Chapter 432: A Dream
After Yu Sheng told the young woman in front of him the information he currently had, she was silent for a long time.
"I know this is hard to accept. After all, it is indeed a bit too unbelievable," Yu Sheng sighed, and raised his hand helplessly to point around. "But this is the fact. Look around you. This is the strange phenomenon that was 'squeezed' out of the boundary of people's collective subconsciousness after the conflict between reality and illusion. Although I am not sure how you suddenly 'woke up', if you recall the past now, you should be able to perceive those inconsistencies that have always surrounded you but you can never see clearly."
Mo Ran didn't speak for a while, until she pondered for a long time, she spoke softly.
"Many years ago, there has been a 'strange disease' on the planet Shuji. Very few people are sick, but the symptoms are strange and inexplicable. The sick will have a mental attack for unknown reasons, or suddenly go crazy in the daytime, saying that they saw strange and terrifying things. But often in a very short time, the sick person will suddenly return to normal, and may not even remember that they were crazy. It's just that their vitality is severely damaged, and it is difficult to make any progress in cultivation...
“In addition, the monks living in Shuji are more likely to become possessed than other monks… The proportion is not high, just a little bit higher, but no matter how we investigate or solve it, the proportion is just a little bit higher.
"People have always believed that this is related to the earth veins of Shuji or the spiritual mineral collection and refining facilities throughout the planet... As time went by, no one could find out anything, and in the end it became a commonplace. 'Shuji is a little strange, and the energy veins in remote places are not good', that's what people say."
Mo Ran let out a light breath, his expression restrained, and his gaze fell on Yu Sheng.
"Since you can come and go freely in this strange land and take the initiative to investigate this matter, you must have extraordinary abilities. Immortal Envoy Xuanche... you must have been on guard against me before, so you didn't tell me many of the truth. Please tell me what to do next - I will definitely cooperate with you to the fullest."
"You are not required to do anything for now, but I'm afraid you, the 'city lord', will be needed to take charge of the situation later," Yu Sheng had obviously already had some ideas, and said casually at this time, "Now what we have to do is to find the 'derivative star body' as soon as possible, and find a way to expel it from this planet before it completely ecloses. To do this, we must enter the real Silence... This requires us to find a way to break through this 'nightmare border'."
"Punch it?" Irene subconsciously looked up at Yu Sheng and said, "How do we do this? Do you have any ideas?"
"The Derivative Star Body relies on the 'cognitive barrier' shared by all the people on the planet to hide the real Shuji, so the key is how to drill a hole in this cognitive barrier. It has to be a big hole, enough to tear apart reality over a fairly large area," Yu Sheng said while stroking his chin and thinking, "Mo City is a big city, and the huge population in this city is the best breakthrough point - if we can 'wake up' a large number of people in a short period of time, this 'barrier' that relies on collective subconsciousness to be effective will probably have a hole..."
Irene blinked her eyes, exuding an aura of someone who was trying hard but couldn't keep up. After a long while, she couldn't help but say, "...What should we do?"
"You're asking me?" Yu Sheng glared, "You do it yourself - aren't you the best at 'waking' people up from their dreams?!"
The little puppet was stunned for a moment, then reacted belatedly. But as soon as he looked up and looked around, he shrank his neck: "Fuck! That's easy for you to say! Do you know how many people there are in this city? I wake them all up? Even if you make me 20,000 mass-produced machines right now, it may not be enough!"
Yu Sheng narrowed his eyes slightly: "There are indeed a lot of people - but what if there is only one dream that requires your intervention?"
Irene: “…Huh?”
"Have you forgotten what I just said? The 'collective subconscious' - the cognitive barrier covering Shuji is connected from the bottom structure, at least in large 'gathering points' like Mocheng, it must be like this," Yu Sheng said, and recalled the scene when Irene unconsciously released the "thread" outward. "If I'm not mistaken, you should have noticed this when you entered this 'nightmare border', but you instinctively ignored this 'collective dream' because it was avoiding you... To it, you are a threat."
The little doll listened blankly, as if gradually recalling something, as if it felt something.
"Erin, think carefully about the time before we left Huixianzhou - when we just saw the reminder on the glass window," Yu Sheng said slowly, "Think about whether you felt anything at that time, and then..."
He stopped.
Because he saw thin black threads beginning to permeate the air.
Irene disappeared.
Before disappearing, she first turned into an oil painting, but the process lasted only for a moment, so short that it could be just ignored by a dream. Then the oil painting rose into the air and merged into the depths of wind and rain in Yu Sheng's sight.
Black silk threads began to grow in the air, weaving into shape at an astonishing speed. A huge spider web instantly covered the sky, and then began to slowly cover every inch of land in Mo City. Endless spider silk hung down from the clouds, and within the "web" woven by the black spider silk, the entire city began to tremble and shake.
Everyone stared at this scene in amazement; even Yu Sheng was a little caught off guard.
He didn't expect that after receiving his "reminder", Irene's power could instantly spread in such an amazing way in this special "dream" - she just didn't realize the "essence" of this dream before, and when she realized it, everything was different.
For a puppet that can invade dreams, this place is simply a "hunting ground" set up for her.
And this "mountain" located in the center of the city is the best place for her to release her power.
The mines have dried up, the city has declined, the past glory is gradually being forgotten by people, and the last prosperous area has become a common pillar in everyone's heart - in the dream, those buildings that symbolize the past prosperity are piled up and growing like living things, and the center of the city has risen up a mountain covered with neon lights and welcome speeches. The minds are surrounding this mountain, subconsciously missing the good times when the refining towers can still run smoothly... They gathered just right.
A huge black spider web spread in all directions with the "mountain" as its center. Wherever the spider web went, countless minds turned into bubbles that shattered at the touch of a finger. Twisted buildings collapsed and melted in silence. The chaotically piled city roads fell into the endless darkness. An astonishing gap appeared in the sky. Wind and rain howled in the gap, spider webs crisscrossed, and a shadow that seemed to be larger than the entire nightmare revealed its existence from the gap.
That was the Weaver, he was crawling on the edge of the hunting ground, weaving his spider web quickly. When the whole city was wrapped in endless black silk threads, when millions of minds in Mo City were simultaneously wrapped in the spider web and "peeled off" from the overall cognitive barrier of Shuji, everyone saw... two balls of scarlet light reflected in everyone's mind.
It was so cold that it seemed to penetrate the bone marrow and the soul.
All the people in Mo City had a dream at this moment.
No matter they were strolling in the city streets, resting at home, in school, factory, shopping mall, chatting with friends, or arguing with others - in what they considered to be "normal" life, a short dream broke into the depths of everyone's consciousness at the same time.
Mo Ran raised his head and saw that the entire city had turned into a miniature insect, with all the people clinging to the insect like dust.
She saw a small insect land in the center of the black spider web, and a weaver with scarlet eyes was hiding in the huge shadow, crawling slowly along the spider web.
She saw the Weaver's gaze, and every breath he took seemed like the last warning before the end of the world.
Everyone heard the warning.
"Sleep on it! Get up and have fun!"
The weaver's words are a bit rough.
But there is no malice at all.
Then the city woke up.
Yu Sheng felt that he heard a loud rumbling sound, but in fact there was no sound at all - what he felt was the collapse of his cognitive level, and after the collapse, he saw that the entire city was quickly stripped of its disguise.
It is neither the "normal" Mo City nor the bizarre dreamland with twisted and stacked buildings - the towering buildings stand in the wind and rain, old and ancient, and countless crystalline substances grow like mold along all the buildings in the city, layered and intertwined, stretching as far as the eye can see.
Pale crystal clusters were everywhere. They squeezed open cracks on the surface of the earth, piled up precariously on the surface of the aerial tracks, entwined around distant refining towers like branches and vines, and even grew into crystalline jungles covering the wilderness outside the cities, spreading from one city to another.
The "mountain" under everyone's feet also returned to its original appearance.
This is the rooftop terrace of the city lord's mansion.
Those strange "pillars" surrounding the top of the mountain are actually models of the twelve refining towers - as the symbol of this city, they have always stood at the highest point of the city lord's palace.
But even the entire city lord's mansion has been covered with crystalline matter - perhaps even for hundreds of years.
Mo Ran looked at everything in front of her in astonishment. Even though she had prepared herself mentally as much as possible beforehand, she was still shocked at this moment and almost lost her mind.
But then she realized that she had to start maintaining order in the city immediately! "It's up to you now," Yu Sheng nodded to Mo Ran, "Keep the situation in the city stable, and we'll go deal with bigger troubles."
"good!"
(End of this chapter)
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