‘Is this an illusion? No, it is not…’ Even though Gu Jun could feel his mental power draining, it did not feel like he was inside an illusion. This was something completely new and different. Currently he was inside a theatre, not the modern opera house but some kind of ancient round-topped playhouse with bad lighting, narrow walkways, and a small stage with curtains. There were 10 rows of seats before the stage and each row had 10 sturdy wooden chairs so 100 seats in total.
‘Wait a minute, what’s this?’ Gu Jun noticed immediately that he could adjust his point of view freely. He could be looking from the top of the stage to the back of the seat from one second to the next. It appeared to mean that he was not here in the point of view of a person or an object. This kind of all-knowing perspective… seemed to suggest that he was embodying theatre itself.
With this seemingly ludicrous idea in mind, Gu Jun moved his thoughts to try to open curtains and open it did. The stage was empty. Other than the dust on the ground, there was nothing. ‘If I am the theatre…’ Gu Jun thought confusingly, ‘Who are the audience? And who are the performers?’
There was a wooden door behind the tenth row. It was closed but with a thought, it swung open easily. With that, a figure sauntered slowly into the theatre. The figure was shrouded in blurriness so much so that Gu Jun could not even tell their gender. Gu Jun tried to clear the shroud away but he felt the drainage on his mental power so he stopped. The person walked to the middle seat in the first row and then sat down facing the stage.
‘The sweet dream belongs to this person?’ Gu Jun thought. ‘But whose idea of a sweet dream consists of sitting inside a small playhouse alone looking up at an empty stage?’ The person sat quietly but the space around them started to ripple, becoming unstable…
‘Something’s wrong.’ Gu Jun latched onto an idea among the many confusing ones, ‘the play repertoire should be the real sweet dream, the audience is merely summoned here by the dream, while the repertoire is being handled by me, or rather the theatre itself. Probably by starting the play on stage that the sweet dream could be shown to the audience. Then the figure would actually materialize in the dream and lose the blurriness. The repertoire should be inside the dream already, there was no need for me to go search for it, instead I only needed to initiate the play…’
‘Ah,’ Gu Jun wanted to start the play but he sensed quite a big problem, his mental power was too weak to move the play into motion. He had no choice but to stop and instantly the inside of the wooden barrel stared back at him. Helplessness overwhelmed him. ‘I am not in the shape to do anything. Also where was I transported earlier? Was I still inside my own mind?’ Gu Jun closed his eyes and entered his sea of consciousness. There were still 5 bubbles but the one on the most left had lightened quite a bit like it was about to burst. ‘These sweet dreams last more than one use but each use will deplete their energy. I wonder if that energy can be recharged. And was it the failure of triggering the sweet dream that caused the energy depletion? Will the energy not deplete if I was successful?’ New questions surfaced but temporarily he did not dare to enter this sweet dream again. It was the same with the other four, if he did so, he would only exhaust his and their energy pointlessly.
‘For now, I better focus on recovering my mental power…’ He decided. ‘Only after I have enough mental power to control the machinations within the sweet dreams should I enter them.’ But this led Gu Jun back to the issue of the corruption. With no other choice, he continued to train his mind and roll his eyes to help complete the simple and difficult missions. ‘Perhaps I can utilize the sweet dream with another 1 percent drop in corruption rate. Patience, now I all need now is patience.’
Gu Jun was feeling quite tired from all the mental activity, he decided to close his eyes to rest when he heard commotion coming from outside. The axle of the wheel kept spinning and then came the tingling of bells, the whinnying of horses and other vehicles. It felt like he had entered a city as the sound of the street crowded in. He could listen to a lot more people speaking. Some of the conversations he could understand because the speaker meant for everyone to hear everything. One of them was the argument between a drunkard and the tavern owner.
“Fuck you! Do you know how long I’ve lived at Dylath-Leen? Don’t you think I would know if I’ve racked up a bill at the tavern?!”
“Get the hell out! Don’t disturb the rest of my customers. Fucking bastard!” There was the sound of pushing and cheering from the crowd. The cart of the merchants kept on moving. Gu Jun though latched onto a piece of information. ‘Dylath-Leen’, that appeared to be the name of this place.
‘So there are cities in the dream world as well. This world is not a collection of dreams but a dimension that is only accessible through dream. This world appears to have its own local people and its own civilization… Could Barzai have come from this place? He definitely does not come from Earth. The fact that he had the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan in his merchandise probably meant that he had traded with Chinese in the past. That also means that I am probably not the first earthling who has ventured here.’ Before Gu Jun could contemplate further, the cart stopped. It appeared like they had reached their destination.
The wooden lid was still secured as he was moved down from the cart and transported into who knows where. After a long time, the lid was taken off. He was taken out by several middle-aged men and women in black robes. He found himself inside a storage room and finally got a better look at his physical condition. He finally understood why he had no living needs for so many days. The part below his knees were connected to some kind of organism that resembled a purplish-black vine. He could see clearly that some of the vines had crawled into his skin and joined with his own blood vessels…
‘Are those plants or animals?’ Gu Jun’s heart chilled. This was completely out of his biological knowledge, after all he was in the dream world. ‘So this was how the Zoogs saved me? The reason why the system showed ??? in my status?’ The vines provided him with nutrients and siphoned away the excess, but were they responsible for his palsy as well?
The black-robed people took care of him gingerly, careful not to injure any of the vines as he was moved into a delicate-looking earthen pot. As his body made contact with the dirt, the vines quickly took root. His upper body was exposed and he was left leaning against a wooden stand that was stuck inside the pot. Then he was changed into a set of clean and strange looking outfit.
“Hello, can we talk?” Even though Gu Jun tried communicating with his eyes, the black-robed people ignored him like he was just another inanimate object. Then they took out two strange-looking metallic instruments. They looked like blepharophthalmostat and blepharostat. They forced them on Gu Jun’s eyes.
“Hey! Hey!” Gu Jun struggled to move his eyes but it only rewarded him with more pain. The metallic fixtures were put on and he found himself unable to even move his eyeballs and close his eyelids anymore. His eyes were peeled wide open as he was forced to look ahead. Fury burned within him, ‘these bastards…’
They moved the pot onto a wooden wheelchair and covered him with a black cloth before he was wheeled away. Eventually, Gu Jun heard an ecstatic voice saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, bringing you the next and unseen before ‘Nightmare Wonder’, the Nightmare Man!”
The wheeling stopped with a thud. The black cloth was pulled back and Gu Jun was greeted with a theatre filled with audience. The theatron rows could occupy more than several thousand people each and currently the theatre was about 50 percent occupied. The audience members were dressed in exotic clothing and had strange and unusual looks. Their gaze of confusion, curiosity and interest were all turned towards the stage, onto him.