Shared Dream

"Congratulations to all dream experience officers for successfully waking up. Zhu Family Village will distribute dream rewards to everyone later. Please check your messages."

Zheng Wuyou looked at the message on her phone and felt a headache. The time displayed was still 5:07 AM.

From her understanding of her close sisters, at this hour, everyone's phones should be in the automatic Do Not Disturb mode.

Yuan Ling... why would her phone notification ring like hers?

With doubt, she slowly pulled back the bed curtain and looked towards Yuan Ling's bed through the small gap.

There was no movement from Yuan Ling's side; she seemed to still be asleep...

She sighed. It seemed she was overthinking. She must have accidentally turned off Do Not Disturb last night.

Just as she was about to lower the curtain and continue checking her phone messages, she heard the creaking sound of a bed frame from the diagonally opposite bed, accompanied by a faint sigh.

Even though it was very faint, in the quiet early morning, it sounded magnified several times.

A faint light flickered from within Yuan Ling's bed curtain...

She's awake? And she turned on her phone?

Did this coincidence make her lose sleep because of what happened yesterday?

Or perhaps...

She's having the same experience as me?

The waiting time felt exceptionally long, as if the rest period in Zhu Family Village at night had merged into the entire night, leaving her unusually awake at this moment.

She wanted to ask Yuan Ling directly, but she was afraid Yuan Ling wouldn't understand. It was just a dream...

That's right, maybe it really was just a dream. This text message could be a prank.

She looked at the phone number. It was a virtual number!

This must be a prank!

Could someone have used some kind of brain-computer interface technology to make her enter her subconscious?

But technology shouldn't have developed to that point yet...

Her thoughts were so jumbled that she tried hard to search for related information online.

She couldn't find any useful technological information, but she did see a familiar news report...

H City Morning News Express: Last night at 11:08 PM, a man was found unconscious in a KTV, his upper body bare. The woman beside him tried to call for help for over three minutes, but the man suddenly fell ill, convulsing all over. Before the ambulance could arrive, the man had already died. At the same time, in a residential building on Xiangya Street, two women were found dead in their rented apartment. The preliminary cause of death was dissolution by a certain substance. Police suspect that their roommate, who had mental health issues, poured a dissolving agent onto her sleeping roommates and set a fire...

Zheng Wuyou had no interest in reading further. She looked at the familiar face in the news photo and couldn't help but exclaim, "Woc."

Cold sweat broke out on her back, as if everything was telling her this was real.

Although the eyes of the three deceased were pixelated, she was very familiar with one of the facial structures... the roommate with mental health issues who died in the fire looked exactly like Xiao Xia.

Perhaps Zheng Wuyou's commotion also caught Yuan Ling's attention. Yuan Ling sent her a message shortly after.

Old Yuan: "Why are you awake so early?"

Little Zheng: "...Had a nightmare, and then read some bad news. Can't sleep."

Old Yuan: "Don't even start. I also... had a nightmare. It was too absurd, more absurd than the extreme horror escape rooms I've played."

Old Yuan: "And, this dream feels like it's affecting my reality. I already believed in dreams quite a bit. Anyway, it's hard to explain in text. I'll tell you when I get up later."

Old Yuan: "I'm going to try and sleep a bit more."

Little Zheng: "...Okay."

For some reason, she had a strong intuition that the witnesses of last night's accident might have all seen that NPC, "Chi Ao Chi Yin"... It's just that they didn't enter the same dream.

She had intended to catch up on sleep, but tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep. Zheng Wuyou picked up her phone to watch some videos, only to find that her earphones had fallen onto the desk under the bed.

She had no choice but to put her phone back by her pillow and start brainstorming, recalling the details of Zhu Family Village.

The hands that tightly gripped her when she was being swept away by the water were still vivid in her memory.

He was the one who pulled her towards the clock.

Did anyone else come out safe and sound?

After all, she had safely left Zhu Family Village, perhaps they had also returned to their respective lives.

One by one, her guesses led her to the blurry yet familiar figure in the water. Zheng Wuyou suddenly came to her senses and shook her head.

Zheng Wuyou, Zheng Wuyou, you mustn't let your future be ruined by good looks!

Handsome guys are indeed handsome, but you can't get too caught up in them.

At this moment of distraction, the opposite bed suddenly began to shake. She heard a loud shout from the diagonally opposite bed, which was leaning against the opposite bed: "Earthquake?"

"Yuan Ling, what are you doing? There's no earthquake!"

Zheng Wuyou quickly pulled back her curtain and questioned Yuan Ling, who emerged from the diagonally opposite curtain with a look of terror, her voice suppressed as much as possible.

The commotion in the dormitory was too great, even waking up the sleeping Gu Yunting. She opened her eyes groggily, revealing her curtain, and looked at Yuan Ling standing on the ladder of the bed with confusion.

"No, no, it's Wushen who's shaking!" Before she could finish speaking, Yuan Ling, with her messy hair, anxiously opened Wushen's bed curtain and crawled inside.

Zheng Wuyou's guard was raised by this statement. She quickly got out of bed and stood by Wushen's. Tall enough to peek over the edge of the bed, she pulled back Wushen's bed curtain. She watched anxiously as Yuan Ling performed CPR on Wushen.

"Yunting! Quick, contact the dorm supervisor and the infirmary!" Zheng Wuyou watched Yuan Ling's hands rhythmically push up and down on Wushen's chest. After Wushen stopped convulsing, her face was deathly pale, and she showed no reaction.

Gu Yunting, who had just been woken up, was a bit confused by the scene. She only knew that Wushen had a sudden emergency, but she still quickly picked up her phone as requested and found the dorm supervisor's number.

"Pfft…" Suddenly, Wushen spat out a mouthful of black blood, splattering Yuan Ling all over. Then, as if she had suddenly regained her energy, she immediately pushed Yuan Ling, who was covered in blood, away and sat up.

Wushen seemed to have narrowly escaped death. She patted her chest and muttered to herself, "I'm alive, I'm alive…"

"Did you have a nightmare too?"

"Did you have a nightmare too?"

… Zheng Wuyou and Yuan Ling exchanged a look with unspoken understanding, then turned their gaze back to the main subject, Wushen.

Gu Yunting, holding the phone she hadn't dialed yet, stared at the entire scene, dumbfounded.

What nightmare? What had these three been up to behind her back? It was six or seven in the morning, and instead of sleeping soundly, they were pulling this stunt? And now everything was fine?

Should she still call the dorm supervisor?

She even began to suspect it was a prank or some new kind of contagious vir