Chapter 103
Outside, Lilus and Li Lu stood guard over the dreaming team.
Xi Jiangyuan lay at the center, the others around him arranged like petals, pressed close to him.
Lilus stared down at the red-marked stick in his hand, fuming.
They all got to enter the dream, and he was the only one left outside to wait.
“It’s only fifteen minutes. It’ll pass quickly.” Li Lu noticed his sour expression and hurried to comfort him.
“Next time we draw lots, I won’t be this unlucky.” Lilus ground his teeth.
Li Lu gave an awkward laugh, unsure how to respond.
About five minutes later, Lilus glanced down at Xi Jiangyuan and the others, noticing subtle changes in their expressions.
“Take out your gear and weapons — stay alert.” Lilus’ instincts prickled. Only five minutes had passed here, but inside the dream, who knew how long it had been? If they’d run into the whistle blower, fighting might have already begun.
Li Lu was just about to move when her body froze.
A sharp whistle split the air.
*
Inside the dream
Xi Jiangyuan quickly pulled his thoughts back. Finding the one blowing the whistle was the priority — if they didn’t, once it sounded again, someone among them would vanish.
“Looks like you’re adapting to the dream faster than I expected. Good. I’m going to expand it now.” He warned them to prepare.
Lu Chuan and the others obediently stayed where Xi Jiangyuan told them, focused as he unleashed his power.
The ground beneath them turned into a mirror, yet none of their reflections appeared on its surface.
As Xi Jiangyuan stretched the dream outward, the mirror began to reveal the whole town — like a drop of ink spreading through water. His consciousness flooded every corner, and the mirror filled with the town’s image.
Nighttime: some townsfolk slept, others worked, some drank and played cards. Everything seemed ordinary.
But the more normal it looked, the more suspicious it was.
“Captain, check the morgue at the hospital,” Messiah suggested.
Xi Jiangyuan nodded, extending his perception into the morgue. The mirror showed it in perfect detail — nothing amiss.
But Messiah’s gaze sharpened. “Can you push your awareness below the morgue? I mean, the ground beneath it.”
“…I can.” Realizing what Messiah implied, Xi Jiangyuan forced his consciousness downward.
Darkness. Then faint shapes — countless corpses, most still standing, hands clawing forward, as if begging to be pulled out. They suffocated within minutes, frozen in their final plea.
Just brushing against that place filled Xi Jiangyuan with endless resentment. He held on for two minutes before pulling back, sweating.
“The earth under there is packed with bodies,” he panted. “Those people who disappeared — they were buried alive. Messiah, how did you know?”
Messiah pursed his lips. “It didn’t add up. It’s only our third day in this instance, yet so many are gone. The town isn’t that big; they couldn’t just vanish without a trace. And instances always leave clues. At the hospital, Edith and I checked: every seven to ten days, the number of corpses in the morgue spikes. Why wouldn’t the staff find that strange?”
He glanced at Lu Chuan. “First, like you said, the staff forget — they don’t notice or recall what happened. But that still doesn’t explain why the bodies keep increasing. The second reason is sound.”
“Sound?” Xi Jiangyuan blinked.
“The ground speaks differently,” Messiah said. “In the old days, some could tell if tombs or ore lay beneath by sound. Our hearing is sharper than a normal person’s. I trained myself to distinguish subtle changes. When Edith and I walked in the morgue, the floor sounded different from the rest of the hospital.”
Sound travels through matter — soil with people in it doesn’t echo like plain earth. Messiah couldn’t confirm in reality, but in a dream, with Xi Jiangyuan’s power, he could. And it proved true.
“As time passes, more will vanish. When the mass grows too large, they won’t stay buried. The instance needs hints — the morgue is a perfect one,” Messiah reasoned. “The designers didn’t expect us to figure it out before spotting the clue, or to slip into the dream ahead of schedule.”
“Right. The surplus corpses lure us to investigate. Find that batch, and we can deduce their deaths, their hiding place, maybe the instance’s killing method,” Lu Chuan added. “Now there’s only one question: we found the victims — but where’s the thing hiding them?”
“Underground,” Xi Jiangyuan murmured after a pause. “They’re underground.”
“When I first saw it in a dream, it was above us,” he said wryly. “But dreams blur sky and earth — there’s no boundary.”
“If it’s underground, and just now you pushed your power down there…” Starry Shasha trailed off, clapping a hand over her mouth — too late. Speaking had triggered her Lucky Demon ability.
The buried arms stirred, roused ahead of schedule. The once-placid dream sky split apart like cracked earth. Through flaming clouds, a pure white arm thrust out. Half a body emerged — even an ear was visible. The fingers curled back.
“Not good — everyone, hide!” Xi Jiangyuan shouted.
But the whistle came first.
In an instant, the dream was breached.
“No—!” Xi Jiangyuan’s eyes flushed red. His realm shuddered, on the verge of collapse. For a heartbeat he was back in that nightmare years ago — when dragging teammates into a dream had also pulled in the boss, and comrades were slaughtered before him.
Wake up! I have to wake them! If I kick them out, can they escape this?
His focus thinned; the ground quaked.
Lu Chuan and the others heard a brittle cracking, as though the dream were a vast glass dome, webbing with fractures, ready to shatter.
Then — countless hands erupted from mirror and sky, interlocking to stitch the breaking world closed.
They wouldn’t allow prey to flee, or the dream to end.
They spread like choking weeds, yet each clamped precisely onto Lu Chuan and the others.
The whistle keened on.
“So this is what we’re dealing with.” Lu Chuan didn’t flinch. He tapped one clutching his ankle — the pale arm instantly turned gold, stiffening.
Shen Li conjured a torch and blade, tossing them to Messiah. “Burn them — if that fails, cut.”
Edith radiated holy light, silver armor forming over her.
Vivian’s eyes shifted oddly, mist swirling at her side; a sweep of her hand shredded the arms clutching her.
Starry Shasha stayed still — and somehow, the arms binding her knotted themselves, cocooning her tight.
In the dream, as long as they held onto themselves, they could manifest their real powers and fend off the whistle’s grip.
Reality, however, might not be so kind.
Lu Chuan knew: this was their best chance.
“Captain, hold on! In the dream, we can resist!” Lu Chuan shouted loudly. “Trust us—we can save ourselves!”
[Host… Host…]
[Host… can you hear me?]
