Even after enduring all kinds of inhuman torture, the little girl remained kind. She personally told Gao Ming what had happened in the past and shared a great deal of information about nightmares.
Every nightmare in the world was unique. Drawing on the dreamer's memories, it distilled a moment of their despair, imprinting reality onto illusion.
Perhaps because far too much pain had accumulated, that illusory despair had settled into something real, becoming an invisible yet existing Deep Sea.
The little girl spoke from firsthand experience. She said nightmares could roughly be divided into three layers. The first was the most ordinary, also called a Shallow Nightmare, and anyone could have one. It was entirely a projection of reality. Everything in the nightmare, however strange or absurd, could be matched to something that had happened in real life.
The small building the Testers had entered earlier was a Shallow Nightmare. The charred home, the adoptive parents who had turned into monsters, the intellectually disabled Older Brother who insisted on protecting his sister—all of those things had really happened.
Once the negative emotions in a Shallow Nightmare accumulated to a certain point, a shadow would appear. It could not be eliminated, but at first, its range of movement could be restricted.
The little girl did not know what the shadow represented, either. Worried that her Older Brother would be hurt, she had kept it trapped inside her body. Gradually, she had fallen asleep within her own nightmare, slumbering in the shadow and entering the nightmare's second layer.
The second layer was completely covered in shadow. Everything there was made up of what she feared most. Because she had desperately wanted to leave after being adopted, the nightmare had become a cage she could never escape. Using anything in the house came