In the dream.
She appeared at the edge of a pitch-black stairwell.
There was no way back.
Only the faint, agonized cries beside her remained.
It sounded as though.
Those pained voices had changed from a little girl's into those of several adult men.
Lin Xiqing was just an ordinary little rich girl who normally had to keep the lights on, curl up in the corner of the sofa, and hug a big pillow whenever she watched horror movies.
Naturally, she was terrified when faced with such a scene.
But then.
Something even more horrifying happened.
A terrifying, twisted monster resembling a spider, with countless arms, stared at her from within the darkness.
The next second.
It lunged at Lin Xiqing in a vicious posture.
But in midair.
The monster was firmly nailed to the wall by a spear that pierced out from behind it, blazing with dazzling silver light.
In an instant.
Pure light dispersed into particles, colliding with the wavelengths of the Dead Zone radiation under equivalent conditions.
Everything became so dazzling.
The world's energy level returned to its point of origin.
As the theory of Mie Scattering proposed by Gustav Mie was proven at the boundary between reality and dreams.
Lin Xiqing also saw the handsome, upright figure of that knight.
She felt that figure.
Was very familiar.
Yet she could not remember him no matter how hard she tried.
She only heard his final words:
"Good night."
At that moment.
Countless residents of the Coastal urban district who had wandered into this dream saw a god of salvation through their haze.
When humans encountered danger, they instinctively magnified the silhouette of their savior.
In Freud's view, the workings and disguise of dreams primarily reprocessed and condensed the manifest content through compression, displacement of features, and secondary revision, until in the end, only one unforgettable point remained.
And as the "Dead Zone" dream shattered, and the Silver Sea's rising tide repaired the fragments of consciousness.
This positive embellishment was further amplified.
World Influence +100 Achievement Obtained: Nameless Savior Achievement Description: A silhouette, an unknown pioneer, a dreamlike memory that could not be forgotten
Su Wen saw the notification.
He considered where this achievement had come from.
Then looked out the window.
For some reason, the moonlight had long since escaped the clouds' cover, spilling pale silver streams of clear light across the pristine night sky.
The Coastal urban district.
Inside the bookstore of the Night Watch office on Yulin West Street.
Lin Yunwen walked to the entrance and switched off the hanging lamp engraved with the Lunar Cloud Sea.
Not long after.
A burly man holding vodka arrived, his footsteps heavy as he leaned against the metal shutter of the closed shop beside the bookstore.
Then he asked in a deep voice:
"Director Lin, has the crisis warning been lifted?"
"It has."
Lin Yunwen casually opened a magazine about traveling in New Jersey.
"A border crisis broke out in Yunzhou, and just as the Night Watch was being redeployed there, the Coastal Dead Zone erupted.
I really am getting old.
When something like this happens again, I no longer think it's a coincidence."
The burly man drank the remaining half-bottle of liquor by himself, then set the bottle beside the old bookstore's entrance. Looking at the quiet road with barely any traffic late at night, he said:
"Did the Dormant Sect trigger it?"
"What? You're a fisherman, and you're planning to find those rats hiding in the cracks between dreams?"
Old Man Lin took a sip of tea.
"Why not think about where to set up your chum tonight, so you don't come back empty-handed tomorrow?"
"I'm a fisherman who catches fish at sea, following the currents to find schools of fish. I'm not an angler.
That joke is so old it's outdated."
The burly man continued.
"The Ewiniar affair has completely died down. Captain Spring invited me to set sail; he wants to visit the Lost Sea once more."
"Would you like a cup of tea?"
"I'm not drunk, so I probably don't need to sober up."
"Then fair winds.
I'm old. Staying here and selling books suits me just fine."
Lin Yunwen said leisurely.
"Oh, I almost forgot.
Old Man Lin, the quality of your books really isn't great. My nephew handed in homework using the answers from the after-class exercises, and his teacher gave him a zero. They said that book was from before the Origin Era."
At the same time.
A ripple of distortion appeared in the dim yellow light of the old bookstore.
"What zero?"
A young woman in a hood emerged from the shadows and asked curiously:
"Could it be that one of Old Man Lin's fake books has fooled someone again?"
"Scram, scram, scram. One after another, the Lunar Cloud Sea is already gone.
If you don't have anything important to do at night, don't disturb this old man's rest."
A night passed.
A local Coastal topic quietly climbed to the top of the trending list:
Knight
After all.
Last night.
Many people had dreamed of that scene at the same time.
It was a memory they could not forget even after waking.
And at eight in the morning.
The Mental Review Bureau also received an anonymous letter whose source could not be traced.
The letter stated:
A little girl who had been classified as missing had actually been buried beneath a tree on the playground of the abandoned Tenth Middle School.
After receiving this information.
Zhu Yu immediately sensed that the matter might be related to the "Dead Zone fluctuations" from last night.
He promptly began the investigation.
The subsequent findings were obvious as well.
This heinous and inhumane crime.
Had truly happened!
According to our station's report: At the long-abandoned Tenth Middle School, police uncovered another exceptionally vicious intentional homicide case today.
At the same time, according to the latest information obtained by our station:
On the night before, the four murderers who had once "taught" at Tenth Middle School all suffered sudden brain death for "unknown reasons" and currently showed no signs of life.
Our station will continue following and reporting on the details and subsequent developments of this incident.
At this moment.
Many people across Coastal University's campus were discussing the two major events from last night.
One was the dreamscape.
The other.
Was that report.
Outside the wind tunnel laboratory of the Physics Academy.
After Su Wen copied out the data and locked the laboratory door.
He also saw the news on his phone's lock screen.
That was right.
Wu Shuang's information had been sent by him using the in-game mailbox function of Time Travel.
The advantage was that no one could trace who had sent a letter from the future.
The disadvantage was.
Sending emails also consumed World Influence.
That directly destroyed his dream of becoming Kaito Kid.
The young woman had seen the message too. She calmly asked Su Wen beside her:
"What do you think?"
"I think those four beasts died well. It saves internet users from arguing over their final verdicts."
Hearing him say that.
The young woman nodded lightly.
And at that moment.
An account that had gained immense attention and viewership from releasing only a few feature-length films published its newest video:
After the Origin Era, civilization's Fire-Bringers should no longer be cold-blooded butchers.
Narrator: Azure
Before you continue