"Dream Man" Incident

The continuing rumble seemed to be coming from the office area inside the room.

Fan Ning hurried back to his desk.

Under the light, he saw that the storage shelves behind the office chair were rotating inward slowly, with one side fixed as the center of a circle!

In the dim light, Fan Ning moved closer, but still couldn't make out what kind of mechanism it was, much less how it had been set up.

The rumbling lasted for nearly half a minute, until the rotating shelves swept out a small fan-shaped area.

In the direction of the arc's edge, Fan Ning discovered an even smaller shelf hidden in the darkness.

There weren't many compartments—roughly four or five rows and four or five columns, a little over twenty in all. Most of them were empty as well.

But Fan Ning clearly saw a large folder in one of the compartments.

He also found a small brass box after searching a little.

Fan Ning carried both items to the desk, then looked at the folder first.

It was more than ten centimeters thick and made of something resembling black plastic. To the touch, it was already quite similar to the folders commonly seen in his previous life.

He opened it easily and took out the first stack of documents, which were fastened with a paper clip.

The pages had grown old and yellowed. In the upper-right corner was an unfamiliar young man wearing a top hat and tie, smiling faintly. The rest of the page was filled with text in a form.

A file?

The name was unfamiliar, but he immediately saw the line recording the year of birth: New Calendar 864.

The date was long ago, the name was wrong, and the face was unfamiliar. But the year of birth matched, and this was his father's office...

As he continued reading, it was easy to assume that this was Vincent van Ning.

His father's former work records?

The lower half of the page contained a large table filled with several lines of text.

Work history?

"881: ...!!!" Fan Ning was dumbfounded as soon as he read the first entry.

He couldn't believe his eyes and read it again.

October, 881: Joined the Special Events Inspection and Investigation Bureau; assigned to the Imperial Capital, Saint Talanburg, Tulip Parish, Fourth Patrol Division (probationary period).

The Special Events Inspection and Investigation Bureau?

His father had once been a member of the Special Inspection Office?

According to the original host's memories, his father had been a folk artist ever since the original host could remember.

Because of the Key's unusual nature, Fan Ning had been wondering all day whether his father might have had another identity.

But he had never guessed this answer.

He continued reading.

April, 882: Special Events Inspection and Investigation Bureau, Imperial Capital Saint Talanburg, Tulip Parish, Fourth Patrol Division, regular member.

June, 884: Imperial Capital Saint Talanburg, Tulip Parish, deputy head of the Fourth Patrol Division.

December, 885: Imperial Capital Saint Talanburg, Tulip Parish, head of the Fourth Patrol Division.

April, 889: Deputy leader of the B-105 Anomaly Zone investigation team.

The work history ended there.

"What is an Anomaly Zone?" Fan Ning asked in confusion.

He suddenly recalled one of his doubts about the state of the world in the original host's memories.

The world map consisted of oceans and landmasses shaped roughly like an inverted "C."

The Theolan Empire was in the north, on the Northern Continent. The Holy Janus Kingdom and the Lydian Kingdom were to the east, on the Western Continent. The United Grand Duchy of Phaeton was in the south, on the Southern Continent.

That itself wasn't strange.

But Fan Ning had been puzzled by two things. First, this world was somewhat small, with an area that seemed to be less than a third of Earth's.

Second, shouldn't this world be spherical as well? Judging from his observations over the past few days, the sun still rose and set, and the seasons still changed. So why wasn't the commonly used world map a rectangular map or a projection of a sphere? Why was it instead enclosed by irregular closed curves?

Now, it seemed to be related to these "Anomaly Zones."

Judging from the literal meaning, were some regions of this world currently in an abnormal, out-of-control state? Were these places inaccessible to ordinary people, and therefore absent from the world map?

And judging from the numbering, there was more than one Anomaly Zone.

"Father entered an Anomaly Zone to investigate in New Calendar 889. It sounds mysterious and dangerous, but the result was that he didn't die. He went on to live just fine afterward; otherwise, I wouldn't exist." Fan Ning pondered silently.

He had been born in New Calendar 890, exactly the following year.

Although he had no memories from when he was very young, he at least had vague memories from the age of three or four onward. His father had always been a folk artist in Ufransel.

"Why does my father's face in the photograph look so unfamiliar..." Fan Ning looked back at the young man's smiling face in the file.

"In theory, even if this was a photograph of my father when he was young, as the person closest to him, I should still be able to vaguely recognize some of his features..."

"Is it because it was so long ago, when photography had only just appeared? Or is it because the light here is too dim?"

The easiest explanation for the name and appearance both being wrong was...

"After leaving the Anomaly Zone, did Father disguise himself and assume a new identity because of some concerns, then live in a new city? Was the face in the photograph his real face, or was the face I saw every day his real one?..."

Fan Ning felt a deep sense of unease. If that was the case, and the Remnant of the Musical Scale had been taken away beforehand, then the force behind it had already traced things back here.

A member of the Special Inspection Office, the leader of an Anomaly Zone investigation team... In the face of all this, his father might very well have been a "Knower."

And Fan Ning currently had no ability to protect himself at all.

He set the file aside and looked at the materials that followed.

"These are case files concerning the handling of mysterious incidents." Fan Ning flipped through them quickly.

"Good grief. They're practically a collection of all kinds of urban legends and supernatural incidents from my previous life—haunted hospitals, attacks by evil objects, bizarre disappearances, sacrificial ceremonies... Only these are the real-life versions."

One of the incidents left a particularly deep impression on Fan Ning:

The "Dream Man" incident in the Imperial Capital Saint Talanburg in New Calendar 887. Twenty-five years had passed since then.

One day, a psychologist from Saint Talanburg's Tulip Parish received a request for help from a woman.

The woman claimed that for more than a month, whenever she slept and dreamed, she saw the expressionless face of an unfamiliar man.

At first, she had only felt a little frightened after waking up, and it hadn't affected her normal life. But later, she began to see the face more and more often.

The face had initially been expressionless, but later developed emotions—sometimes grinning viciously, sometimes weeping, sometimes screaming hysterically...

In recent days, it had even stopped being merely a face. A whole person with that face had appeared in her dreams, accompanied by all kinds of terrifying scenes.

The woman's mind had been on the verge of collapse, and she had no choice but to seek help from a psychologist.

The doctor guided her in drawing the face she had seen using simple lines.

(Fan Ning saw the poor-quality printed image in the file: a middle-aged man with very little hair on top of his head, thick eyebrows and eye sockets, a flat nose, and a long upward-curving line for a mouth.)

"A little creepy. It's mainly because of the black-and-white image and the dim lighting..."

Although the doctor also found it somewhat frightening, he believed it was caused by excessive pressure in her life. He comforted and reassured her for a while, then sent her away.

The matter should have ended there, but something unexpected happened next:

Before long, more and more people came seeking help, and every one of them reported exactly the same thing!

Moreover, when they identified the face, the man in their dreams looked exactly like the one drawn by the first woman!

The psychologist panicked as well. He immediately called the authorities, and after the Public Security Bureau confirmed that this was a mysterious incident, they promptly reported it to the Special Inspection Office.

A lengthy investigation followed. During that time, more and more groups in the various urban districts received reports of the same kind.

Even other cities, such as Ufransel, received a large number of residents seeking help over encounters with the "Dream Man" incident.

Fan Ning glanced over the detailed list and found many familiar place names.

According to the Special Inspection Office's classification system, this case seemed to rank only slightly below moderate in severity.

The reason was that although the incident involved a huge number of people and had spread across a vast area, it had not resulted in deaths, Aberration, disappearances, or other serious consequences. It had merely left many people with varying degrees of psychological illness, cognitive confusion, and memory damage.

In other words, it had caused a huge commotion without anyone dying.

That made sense. Compared with those horrifying death cases, this really didn't amount to much. If not for the number of people involved, it might not have ranked at all among mysterious incidents.

The Special Inspection Office investigated for a while but found nothing of substance. Apart from the victims' accounts, there were no clues from the other side to investigate, and the victims' lives before the incident showed no obvious abnormalities either.

In the end, the official conclusion was "an incident of collective memory disorder, possibly originating from a prank."

Many people were dissatisfied with the result, believing that the authorities were concealing the truth. They also demanded, "Many people are still dreaming about this face. What kind of prank could cause such a massive and terrifying impact? Don't you have any other explanation?"

The authorities said it was easy to explain. The incident had now objectively formed a collective memory, while dreams were originally projections of certain memories from reality.

The official in charge even used himself as an example at a press conference: "I was perfectly fine before. But after taking over this case, I've had to look at that face printed in the files every day. Now I've started dreaming about it every night too... With all of you paying this much attention to it, how could anyone's mind stay normal?"

That was roughly the entire course of the incident as recorded in the file.

What caught Fan Ning's attention was that the elements comprising the incident were, on one hand, strange dreams and, on the other, abnormal memories.

They seemed somewhat similar to certain elements of his own experience after crossing over.

All right, the logic was rather tenuous...

Fan Ning shook his head, put all the materials back into the folder, and then looked at the other brass metal box.

Was this what he had come here to find?