Sleepwalking Filth

In his groggy haze.

Gu Bei had another dream.

Time returned to his middle school days. On a sleepy afternoon, the English teacher still wore a bob haircut and stood at the podium with her back turned, writing on the blackboard. The chalk struck the board hard, making dull, solid thuds.

He felt dizzy.

Yet Gu Bei could not make out what was written on the blackboard. Everything around him seemed out of focus. All he could stare at was the outline beneath the English teacher's clothes. It was as if everything else had drifted farther and farther away, leaving only the raised strap beneath that pink sweater, every detail painfully clear.

Gu Bei stared blankly, his neck and cheeks growing a little itchy.

Then the English teacher turned around, revealing the face of a middle-aged uncle in his forties, wearing glasses and lipstick. It was his boss.

His boss pointed at Gu Bei and shouted, "Balala Power, transform!"

"..."

Gu Bei woke up in fright again.

The second time he woke from that bizarre dream, he felt as though he had been squeezed onto a subway train for two hours and was about to throw up. Fortunately, this time he was not tied up somewhere strange, nor was his entire body aching. Only his left cheek hurt faintly, as if it had swollen up.

His left cheek...

Gu Bei gradually came to his senses and recalled what had happened.

Michelle had punched him hard in the left cheek, and then... he did not know what happened after that. He must have been knocked out, had that strange dream, and finally woken up here.

What had happened?

He opened his eyes, only to discover complete darkness around him. He could not see a thing, and for a moment he nearly thought he had gone blind. He moved his limbs again. Nothing was wrong, and whatever he was lying on felt soft.

A little like his own bed.

Had he somehow traveled back? Had everything that happened merely been a long dream?

He focused his senses again. No, this was not his home. He could faintly hear the ticking of a pendulum clock, and his home did not have an old-fashioned mechanical clock like that. Besides, this bed felt more like one of those thousand-yuan IKEA display beds. He had tried them in the store plenty of times, but he could never afford one. So this had to be somewhere else.

"Hello? Is anyone there?"

After thinking it over, Gu Bei decided he should be cautious and called out.

There was no response at all.

Gu Bei called out again in his mind, thinking the system might know something he did not. Strangely enough, the system seemed to have vanished into thin air as well. If not for the blue Triangle Glyph still glowing in his Consciousness Space, Gu Bei would have thought he had run into a ghost.

But that glyph also proved that none of this was a dream. He had not traveled back.

Since he was still in this world, only one question remained: what had Michelle done after knocking him out?

After five minutes of deep thought, he realized that lying here would solve nothing. No matter what, he had survived. Michelle had not killed him, nor had she framed him for the Purifier to kill. That was good news. When he had cast Water Ball Spell, although he knew Michelle needed him, Gu Bei had still been uneasy.

What if? What if Michelle had really made up her mind and gone through with it?

But he was still alive now, and that said it all.

With that thought, Gu Bei felt much more relaxed. His life had practically been picked up off the ground. Why should he be so timid? Michelle still needed him, so even if he did something out of line, what could she really do to him?

So Gu Bei got out of bed.

There were shoes beside the bed. He fumbled around and put them on. At the same time, he found an iron object next to the bed, hard and solid. He picked it up and felt its weight. It was fairly heavy, a bit like some kind of jar.

Gu Bei's eyes lit up. He took it with him as a weapon for self-defense.

After taking two steps forward, he suddenly felt a door.

There was a handle on it, somewhat like a modern one. Gu Bei tried turning it. The door opened, and faint light filtered in. Gu Bei immediately felt reassured. Anyone who could not see anything for so long would be frightened.

Though the faint light was perhaps a little too faint.

By the weak light, Gu Bei looked outside. This seemed to be a large house, something like a villa. A long corridor stretched beyond the door, and a faint fragrance lingered in the air. There was a window at the end of the corridor, with moonlight shining through it, making the place seem less eerie.

Another night.

The surroundings were quiet, as though everyone here had already gone to sleep.

Where was this?

It looked a little like the houses inhabited by nobles in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century European films.

After considering it, Gu Bei took two more steps outside. But just then, a low sound suddenly came from behind him.

"Woo... woo... woo..."

Gu Bei was so frightened that his hair stood on end. He quickly turned around.

At the end of the corridor, a humanoid thing was slowly walking toward him. Why call it a thing? Because the corridor was so dim that he could not see it clearly at all, and its posture was strange, swaying from side to side like a zombie. It did not look like a normal human being walking.

And that sound would not have felt out of place in Plants vs. Zombies.

"Holy shit, is this a ghost?"

Gu Bei panicked a little. He felt that this world's setting had become rather wrong again. Had it not been about mages and The Church before? Why were zombies appearing now? Was this novel called something like The Archmage of the Apocalypse Virus?

He felt thoroughly blindsided.

The figure gradually approached. In the darkness, Gu Bei could not see very well, nor did he know whether its face was rotted like special-effects makeup. But after recovering from his shock, he recalled the zombie movies he had watched and suddenly felt that this thing in front of him might not be so frightening.

With movement speed like a sloth's, how dangerous could it be?

So Gu Bei calmed down, raised the heavy object in his hand, and quietly waited for it to come closer. Half a minute later, he judged that the distance was about right. Then he hurled the jar viciously at the thing's head!

Clang!

The loud crash made even Gu Bei's skull ache.

The thing suddenly stopped moving. Gu Bei stared nervously at the figure, afraid that smashing its head with something heavy would not work. After all, the object was not particularly heavy. With the physique of the body he had transmigrated into, there were not many heavy things he could even lift.

What if it was not afraid of this thing? What would he do then?

He could not exactly kill it with Water Ball Spell, could he? He had never heard of zombies being afraid of water.

Just as Gu Bei stared anxiously at it, a scream came from the figure.

"Argh—!"

What a heart-rending scream it was, like an old cat whose tail had been stepped on by a four-hundred-pound fat man. It echoed through the entire house. The lights in every room flicked on at once, doors opened one after another, and footsteps came from every direction.

The silent night became noisy in an instant.

"What happened? What's going on?"

"Who is making such a racket this late at night?"

"That voice sounds rather familiar."

"..."

The darkness was driven away, allowing Gu Bei to see everything around him clearly.

The strange figure standing not far from him was a blond man. He wore silk pajamas, his face filled with shock. An unknown brown substance dripped from his lovely curls, leaving winding trails across his pristine white sleepwear.

"Uh-oh..."

Seeing this, Gu Bei's expression turned awkward.

So this world's setting was not that strange after all. That was a person, not a zombie.

And the jar he had taken for self-defense was... not an ordinary jar.

...For now, let us call it this world's "chamber pot."

The people in the house gradually gathered here. Most were men and women dressed in coarse linen, while a few wore silk robes. They were mostly bleary-eyed, but the moment they arrived, their sleepy eyes widened enormously.

As more people gathered, the noisy house instead gradually fell silent.

Everyone stared at the blond man, holding their breath and not daring to make a sound.

"Pfft..."

Gu Bei could not quite hold it in and laughed, but he knew that was inappropriate and immediately forced himself to stop.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to." He was having a hard time holding back his laughter.

The blond man came back to his senses and wiped the unknown substance from his face. He glared at Gu Bei, his voice trembling like a rooster having its throat slit and bled dry.

"You, you, you... I, I, I... fuck, fuck..."

Gu Bei tried his best not to laugh and put on a sorrowful expression.

The blond man's face turned bright red. His chest heaved nonstop, and his eyes nearly bulged with bloodshot veins. He seemed to want to finish his sentence, but all his rage and grief were stuck in his throat. He simply could not get the words out.

"You... did you want to say something?"

Gu Bei asked kindly.

The blond man seemed even more agitated. He began twitching, pointing at Gu Bei and shaking for a long time like an orchestra conductor. The unknown substance in his hair and on his clothes splattered everywhere.

"Don't get worked up. Take a deep breath. Take it slow." Gu Bei felt that he was being remarkably considerate.

The blond man seemed comforted and took a deep breath.

Then, before he could even exhale, his eyes rolled back and he collapsed with a thud.

"..."

Dead silence.

The kind of dead silence where a needle hitting the floor could be heard.

People's gazes shifted between Gu Bei and the blond man passed out in a puddle of shit. From time to time, they looked at one another as if everything had exceeded the limits of their understanding. They stood as motionless as if struck by a Binding Spell, unable to make even the slightest sound.

An awkward silence.

And... an awkward smell.

Just then, a mechanical voice sounded in Gu Bei's mind at the worst possible moment.

"Wow, this guy ate shit."

The system's attack was so sudden that Gu Bei could not stop himself from laughing.

Everyone's gaze instantly focused on Gu Bei as though they were looking at a rare animal in a zoo. Gu Bei felt as if ten bathroom heat lamps were shining on him at once, and the pressure doubled.

The key was that staring would have been one thing, but not a single person said anything. It made Gu Bei rather nervous.

He felt that he needed to say something.

"Um... it's so late. Why isn't everyone asleep?"