Chapter 428: Reconstruction |
The instant the line appeared on the window: “We are inside a vast dream,” Yu Sheng felt as if a thunderous boom erupted deep in his mind, a lightless bolt shattering the night. At once, the “curtain” that had been supporting everything around him began to unravel under this cognition-level thunder.
A gust of cold wind suddenly surged into the room, the wind laced with icy rain. The doors and windows were shut, yet the storm outside swept through the living room without resistance. It pierced the window, the walls, and every item in the room, after which everything seemed to melt and collapse, twisting and heaving violently.
The nearby wall was the first to corrode into a gaping hole whose edges ran like grease, revealing a winding corridor beyond. Half the corridor’s ceiling had been torn away, and a gale poured rain into the space. A long bridge, origin unknown, hung upside down over the corridor. On its inverted deck swayed pedestrians and many car silhouettes blurred into inky smears.
A strange roar came from close at hand. The rain-punctured window finally shattered with a crash, dissolving into a chaos of color that vanished from their sight. The living room lurched, then tilted and began to topple. It halted abruptly in midair, as if an invisible hand had seized it. Not far away, a building grew toward the sky in the raging wind, while at the same time an unseen blade seemed to slice it into enormous segments during this “growth,” leaving the pieces drifting loosely in midair. The metal framework that once supported the structure oozed from between those chunks like dangling hair and wove a forestlike lattice, tangling in masses that spread through the city, knotting, stacking, and spawning.
The whole of Mo City became an absurd nightmare. The cold gale and pounding rain howled through the dream, seizing the city and letting it expand unchecked in runaway cognition and imagination.
Irene vaulted onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder at once, hugged his head, and cried out: “Holy ancestor of dolls! What the hell is what and what and what!”
Blue ghostly fire layered itself around Foxy. She crouched slightly, a warning growl rumbling in her throat at the storm that had forced its way in. Luna snapped fingertip blades into place, leaped lightly to Yu Sheng’s side, and let the radar system embedded in her body scan the environment.
Maintaining a razor’s edge of vigilance, Luna spoke in a low voice: “Not an illusion; the changes are real.”
A vast dream? Real?
A chill seemed to penetrate his flesh and coil around his mind. Yu Sheng snapped out of his brief daze, shook his head, and looked instinctively toward the source of the cold sensation. Irene sat on his shoulder, apparently unaware, her tense face scanning every direction.
Threads of black webbing were unconsciously spreading through the air around her.
Seeing this, Yu Sheng prodded the little doll to remind her: “Irene, you are pulling threads.”
“Ah—huh?” Irene finally noticed the strands drifting off her, hurriedly raised a hand, and reeled them in: “I didn’t realize. How did that happen… uh, Yu Sheng, what do we do now? This place is like this already. Where are we supposed to find our nephew?”
“Maybe this is exactly how we find them,” Yu Sheng said, already settling inside despite not understanding the principles of the change. Reason told him that since those two lines had appeared on the window just now, Immortal Yuan Hao and the others were very likely trapped in this “twisted Mo City” layer as well: “Foxy, fire two missiles straight up, the flashier the better, then we look for a way down. Let’s see if Immortal Yuan Hao left any marks nearby.”
“Right!” Foxy nodded briskly, then launched two Fox Carrot Missiles into the sky. With two booming reports, brilliant Fox Fire burst in the rain, its scattered light illuminating the sky above the entire district.
Yu Sheng glanced up at the spreading flare, then stepped without hesitation through the sheet of rain cutting the room and headed for the slanting corridor outside that seemed to lead to the lower floors of the building.
They left, and only rain and wind remained in the room, pouring and howling.
The barrier between reality and illusion had been pierced. A cognitive interference that had shrouded Mo City for years fell like a torn curtain, its folded fabric heaping across the city into grotesque tableaux.
After quite some time, the empty room was suddenly broken by the soft click of a lock.
In one corner of the living room, the door to the master bedroom swung open from within.
A young woman with a head of blond hair strode out casually, a half-eaten jianbing guozi in one hand and a water bottle tucked under her arm. Behind her was the living room of 66 Wutong Road.
The wind and rain on this side of the door slammed into her face. Caught stepping out without looking, she was drenched at once, even soaking the jianbing in her hand.
Princess Rapunzel lifted her head in a daze, watching the storm roar across the living room. Beyond the roof and walls, half-dissolved by the weather, stretched a frenzy of alien vistas. A shattered black-awning boat slanted across the sky and crashed into a pavilion less than a hundred meters away.
In the next second the blonde girl turned tail and bolted back the way she had come, shouting over her shoulder: “Ah! I’m scared to death! I’m scared to death! Red Hood! Snow White! Brother moved the house to a weird place again! Today’s picnic is canceled!”
Yu Sheng and the others hurried along the slanting corridor, then descended a staircase that had long since warped, a stairwell that felt as though it would never end. They went down more than ten floors.
At irregular intervals, large holes had opened in the walls nearby, beyond which lay a Mo City streetscape stripped of its former face. The wind and rain whipped into the hallways through the holes or simply cut through the walls, spinning in eddies along the corridors. Yet some sections remained perversely dry despite the storm’s assault, as if the rain could not “interact” with the surrounding “scene,” sliding past walls and ceiling. Even the chill in the wind felt unreal and fleeting.
As they moved through those passages, Yu Sheng could not help recalling the rain that fell in the Soul Wilds, that same rain from Sentinel Silence that seemed to fall unceasingly through unreality.
They reached the ground-floor lobby. In Yu Sheng’s memory their room had been on the seventh floor, but this time he had descended more than ten levels to reach the lobby. It too was under siege by wind and rain. Compared with the impression in his mind, the lobby was clearly much larger, with interior spaces that seemed to belong to other buildings grafted suddenly onto its far side, fused there out of nowhere.
Foxy, sharp-eyed the instant she stepped out of the stairwell, pointed and shouted: “There are people over there!”
Yu Sheng strode quickly in the direction she indicated and indeed saw several figures.
Close up, he realized they were only “human shapes.”
Blurred silhouettes assembled from smudged blocks of color were sprawled in the lounge area. Two lay on a sofa, two on the floor, and one on a bed that by rights should not have existed in a ground-floor lobby. The hazy outlines tossed and turned as if mired in nightmares.
Yu Sheng reached toward them and found his fingers slipping easily through the color blocks.
Irene blinked, one hand gripping Yu Sheng’s hair while the other reached out. Fine threads unwound from her fingertips and connected to the silhouettes.
“They are dreaming,” the little doll muttered, “but it’s odd. Their dreams aren’t in the dream. Does that make sense to you?”
Yu Sheng replied without mercy: “No, of course it doesn’t.”
Irene pouted, then saw several figures flicker into the lobby out of nowhere.
They were also blurred color-silhouette outlines. One second earlier they had not been there; now they appeared at the entrance, hovering a few centimeters above the floor like a projection with a bad signal, blinking as they stood dazed or raised a foot to step, suspended mid-motion.
Black threads immediately spread to those new arrivals as well.
“They are dreaming too, and it’s a ‘lucid dream,’” Irene said quickly. “I can’t quite read their minds, but it looks like they are walking into this hotel to check in. No fear, no confusion. In their eyes the world is normal.”
Yu Sheng frowned, a glimmer of understanding stirring. Just then a faint vibration came from his pocket.
He pulled out his phone. Where there had been no signal before, a line now flashed on the screen: “Anomalous fluctuation… signal restoring.”
A flood of messages arrived at once, the phone buzzing nonstop.
The sender was the Special Service Bureau, Bai Li Qing.
Yu Sheng hesitated, unsure why communications had suddenly returned, but instinctively opened one of the messages.
“There is a record in the database. What you have likely encountered is a Dark Angels ‘Starform’… Be wary of the Class IV cognitive remolding it creates. Such remolding can trigger planetwide reality reconstruction.”
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