Chapter 427

Chapter 428: Reconstruction

“We are inside a vast dream.”

At the moment Yu Sheng saw that line appear on the window under the word “Ascend,” he felt a boom explode in the back of his mind, like lightning without light tearing the night. At once, it was as if a hidden “curtain” holding up everything around him began to rip apart under that strike on the level of thought.

A blast of cold wind rushed into the room. It carried freezing rain. The doors and windows were shut, yet wind and rain poured into the living room without any barrier. They passed through the glass, through the walls, through every piece of furniture, and then everything melted and collapsed, twisting and heaving.

The wall not far away was the first to erode, opening a huge hole. The ragged edge ran like melting fat and revealed a crooked corridor outside. Half the corridor’s roof had been torn off. The gale rammed rain into it like a flood. A long bridge, from who knows where, hung upside down over the corridor. People staggered on the inverted deck, and the smeared shadows of many cars, black and hollow, blurred into one dark streak.

A strange roar rose nearby. The rain-pierced window finally shattered with a crash and broke into wild colors that vanished from sight. The living room jolted, then tilted and fell, only to stop in midair as if an unseen hand had caught it. Distant buildings grew upward into the sky in the howling wind, and at the same time invisible blades sliced them apart. During that “growth,” they became huge chunks that drifted loosely in the air. Metal frames that once held those buildings spilled from the gaps like long hair, drooping down to weave a forest-like web that spread through the city, tangling, piling up, breeding new knots everywhere.

All of Ink City turned into an absurd nightmare. Cold wind and heavy rain roared through the dream, picking the city up, then letting it run wild, multiplying in broken thought and runaway imagination.

“Progenitor of Dolls!” Irene sprang onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder, grabbed his head, and yelled: “What the heck is even happening right now!”

Blue spirit fire layered up around Foxy. She crouched a little and growled from deep in her throat at the invading wind and rain. Luna flashed her Fingertip Blades into place and landed light at Yu Sheng’s side as the radar System inside her started scanning the area at once.

“It isn’t Illusion Arts,” Luna said in a low voice without lowering her guard, “the changes are real.”

[A vast dream? And it’s real?] Yu Sheng’s thoughts crashed into each other. He remembered what Xuan Che had told him in his last message: widespread cognitive anomalies.

So all this was caused by cognitive anomalies? If this wild, impossible scene came from such an anomaly, then whose perception was off right now? His? But when the wind and rain poured in, he clearly felt a thunderclap shatter some kind of veil, as if he had broken through Illusion Arts in an instant, and only then did the real scene appear. [So is this the truth, and that earlier “everything normal” Ink City was the anomaly? Which layer is the anomaly? Or… are they all “anomalies”?]

A chill like a thread slid through his flesh and wrapped around his mind. Yu Sheng snapped out of the daze, shook his head, and looked toward the source of that cold touch. Irene sat on his shoulder, unaware. She stared around with a tense face.

Faint black Spider Silk was unwinding into the air around her.

Yu Sheng poked her to warn her: “Irene, you’re letting out lines.”

“Ah, huh?” Irene noticed the drifting Spider Silk at last, hurried to reel it back, and muttered: “I didn’t mean to. How did that happen… uh, Yu Sheng, what do we do now? The place turned into this, so how do we even find our big nephew and the others?”

“Maybe this is exactly how we find them,” Yu Sheng said, calm returning to his chest. He still couldn’t explain the logic of these changes, but reason said that since the window showed those two warnings, Immortal Yuan Hao and his group were also most likely trapped in this twisted version of Ink City: “Foxy, fire two missiles straight up. Make them obvious. Then we find a way down and check for any marks Immortal Yuan Hao left nearby.”

“Got it!”

Foxy nodded fast and launched two Fox Carrot Missiles into the sky. With twin booms, dazzling Fox Fire burst inside the rain and spread outward, lighting the air over the whole district.

Yu Sheng watched the spreading firelight, then stepped through the sheet of rain cutting across the room and headed for the crooked corridor outside that seemed to lead to the lower floors.

They left. Only the storm remained, pouring and howling in the empty room.

The barrier between real and unreal had been pierced. The cognitive fog that hung over Ink City for years fell like torn curtains. The wrinkled drape piled across the city and folded into these bizarre shapes.

Much later, a soft click sounded in the empty room as a lock turned.

In the corner of the living room, the bedroom door pushed open from the inside.

A blonde girl walked out, easygoing and careless, one hand holding half a jianbing, a water bottle tucked under her arm. Behind her was the living room of Wutong Road 66.

Wind and rain from this side slammed her in the face. The blonde, who always walked without looking, had opened the door and stepped straight into a downpour. Her hair got soaked. Even the jianbing went soggy.

Rapunzel stared, stunned. Beyond the door, wind and rain whipped across the living room. Outside the roof and walls, half eaten away by the storm, lay a mad alien landscape. A shattered black-canopy skiff drifted crooked through the sky and crashed into a tower less than a hundred meters away.

The next second, the blonde spun and bolted: “Ah! So scary! So scary! Red Hood! Snow White! Big bro moved our home to a weird place again! Today’s picnic is canceled!”

…

Yu Sheng’s group hurried along the skewed corridor and then went down more than ten floors of a stairwell that had already bent and warped, a stairwell that felt like it would never end.

Every so often, the walls around them opened in big broken holes. Outside each hole lay a ruined street of Ink City. Wind and rain slipped through the holes or even straight through the walls, swirling like little cyclones and racing down the halls. Yet some patches stayed dry in the storm, as if the rain could not “interact” with those parts. Water skimmed across walls and ceilings without wetting them. Even the chill in the wind felt unreal and brief.

As they crossed those halls, Yu Sheng couldn’t help thinking of the rain that fell in the Soul Wilderness, the same kind of rain that came from Sentinel Silence and kept falling like a mirage.

They reached the first-floor lobby. In Yu Sheng’s memory their room was on the seventh floor, but this time he had gone down more than ten. The lobby was under storm attack and much larger than he remembered. Rooms that clearly did not belong to this building had been “merged” into it and now stuck onto one side like pieces from another puzzle.

“People over there!”

Sharp-eyed Foxy pointed to a corner of the lounge the moment she stepped out of the stairwell.

Yu Sheng strode that way and saw a few human shapes.

But up close, they were only “shapes.”

Fuzzy figures, like human silhouettes pieced from blurred color blocks, lay in the lounge. Two on sofas, two on the floor, and one on a bed that had no business being in a ground-floor lobby. The blurred bodies turned restlessly, trapped in nightmares.

Yu Sheng reached a hand toward them. His fingers slipped through the colored blocks with no resistance.

Irene blinked. Holding a fistful of Yu Sheng’s hair with one hand, she stretched out the other. Thin strands unwound from her fingertips and linked to the silhouettes.

“They’re dreaming,” the little doll murmured, “but it’s weird. Their dream isn’t inside the dream. Do you get what I mean?”

“Of course I don’t,” Yu Sheng said.

Irene pouted, then saw several more figures flicker into the lobby.

They were the same blurry color-block silhouettes. A second ago nothing stood there. Now figures faded in at the entrance, floating a few centimeters above the floor like a bad projection. They flickered, frozen mid-stance as if standing blankly or stepping forward, stuck in the air.

Black Threads spread to those new forms at once.

“They’re dreaming too, and it’s a lucid dream,” Irene said quickly. “I can’t read their minds very well, but it looks like they’re walking into this hotel to check in. No fear. No confusion. In their eyes the world is normal.”

Yu Sheng frowned. A guess formed. His pocket vibrated.

He pulled out his phone. Where there had been no signal, a line flashed across the screen: “Abnormal fluctuation… restoring signal.”

Then a stream of messages poured in. The phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.

They were from the Special Affairs Bureau. Sender: Bai Li Qing.

Yu Sheng hesitated for a breath. He didn’t know why the signal was back, but he tapped one message out of habit.

“The database has records. What you ran into is most likely the Dark Angel known as the ‘Evolving Youth Form’…

“Beware of its Class IV cognitive reshaping. That level of reshaping can trigger planetary reality reconstruction.”