Chapter 556: Last Stand |
"Not again," Lu Chenyang whispered next to me, his face had gone pale like someone suddenly drained all the blood straight out of it. His hands were already moving with dream qi swirling around his fingers while he prepared to run.
I frowned because I'd wanted him to finish explaining the dream gate creation technique before anything like this happened, the timing was honestly terrible but complaining wasn't going to fix anything. The situation was what it was.
"We need to move," I said, channeling Du Yanze's cultivation as the Xuan Yi wrapped golden light around my legs. "Now."
Lu Chenyang didn't need to be told twice, he was already running. I followed close behind him using the movement technique I'd prepared earlier, each step carrying me dozens of feet forward while reality bent itself around my conviction.
The pressure behind us intensified and I risked a glance back, which I immediately regretted doing.
The Nightmare Enforcer looked different this time around. It wasn't a hole in reality anymore, it had taken on something that resembled a humanoid shape made out of absolute darkness. The details kept shifting and changing while I watched it because the shape refused to settle into anything solid or concrete, one moment it had too many arms, and the next it was a torso and a head with nothing sitting below the waist.
"It's faster than before," Lu Chenyang panted as his spiritual form flickered slightly at the edges. "And smarter too. Look at how it's moving."
He was right.
The Enforcer was actually anticipating which way we were going to move and cutting off our escape routes before we could reach them. When I tried to veer left toward a narrow alley, the darkness was there waiting for me, and when Lu Chenyang tried creating a dream construct as a distraction, the Enforcer simply flowed around it without even slowing down at all.
A merchant walked directly through the space where the darkness was flowing and he didn't react at all, he just kept on arranging his display of supposedly blessed fruits like nothing had happened.
That’s when I realised that the Enforcer was invisible to all of them. Or maybe it existed an entirely different layer of reality, something that only dream cultivators could actually perceive. Either way, we couldn't count on any help from the locals here.
"The tea house," Lu Chenyang gasped out, and he pointed ahead of us. "We can't outrun it, maybe we can lose it in the crowds."
I looked where he was pointing and I saw what he meant right away. It was a large establishment, the sign out front called it "The Emperor's Cup" in pretty ostentatious lettering. Three stories tall, packed full of customers, and I could see multiple exits from the street. If we could get inside, maybe we could create enough confusion to slip away.
We sprinted hard toward the entrance. I pushed Xuan Yi to enhance my speed, writing the phrase "My steps are untraceable" out in the air. The golden calligraphy blazed brightly for a second before fading away, but I could feel the effect locking into place. My footsteps stopped making any sound. The air itself stopped being disturbed as I moved through it.
Lu Chenyang noticed what I did and used his dream qi to pull off something similar through different mechanics. We reached the tea house entrance like we were ghosts, slipping right through the doorway without alarming a single person.
Inside was absolute chaos.
There had to be dozens of customers sitting at tables and every single one of them was loudly proclaiming their superior taste in tea to anyone who would listen. All the conversations overlapped into this solid wall of noise that made it hard to think straight. Servers moved between the tables with trays held high, and somehow managed to navigate through the whole crowd despite everyone in the place being convinced they personally had the right of way at all times.
"Upstairs," I said, spotting a staircase near the back. "Third floor and then we find a window facing the opposite street."
Lu Chenyang nodded and we started weaving through the crowd. The tea house patrons kept up their conversations without having any idea we were threading between them, and they had no idea about the darkness that was following our trail.
We made it to the second floor before the temperature dropped.
I felt it the instant it happened.
The warm comfortable air of the tea house turned cold of void.
The Nightmare Enforcer had followed us inside the building.
"It's inside," Lu Chenyang said, which wasn't necessary because I'd already figured that out. His voice was shaking. "How did it track us that precisely?"
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I turned that question over in my head while we kept climbing toward the third floor.
The Enforcer was specifically designed to hunt down dream walkers, entities that didn't belong anywhere in this realm, and despite our best efforts to hide our presence, it probably had some way to lock onto our spiritual signatures directly, following the foreign energy we were radiating by existing.
The third floor was a lot less crowded than the rest of the building, mostly private rooms for wealthy customers who wanted to loudly proclaim their superiority away from all the common masses below. We rushed straight down the corridor and checked room after room looking for windows that faced the right direction.
"Here," Lu Chenyang said, and he pushed a door open. The room inside had elaborate decorations all over the walls and a large window that looked out over a side street. Perfect.
I moved over to open the window and then the door slammed shut behind us.
The temperature dropped even further than it already had. My breath came out in visible little puffs and frost started forming on the walls and the ceiling around us. The window I'd been reaching toward frosted completely over, the glass turning solid opaque white.
The Nightmare Enforcer materialized right out of the corner of the room.
Up close it was a lot worse than seeing it from a distance. The darkness wasn't empty at all, it was full, completely full of shapes that kept moving right at the very edge of what you could perceive, things that might have been faces or hands or possibly something else entirely. The creature's presence pressed against my spiritual form like it had actual physical weight.
Lu Chenyang launched his attack, his dream qi forming out into sharp spears of silver light that shot toward the Enforcer with impressive speed and precision. The creature didn't even try to dodge any of them. The spears hit its form and vanished, swallowed up by darkness without leaving any visible effect at all.
"It's not working," Lu Chenyang said, and I could hear his voice climbing toward something close to panic. He kept forming more constructs, throwing different shapes and patterns at the thing, putting everything he had into his attacks. Nothing made even the slightest bit of difference.
I tried my own approach. Xuan Yi ran on belief and conviction, which made it about as opposite from what this thing represented as you could possibly get. If anything was going to hurt a manifestation of rejection, it had to be aggressive affirmation.
I wrote quickly in the air and golden calligraphy blazed into life: "You do not exist in this realm."
The phrase hung suspended in the air for a moment, and then it struck the Enforcer dead on. For a second, I thought I saw the darkness ripple, some tiny visible reaction to the technique.
Then the creature adapted.
It tore the phrase apart, the golden characters dissolving down into harmless little sparks.
The Enforcer kept moving forward and I understood what had happened. It had learned. It now understood Xuan Yi, at least well enough to counter it, the realm's defense mechanism was evolving in real time so it could handle threats more effectively.
"That's not going to work anymore," I said, backing away. "It adapted too fast. It already understands the techniques."
Lu Chenyang looked terrified, but he was holding himself together. "What do you suggest then? We can't outrun it and we obviously can't fight it. Those are the only two options we have."
I thought through the situation as clearly as I could manage while I was staring down a reality-erasing entity and trying not to panic about it. The Nightmare Enforcer specialized in hunting down dream cultivators, it could counter dream qi without any difficulty, and had already adapted to handle Xuan Yi techniques on top of that. My spiritual manifestation was severely weakened compared to my normal abilities. All the options were bad.
The truth was simple and uncomfortable and I'd been avoiding thinking it: staying in this realm any longer wasn't actually worth the risk.
I was here for the tournament. My actual body as Hua was sitting in meditation back with Moon, protected by the tournament's rules. If I died here, I'd just wake up back there, alive and whole. The dream world would pull me back automatically if anything except Wu Kangming managed to kill me.
But I didn't want to experience dying. Even knowing with certainty that I'd return afterward, the actual process of having my spiritual manifestation destroyed was extremely unpleasant, and it probably wasn't doing anything good for my mental state either.
More importantly than all of that though, I'd already accomplished what I came here to do. I'd found the corruption's source. I understood the mechanism behind it. I knew exactly how to fix it whenever I came back with proper preparation. Staying any longer just to fight a battle I had no way of winning would be pointless.
The decision settled into place.
"We need to leave. Right now."
"Leave?" Lu Chenyang stared at me hard. "You mean abandon the realm?"
"I mean I'm not sticking around to get destroyed by something I can't fight," I told him. The Enforcer was getting closer, and the cold was intensifying with every step it took toward us. "I came here to gather information and help Du Yanze. I've done both of those things already. There's no point in risking permanent damage to our spiritual manifestation at this stage."
The old man looked torn between agreeing with me and the terror of what agreeing meant. His survival instinct was screaming at him to get out of there, but hundreds of years of dream walking pride was making him hesitate because admitting defeat hurt in a way that ran deep.
"You're right," he finally said. "We can't win this. Better to retreat and come back when we're ready."
The Enforcer lunged forward without any warning and closed the distance between us in an instant, we both threw ourselves aside and the darkness passed straight between us. Where it moved through the air, reality itself seemed to crack open slightly, hairline fractures appearing like someone had broken glass and left it hanging in the air.
"I need to wake Du Yanze up first," I said, focusing inward on the connection running between my consciousness and his. "Can you buy me even a few seconds?"
Lu Chenyang didn't bother answering me with words. He just gave a nod and threw himself straight at the Enforcer, using every single technique he knew to create distractions and barriers between us. Dream qi poured out of him in desperate waves and formed walls and obstacles that the creature flowed through or around like they weren't even there.
I reached deep into Du Yanze's consciousness. He was sleeping peacefully for what was probably the first time in who knew how many loops, finally able to actually rest without the crushing weight of responsibility and isolation pressing down on him constantly. I felt bad about interrupting that, but I didn't have any choice left.
"Du Yanze," I said, and I spoke it directly into his sleeping mind. "Wake up. I need to talk to you."