Chapter 571

Chapter 571: The Spreading Depths

The tall, gloomy man opposite muttered to himself under his breath, and his one sentence made Shirley instantly hold back her urge to swing Dog at him.

She reacted at once. All the skills in reading faces and putting on an act that she had learned since she was little made her expression flawless in an instant. Looking at the man opposite her, she loosened Dog’s chain a little and put on a puzzled and slightly nervous look. “Is something wrong?”

The gloomy man smoothed his brows when he heard her and waved a hand at Shirley. “Don’t be nervous, fellow believer. We still don’t fully understand all the rules of the Nameless One’s Dream. It’s normal for some deviations to appear when we enter the dreamwalking state. It’s just that…”

He paused here, and a trace of doubt slowly appeared in his gaze toward Shirley. “I didn’t expect such a young fellow believer to show up here. Are you really fine entering the Nameless One’s Dream like this?”

“The connection with the Abyssal Deep has nothing to do with age,” Shirley said at once. She shook the sturdy black chain in her hand, and Dog beside her cooperated by letting out a tame low growl. “I’m a veteran summoner. Don’t be fooled by how I look.”

“…All right, I was being rude,” the Annihilator opposite her seemed to let go of his doubts. A stiff smile appeared on his harsh face. Then he raised his head to look around. His gaze quickly fell on the “border line” not far away, and he grew thoughtful. “The corruption boundary… We are in luck. It looks like we are not far from that ‘wall’.”

Seeing his attention shift elsewhere, Shirley quietly let out a breath of relief. She also noted the strange terms he had let slip, like “corruption boundary” and “wall”. She kept her expression under control and memorized those words, then went on using the acting skills she had not used in a long time but still handled with ease. Casually, she said: “Just now that boundary was spreading like crazy. To be honest, it was pretty scary.”

“You ran into the corruption zone expanding?” The gloomy man raised an eyebrow. “Ah, that really does sound unlucky—but as the Nameless One’s Dream keeps developing, this will only happen more and more often. According to those ‘Preachers’, the corruption and collapse of this dream are bound to happen. That’s why we must find that Wall of Silence as soon as possible… We shouldn’t waste time.”

As he spoke, the Annihilator raised his right hand slightly. A black chain appeared in the air beside him, and the smoke and dust at its end gathered into a “Death-Omen Bird”, as if something had half rotted away. It was pieced together from bones and shadows.

This Abyssal demon let out a sharp, grating cry as soon as it appeared. Then it beat its tattered bone wings and flew up into the air, as if sensing some flow of breath within the dream. After a moment, it landed on its master’s shoulder. No one knew how this muddled, dim-witted demon communicated with its “master”, but the latter soon settled on a general direction and looked toward the depths of the forest. “Let’s head this way first.”

Shirley stayed quiet and, with Dog, simply followed the tall, gloomy cultist, walking with him toward the depths of the forest.

But beneath her calm surface, her mind was already racing. She thought about this man’s goal, thought about how to ask questions without arousing suspicion, thought about how to make herself act more like a normal Annihilator. At the same time, she also thought about how she should move to take this guy out at once if her disguise failed.

She felt her mind grow sharp again, as if, now that she finally did not have to think about all those sleep-inducing letters and numbers, all kinds of ideas had come back into her head.

She carefully controlled the distance between herself and the cultist—

She could not be too close. Too close would make him wary and suspicious.

She also could not be too far away. If she was too far, she would not be able to hit him with one swing of Dog. She had to keep him within one-dog throwing range.

“My name is Sarah. What’s yours?” After a few seconds of silence, Shirley made up a name for herself and asked.

She had grown up cheating and swindling in the Slum Quarter, so such little lies came easy to her.

“Richard,” the cultist walking ahead said without looking back. “The Holy Lord gave us a shortcut to the ‘essence’. Names aren’t that important, young fellow believer.”

“Oh… you’re right. I was just asking,” Shirley hurried to nod. Then, as if without thinking, she asked: “Are there many people who ‘came in’ this time?”

“There are more than a dozen other Church brothers and sisters acting with us. They come from different city-states—but I don’t know the details. The Saint above arranges everything. I’m the same as you, only carrying out the orders passed down by the envoy.”

“…Sigh, they think I’m young, so they never tell me anything. They just send me in to scout,” Shirley grumbled casually, her complaining tone sounding very real. “And right after I came in, I ran into the corruption zone expanding. I’m so unlucky today—thank goodness for the Holy Lord’s protection.”

The cultist who called himself Richard glanced back at her. He did not seem suspicious at all.

After all, the Abyssal Hound walking beside this girl was the strongest “proof of identity”. In this world, only Annihilators could form a symbiotic pact with Abyssal demons. As long as that identity was clear, she was definitely a “fellow believer”.

At most, she was just a fellow believer who lacked experience and asked too many questions.

Once Shirley realized this, she herself grew a bit bolder.

She began to make use of her image as “young and inexperienced”, dropping one roundabout question after another from time to time.

Dog’s slightly puzzled voice sounded in her mind. “Shirley, why do I feel like you’re actually pretty excited?”

“Of course I’m excited. I’m about to do something big!” Shirley kept chatting idly with the cultist ahead, her face calm, while she muttered to Dog in her heart. “If I can trick him into saying a few useful things, the Captain will definitely reward me later—maybe I won’t have to memorize vocabulary for a couple of days… Dog, Dog, do you think if I catch one alive and bring him back, he can cover my math homework?”

“How are you going to drag someone back out of a dream?”

“Ah… right. I forgot about that part.”

…

Deeper in the district, vines and giant trees that seemed to have grown and spread out from the dreamscape wrapped around and covered every building in sight. The whole block became a silent, shadowy, eerie forest.

Dark-colored vines climbed the high walls nearby. Fine thorns coiled around the lamp posts. Tall trees blocked the mouths of alleys, and their crowns covered the rooftops of the buildings. Some branches crisscrossed between the trunks and went straight through those dead-silent houses, as if fused with the solid cement walls. It created a strange scene where the forest and the city’s buildings merged and twisted together in a warped symbiosis.

In this eerie, deathly still scene, the footsteps of Duncan and Alice sounded especially out of place. They even seemed like a ripping, discordant noise inside this “spreading dream”, echoing along the empty street.

Duncan frowned, his gaze sweeping over the lifeless street before him.

The towering crowns of the trees blocked out the sky. Both the sunlight that usually spread in from the sea outside the city-state and the cold glow of the World’s Wound that faintly appeared in the night were blocked by the thick plants over the district. The street lay in an unsettling gloom, and in that darkness, he and Alice had not seen a single person as they walked.

That was, of course, not normal.

The district was under curfew after nightfall, but even on a curfewed street they should still have seen patrolling Church guardians.

Yet there was no one at all—not only was the street empty, but when they passed some houses along the road, Duncan and Alice did not see any figures inside them either.

Some of those houses even still had their lights on. From the way things were set up, it looked as if someone had been moving around in the living room just a moment ago.

“We haven’t seen anyone in the part of the district covered by this ‘forest’, not on the streets and not inside the buildings,” Duncan said, turning his head toward the puppet head Alice was holding in her arms. “It’s like everyone has vanished, just like you did.”

“Like us?” Lucretia’s voice came from the puppet’s mouth, sounding a bit distorted. “Do you mean… everyone in the whole city has been shifted into this ‘dream’?”

“Hard to say, but at least in the places Alice and I have passed, the people are all gone,” Duncan shook his head. “Over there, have you run into anyone else who entered the dreamwalking state from the Mortal Realm?”

“No,” Lucretia answered at once. “I’m still moving together with this elf who calls herself ‘Celine’. We haven’t met anyone else along the way.”

Duncan listened quietly, then turned to look at Alice. “Can you see any ‘lines’ around here?”

“No,” Alice shook her head. “We haven’t seen any at all.”

Duncan nodded, his face dark.

The lines of spirit form could not hide from Alice’s eyes. No matter how clever the masking trick, as long as a “person” was still in the Mortal Realm, Alice would see the “lines” drifting in the air. But now even this doll said she saw nothing at all… That could only mean that, at least within the streets that had changed like this, the “people” really were gone.

This was not like what had happened before with Taran Ael, or with that elf maiden from Pland.

Although it still seemed that this incident was related to the Nameless One’s Dream, clearly… this time the dream’s scale and power had grown to an unimaginable level.

Duncan lifted his head and looked into the center of the altered district through the gloom.

Suddenly, a patch of shadows in that darkness caught his eye.

It was a structure that wound between the buildings, like a huge vine or some exposed root system stretching outward.

It lay there quietly in the dark, as silent as everything around it. Yet for some reason…

Duncan kept feeling that this huge “vine” was different from the rest.