Chapter 520

Chapter 520.

The Intruder’s mental presence vanished, but it was not because she had destroyed it. Somehow, it had broken away from this “building” shaped by a twisted dream.

Heidi frowned as she sensed the steady flow of information coming back from the Personality Splits she had sent out. At the same time, she let her gaze sweep across the “ward” in front of her.

As the Intruder’s mental presence faded, the ward quickly returned to how it had first looked. The horrible deformed scenes caused by the corruption slowly peeled away. Walls that had looked like withered flesh turned back into the clean white walls of a medical facility. The cracked, rot-blackened ground became an ordinary floor again. Outside the ward, the gloomy, frightening air that had filled the whole facility also began to scatter.

But Heidi did not relax her brow at all. Instead, she grew even more alert at these strange changes.

Because this was not normal. A dream twisted by corruption was a closed structure. Inside it, the Intruder’s mind was the attacking side of the dream, but also a part of the dream itself. If that mind tried to force its way out of the dream, it would definitely cause a huge disturbance. A powerful dream Expert could press that disturbance down until it was very small, of course. But that Intruder… was not that strong.

Heidi knew her own ability. She had been an outstanding student at the Truth Academy and had received careful instruction from Father since she was a child. She had always been confident in the field of dreams. She did not believe that this Intruder could leave this twisted nightmare without her noticing at all. The other party must have found some way to hide, or slipped into some Cognitive Void.

She hesitated for a moment, then slowly walked toward the bed in the middle of the room.

The unfamiliar elven maiden still lay quietly on the bed, her brows tightly knit, showing no sign of waking.

In theory, this maiden was the core of the dream. Her being trapped had caused this twisted “medical facility” to appear in her dream. Under normal conditions, she should have woken up by now.

Because the Intruder’s power had already left. Whether that cultist had only hidden himself or had really run away, the corruption he had left here had clearly faded. Once the corruption faded, the one trapped in the dream should wake up at once. That was what made sense.

Because in most cases, a person could do countless strange things in their own dream, but there was one thing they could not do: keep sleeping inside the dream.

Even in dreams nested inside dreams, at the deepest layer the person’s mind was always active.

Heidi stepped forward to check the elven maiden’s condition. Then she hesitated, helped the girl sit up, and then pushed her hard back onto the bed.

It had no effect. Her patient still slept on.

“The Falling Reflex isn’t working…” Heidi muttered to herself, her serious face full of thought. “So this still isn’t her final layer of dream? Just a ‘middle layer’ of a dream within a dream? That doesn’t make sense… Even in a middle layer, the Falling Reflex should be able to wake her…”

She kept muttering, then suddenly stopped, as if something had just come to her mind. She turned around and ran out of the ward.

Her hurried footsteps echoed through the medical facility. Heidi ran quickly down the deep, long corridor. Along the way, she saw the Personality Splits she had released earlier. Those other “Heidis” holding golden awls were still roaming all over the facility, searching the place. Some checked the corridors, some checked the stairwells, and some checked those half-open doors of eerie, empty rooms. They all looked very busy.

Heidi ran past these Personality Splits. Each time she passed one, that split turned and rushed back into her body. The splits scattered in other parts of the facility also received the order. They appeared one after another from nearby junctions and each returned to the main body.

The medical facility no longer kept the layout she knew. The dream’s misaligned projection had caused a mess of corridors, dead ends, and side passages to appear inside the building. Some stairways were even flipped and twisted, linking rooms and halls that made no sense at all in real space, like something out of an absurd abstract painting. The sight was deeply strange.

Yet such a chaotic space was nothing special for Heidi, who often dealt with dreams. She easily picked out the right paths, avoided the dead ends that would lead into endless loops, and at last reached the end of the way—

A great door stood quietly before her eyes, and the word “Exit” was written upon it.

Heidi stopped. The last Personality Split ran up from behind and quickly merged back into her body. She took a light breath and walked slowly toward the door.

That was the exit of the “medical facility” and, in theory, also the “edge” of this twisted dream.

She placed her hand on the door handle and slowly calmed her heartbeat.

The edge of a dream was dangerous. It marked the Dreamer’s limit of understanding. As a Visitor, stepping over the Dreamer’s limit at random meant letting her own mind fall into a huge “undefined” region. In this chaotic zone, no longer under the Dreamer’s control and ruled by the subconscious, unwelcome intruders could meet all kinds of dangers. They might even face those terrifying things that wandered along the border of Mortal reason and lay hidden in the Spirit Realm.

Heidi hesitated. Going any farther would not fit any medical guideline.

The purple crystal pendant hanging at her chest no longer felt hot. This “shoddy product”, which was in truth only a piece of cheap glass, had gone completely cold.

Feeling the chill from the pendant, Heidi made up her mind.

This strange little pendant had not gone wrong even once so far. She decided to trust its reaction.

“If this were on a professional exam, they would knock at least fifteen points off for this step…”

Miss Psychiatrist muttered this under her breath and pushed the door open with force.

The vast darkness and chaotic Shadows she had expected did not appear. She saw no terrifying abyssal rifts and no Spirit Realm monsters.

Heidi stood at the edge of the dream, staring, dumbfounded, at the scene before her.

A lush… forest spread out before her eyes.

Everywhere she looked, there were towering trees she had never seen before. Their thick, leafy crowns overlapped and crossed high above, blocking out the sky and sun. Countless flowers, grasses, and bushes covered the ground. Between them she could see clumps of trees of all sizes and lively creeper vines. Now and then, the cries of unknown birds echoed between the giant trunks. The sound felt new and yet… strange.

sunlight poured over the dense woods, and the life it brought was something Heidi, who had lived in a city-state since childhood, had never seen before.

She could not even understand what she was seeing.

She could not imagine why so many huge trees would grow together like this. Why such precious land would be covered with strange plants instead of houses and roads. Why she could not hear the sound of the sea in her ears and could only smell plants and soil through her nose.

She fell into confusion, a confusion of both senses and mind. Even as a top student in the Truth Academy with a full scholarship and a combined master’s and doctorate track, she grew dazed for a moment. She almost forgot where she was and what she was supposed to do.

Luckily, years of professional training and her strong mental self-control pulled her back. After only a few seconds of blankness, she snapped herself awake, took a deep breath, and forced herself back into a calm, thinking state.

Then she looked back in the direction she had come from.

The “medical facility” stood right behind her, wrapped in huge trees and countless interwoven vines. Unknown plants crawled over its walls. The man-made building stood in the forest as something sudden and out of place.

But Heidi quickly drew a few conclusions from this jarring sight—

“The dream’s range really should be limited to the inside of this medical facility. This strange place outside the door is not part of the normal dream structure… Some kind of mutated ‘edge-awareness zone’?

“I can’t see any element tied to the city-state of Pland. It’s all plants I don’t know… Is this a scene inside this elf’s subconscious? But even elven city-states like Lightwind Harbor or Morka don’t have vegetation on this scale…

“Or… is this outside space the real ‘final layer of dream’? But the scale is far too big, and there are so many details… Her brain should have burned out long ago if that were the case…”

Heidi muttered to herself in confusion. Then she felt around beside her and pulled out a brightly colored ball of yarn.

She hooked the end of the yarn around her finger and threw the ball hard into the distance.

The bright ball of yarn rolled across the ground, bouncing and spreading over damp stones, soil, and vines.

Heidi watched every moment of the yarn’s rolling path, making sure none of the lines that landed on the ground turned blurry or strange.

If they did, it would prove that this place, which looked so “rich in detail”, hid a Cognitive Void. She would have to avoid those gaps with care, so that she did not fall into a nightmare.

The ball of yarn rolled smoothly into the distance without any abnormal sign.

Heidi let out a small breath of relief. Following roughly along the path the yarn had taken, she finally took her first step into this plant-covered “strange place”.

She had already put away her revolver for the moment and only gripped the protective golden awl tightly in her left hand.

In this unclear “border zone”, it was best not to use anything that caused too much noise. The lush plants here looked pleasant enough, but in the silence of the surroundings, who knew what might be hiding?

She had to be careful not to awaken those “beings” that slept at the edge of Mortal awareness.

As she moved forward with care, a question slowly rose in Heidi’s heart:

Had that cultist escaped the dream in a similar way? Had he not “woken up”, but instead run straight out here, to this strange place beyond the dream?

Could there be some trap waiting ahead?

All kinds of ideas spun through Heidi’s mind, but suddenly her heart gave a jolt.

In the next second, she snapped her head up and looked in the direction her intuition pointed.

Between several unknown trees, on a small open patch in the woods, a figure stood quietly with its back to her.

It was a stranger in a light-colored coat of southern style. The figure had messy blond hair and a slightly hunched back. Even though the stranger faced away from her, the two long, sharp ears poking out from the hair were the first thing to catch Heidi’s eye.

An elf?