Deep into the Dream

What Irene needed him to do was actually quite simple. Basically, find an out-of-the-way spot to lie down and stay put without making a mess. Yu Sheng walked over to the slumbering silver-white demon fox. Circling her massive body and the cluster of tails, he found a relatively comfortable-looking spot—a hollow formed where two large tails overlapped. He bent down, tugged on the fluff of Hu Li's tail to adjust its position, and patted the fur of the other tail to fluff it up. Irene watched dumbfounded from the side. "Are you making a bed or what?" "I'm just making sure I'll be comfortable," Yu Sheng replied naturally as he leaned against the fluffy silver-white tail. "Heaven knows how long you'll take, and I'm a man with high standards for sleep quality..." Irene clicked her tongue. Once Yu Sheng was settled, she drifted over, and her entire picture frame dropped straight toward his chest. "Catch." Yu Sheng hurriedly scrambled to catch the frame plummeting from midair, half-suspecting for a moment that she was retaliating for him laughing in his head earlier and trying to crush him to death. "Holy crap! Could you give a heads-up before dropping like that?!" Fortunately, he caught Irene and avoided being smashed flat by her frame. Adjusting his posture, he reclined against one of Hu Li's giant tails, cupped Irene's frame in both hands, let out a soft breath, and waited for the moment he would sink into the dream. Sinking from his own dream into another dream was truly an unprecedented experience. From the oil painting came Irene's soft humming. It was an ancient ballad, tinged with a distant, nostalgic atmosphere. Though he couldn't understand the lyrics, he could feel a gradually calming force seeping into his heart bit by bit. Yu Sheng felt his eyelids growing heavy. In a half-awake, half-dreaming state, he glanced down at the painting held against his chest. It felt a lot like holding someone's funeral portrait.jpg. Yu Sheng: "..." Why did this doll always manage to evoke the feeling of someone departed whose memory lived on! The next second, his thoughts abruptly cut off amid that wild notion, followed by a sudden plunge through nothingness, tumbling straight into the deepest reaches of the dream. He felt himself instantly lose control of his body—or rather, he could no longer feel his body's existence at all. He seemed to have turned into an incorporeal point of view, hurtling rapidly through a flurry of memories, thoughts, and sensory impressions that did not belong to him. Phantoms loomed all around him; countless overlapping image fragments wove into an endless curtain, and that curtain coalesced into an endless tunnel. Sounds rumbled and droned as information flooded his mind. He couldn't even tell whether he was truly hearing those noises or if they were memories surfacing directly in his consciousness— Voices cried out in alarm; something exploded; a roar shrilled from the propulsion drive of the celestial shuttle. They were falling—the celestial shuttle had derailed from its track, plunging into a world not on its course, a world that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. A massive impact: the celestial shuttle slammed into a pitch-black mountain. The artifact spirit surged out of the Hengtian instrument, clashing violently with the immortals piloting the shuttle, squabbling over things like "withholding spirit stones," "reckless driving," and "reporting to the immortal sect." Then, in a blast, the artifact spirit perished, and many people died. Those who survived died off one after another. Every death and parting turned into a rapid cascade of fragments flitting past Yu Sheng's eyes. He saw those yellowed, blurry figures die of starvation, die of poisons in the mountain woods, die in desperate infighting, and die of... the pervasive, inescapable malice that saturated this valley. The valley itself wanted to kill them, wielding the power of hunger. The seemingly endless "tunnel" suddenly vanished. Yu Sheng found himself lingering in a faded scene—after passing through so many chaotic memory fragments, he had finally arrived in Hu Li's actual dream. Just as Irene had said, dreams tended toward a uniform palette. Everything here carried an old, lifeless, murky gray texture: a pitch-black sky, gloomy woods, filthy and drab mud and stones. A single glance was enough to feel overwhelmingly suffocating. "Irene?" Yu Sheng tried calling out in his mind, for he couldn't see her anywhere. "I'm here." "Where are you?" Yu Sheng looked around. "Why don't I see you?" "With you," Irene's voice sounded as if it came directly from inside his mind—a truly strange feeling. "You can't see me, and you can't see your own body either. Right now we're two 'foreign consciousnesses' who infiltrated the dream. We're lucky to even have a vantage point." "Oh, I see." Yu Sheng understood. Next, he began searching for Hu Li in the grove. He didn't have to search long. In fact, almost the instant the thought of looking for her crossed his mind, he heard a sound coming from nearby. It was the sound of earth being dug. Yu Sheng immediately followed the sound. His perspective drifted through the shadowy trees, and before long, he caught sight of that flash of white. A silver-haired girl in a tattered dress knelt at the edge of a forest clearing. Her fox tails, once fluffy and beautiful, were caked in mud, looking filthy and disheveled. Head down, she frantically dug into the dirt, muttering under her breath as she went. All around the girl were pits of various sizes, all hollowed out by her bare hands. Yu Sheng "drifted" over and came beside Hu Li. Hu Li couldn't see him and kept digging furiously, her hands clawing into the earth again and again. Irene's voice suddenly echoed in Yu Sheng's mind. "Talk to her. Start a conversation." "She can't even see us." "It doesn't matter, just talk to her. This is a dream—she'll respond. To someone dreaming, nothing in a dream feels unreasonable." Yu Sheng thought for a moment, then looked at the demon fox girl. "What are you digging for?" "Mom and Dad..." Hu Li indeed didn't question the sudden voice at all, answering naturally, "I remember burying them here... They were definitely buried right here..." For some reason, Yu Sheng felt his heart sink. Subconsciously, he asked, "Why... do you want to dig them up?" "I... I miss them," Hu Li slowly stopped, her eyes vacant and hollow, yet she still answered instinctively. "I'm so hungry. I want to tell them I'm so hungry... But I held out. They told me not to listen to that monster, and I kept holding out, but... I'm so hungry..." Hu Li lowered her head, glanced at her dirt-covered hands, and resumed digging. As she dug, she mumbled as though talking to herself: "They should be right here. They're definitely here, resting safely down below... I listened to them. I've always listened to them. I didn't listen to the monster..." "Her mental state isn't right," Irene's voice sounded in Yu Sheng's head. "It's way off..." "I know. I could tell her mental state wasn't right the first time we met," Yu Sheng answered in his thoughts. "That's not what I mean. I mean... something else seems to have seeped into her psyche. Something is trying to intrude and interfere with her thoughts," Irene explained, attempting to convey the complex situation to a layman like Yu Sheng. "There's another voice in hers. Her own will has been holding out, but an alien mind is pushing her to the breaking point." Irene stopped abruptly. Hu Li stopped digging. With a dazed expression, she stood up, took a few steps to the side, and then stood blankly in the clearing. Yu Sheng immediately followed. In the next second, he seemed to hear a faint, muffled voice. The voice seemed to rise directly from his own heart, sounding almost as if he were whispering it himself: "Dig. Dig them up... "You just want to see them. You just want to make sure you've been listening to them properly. You haven't seen each other in so long, right... "'I' miss them so much..." Hu Li turned back blankly, looking at the pits she had dug out one by one. "I miss them so much..." she whispered. Yu Sheng snapped to attention, realizing that the voice echoing from his own heart was the "external intrusion" Irene had spoken of! His spirit and dream were connected to Hu Li's, so what he had heard wasn't actually his own heart, but the voice deep inside Hu Li's! Hu Li turned slowly toward another spot in the clearing, seemingly intending to keep digging. Every handful of dirt was gradually digging through her own mental defenses. Yu Sheng finally understood what the voice was coaxing her into doing. A sudden chill rose from his heart, prompting him to shout instinctively: "Hu Li!" The demon fox girl froze in confusion, looking back toward the empty edge of the woods. Only after quite a while did a glimmer of clarity return to her eyes, and she recalled where she had heard that familiar voice. "...Benefactor?" Yet the forest was empty. No further sound came from Yu Sheng; that cry just now seemed like nothing more than an illusion. Hu Li stood dazed in the clearing. After a moment, she finally noticed the massive pits she had dug all around her. Panic finally crept across the demon fox girl's face. She woke—jolting awake right before the final collapse of her defenses.