, and Rowan’s fractured consciousness is all over him, picking at his mind like Durant carrying scraps back to a hive. Bill keeps looping on “Got to get to the—” while fear and some kind of mental sabotage stop the thought from completing, and then Rowan abruptly switches targets and merges directly with Red.
The training pays off: Sabrina, Rey, and Leaf enter the fight
As Rowan starts tearing down Red’s partitions, the chapter flashes back to Sabrina explaining that psychic combat is about learning the structure of the other mind faster than they learn yours. Red then weaponizes the mirrored mental states he trained with: Sabrina for ruthless psychic offense, Rey for analytical strategy, and Leaf for destabilizing compassion. That Leaf angle is especially sharp — her care for Rowan is real, and that authenticity keeps parts of Rowan’s mind from rejoining the attack.
Rowan’s origin story: the lonely one, the hungry one, and the infection
Once Red and his partitions push through, the chapter drops the biggest reveal: Rowan’s mind contains not just himself but a Tulpa born from his loneliness and a deeper corruption tied to the Unknown. Rowan first receives the Dreamer’s warning nightmare, then goes searching, encounters a terrifyingly beautiful Unknown swarm, and mistakes infection for insight. From there he and the lonely one become entangled with the “hungry one,” spreading influence through wild Unknown while half-believing they might still turn it against its source.
The Dreamer flashback reframes everything
A long flashback fills in Red’s secret training with the Dreamer — the anonymous psychic who contacted him telepathically, later revealed to be using a specially made Tulpa as an interface. The Dreamer teaches Red a new way of fighting minds, and that mirrored state now becomes a force multiplier against Rowan’s own corrupted Tulpa. It also ties the chapter’s themes together: partitions, Tulpas, identity, and the danger of building extra selves when something alien can get inside them.
Will’s “kill shot” becomes the chapter’s moral knife twist
Another flashback to Will sharpens the final tactic. Will tells Red that the real way to break someone in psychic combat is to find the single deep assumption their worldview depends on and “flip that switch.” In the present, Red realizes Rowan’s deepest surviving core isn’t a belief but the bare will to live — the thing keeping Rowan, the lonely one, and the hungry one locked in unstable equilibrium.
Red wins, but only by pushing Rowan toward oblivion
Red has Rowan mentally disabled but is too exhausted to hold him, arrest him, or guarantee he won’t hurt anyone again. So he does the ugliest thing available: reconstructs from memory a suicidal desire for oblivion and projects it into Rowan’s core. Red immediately feels Rowan let go — “a sigh as he lets it all go” — and the victory lands less like triumph than mutual collapse.
The aftermath is all body, pain, and static on the radio
When Red wakes, Bill and he are the only awake minds in the lab. His body is wrecked, his head is splitting, his legs won’t hold him, and the psychic battle’s metaphysics give way to a painfully physical scene of crawling for the radio and trying to answer Looker. He gets out only the essentials: “It’s over,” “Need medical,” and most importantly, “Rowan needs help,” before blacking out again.