Nightmare Master – CH 007

Chapter 7. Nightmare

As the light faded, Xie Yuzhu rubbed her eyes and said, “Ouch! What happened? Why was it so bright all of a sudden?”

She tentatively opened one eye, then both eyes, and her mouth gaped open in shock. The world before her trembled in her pupils, like a small boat on a vast ocean.

“This…this…”

All she could see was a quiet, rain-soaked alley in Jiangnan, with high white walls and black tiles and bluestone slabs under her feet. Mist swirled around her, and the alley stretched endlessly. She was alone.

“Is…is anyone here? Yun Chuan? Uncle Zhuang? Is anyone here? Where am I?”

Xie Yuzhu was astonished and frightened, calling out loudly as she walked forward. But the alley ended in another alley, and the silence ended in silence. This long alley had no doors, no one.

Xie Yuzhu had turned countless corners in the alley. The rain intensified, pouring down the eaves and causing the roadside drains to swell. Soaked to the bone, she grew increasingly anxious. After turning a corner, the road suddenly widened to twice its original width. A group of young girls with oil-paper umbrellas walked slowly forward, their clothes fluttering in the breeze, their backs to her.

“Sisters! Wait for me!”

Xie Yuzhu was overjoyed. She chased after them, lifting her skirt in the pouring rain, but the girls paid no heed, their pace unwavering.

Xie Yuzhu finally caught up with the last girl and reached out to support her shoulder: “Wait!”

The instant Xie Yuzhu touched the girl’s shoulder, all the girls with umbrellas stopped and turned around in unison. The turn was so dramatic that it would break an ordinary person’s head, yet their movements were swift and stiff.

What they saw was a vast expanse of masked faces. The mask, white with long, upturned eyes painted on it and large patches of pink around them, resembled the face of a female opera performer. In the world of white walls and black tiles, it was eerily bright.

Pretty female opera faces crowded the streets in the pouring rain, layer upon layer, densely packed, silently facing Xie Yuzhu.

A sense of foreboding rose in Xie Yuzhu’s heart. Trembling, she reached out and removed the mask of the girl closest to her. The girl’s face was revealed little by little—eyebrows, nose, lips—everything was familiar.

It was a face exactly like Xie Yuzhu’s.

The girls under the oil-paper umbrellas stared intently at her, at the eyes behind the masks, at the hands holding the umbrellas, and at the rain-soaked figures.

The more they looked, the more familiar it became.

Every single one of them looked like her.

The rain intensified, the world reduced to the sound of rain, the tall, doorless white walls, the black tiles like dark clouds, and the likes of Xie Yuzhu emerging from this gray world.

Xie Yuzhu’s hands trembled violently. Her gaze darted frantically across their faces; her chest suddenly felt as thin as a sheet of paper, her heart pounding so hard it seemed about to burst. Fear rendered her speechless; even the strength to retreat vanished.

The girl whose mask she had removed suddenly smiled. Or rather, it was more like manipulating her stiff face to conjure a smile-like expression.

Behind the dense array of masks, eyes also held amusement.

The wrinkles on the girl’s neck relaxed, and she slowly turned around.

In that instant, the sound of splashing water approached from afar. The mask was snatched from Xie Yuzhu’s hands, the newcomer shoved it onto the girl’s face, grabbed Xie Yuzhu’s wrist, and uttered a single word.

“Run.”

Xie Yuzhu was pulled around and made to run. The sound of splashing water followed them. She ran a few steps in a daze before she could make out the person’s profile in her fear. The girl pulling her had long, silver-white hair, soaked through in the rain and clinging to her body in strands. She had delicate features and wore a gold bracelet with two pendants on her wrist.

“Sister Yun Chuan!”

Xie Yuzhu finally gasped for breath, almost bursting into tears. She knew the girls with umbrellas were chasing them. She did not dare look back, just desperately running after Yun Chuan, asking in a tearful voice, “What happened?”

Yun Chuan turned her head. Through her profile, Xie Yuzhu saw the vision stone before her eyes, with faint, crisscrossing blue lines.

“The spell malfunctioned a little. We’ve entered a nightmare,” Yun Chuan said casually.

Xie Yuzhu froze, then gasped, “A minor mistake? Is this a minor mistake?! Sister Yun Chuan, we’ve entered a nightmare controlled by a Nightmare Master! Dying in a nightmare is truly death!”

In this situation, even if they were not killed by the dream, they’d be scared to death!

Yun Chuan said, “Did you not want to see the Nightmare Master manipulate dreams?”

“Watching the Nightmare Master manipulate dreams and entering a nightmare yourself are two different things!”

Xie Yuzhu screamed, her voice echoing through the alleyway, piercing the rain. She ran as fast as she could with Yun Chuan, the girls chasing them seeming to enjoy it, their laughter growing louder and louder, clear as pearls falling on a jade plate, making Xie Yuzhu feel uneasy. Fortunately, the girls did not seem very clever; every time they turned a corner, they could not stop, crashing into the wall before turning back to continue chasing them. So, in these winding alleys, although she and Yun Chuan were not fast, they were not caught.

“Where are we going?” Xie Yuzhu shouted.

Before she finished speaking, Yun Chuan suddenly stopped, and Xie Yuzhu almost slipped and fell to the ground.

“We are here,” Yun Chuan said.

Xie Yuzhu looked up and suddenly saw a large open field in front of her. The water was ankle-deep, and the white walls and bluestone slabs had disappeared. The end of the field was shrouded in a hazy mist, indistinct. A group of white, paper-cut figures lay scattered on the ground, dressed exactly like those young girls. Their faces were buried in the soil, half their bodies submerged in water, their bodies swollen, their long hair floating on the surface, tangled together.

Xie Yuzhu covered her mouth to stop herself from screaming. She asked tremblingly, “Where…where are we? Our…burial place?”

“The border,” Yun Chuan replied briefly. She squatted down and reached out to test the mud beneath the water.

The sounds of pursuit and laughter grew closer. Xie Yuzhu turned around in alarm. The girls had appeared joyfully around the last corner, their graceful figures running towards them.

“They are coming…”

Before Xie Yuzhu could finish speaking, she felt herself being pulled forcefully, and she stumbled forward. The ground was slippery, and she lost her footing, falling face-first into the mud. Seeing that she was about to meet the same fate as those who had been submerged in the water, Xie Yuzhu closed her eyes with a resigned air.

The wetness was only momentary, and the suffocation was as fleeting as a hallucination.

The pain of hitting the mud did not come as expected. Xie Yuzhu seemed to have overshot her fall, spinning a full semi-circle around her feet before standing up again.

Suddenly, she opened her eyes and saw a golden sun hanging in the sky. Looking up, she saw endless grassy hills, the grass reaching her calves, and the surrounding wind was warm and fragrant with flowers.

“This is grassland… a grassland? I’ve never been to a grassland before… Am I dead? Is this paradise? A place where wishes come true?” Xie Yuzhu murmured.

“No, this is another nightmare.”

The voice beside her startled Xie Yuzhu. She turned her head and saw Yun Chuan standing next to her, unbuttoning her soaking wet cloak. Yun Chuan was drenched, her damp hair clinging to her body, water streaming down her face, and her cloak dripping heavily.

She spread the cloak out in the air and shook it, as if she were just an unlucky soul who had escaped a downpour and was now focused on drying her clothes.

Xie Yuzhu was not in much better shape. She looked down at her dirty, damp clothes, paused for a moment, then raised her hand and wiped the mud and water from her face.

The girls could not catch up; they were safe for now.

The moment the thought crossed Xie Yuzhu’s mind, all her strength left her. She let out a long breath, then plopped down on the grass, spreading her arms and lying back: “Finally… Ahhh, help!”

As she lay back, the instant her body touched the grass, she was thrown into thin air again, falling backward and spinning once more.

Rainwater soaked her face once more, and the girls’ laughter returned.

Xie Yuzhu’s heart nearly stopped. In her desperate struggle, her wrist was grabbed, and she was pulled back sharply.

She sat on the grass, still shaken, looking at Yun Chuan, who was dragging her.

Yun Chuan’s hair and eyelashes were still dripping wet, and her vision stone was covered in water droplets, but the eyes behind the stone were bright and calm.

Yun Chuan released her grip and pointed to the grass beneath them: “You cannot lie down here. This is the boundary between two dreams. If you lie down, you will fall back.”

Xie Yuzhu immediately sprang to her feet, wishing she could stand on one leg to minimize contact with the grass.

Thank God, if she had to go back again, she’d rather die of chest pains!

In the new dream, the sun blazed, and the air was scorching. Xie Yuzhu and Yun Chuan moved to a different grassy mound, sitting cross-legged on the grass, finally able to catch their breath.

Xie Yuzhu felt the water on her body evaporating rapidly; her clothes and skin gradually dried. Although Yun Chuan said this was not the boundary anymore, Xie Yuzhu dared not lie down again, sitting upright. Having survived a near-death experience, her mind was now full of questions, and she picked up whatever came to mind to ask.

“Yun Chuan, how did you know that was the boundary of dreams?”

Yun Chuan, who was squeezing water out of her hair, took off her vision stone and handed it to Xie Yuzhu. “I saw it.”

Xie Yuzhu took the vision stone with some skepticism. The moment she put it on, her vision distorted, and a wave of dizziness rushed to the top of her head. It took her a while to recover before she could slightly open her eyes and see the image on the stone.

The entire world was divided by thin blue lines, like being framed by an uneven weiqi board, or like being covered by a fishing net. As Xie Yuzhu turned her head, the scene before her changed, and the distribution of the blue lines changed accordingly.

“This…this is…”

“Can you not see it?”

Xie Yuzhu swallowed hard, earnestly saying, “I see it, but I do not understand it. What are these blue lines? Why can I see the boundaries?”

Yun Chuan pondered for a moment, then solemnly replied, “I do not know either.”

Xie Yuzhu’s eyes widened: “Then how can you say you saw it with it?”

“I guessed.”

“How did you guess?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

Xie Yuzhu was speechless. She clutched her chest, pondering helplessly for a long time, then said without much hope, “How about an analogy?”

Yun Chuan thought for a moment, then gestured in the air, “For example, this dream is a lantern. We are inside the lantern, and what we see is the paper covering. The blue lines we see in the stone are the bamboo ribs supporting the lantern. The distribution of the bamboo ribs follows a pattern; the denser the ribs, the more solid and closer to the core of the dream. Conversely, the sparser the ribs, the weaker and closer to the edge of the dream.”

Yun Chuan spoke quickly, and Xie Yuzhu followed her train of thought, continuing, “So just now we kept running towards the sparsest part of the bamboo ribs, then we crashed into the lantern paper and fell into another dream?”

“That should be it.”

These were all guesses? Was this something an ordinary person could figure out? Xie Yuzhu sighed inwardly and asked the same question aloud.

Yun Chuan put the vision stone back on and said, “Why can you not guess? Look and think, and you will figure it out, will you not?”

Xie Yuzhu did not know if Yun Chuan’s eyes were different from hers or if her mind was different; she guessed both.

She remained silent for a while, then gave a thumbs up: “Sister Yun Chuan, you are truly capable…”

Xie Yuzhu had calmed down by now and began to organize her thoughts.

Nightmare Masters manipulated dreams, needing to borrow dreams from those sleeping soundly within a hundred li. They either pulled others into their controlled nightmares to kill them or summoned things from the nightmares into reality to kill. Their situation seemed to be the first.

But the Nightmare Masters were fighting in pairs, and there were people from various sects watching outside. They should have noticed they had inadvertently entered the dream by now. Why had no one come to rescue them yet?

Xie Yuzhu raised this question, while Yun Chuan speculated that the bronze mirror’s field of vision was limited, only focusing on the Nightmare Masters’ location. They were always at the edge of the dream, and the dream observer should not be able to see them.

“Then let’s go to the center of the dream!” Xie Yuzhu raised her fist, full of confidence.

Yun Chuan watched her quietly without speaking. Xie Yuzhu was silent for a moment, then cautiously asked, “The closer we get to the center…the more of those scary things there will be, right?”

Yun Chuan nodded: “That should be the case.”

“Will we die on the way to the center?”

“Very likely.”

Xie Yuzhu lowered her raised fist, sighing with a worried expression: “Even if the people from the various sects cannot see us, the Nightmare Master should be able to sense that the number of people he’s controlling in the dream is wrong, right? Four people showed up for a duel between two; how come they did not notice us…”

Yun Chuan looked up at the sky; the sun was shining brightly, and dust was flying everywhere.

“Before we came in, the dream suddenly became chaotic and turbulent. Perhaps something else happened outside as well.”