Chapter 6

Lin Sheng stood motionless in front of the passage.

The kitchen around him warped from time to time in the dream, like a shifting illusion.

He didn't know how long it had been—ten seconds, or perhaps twenty.

Time had no real meaning in a dream.

Lin Sheng slowly raised his foot and took a few steps toward the passage.

"This crack must be connected to the nightmare that terrified me before."

Lin Sheng had a hunch.

"The aura coming from inside feels exactly the same as what I encountered in my previous nightmare!"

Just standing in front of the crack made the skin on the front of his body grow cold and stiff. It felt exactly like it had in his previous nightmare.

"I'm going in to take a look."

Lin Sheng paused, then made up his mind. It was only a dream, after all. He couldn't die here. At last, his curiosity overcame the trace of fear in his heart.

He calmed himself for a while, then slowly raised his foot and walked toward the crack, one step at a time.

Whoosh.

The moment his head entered the crack, Lin Sheng felt ice-cold all over, as if he had plunged into freezing water.

Everything before him was pitch-black. A faint howling wind came from both sides.

Soon, in less than three seconds, Lin Sheng's eyes suddenly lit up.

The chill in his body slowly faded. He was still a little cold, but could bear it now.

Before him stood a European-style living room built of gray-black stone.

He was standing at one end of the rectangular room.

Nearby on his left was a fireplace, an old, reddish-brown stove. A portrait bust of a solemn-looking, curly-haired man sat on top.

Almost without thinking, Lin Sheng reached out and touched the bust. It was hard, cold, and smooth.

"!?" He startled and snatched back his fingers as if shocked.

"The sense of touch is so much clearer than before. It feels real."

At the thought, he hurriedly turned to look behind him.

On the wall behind him, the crack he had just come through was shrinking rapidly before his eyes.

Through the crack, he could make out faint details of the kitchen.

Before Lin Sheng could react, the crack suddenly began to shrink even faster. In the space of a few blinks, it had sealed shut completely.

"..."

Lin Sheng stood there in a daze. He could still feel that he was dreaming, but...

He lowered his head and saw wisps of black air in the surrounding space, like threads, continually burrowing into his body and beneath his skin.

He felt himself being accepted by this place, infected by it.

It was a strange sensation.

He seemed to feel that he could stay here for quite a while.

It was an instinct, one that had appeared for no reason.

There seemed to be a strange sense of safety here.

After steadying himself, Lin Sheng looked around the entire hall.

At the center of the rectangular hall stood a conspicuous dining table covered with a white cloth. Dark red stains splattered across the cloth. It was faded, tattered, and old.

The floor was made of cold, hard, unfamiliar stone, black with yellow markings.

A plain, flower-shaped black candlestick hung from the pale yellow ceiling above. Sixteen leftover white candles, some long and some short, sat on it in the shape of petals. None were lit.

On one side of the hall were large rectangular windows; on the other, a pale yellow wall hung with all kinds of oil paintings.

Lin Sheng paused, then headed toward the windows first.

When he reached them, he slowly drew back the gray-black curtains and looked outside through the gridded window.

Outside was dim and overcast. Nearby, a few gnarled, leafless trees swayed in the wind. Beyond the wall in the distance, there was only darkness.

Lin Sheng let the curtains fall, stood silently for a moment, then turned and walked toward the opposite wall.

It was covered in all kinds of oil paintings.

But every painting was blurry now. He could barely make out that some depicted people and others landscapes.

"Just like my previous dreams. As soon as I start paying attention to details, everything goes blurry." Lin Sheng felt a little more at ease.

The familiar similarity to his other dreams helped steady him.

He reached out and touched the surface of an oil painting. As before, he couldn't feel anything at all. It was as if his hand were wrapped in thick cotton.

He was patient and examined every painting one by one. After a long while, he stepped back and looked toward the hall's exit.

In one corner of the hall stood a wooden door leading to another room.

Without stopping, Lin Sheng quickened his pace and went to the door. He gripped the black handle, which was carved like a horse's head, and turned it gently.

Click.

At the faint sound of the door opening, he slowly walked into the adjoining room.

A cloth curtain with dark patterns hung across the entrance. It was tied back now, its two sides spread apart like the strokes of the character 八, revealing the room beyond.

Two dark red bookcases stood facing the door, filled with neatly arranged books.

"A study," Lin Sheng guessed.

He paused without going in. From his past dreams, he knew there was no way he'd be able to read the books in the study. They'd all be blurry. He might as well look around elsewhere and see if there was anything new.

Lin Sheng turned and went back to the hall.

He wandered around the hall and soon found another door. This time, it led to a bedroom.

After wandering around the bedroom for a while without finding anything unusual, Lin Sheng returned to the hall once more.

Before long, he also found a cellar in one corner of the hall. It was packed with bottles of liquor, and a large dark red wine barrel stood inside. The air was thick with the aroma of wine.

After wandering around for a little while, he had a general idea of the place.

"It's an old European manor."

Lin Sheng returned to the hall. He felt that he was about to wake up.

People could sense when they were about to wake from a dream.

"With the little time I have left, I'd better take a look at the study."

He didn't waste time. He headed straight from the hall to the study.

He strode into the study.

The first thing Lin Sheng saw was a low rosewood table in the center of the room, with a stack of gray-covered books on top.

Beside the books stood a silver-gray candlestick, right next to a large book lying half open.

Curious, he leaned closer. The open pages were covered in tiny, densely packed letters. Every character was perfectly clear, but he couldn't understand a single one.

"Why is it so clear?" Lin Sheng was surprised.

He looked past the book to the other bookcases.

They were crammed with all kinds of books.

He casually reached out, pulled one from the shelf, and opened it. It too was covered in tiny, densely packed letters that he couldn't understand.

"It doesn't look like Celine Language. It looks more like Guren Script." Lin Sheng frowned. He had seen ancient texts written in this famous script on television.

Guren Script, Hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, and Ancient Xiguang Script were grouped together as the four oldest writing systems in history.

He had come across the origins of these ancient scripts in plenty of books outside school ever since middle school.

Of the four ancient scripts, Hieroglyphs and Guren Script were the easiest to recognize, with the most distinctive features.

That was why he had recognized them at a glance.

"This is ridiculous. I dreamed of Guren Script." Lin Sheng found it a little funny and carefully examined the book in his hands.

But what surprised him even more was that the illustrations and text on many of the pages gave him a strange, unfamiliar feeling.

"By rights, even if you see something unfamiliar in a dream, it should still feel familiar. But this kind of unfamiliarity..." Lin Sheng sensed something was wrong.

He was about to copy down a passage and write it down so he could look it up after waking when a violent dizziness suddenly swept over him.

"Time to wake up." He understood at once.