Night fell as dark as ink, enveloping Hope Town for the third time.
Lin Yi stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of the command center, the city lights flickering in his deep eyes.
Behind her, Chu Yao's voice carried an uncontrollable weariness and anxiety: "Lin Yi, the brainwave data analysis is in. These dreams... are like a virus, self-replicating. The source is ourselves."
She handed me a report, filled with densely packed data curves, each pointing to the same chilling conclusion.
“Fear’s self-replication.” Lin Yi didn’t turn around, his voice was eerily calm. “It doesn’t create fear; it just finds a perfect breeding ground and then awakens the seeds that have already been planted there.”
He retrieved all the action records of the "Ordinary Hero Project".
From the initial arrival of the spatial rift to each monster extermination, and then to the daily resource allocation and defense training.
One familiar name after another lit up on the screen, and their commonality was magnified infinitely in Lin Yi's eyes—at every crossroads of choice, they all chose to wait.
We await Lin Yi's orders, Lin Yi's plans, and Lin Yi's arrival.
They outsourced their judgment, along with the fear that should have been theirs, to the symbol "Lin Yi".
Dependence, without one realizing it, becomes the most deadly poison.
The blurry figure in the dream, with his back to all living beings, was not some evil god from beyond the realm, but Lin Yi himself, who had been deified and alienated in their hearts.
A phantom that is always right and can always cover up the truth.
"It's forcing me," Lin Yi muttered to himself, his fingers tracing across the cold screen. "It's forcing me to continue playing the omnipotent savior. As long as I step in and use even greater power to dispel the nightmare, I can temporarily solve the problem. But that way, the roots of dependence will grow even deeper, and next time, it will come back with an even more terrifying force."
Chu Yao's heart tightened: "Then what do we do? Organize a 'dream-breaking ceremony'? Or use a mental calming force field?"
“No.” Lin Yi finally turned around, his eyes lacking the familiar firmness, instead displaying a rare, almost fragile calm. “What we need to do is the exact opposite. Not to dispel fear, but to make everyone… see the face of fear.”
He walked to the broadcast control panel and gave Chu Yao, who looked completely bewildered, an incomprehensible order.
"Connect to the town's broadcasting system and play this recording."
Chu Yao took the audio file he handed her, and her expression changed instantly after just one glance at the filename: "Lin Yi! This...this is..."
Yes, it's the one you're thinking of.
That was a monologue he recorded with a tactical recorder when he stood alone in front of the "Gate of Destiny" at the beginning of Hope Town's establishment, when humanity faced its final choice and thought no one was around.
That was the most vulnerable moment of his life, a moment that even Chu Yao had never heard of.
Chu Yao's finger hovered over the play button, her fingertips trembling slightly.
She knew that once the button was pressed, the indestructible idol that Lin Yi held in the hearts of the entire town would instantly be covered with cracks.
“Press it down, Chu Yao.” Lin Yi’s voice left no room for doubt. “What they need is not a god, but a fellow human being who is also afraid.”
Chu Yao bit her lip, closed her eyes, and abruptly pressed the play button.
After a crackling sound of electricity, a young, trembling voice, filled with confusion and fear, clearly reached everyone's ears through the loudspeakers that were spread throughout the town.
“I’m afraid… I’m really afraid… I’m afraid that after opening this door, I’ll find… nothing outside. All our sacrifices, all our perseverance, will just be a joke…”
The sound was short, but it struck like a heavy hammer, hitting everyone's heart hard.
The bustling street fell silent instantly.
The arguing neighbors fell silent.
The crying child seemed to have his throat choked.
The entire Hope Town fell into an unprecedented, suffocating silence.
That Lin Yi, who was always as steady as a mountain and always at the forefront, that towering figure in dreams who turned his back to all living beings and waited for their calls... it turns out, he could be so afraid.
The silence lasted all night.
The next morning, as the first rays of sunlight pierced through the clouds, people stepped out of their homes to find a colossal "mirror wall" erected in the town center square.
It is neither metal nor glass; its surface shimmers with a faint light, as if it were constructed from pure spiritual power and illusion.
The wall exuded a strange resonance, and just looking at it from afar made one feel an uncontrollable chill rising from the deepest part of their heart.
Lin Yi stood in front of the wall, having not slept all night, but the bloodshot eyes made him appear even sharper.
“This is the ‘Fear Mirror Wall’,” his voice carried across the square through the loudspeaker. “It won’t hurt you; it will only reflect your deepest fears—the moments you most want to escape from and are most afraid to face.”
Without offering further explanation, he stepped into the shimmering, colorful barrier amidst the astonished and uncertain gazes of everyone present.
Inside the mirrored wall, light and shadow are distorted.
The square in front of us has disappeared, replaced by endless ruins.
One failed timeline after another unfolded before him, like a scroll painting of hell.
A "Lin Yi" was covered in blood, torn apart by the monster, and looked at him with resentment before dying: "Why didn't you make a decision sooner!"
Another "Lin Yi" knelt before Chu Yao's cold corpse, his eyes filled with endless regret and madness: "If only you had chosen a different path back then!"
Thousands upon thousands of defeated "Lin Yis" rose from the ruins, their faces contorted, as they approached step by step, their voices converging into a torrent that exploded in his mind:
"What makes you think you can win? What makes you stand here while we are reduced to dust?"
Lin Yi stood amidst countless corpses of himself, staring directly at those faces identical to his own, staring directly at the fear of "defeat" that was enough to crush any hero.
He remained silent for a long time, then slowly raised his head. His voice was not loud, but it clearly pierced through all the noise.
"Even though I've done it every time... I still came."
As soon as the words were spoken, all the illusions shattered like glass.
He emerged from the other side of the mirror wall, his face pale, but his spine ramrod straight.
The square was deathly silent. Everyone was stunned by his words.
Lin Yi surveyed the crowd, his gaze sharp: "Now, it's your turn. Remember, fear itself isn't scary; what's scary is your avoidance of it."
The crowd stirred; some cowered, others hesitated.
Finally, a teenager mustered his courage and walked in with trembling legs.
In the mirror, he returned to the moment when the monsters attacked the city last time.
A ferocious, clawed monster lunged at him. His legs went weak, and he couldn't move. Instinctively, he wanted to shout that name—"Lord Lin Yi, save me!"
Just then, Lin Yi's icy voice rang in his ear, not as a word of comfort, but as a question: "And now? Do you still want to call my name? Or do you want to pull the trigger on your own?"
The boy shuddered, looking at his cowardly self in the mirror, and for the first time, a mixture of shame and anger appeared on his face.
Then, an elderly woman with white hair walked in.
The mirror reflected her home surrounded by monsters. To protect her grandson, a wicked thought flashed through her mind—to push the awakened child from next door out to attract the monsters' attention.
"Sacrificing others for family sounds noble, doesn't it?" Lin Yi's voice rang out again, like a scalpel, precisely dissecting her hypocritical moral facade. "But now, looking at your face, twisted by selfishness, do you still think... this choice was right?"
The old woman collapsed to the ground and wept uncontrollably.
One by one, people walked into the mirror wall, and one by one, they walked out.
They saw their own cowardice, selfishness, greed, jealousy... all the dark sides that had been covered up by the huge halo of "relying on Lin Yi" were laid bare before them.
When fear is made concrete, examined, and acknowledged, it loses its most mysterious and powerful force.
The third night arrived as scheduled.
The tide of nightmares surged again, darkness descended, and monsters roared at the edge of the world.
But this time, everything is different.
The darkness in the dream seemed less intense, and the monster's roars were less intimidating.
Most importantly, the blurry figure standing high up, with its back to all living beings, began to shake violently, as if it might disappear at any moment.
Everyone stood still, silently watching that figure from behind, but no longer felt the urge to call out to it.
Just then, a little girl who dreamt of hiding under the bed, trembling with fear, did not cry for the first time in her dream.
She crawled out from under the bed, looked at the hideous shadow of the monster outside the window, and then glanced at the blurry figure in the distance.
She clenched her little fists, mustered all her strength, and uttered a startling statement in her childish voice:
"I'm not waiting anymore!"
His words seemed to have triggered some mysterious switch.
The entire dream structure, as if its core foundation had been removed, groaned under the unbearable burden, and then—collapsed with a crash!
The darkness receded like a tide, the monster vanished into nothingness, and the blurry figure completely disappeared in the crumbling world.
In the command center, Chu Yao stared at the unprecedented and spectacular scene on the collective brainwave monitoring device, her voice trembling with excitement: "Success! Lin Yi, success! A large-scale 'autonomous blocking' phenomenon has occurred in the collective brainwaves! Without any external guidance, they have actively severed their expectations of that 'savior script'!"
For the first time, the human spirit has achieved self-salvation on a collective level.
The morning sun, with an unprecedented warmth, bathed every corner of Hope Town.
The weariness on people's faces vanished, replaced by a sense of relief and peace after surviving a catastrophe.
Lin Yi stood in the center of the square, looking at the "Fear Mirror Wall" that had completed its mission and was slowly dissipating.
The light and shadow shattered, turning into countless specks of light that drifted into the sky.
Just a second before the mirror wall completely disappeared, he caught a glimpse of a very fine scratch on a fragment that was about to turn to light out of the corner of his eye.
He instinctively reached out and grasped the fragment in his palm the instant it vanished.
It was a line of small characters carved out with fingernails, the handwriting messy yet profound, with a hint of trembling:
"So... you can be that scared too."
At the end of the handwriting, there was no signature, only a symbol he knew by heart—a five-pointed star with a missing corner.
Those were marks that Long Wu had carved on everything that belonged to him when he was still in the orphanage.
A mark that only Lin Yicai recognized besides himself.
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted, and a chill even deeper than when facing thousands of monsters shot from the soles of his feet straight to the top of his head.
Long Wu... how did he get here? And how did he know what he was seeing?
He gripped the fragment that was turning to nothingness in his hand, raised his head, and looked into the distance.
The warm spring sun is melting the last bit of snow on the distant mountains, and all things are reviving, full of vitality.
But his gaze went beyond this newly born land, toward a more distant and dangerous region.
That place, on the edge of the town, is a forbidden zone known as the "Battlefield of Burning Creation," which is about to open.
Is this mark a greeting from a former comrade-in-arms, or... a declaration of war from an unknown enemy?
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