Chapter 431

Chapter 432: Startled Dream

After Yu Sheng told the young woman everything he had learned, she stayed quiet for a long time.

“I know this is hard to accept, because it does sound unbelievable,” Yu Sheng sighed, lifting a hand to point around them, “but it’s true. Look around you. This is the strange scene squeezed out at the edge of people’s collective subconscious when the real and the unreal clash. I can’t tell how you suddenly woke up, but if you think back, you should notice those wrong details that always hovered around you yet never made sense.”

Mo Ran kept silent at first. After a long pause, she spoke softly: “Many years ago, the planet called Sentinel Silence started showing a ‘weird illness.’ Very few fell sick, but the symptoms were strange. For no clear reason they would suffer an outbreak of heart demons, or go mad in broad daylight, saying they saw horrible things. But in a very short time they would suddenly return to normal, even forgetting they had gone crazy, though their core was weakened and their cultivation could hardly improve again.

“Besides that, cultivators on Sentinel Silence are more likely to suffer Qi Deviation than those elsewhere. The rate isn’t huge, just a little higher, but no matter how we checked or tried to fix it, that rate stayed higher by that little bit.

“For a long time, everyone thought this had to do with the planet’s earth veins or the network of spirit ore collection and refining facilities. Time passed, nothing was proven, and it became normal to say, ‘Sentinel Silence is a bit odd, the distant lands have poor energy flow.’ People just said it like that.”

Mo Ran exhaled, reining in her emotions as her gaze fell on Yu Sheng: “Since you all can come and go freely in this eerie zone and came on your own to investigate, you must have real skill, Immortal Envoy Xuan Che. He must have held some things back from me before, just to be safe. Please tell me what we should do next, expert. I will give my full support.”

“You don’t need to do anything for the moment, but soon we’ll need the City Lord to take charge,” Yu Sheng clearly had a plan and said casually, “Right now we must find the Evolving Youth Form as soon as possible and drive it off this planet before it completes Metamorphosis. To do that, we have to enter the real Sentinel Silence. We need a way to pierce this Nightmare Border.”

“Pierce it?” Irene looked up at Yu Sheng without thinking and asked: “How? Do you already have an idea?”

“The Evolving Youth Form uses everyone’s shared ‘cognitive barrier’ to hide the real Sentinel Silence. So the key is to punch a hole in that barrier. It has to be a big hole, big enough to tear reality across a wide area,” Yu Sheng said, rubbing his chin as he thought. “Ink City is a large city. Its huge population is the best breakthrough point. If we can ‘wake up’ a lot of people in a short time, this barrier that only works through the collective subconscious should start to split.”

Irene blinked, giving off the vibe of someone trying hard to keep up but failing, then blurted: “So how do we do that?”

“You’re asking me?” Yu Sheng stared: “You do it. Aren’t you the best at shaking people awake from their dreams?!”

The little doll froze, then got it. She lifted her head to look around and shrank her neck: “Come on! Easy for you to say! Do you know how many people live in this city? You want me to wake them all up? Even if you hand me twenty thousand Mass Production Units right now, I might still not have enough!”

Yu Sheng narrowed his eyes: “There are a lot of people, yes. But what if there’s only one dream you have to enter?”

Irene said: “Huh?”

“Did you forget what I said? ‘Collective subconscious.’ The cognitive barrier over Sentinel Silence is linked at the base level. At least in a big ‘gathering point’ like Ink City it has to be,” Yu Sheng said, remembering how Irene had unconsciously released those ‘threads’ earlier. “If I’m right, when you stepped into this Nightmare Border you already sensed it. But you ignored the ‘collective dream’ by instinct, because it was hiding from you. To it, you are a threat.”

The little doll listened in a daze, as if memories and new feelings were rising together.

“Irene, think back to when we were still on Immortal Conclave Isle, right after we saw the warning words on the glass,” Yu Sheng said slowly, “remember whether you sensed something then, and then…”

He stopped.

Because wisps of black threads were already spreading through the air.

Irene vanished.

Right before she vanished, she first turned into a painting. The shift lasted only a blink, short enough to be missed by a dream. Then the painting rose into the air and melted into the storm and rain at the edge of Yu Sheng’s sight.

Black threads began to sprout in the air and wove themselves with shocking speed. In an instant a vast spiderweb covered the sky, then slowly sank down over every inch of Ink City. Endless spider silk hung from the clouds. Within the net of black spider silk, the whole city started to tremble and sway.

Everyone stared, stunned, even Yu Sheng who had not expected this. [He had not thought that once she took his hint, Irene’s power would spread so fast in this special ‘dream.’ She just hadn’t recognized the dream’s nature before. Once she did, everything changed.]

For a doll who can invade dreams, this place was made for hunting.

And the “mountain” at the city center was the best place for her to unleash her power. The mines dried up, the city declined, and past glory blurred in memory. The last lively district became a shared pillar in everyone’s heart. In the dream, the buildings that once meant prosperity piled up like living things; a neon-lit mountain of welcome messages rose at the center. The mind-bodies circled it, remembering, deep down, the days when the Refining Towers still roared to life. They had gathered just right.

The huge black spiderweb spread out from the mountain in all directions. Everywhere the web reached, mind-bodies turned into bubbles that popped with a touch. Twisted buildings collapsed and melted without a sound. The city’s tangled roads broke and fell into endless darkness. The sky split with a jagged gap. Wind and rain howled through the rift, the web crisscrossed, and a shadow larger than the whole nightmare itself showed that it was there.

It was the Weaver. They crouched at the edge of the hunting ground and wove their web at high speed. When the web wrapped the city in endless black threads and the minds of the millions in Ink City were peeled off together from Sentinel Silence’s overall cognitive barrier, everyone saw it: two crimson lights glowing in all minds.

Cold. Cold that stabbed into bone and soul.

In that instant, everyone in Ink City had the same dream.

No matter if a person had been strolling the streets, resting at home, sitting in school, working in a factory, shopping at a mall, chatting with a friend, or arguing with someone, a short dream barged into the depths of every mind at once.

Mo Ran looked up and saw the whole city turn into a tiny bug, with everyone clinging to it like dust.

She saw the bug land at the center of the black spiderweb, and a Weaver with crimson eyes moved in the vast shadow, crawling along the strands.

She felt the Weaver’s gaze. Each breath from the Weaver felt like the last warning before the end of the world.

Everyone heard that warning: “Sleep my foot! Everybody up!”

The Weaver’s words were rough.

But there was no malice at all.

So the city woke up.

Yu Sheng felt a thunderous boom, though there was no real sound. What he sensed was the collapse of a layer of knowing. After that collapse, the city’s disguise was stripped off.

It was neither the “everything is normal” Ink City, nor the warped dream of piled buildings. Towering high-rises stood in wind and rain, old and worn. Countless crystal deposits grew like mold along every structure, layered and endless.

Pale crystal clusters were everywhere. They forced open rifts in the ground. They piled on the rails in the sky, ready to topple. They wrapped the distant Refining Towers like branches and vines. Outside the city, they became a crystal jungle spreading across the wilds, from one city to the next.

The “mountain” under their feet also showed its true shape.

They stood on the rooftop terrace of the City Lord’s Manor.

The odd “pillars” around the mountain peak were models of the twelve Refining Towers. As the city’s symbol, they had always stood at the top of the manor.

But even the whole City Lord’s Manor was covered in crystal. It might have been like this for hundreds of years.

Mo Ran stared in shock. She had tried to be ready, yet her mind still shook, almost losing its balance.

Then she snapped back. She had to keep order in the city right now: “The rest is up to you,” Yu Sheng told Mo Ran with a nod. “Steady the city. We’re going to deal with a bigger problem.”

“Alright.”