Chapter 51: Parallel Advancement
As everything around Su Xiao became blurry, while gradually falling into a dream, he began to hear chaotic murmurs.
‘Beast, the beast within me.’
‘All of you, go die, hahaha, there’s nothing left in this world but despair.’
‘Nightmare, endless, nightmare…’
Accompanied by these murmurs, everything around him became clear. Su Xiao opened his eyes and sat up from the bed.
He was still in Mayor Queller’s home, still on the bedroom bed. The difference was that Bubu Wang and Baha had disappeared.
Su Xiao confirmed that he was currently inside the nightmare. What had entered the dream should be his spiritual body. Thinking of this, he pressed one hand against the blade of the Cruel Saw beside him. A sharp pain came from his palm, and blood dripped down the saw’s jagged teeth. The sensation was too real.
Su Xiao looked at his hand and the notifications that appeared after being injured. It seemed… he wasn’t just entering the nightmare as a spiritual body. But if it were his physical body entering, that wasn’t right either.
Here, Su Xiao could open his storage space but couldn’t take items out of it.
Although Su Xiao didn’t know whether his body, will, and soul had all entered the nightmare, or if only his consciousness and soul had entered Nightmare·Eternal Hope Town, regardless of the method, he had to be constantly vigilant. In a place like this, there were likely enemies that were nearly impossible to defeat.
After getting out of bed, Su Xiao strapped on the Cruel Saw and headed downstairs. A burnt smell drifted into his nostrils, coming from upstairs. After a brief pause, he continued downstairs.
The bloodstains on the wall in front of the doorway had disappeared. Su Xiao pushed open the door and found that Eternal Hope Town here was also in the nighttime. The difference was that the full moon in the sky faintly showed a red hue, enchanting and eerily beautiful.
Just as Su Xiao was about to step onto the street, he saw a massive black shadow approaching. This shadow was a four-legged creature. When it walked on the street, it almost filled the entire road. Some of the buildings on both sides were squeezed flat by it. Cracks appeared on the buildings, and within the cracks, purple-black light particles emerged. After a while, the flattened buildings restored themselves.
The black shadow walking on the street was a black boar, a giant black boar with tusks and dark brown hide.
As if sensing Su Xiao, the giant black boar stopped in its tracks, let out a roar that could almost deafen a person, and then charged toward Su Xiao’s direction.
Su Xiao slammed the door shut and quickly retreated.
Boom!
A dull impact came from in front of him. Su Xiao saw that the door and wall in front of him were bulging inward from the collision. The purple-black light within the cracks grew brighter as the bulge increased.
Su Xiao confirmed that the trouble here couldn’t be solved by force alone. Judging by the boar’s strength, it wasn’t just astonishingly powerful; it was also so thick-skinned that fighting it would make anyone want to vomit.
Besides this boar, within a few hundred meters, Su Xiao faintly sensed other ‘stronger’ presences. The strength of these enemies didn’t come from themselves but from the fact that this was Eternal Hope Town within the nightmare.
The reason Su Xiao’s own combat power hadn’t increased and the bonuses from his equipment had disappeared was that he hadn’t entered here with his physical body. Additionally, he was fully conscious. As the price for maintaining consciousness in the nightmare, his sanity value was decreasing at a rate of 10 points per minute.
The good news was that although all other equipment bonuses had disappeared, the bonuses from the Sun Church set remained. This wasn’t surprising; the Sun Church set likely had traits specifically for this kind of situation.
Given Su Xiao’s current sanity value, he could stay in the nightmare world for at most 48 minutes. Any longer would cause mental beast transformation. Moreover, during those 48 minutes, he couldn’t be attacked by enemies here, or his sanity value would also decrease.
To put it simply, here, sanity value was equivalent to health in the outside world. When sanity value hit zero, he wouldn’t die in the nightmare world; instead, Su Xiao would wake up in reality and begin mental beast transformation.
After confirming this, Su Xiao was very puzzled. The town’s residents entered Nightmare·Eternal Hope Town every night. Why didn’t they undergo mental beast transformation? Was Mayor Queller the only unlucky one?
Obviously not. As an ordinary person, Mayor Queller still had a shred of sanity left when he entered third-stage beast transformation. For an ordinary person, Mayor Queller was a respectable man.
It was very likely that Mayor Queller had issued the commission to the Sun Church. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have previously said he was grateful that Su Xiao could come here on behalf of the Sun Church.
Su Xiao realized that from beginning to end, Mayor Queller had been doing his utmost to save the town he loved. This wasn’t Su Xiao’s speculation but a fact supported by much evidence.
First, when he first met Mayor Queller, the man’s behavior was too abnormal. He first opened the door a crack, letting Su Xiao see his bloodshot eyes, then closed the door and calmly conversed with Su Xiao.
Facing a member of the Sun Church, such abnormality equaled seeking death. Mayor Queller was doing everything possible to die. His rational side and his beastly side were constantly repelling each other within his body.
This meant Mayor Queller could do very little. He could barely describe what he knew, so he chose the simplest method: letting his beastly side die. Perhaps before that, his rational side could gain the upper hand for a moment.
Things didn’t go as Mayor Queller had thought. He had overestimated himself a bit, which meant he could only provide very limited information. Please don’t have too high expectations for this middle-aged mayor approaching old age. He was just an ordinary person, struggling bitterly in a mad world. To have done this much was already impressive.
All of Mayor Queller’s efforts had finally yielded some results. Based on the clues he left before his death, Su Xiao had successfully entered Nightmare·Eternal Hope Town.
Why did only Mayor Queller undergo mental beast transformation? Su Xiao deduced that it was because Mayor Queller had awakened in the nightmare, just like his current state. By letting his sanity value drop, he maintained consciousness.
Mayor Queller’s sanity value had been completely drained in the nightmare, which was why he underwent mental beast transformation in reality. As for the other townspeople, they indulged their desires and did whatever they wanted in the nightmare.
Because they weren’t conscious, there was no talk of sanity value dropping. This was also why the townspeople’s sanity value didn’t decrease when they entered Nightmare·Eternal Hope Town. As the saying goes, as long as I’m useless enough, no one can use me. That was roughly the logic.
Squeak, squeak~
A sound like scraping glass appeared in Su Xiao’s ears. As this sound emerged, he found that his sanity value had stopped dropping. As the price, the strange noise in his ears became clearer.
Su Xiao tried his best to ignore the sound. Gradually, the strange noise in his ears faded away and finally disappeared. His sanity value began dropping again at about 10 points per minute. This was a good thing. The townspeople could all hear that strange noise, and it was the only ‘remnant’ of the nightmare they remembered after waking up.
That’s right, this was a puzzle-solving event. Unfortunately, there was no professional like Umbrella Brother this time. Su Xiao had to do it himself.
In front of the doorway, Su Xiao recalled the burnt smell that had drifted from upstairs earlier. He turned and headed upstairs. The boar was on the street. Before finding a way to break the situation, blindly fighting these monsters was very unwise.
Going up to the third floor, Su Xiao found it very empty, completely different from the scene on the third floor in reality.
Against the wall was a table embedded in the wall. A dried corpse sat at the table, as if it had been sitting there for many years, completely desiccated.
From the general features of this dried corpse, Su Xiao guessed it was Mayor Queller. Of course, that was just a guess. The corpse’s appearance was too abstract.
Su Xiao looked at the test table and saw many words written on it. The content was:
‘When you see this, you have already entered the nightmare. Follower of the Sun Church, thank you for coming here. Regarding the commission, please don’t blame the residents of Eternal Hope Town. Everything is my responsibility. I can no longer issue a clear commission with complete sanity, but you will accept this commission. In my impression, you are madmen, but also the only hope in the most desperate times.
‘This is within the nightmare. Cherish every minute and every second here. This is bought with your mind and reason. Don’t be infatuated with the false beauty here, and don’t fight the monsters here. As a transcendent, you are very powerful, but fighting the monsters here yields no reward. You cannot kill them, just as you cannot destroy a nightmare, something that exists only in the spirit.
‘According to my calculations, all of Eternal Hope Town can be divided into reality and the nightmare. The nightmare is a projection of reality, and some things can be reflected from the projection into reality, like beast transformation.
‘The nightmare is entangling us. All the residents of Eternal Hope Town cannot escape the nightmare. Even if they flee Eternal Hope Town, as long as they fall asleep at night, their consciousness returns to the nightmare. Their bodies move on their own, step by step toward Eternal Hope Town. Many people have died from accidents because of this.
‘I have no transcendent power, no firm will. Fortunately, my pride, my son, is a brain surgeon. He used a flat needle to pierce through my eye socket into my brain and removed a small part of my brain. My son told me this was brain… I forgot. Obviously, I have no talent for medicine. Every time a small part of my brain was removed, it gave my collapsing sanity a moment of respite. I will not let the town I love become a beast.
‘The nightmare and reality reflect each other. There must be a connection between the two. What is this connection? After my wife’s research, we finally discovered that the connection is will. Will is power!
‘My wife, son, and daughter-in-law are all nearing their limits. They have already removed too much of their brains. I am also nearing my limit. Everything we have done is not for the residents of the town. They have all… fallen. The nightmare binds us. There is… nowhere to escape.
‘But compared to them, we love this town more. Eternal Hope Town has a history of 294 years. In this despairing world, this town is my home, the home of our family. No one! Nothing can take her from our family, even if we are burned to ashes. Outsider, sorry for wasting your precious time reading this, but… this is the last remnant of our family of four. People always want to be remembered, don’t they?
‘After the last family meeting, our family of four decided to enter the nightmare one last time. The nightmare and reality are connected and influence each other. Things that are weak in reality may become extremely powerful when projected into the nightmare. Don’t fight them in the nightmare. Find them in reality and wake them up.
‘There is a prerequisite. When they are woken up in reality, there must be someone in the nightmare world who can maintain extreme rationality to witness the disappearance of the monsters they project. This is a kind of witness, a cognitive erasure and confirmation, like drawing a stroke on a painting.
‘My son and I tried it. I stared at a certain monster in the nightmare. My son, at a heavy cost, forcibly broke free from the nightmare, found the monster’s original body in reality, and killed it. The result was that the monster in the nightmare not only didn’t disappear but broke free from its restraints.
‘For a moment, I could feel that the monster could have been eliminated, but my rationality wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t use my cognition, my heart, and my gaze to kill it, to confirm that it was dead or that it had woken up.
‘In the end, I thought of a possibility. Have a person with strong enough rationality enter the nightmare, and have an assistant stay in reality. Advance on both sides simultaneously. The person in the nightmare guides the person in reality on which are the monsters, and the person in reality finds the original bodies of those monsters and wakes them up. This way, they can move unimpeded in the nightmare and find the source of the strange noise.
‘How to quickly establish communication between the people in the nightmare and reality? This… is the last thing our family can do. The only connection between nightmare and reality is will. If will is used as a medium to write information on the ground and walls, can it be reflected from the nightmare into reality for the person in reality to see?
‘When doing this, I hesitated. But after our family of four woke up in the nightmare, the result was already decided.
‘Do you see the three white charcoal sticks on the table? Although they are only as long as fingers, they… are the remains of my wife, son, and daughter-in-law in the nightmare, compressed into powder and formed. Use them to write words in the nightmare, and they can be seen in reality. Please let them realize their value. I beg you.’
Mayor Queller’s message was very long. Su Xiao picked up three chalk-like objects from the table. These things were very useful. Unfortunately, for Mayor Queller’s family, even with these things, they couldn’t kill the monsters in the nightmare world.
For Mayor Queller, the distance between reality and the nightmare was very close. Close your eyes, fall asleep, and you could reach it. But sometimes, reality and the nightmare were extremely far apart, so far that this family was driven to despair.
What Mayor Queller’s family couldn’t do didn’t mean Su Xiao couldn’t. At least he had to try whether this method could kill the monsters in the nightmare, like the boar.
Su Xiao opened the team channel and found that communication was impossible. Bubu Wang and Baha’s avatars in the team channel were gray.
Realizing this, he opened the team storage space and tried to put one gray chalk stick in, keeping two for himself. If he encountered a monster in the nightmare, he could write clues using the gray chalk stick, and Bubu Wang and Baha in reality would go wake up or kill the monster’s original body.
The monsters in the nightmare could be described in one sentence: They cower in reality but strike hard in the nightmare.
One gray chalk stick disappeared from Su Xiao’s hand and was stored in the team storage space. It worked. The team channel wasn’t very reliable, but the team space was extremely effective.
Inside the three-story building, Su Xiao pondered the locations of Bubu Wang and Baha. Bubu must not be near his physical body but out patrolling the surroundings. Baha must be near his physical body to prevent it from being ambushed while he was in the nightmare. This arrangement was very reasonable. Recently, Baha’s combat power had been growing stronger, even approaching the position of the second strongest in Su Xiao’s team.
Su Xiao returned to the bedroom on the second floor and wrote a few words on the wall by the window.
‘Team storage space.’
Su Xiao began to wait. He couldn’t leave the nightmare now. He had to wait until morning. As for forcibly breaking free, that would not only cost some kind of price but also prevent him from entering the nightmare again tonight.
After writing the words, in less than ten seconds, the gray chalk stick in the team storage space disappeared. A few words appeared on the wall.
‘Baha. Bubu Wang returning. What to do.’
This was Baha realizing the preciousness of the gray chalk stick, so he abbreviated. It meant that he was Baha, and he would immediately have Bubu Wang, who was out patrolling, return. Then what should the two of them do?
Seeing these words, Su Xiao’s thoughts became clear. He began writing on the wall.
A few minutes later, in the bedroom of the three-story building in reality, Bubu Wang and Baha were on high alert. Their tasks were very clear. Whoever struck hard in the nightmare, the two of them would go teach that person a lesson.
“Bubu, let me give you a buff to boost your intelligence.”
“Woof?”
Under Bubu Wang’s confused gaze, Baha took out a can of cooling spray and sprayed it on Bubu Wang’s forehead. After a while, Bubu Wang’s little eyes became filled with wisdom.
PS: (Two chapters today, a total of 8000 words. Will continue working hard tomorrow.)