Chapter 27: Into the Depths of the Dream

Chapter 27: Into the Depths of the Dream

What Irene needed him to do was actually quite simple.

Basically, he just had to find a place where he would not be in the way, lie down, and refrain from causing trouble.

Yu Sheng came to the side of the still-sleeping silver-white demon fox. After circling her enormous body and the pile of giant tails behind her, he found a spot that looked fairly comfortable, a depression where two large tails overlapped.

He bent down, grabbed the fur on Hu Li’s tail and adjusted its position, then patted and fluffed up the fur on another tail to make it softer. Irene watched from the side, completely dumbfounded. “Are you making a bed over there?”

“Isn’t it for lying down comfortably?” Yu Sheng replied naturally as he leaned against the large silver-white fluffy tail. “Who knows how long you’ll need, and I’m someone with very high standards for sleep quality...”

Irene immediately clicked her tongue. After Yu Sheng settled into position, she floated over and dropped her entire picture frame straight onto his chest. “Catch.”

Yu Sheng hurriedly caught the falling frame. For a moment, he even thought she was taking revenge for how he had secretly laughed earlier and was trying to crush him to death with it.

“Holy hell! Could you at least give me a warning before you drop down?!”

Fortunately, he caught Irene and avoided being beaten to death by a picture frame. After adjusting his posture, he half-reclined against one of Hu Li’s large tails, holding Irene’s frame in both hands. He let out a gentle breath and waited for the moment he would sink into the dream.

Descending from his own dream into another dream.

That was truly an unprecedented experience.

A soft humming drifted from the oil painting.

It was some ancient ballad, carrying an atmosphere of distant nostalgia. Though he could not understand the lyrics, he could feel a gradually calming power seeping into his heart little by little. Yu Sheng felt his eyelids growing heavy. As his consciousness hovered between wakefulness and sleep, he lowered his head and glanced at the oil painting resting in his hands.

It looked as though he were holding someone’s memorial portrait.

Yu Sheng: “...”

How did this doll always manage to create situations that felt like the deceased was still vividly alive?

The next second, his train of thought abruptly broke off in the middle of that ridiculous idea. Then he suddenly plunged downward through a stretch of emptiness, falling straight into the deepest part of the dream.

He felt himself lose control of his body in an instant.

Or perhaps, more accurately, he could no longer feel that his body existed at all.

He seemed to become a disembodied point of view, racing through memories, thoughts, and sensory impressions that did not belong to him. Countless overlapping fragments of images drifted around him, weaving together into an endless curtain, and the curtain itself merged into a tunnel with no visible end.

Voices rumbled and buzzed. Information poured into his mind. He could not even tell whether those were sounds he truly heard or memories appearing directly inside his consciousness.

Someone was shouting.

Something was exploding.

A roaring howl came from the propulsion structure of the Immortal Shuttle.

They were falling.

The Immortal Shuttle had left its course and plunged into a world that was not on its route, a world that seemed to have suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

A tremendous impact.

The Immortal Shuttle crashed into a pitch-black mountain.

An artifact intelligence emerged from the Hengtian Artifact. It began fighting fiercely with the immortal who piloted the Immortal Shuttle. They argued about things like “deducting spirit stones,” “reckless driving,” and “reporting you to the immortal sects.” Then, amid an explosion, the artifact intelligence died.

Many people died as well.

Those who survived died one after another soon afterward.

Every death and every farewell became fragments that flashed rapidly before Yu Sheng’s eyes. He saw those faded and yellowed figures die of Hunger, die from poisonous creatures in the mountains, die from struggles born of despair, and die from the malice that filled every corner of this Valley.

The Valley itself wanted to kill them.

It did so through the power of Hunger.

The seemingly endless tunnel suddenly disappeared.

Yu Sheng found himself standing within a faded scene.

After passing through countless chaotic fragments of memory, he had finally arrived at Hu Li’s current dream.

Just as Irene had said, dreams tended toward a unified tone.

Everything here carried a worn-out, lifeless grayness.

The sky was dark and oppressive.

The forest was dim and gloomy.

The soil and rocks were murky and gray.

One glance was enough to make a person feel suffocated.

“Irene?” Yu Sheng called inwardly, because he could not see her anywhere.

“I’m here.”

“Where are you?” Yu Sheng looked around. “Why can’t I see you?”

“I’m with you,” Irene’s voice seemed to come directly from inside his mind. The sensation was... strange. “You can’t see me, and you can’t see your own body either. Right now we’re two foreign consciousnesses that snuck in here. The fact that we even have a viewpoint is already pretty good.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is.”

Understanding dawned on Yu Sheng. Then he began searching the small forest for Hu Li.

He did not have to search for long.

In fact, almost the moment the thought occurred to him, he heard a sound coming from nearby.

It was the sound of someone digging through soil.

Yu Sheng immediately followed the noise.

His viewpoint drifted among the shadowy trees, and before long he spotted that streak of white.

The silver-haired girl, dressed in tattered clothing, knelt at the edge of a clearing.

Her once beautiful and fluffy fox tails were filthy and bedraggled, coated in dirt.

With her head lowered, she was desperately digging at the earth.

As she dug, she muttered to herself.

Around her lay countless pits of varying sizes, all excavated by her own hands.

Yu Sheng floated over and came to her side.

Hu Li could not see him. She continued digging forcefully, repeatedly plunging both hands into the soil.

Irene’s voice suddenly entered his mind.

“Talk to her. Talk to her.”

“She can’t even see us.”

“It’s fine. Just speak to her. This is a dream. She’ll respond. To a dreamer, nothing in a dream is unreasonable.”

After a moment’s thought, Yu Sheng looked at the fox spirit girl.

“What are you digging for?”

“Father and Mother...” Hu Li showed no confusion whatsoever at the sudden voice she heard. Instead, she answered naturally. “I remember burying them here... They were definitely buried here...”

For some reason, Yu Sheng felt his heart sink.

Subconsciously, he asked another question.

“You... why do you want to dig them up?”

“I... I miss them.”

Hu Li gradually stopped moving.

Her eyes carried a trace of vacant confusion, yet she still answered instinctively.

“I’m so hungry. I want to tell them that I’m so hungry... But I held on. They told me not to listen to that monster. I’ve kept holding on, but... I’m so hungry...”

Hu Li lowered her head and looked at her dirt-covered hands.

Then she resumed digging.

As she dug, she muttered as though speaking to herself.

“They should be here. They’re definitely here. They’ve been resting right underneath all this time... I listened to them. I always listened to them. I didn’t listen to that monster...”

“Something’s wrong with her mental state,” Irene’s voice sounded in Yu Sheng’s mind. “Very wrong.”

“I know. I could tell something was wrong with her mental state the first time we met.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean... there seems to be something else mixed into her mind. Something is trying to interfere with and invade her thoughts.”

Irene tried to explain the complicated situation to Yu Sheng, who knew nothing about such matters.

“There’s another voice mixed into hers. Her own will has been holding on this whole time, but the foreign thoughts are close to making her collapse.”

At that point, Irene suddenly fell silent.

Hu Li stopped digging.

With a blank expression, she stood up and walked several steps away before coming to a halt in the middle of the clearing.

Yu Sheng immediately followed.

Then, in the next moment, he seemed to hear a faint and blurry voice.

The voice sounded as though it came directly from inside his heart.

It even sounded like he himself was whispering it.

“Dig. Dig them up...

“You only want to see them once. You only want to make sure you’ve really been obeying them. It’s been a long time since you’ve seen them, hasn’t it...

“I miss them...”

Hu Li turned around blankly and looked at the pits she had dug.

“I miss them...” she whispered.

Yu Sheng suddenly realized what had happened.

The voice he had just heard from within himself was exactly the foreign influence Irene had mentioned.

His dream and consciousness were linked to Hu Li’s.

So the voice had not come from his own heart at all.

It had come from hers.

Hu Li slowly turned toward another part of the clearing, as though intending to continue digging.

Every handful of earth she removed was gradually tearing through her own mental defenses.

Yu Sheng finally understood what the voice was trying to entice her into doing.

A chill suddenly surged up from deep within him.

Without thinking, he shouted:

“Hu Li!”

The fox spirit girl froze in confusion.

She turned her head and looked toward the empty edge of the forest.

After a long moment, a trace of clarity returned to her eyes.

She remembered where she had heard that familiar voice before.

“...Benefactor?”

Yet the forest remained empty.

No further voice came from Yu Sheng.

That call from moments ago seemed nothing more than an illusion.

Hu Li stood motionless in the clearing.

After a while, she finally noticed the large pits she had dug all around herself.

At last, terror slowly appeared on the fox spirit girl’s face.

She had awakened.

Just before the final collapse of her defenses, she had abruptly awakened.