Chapter 161
Chapter 161
Qin Lan sat casually on the bed, looking as relaxed as though he were catching up with an old friend.
Only the mockery in his voice never faded.
“You went to all this trouble to lower my guard, make me search for the ‘dream’s owner,’ and drag me through one memory after another. Why?”
“I’ve been trying to figure that out the entire time. It was only just now that I finally found an answer.”
As he spoke, Qin Lan looked toward the door again.
He sighed with profound regret, his every word laden with disappointment.
“You want to explore all my memories, including the parts even I’ve forgotten.”
“Everyone else’s memory scenes were decoys. Irrelevant filler.”
“I’m guessing you have some sinister purpose? Stealing my body? Mind control? Or some other random bullshit?”
He pointed at the door.
“The moment I walk over and open it, the memories buried deepest in my past will be laid bare before you.”
“And what happens to me? I probably get trapped in one familiar dream after another until I lose myself completely.”
“This is a dream, that much is true.”
“But there is no instance, no set of rules, and no anomaly. There’s only something exceptionally skilled at manipulating memories.”
After Qin Lan finished that last sentence, “Yin Manqing” spoke again.
This time, its voice changed into one Qin Lan knew better than any other.
His own.
The sensation was genuinely strange… like having a conversation with himself.
[Even if you know all that, what can you possibly do about it?]
[Qin Lan, I understand you extremely well, while you know nothing about me.]
[Even if you refuse to open that door, I can trap you here for one year, two years, even decades. Do you understand?]
“Qin Lan’s” voice turned sinister, like some idiot villain who had wandered out of a third-rate horror movie.
Faced with the threat, Qin Lan answered without hesitation.
“Bullshit!”
[Uh, why–]
Before the voice could finish, Qin Lan declared with absolute confidence,
“Because I’ve already figured out why you kept creating a sense of danger while warning me that dying would drop me into a deeper dream and make me lose myself.”
“I thought you were simply terrible at balancing your difficulty settings… Turns out the real reason was even dumber.”
“If I die, I wake up.”
Qin Lan let out an obnoxious giggle.
“Heh heh…”
“You couldn’t afford to let me die. That’s why you warned me before those monsters attacked… And because you were afraid I’d kill myself inside the dream, you invented that whole theory about losing myself to stop me from doing anything rash.”
“The brain has protective mechanisms… Dying and getting lost deeper in a dream? You’ve watched too many Hollywood sci-fi movies.”
Qin Lan scoffed. “Speaking of which, you stole this entire premise from Inception, didn’t you?”
“Then again, if I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it too… Still blatant plagiarism. Plagiarism is shameful, kid.”
[You… are talking complete nonsense!]
[Have you even considered what happens if you’re wrong?]
[What if death really does make you fall into a deeper layer? What if your judgment is mistaken?]
“Qin Lan” stammered, still trying to threaten him.
“Uh…” Qin Lan’s expression became indescribable. “If that were true, you never would’ve said any of this.”
“You’d love to watch me fall deeper and become yours to manipulate, wouldn’t you?”
“The fact that you’re saying this only makes me more certain.”
[?]
[Fuck.]
Qin Lan shook his head, too lazy to waste another word on it.
He stood, clumsily climbed onto the table in front of him, then launched himself backward in a thunderous leap.
In a pose resembling a dive, he pitted his skull against the concrete floor in a contest between evenly matched opponents.
Bang!
“Uh…”
Qin Lan’s vision went black. He pushed himself upright. “That didn’t kill me? Was the table too short after all…?”
Cursing under his breath, Qin Lan went for a second attempt. He steadied the table, aimed his head at its corner, and smashed himself into it with all his strength.
This time, he finally succeeded.
But…
He did not return to reality as expected.
When Qin Lan opened his eyes, he had indeed escaped the tiny house. Yet his consciousness had not returned to his body. Instead, he found himself in a pitch-black space.
It was like floating in a universe without stars.
Dim, silent, eternally unchanging.
There was no light and no gravity. Up, down, left, and right were indistinguishable. Distance and spatial awareness had lost all meaning.
“Oh, shit!”
Qin Lan’s heart lurched. “I acted so damn cool back there. Was I actually wrong?”
“Did I really fall into a deeper layer?”
“No. You did wake up.”
A warm, peaceful voice sounded from every direction, making Qin Lan shudder.
He could not see the voice’s owner at all.
Yet an involuntary conviction rose inside him: I can trust this person completely.
A single sentence had influenced Qin Lan’s consciousness!
There had been no fluctuation of curse energy. This was the pure suppression of an inferior being by a superior one.
In other words, the other party’s mental power exceeded Qin Lan’s by at least ten city blocks!
“Stop looking. You can’t see me, because the only thing I left here was my voice.”
The voice sounded wistful.
“Most of your deductions were correct. Only a small part was wrong.”
“The dream’s owner truly does exist. That owner is me.”
“You weren’t inside your own dream just now. You were inside mine… More precisely, you were inside a dream created by the cursed artifact under my control.”
Those few sentences nearly fried Qin Lan’s CPU.
What the hell?
“You don’t understand?”
The voice chuckled. “This cursed artifact is called [Endless Nightmare], the same name you previously heard for the instance.”
“It cannot create dreams from nothing, but it can construct them from memories.”
“You and the others who wandered into its range provided the consciousness and memories that became the foundation of the dream you just experienced.”
The voice explained with patient care.
“It led you through those scenes partly to acquire your memories and use them to seize control of your consciousness. You were right about that.”
“But it was also searching for me.”
Qin Lan swallowed. He had understood perhaps twenty percent of the preceding explanation, but that last sentence came through clearly enough.
“You, uh… What you’re saying is…”
“The cursed artifact under your control is trying to rebel?”
After turning the situation over in his mind, Qin Lan finally found a reasonably accurate word for it.
“Yes.”
“Ever since my death, it has been trying to escape my control… That’s how these unsolvable cursed artifacts are. Loosen the leash for one moment and they start getting ideas. Such troublesome creatures.”
The voice spoke as though describing a little dog that liked to bark too loudly, equal parts exasperated and indulgent.
Qin Lan, however, had gone completely numb.
“An unsolvable… cursed artifact?”
“Brother, who the hell are you?”