Young Man in the Countryside, Yellow Millet Dream

Zhu Zhengwei jumped in fright, goosebumps rising at the corner of his eye.

"I changed this body's genetic past??"

In that deep subconscious layer, his childhood self had been stabbed by a pencil. In reality, after he had grown up, the wound had turned into a mole.

Absurd.

Bizarre.

If that was the case, then if he was beaten to death in his dream, wouldn't his real self die too?

Zhu Zhengwei's heart tightened. Luckily, he had not recklessly messed around and had instead tested how the dream affected his real body.

Phew!

"What the hell is this?"

Panicking, Zhu Zhengwei turned on the tap and splashed water over his face to clear his head.

He stared seriously at the Tear Mole by his eye for a long while, then slapped both cheeks hard. Only after using the concealer belonging to Li Xiang, his beauty-conscious roommate, to cover it up did he return to bed to study and summarize everything.

"Absurd. Completely absurd!"

He cautiously looked at his two roommates, still shaken, as though afraid they would discover the bad thing he had done.

However, the two had already started gaming together in a Diamond-ranked match. Those two idiots even asked Zhu Zhengwei whether he wanted to join, righteously declaring, "With three of us queueing together, we'll definitely make it to Star Glory."

"No, I'm exhausted from rerolling Initial Accounts. I'm going back to sleep." Zhu Zhengwei returned to bed. For the first time, he understood something so terrifying: an ancient mystery hidden Deep within the soul of humanity.

Other people's dreams were superficial. They were false.

I had crashed through some kind of door. My dreams were real.

Perhaps it was not as simple as entering the soul's consciousness space. Perhaps he had entered the depths of his genes?

It sounded bizarre.

But this was not changing reality's past. It was changing this body's past. That dream was, in essence, a way of delving into the roots of the soul and altering genetic and physical structure.

He suddenly wrote down his ideas and guesses, stroke by stroke. A bold plan gradually emerged in his mind.

"Perhaps this world can be called a Root Dream."

"My dream is fixed. It records my past life. If I change the past, isn't that the same as rerolling an Initial Account??"

His heart pounded as he tried to enter the dream again. "I have to take another look!"

Waa! Waa! Waa!

A baby was born in the countryside.

"The baby's here!"

"It's a boy!"

It was his dream again!

His Root Dream!

This dream recorded his entire life.

It was incomparably real.

"It's starting over again, my past life."

As Zhu Zhengwei continued delving into the dream and trying to break through that barrier, on the seventh attempt, he finally ceased to be a phantom observing the dream. He completely entered the Root Dream world, entered his genetic memories, became that baby, and became his dream self.

But Zhu Zhengwei discovered something even stranger.

Tap, tap, tap.

As his baby self lay on a bamboo mat, a misty black shadow whose form he could not make out sneaked in and picked him up. It said, "You must work hard when you grow up," then accidentally knocked over a bookshelf. A pencil fell, piercing a hole beside his eye. The shadow panicked and fled through the window!

"..."

Zhu Zhengwei was dumbfounded. He had become a baby, only to be stabbed by his first-run self?

"My previous self is still here? There must be some dream disorder—two versions of me overlapping, and I'm stabbing myself!"

Every time Zhu Zhengwei returned, he was stabbed by himself once. Blood burst from the corner of his eye, making him miserable.

Luckily, he was only a mild patient. His blood clotting ability would gradually decline as he grew older.

Even so, a wound the size of a needle prick was already more than enough for his current self to suffer through.

Had he given himself a hellish start?

"This sucks."

His baby self lay on the bed, looking at the crude earthen country house, on the verge of tears.

All he could do was explore his Root Dream and his birth environment while bleeding.

On the third attempt, his baby self tried to sneak away. Before he could even crawl out the door, his parents carried him back inside.

After trying all sorts of things, he finally managed to crawl forward, sneak along, and reach the doorway.

"We gave birth to another child like this."

"What a sin. What a terrible sin."

"Our eldest is already seven. We really can't afford another sick child. Should we just give him away?"

He discovered that his parents were arguing outside. Amid their sobs, he learned about what had happened to him as a baby:

His parents were superstitious.

They believed his Hemophilia was Porcelain Doll Disease—once he was injured or bumped, he would bleed without end.

But to country folk in those days, it meant he had been possessed, that it was some strange illness or curse. Worst of all, the neighbors would look down on them.

Perhaps before long, his parents would abandon him in the county town.

Soon, he tested how long he could stay within the "Life Dream." He found that he could last for at most a week before waking up, his entire body aching and his Spiritual Power completely drained!

Yet even that week-long dream took no more time than an afternoon nap. The sunlight had only just begun shining through the window. It was truly astonishing.

"Life Dream."

Sitting up in bed, Zhu Zhengwei took a sip of water to wet his throat. Then he suddenly recalled an old tale:

Yellow Millet Dream.

This tale came from the Tang Dynasty's The Pillow Record. Lu Sheng failed the imperial examination while traveling to the capital and returned home in dejection. He stayed at an inn in Handan, whose owner was a reclusive immortal who had attained the Dao. Hearing Lu Sheng's story, the innkeeper let him sleep. Lu Sheng dreamed an eighty-year life of glory and riches, but when he awoke, he found that the innkeeper's pot of yellow millet rice had not even finished cooking. Thus, he attained great enlightenment.

"How similar?"

"In a dream, one entered a long, long dream that one could not wake from."

"Just as people's joys and sorrows differed, the time of dreams and the waking world did not flow together either."

Zhu Zhengwei muttered to himself.

Yellow Millet Dream, Zhuang Zhou's Butterfly Dream—these ancient tales of the strange were familiar to modern people. They embodied humanity's enduring curiosity and fear toward long, mysterious dreams of the unknown.

"But it really is possible—changing one's birth in the past!!"

Zhu Zhengwei grinned excitedly, his blood seeming to boil and his heart thudding in his chest. He suddenly recalled what Wang Jun had said on that rainy night a few days ago while they were rerolling accounts:

"Sigh, it's all fate. Looks, family background, talent—they decide where we start."

"If our lives could be like the game you play, where we could reroll an 'Initial Account,' choose our birth family, choose martial talent, choose literary talent, customize our hairstyle, customize our build, and then be born again..."

Wasn't he remaking his own birth right now?

Customize his face?

Customize his build?

Customize his hairstyle?

Choose his talents?

He abruptly stood up from the bed and burst into hearty laughter.

"Life is but a dream! Perhaps this is exactly what it means?? I'm going to customize my face! I'm going to reroll my talents!! Hahahaha!"

His two roommates were bewildered.

"The kid has rerolled so many accounts that he's gone crazy." Wang Jun looked at him with pity.

"He's stupid now. No saving him. Just cremate him already." Li Xiang also wore a sympathetic expression.

"Tch, I can't be bothered with you two idiots. I'm going to sleep." Zhu Zhengwei ignored them, pulling the bedsheet over his head.

Splash!!

With a perfect dive, he plunged headfirst into the Deep Consciousness Sea, passed continuously through the Shallow Sea Region, pushed open a mysterious door of brain patterns below, and entered the Deep Consciousness Layer.

Waa! Waa! Waa!

A baby was born in the countryside.

"The baby's here!"

"It's a boy!"

He clearly understood what was happening now: [I am entering the "past" carried within the depths of this body.]

After countless preliminary tests, he had developed more tricks. He tried to change the fact that his parents had abandoned him.

Life Dream.

He wandered through the distant past of his childhood.

After countless tests and restarts, on his fifth attempt to speak to his parents and communicate with human speech, he found that no matter what he tried, his vocal cords prevented him from making proper sounds. All he could do was babble.

He could not help feeling helpless.

Those legends about babies speaking as soon as they were born were all lies.

"I need to reroll my past Initial Account! Get a more awesome birth! And change the fact that I was abandoned, even if it's only in the dream."

He began trying to control his muscles and walk. After seven attempts, he finally succeeded in shocking his parents.

Waa! Waa! Waa!

The baby screamed miserably.

His parents, who were burning firewood at the stove, hurried into the room.

"Damn it!!! How did the baby get stabbed by a pencil??" It was the same scream as always.

But this time, the baby had deliberately screamed early. They happened to catch sight of a black shadow—the Zhu Zhengwei who had entered the dream on the previous run—putting down the baby and climbing out the window.

"What kind of ghost is stealing our child!!!"

Fear appeared in his parents' eyes as they uttered a second sentence they had never said before.

Wang Shenpo at the village entrance had been right.

A bump caused swollen, bleeding flesh.

A cut bled without stopping.

This really was a strange illness!

Something had gone wrong with the feng shui of their ancestral graves. He had been unfilial, causing his dead father in the graves behind the mountain to become a zombie. His zombie father had cursed them, and they had been possessed by evil.

But in the next instant—

On the bamboo-mat bed, Zhu Zhengwei's baby self, lying in swaddling clothes after being put down by the shadow, naturally and skillfully pulled out the pencil stuck by his eye with his chubby, fair little hand.

The rosy baby crawled on all fours atop the bamboo mat.

Then, with the aged solemnity of a compassionate Buddha in his twilight years, he slowly sat cross-legged.

A vivid flower of blood spread from the corner of the baby's eye. Sitting cross-legged, draped in a bright red swaddling cloth like a cassock, he held a pencil like a whisk.

One hand pointed to the heavens and the other to the earth. Then the hand pointing downward began to hold the pencil, writing a row of crooked characters on the bamboo mat:

"The phantom that held me is no evil spirit, but a god from heaven."

"This is..."

"A God-Given Tear Mole. I was born of heaven and descended upon earth, sacred among the world."

"Above heaven and below earth, I alone am supreme!"

His older brother, who had severe Hemophilia, was sitting at the doorway playing in the mud. Wiping his snot and picking his nose, he stared blankly at the baby on the bamboo mat, gesturing at heaven and earth.

And how could his parents, country people from the eighties or nineties, who stood in the room, have ever seen anything like this?

"An Immortal Descends to Earth."

The couple froze completely beside him, their pupils dilating violently, as though they had been shocked for ten thousand years.