The Interpretation of Dreams: The Strange World Deep within the Soul

A whole morning of classes had passed. Since studying how to enter other people's unconscious, random dreams without sequence last night, Zhu Zhengwei had shut off his computer at noon and lay on his bed, staring blankly at the ceiling.

"Whose dream should I freeload through tonight?"

But one thought grew stronger and stronger in his mind:

Entering other people's dreams was certainly interesting, but it was far too absurd.

One second, he would be in a villa; the next, at a swimming pool. Everything was bizarre and fantastical.

It was a lawless brainstorm, the conscious activity of the cerebral cortex. Anything could happen.

That was how normal people dreamed.

But what about entering his own dream?

Perhaps it would be different.

Maybe because of his uniqueness, his dreams differed from everyone else's??

What was my dream like?

Driven by growing curiosity, Zhu Zhengwei began dreaming again during his noon break.

Zhu Zhengwei fell asleep.

But after falling asleep, he found that he had no "surface-level unconscious activity of the soul" at all.

"I don't have dreams? Did I skip past the unconscious surface layer of dreams?"

As he pondered this, he looked around and felt as if he were in a sea of endless, profound darkness and terror. Like a diver, he kept swimming downward through the sea of his mind, sinking ever deeper into the boundless dark ocean.

Downward,

Downward,

Further downward!

He passed through the surface waters of unconscious dreams, crossed the hundred-meter sunlit zone, and entered a deep darkness untouched by sunlight!

Rumble!

The darkness was so profound that he could not see his hand before his face.

Soon, amid the pitch-black void, he felt himself accidentally collide with some barrier. A mysterious gate formed from the textures of a Flesh and Blood Brain had already developed cracks.

He shoved hard!

The cracks in the gate multiplied, until it finally shattered with a deafening crash.

Bang!

Countless brain fluids and neural cells streaked past behind him like meteors. Strange neural tentacles spread outward, and the Deep Sea Consciousness World inscribed deep within his genes, suddenly released, seemed to have been violently pierced through by him!

Light!

Endless, dazzling white light poured from the cracks in the gate!

In the boundless radiance, he entered it in an instant. His vision abruptly cleared, and he saw the deepest dream realm of consciousness that humanity had never touched.

Boom!

Time began flowing backward.

His school days, his years in elementary school, the childhood years that had already become nearly blurred—even as the scenes kept flashing past, Zhu Zhengwei discovered that he had actually witnessed his own birth.

Everything returned to its source. Zhu Zhengwei saw the first fragment of his life.

Waa, waa, waa.

A baby was born in the countryside.

"The baby's born!"

"It's a boy!"

"He won't be sick like the eldest, will he?"

"We can barely afford to raise the eldest already. If the second one is sick too, we'll secretly abandon him. As long as we hide it well, only the neighbors next door know I was pregnant anyway."

Amid the noisy voices, Zhu Zhengwei crouched beneath a weed-covered window outside the house, eavesdropping as he watched his own birth from the perspective of a bystander.

"What am I looking at?" Zhu Zhengwei's eyes widened in disbelief. "My birth?"

Aside from people with the legendary condition of hyperthymesia, almost no one in the world could remember what it looked like when they had just been born as infants.

Yet he could see it in this deep dream?

But Zhu Zhengwei quickly formed a guess:

Dreams were an extension of soul activity. His dreams were "Deep soul consciousness," recording every memory since his birth.

He had seen the most fundamental region of consciousness rooted Deep within the soul. It contained all the information and code at the source of his being. Rather than a dream, it was more like the deepest root activity space of the soul.

"So these are my parents?"

He looked at the biological parents he had never met.

He was an orphan.

He had been abandoned because of a hereditary disease.

He had never felt much toward his so-called parents while growing up, but seeing them now in the depths of his memories still stirred some emotion in him.

Though he had once gone through a chuunibyou phase where he fantasized that his parents were wealthy tycoons, and that after twenty years, the young master would return.

Zhu Zhengwei calmly watched the two utterly ordinary rural people.

"An ordinary birth, an ordinary family."

"Limited by the era and by medical care, it was an entirely ordinary abandonment in that uncivilized age in the rural mountains."

Zhu Zhengwei watched his own birth in the dream.

After waiting outside for a while, he sneaked into the room when no one was around.

Looking at his newly born self in swaddling clothes, the adorable infant sleeping soundly, he felt an inexplicable sense of strangeness.

"You really had it rough, but life will get better in the future!"

Unable to resist, he suddenly picked up the swaddled infant and lifted him high above his head. It was an unprecedented experience beyond words. "My past self, you have to work hard—"

Crash.

He suddenly knocked over a pen holder on a high shelf. A pencil fell, and its sharpened tip jabbed the infant beside his right eye.

Blood spread across the infant's delicate, fair skin by the corner of his eye like a crimson flower, gushing without end.

Waa, waa!

His infant self suddenly burst into tears.

Zhu Zhengwei froze, unable to react in time.

Click!

The lights in the farmhouse came on at once, followed by hurried footsteps.

Zhu Zhengwei hurriedly put the infant back where he had been and climbed out through the window.

"Damn it!!! How did the baby get stabbed by a pencil??" A furious roar soon erupted from inside the house.

Splash.

Zhu Zhengwei opened his eyes.

His expression turned strange. He had returned to the past in his dream, given his infant self some poisonous motivational advice, and ended up stabbing him instead.

Cough, cough, cough.

Good thing it was only a dream.

"Unlike other people, my dreams are fixed. They can even be said not to be dreams at all, but Root memory—connected to the foundation of my soul, completely recording my entire past life!"

Pfft!

Suddenly, Zhu Zhengwei felt a sharp pain at the corner of his eye.

He covered it in pain. "Could it be..."

Remembering the pencil that had jabbed the newborn infant's eye, he hurried to the bathroom. Swaying as he raised his head to look in the mirror, he saw that beneath the corner of his eye, on his lean yet resolute face, a Tear Mole was gradually emerging, carrying an eerie, hazy, dreamlike beauty.

"My eye corner??"

"A Tear Mole??"