Chapter Summaries

Plot points and events

• During Lord Tang’s birthday celebration, Tang Hu is killed after mistakenly presenting a list of Lord Tang’s dead children as a gift. His death confirms Gao Ming’s belief that no one in Dreamfold Town can be trusted.
• The Night Watchman intervenes, using Wayfinding Incense to seize Tang Hu’s head. Lord Tang retaliates, and the Stone Lions awaken and pursue him.
• With the lions gone, the Butcher tries to enter the Tang Residence and kill Lord Tang. The Butcher’s two inner voices—one violent, one cunning—agree that the moment is right, but Lord Tang’s enormous hand attacks in response.
• Meanwhile, the names in Zhang Mingli’s Scripture turn into the spirits of dead Tang relatives. They break through the Hidden Chamber’s protections and enter it.
• As Lord Tang is occupied, his descendants and guests seize the chance to sever the black threads binding them to him. His youngest son frees himself first, then steals several boxes from the Hidden Chamber. Lord Tang kills him at the courtyard wall, but the guests begin fleeing.
• Amid the confusion, Gao Ming exchanges a look with the chained Chunniang and rushes toward the Hidden Chamber.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming grows more cautious and distrustful. He recognizes that Zhang Mingli’s assignment may have been intended to get him killed, but acts decisively when the chaos offers a chance to reach the Hidden Chamber.
• Tang Hu dies still resentful of Gao Ming, though he cannot voice his accusation.
• The Night Watchman proves more bold and proactive than Gao Ming had assumed, risking Lord Tang’s wrath to take Tang Hu’s head.
• The Butcher reveals the competing sides of his nature: his two voices may quarrel to deceive others, but unite when they see an opportunity to attack.
• Lord Tang’s youngest son breaks free of his father’s control, yet remains driven by the same greed, stealing treasures instead of escaping immediately. Lord Tang’s attack demonstrates the violence of their bond.
• Lord Tang’s descendants and guests turn on the system that has exploited them, but their attempts to escape remain shaped by greed and self-preservation.

Significant themes

• Greed and its consequences: Lord Tang’s greed dominates the household, and those around him imitate it—even when it endangers their lives.
• Betrayal and mistrust: Gao Ming concludes that survival depends on acting independently rather than trusting the town’s residents.
• Liberation at a cost: Severing Lord Tang’s control frees his victims, but the effort can leave them gravely wounded or dead.
• Chaos as opportunity: The simultaneous attacks and escapes disrupt Lord Tang’s authority, giving Gao Ming a chance to act.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming enters Lord Tang’s hidden chamber, suspecting the obvious trove is a trap designed to exploit the guests’ greed.
• Guests swarm a basin of seemingly endless copper coins. One man’s obsession turns grotesque: he gouges out his eyes, which spill coins, intensifying the crowd’s frenzy.
• Gao Ming notices shadow souls copying books for Zhang Mingli, then finds Lord Tang’s self-portrait. Lord Tang’s third son reveals the Bone Painter’s bones form the frame and the Soul Illustrator’s soul is trapped inside; Lord Tang’s private treasures are hidden within the painting.
• Using the Butcher’s Knife, Gao Ming cuts the canvas. Lord Tang screams, and treasures spill out. While others fight over them, Gao Ming takes three keys and escapes the chamber as a giant, bloodshot eye appears overhead.
• Gao Ming survives the darkened residence and is pulled into a side room by Chunniang. He gives her the keys. She keeps the Golden Lock key and returns the other two, explaining that each unlocks a person Lord Tang has imprisoned and can be exchanged for a favor in Dreamfold Town.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shows caution and self-control amid the greed around him, focuses on his objective, and risks himself to retrieve the keys Chunniang needs. His quick thinking and unusual speed help him escape danger.
• Chunniang warms to Gao Ming, impressed that he acted rather than merely making promises. She takes the key she needs and offers him the remaining keys as useful favors.
• Lord Tang’s third son, badly injured after severing his ties to his father, exposes the portrait’s secret and tries to destroy it, briefly aided by the shadow souls.
• The guests’ greed overwhelms them, while the shadow souls pursue their own task: copying books for Zhang Mingli.

Significant themes

• Greed and its consequences: The coin basin turns desire into self-destruction, while Gao Ming’s restraint lets him pursue his goal without being distracted by treasure.
• Appearances and hidden truths: The apparent treasure chamber conceals a trap, and Lord Tang’s portrait hides both his private wealth and the imprisoned artists.
• Trust and action: Chunniang’s regard for Gao Ming changes because he takes immediate risks on her behalf.
• Power and imprisonment: Lord Tang’s wealth and influence depend on the exploitation and confinement of others, represented by the Bone Painter, Soul Illustrator, and the prisoners bound to the keys.

Key plot points and events

• Chunniang uses the key Gao Ming found to unlock her chains and begins recovering in water. She tells him Lord Tang will soon notice and offers to take him out through a well in the back courtyard.
• As Lord Tang fights the Butcher, his descendants and birthday guests try to flee the Tang Residence with stolen treasures. The guests are pierced by bloody threads from the hall’s giant eye, drained, and killed; Lord Tang’s own children also attempt escape, knowing he treats them as resources and sacrifices.
• Lord Tang’s monstrous wall-mouth catches and swallows one fleeing child, while the bloodshed rejuvenates his burial robe.
• Chunniang breaks free by unleashing her immense fish body and using the curtains and rainwater to move through the air. She carries Gao Ming toward the back courtyard as Lord Tang furiously calls after her.
• At the well, Gao Ming discovers it is packed with the bones of Lord Tang’s former wives and missing townspeople. Chunniang jumps in with him, revealing that she had secretly prepared for escape: she sheds her corpse-like fish body and frees a snake tail marked with divine patterns. Her discarded body blocks the well, leaving only two shadow souls able to follow.

Character developments and interactions

• Chunniang shifts from a captive who appears to need rescue to a resourceful escapee who has been feigning weakness and planning her breakout. She helps Gao Ming, though her motives and temperament remain unsettling; her hatred of Lord Tang is intense.
• Gao Ming has little choice but to trust Chunniang as his only route out. He remains wary, but tries to secure her cooperation by invoking their shared goal of avenging her and destroying Dreamfold Town.
• Lord Tang is revealed as brutally greedy and possessive. He regards guests as food and his descendants as expendable blood sources, reacting to their flight with hypocritical claims of having cared for them.
• Lord Tang’s descendants and guests flee in panic, but their different motives are exposed: guests are driven by greed for treasure, while the family members understand from experience that escape is their only hope. Shadow souls also try to get out with Chunniang.

Significant themes

• Greed and exploitation: Lord Tang’s feast turns those who covet his treasures into its offerings.
• False kinship and betrayal: Lord Tang’s talk of family and protection masks his treatment of relatives as supplies.
• Survival through deception and preparation: Chunniang’s apparent helplessness conceals a carefully planned escape.
• Horror and captivity: The well, filled with bones, embodies the hidden victims and brutality beneath the Tang Residence’s imposing façade.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming survives being submerged in the underground river, where the two shadow souls are destroyed by bones lining the well. He retrieves the scripture they copied, though its writing is unreadable and painful to look at.
• As Gao Ming nearly drowns, blood-red tattoos appear and a Blood City seems to form within him. The change tears a small opening in the nightmare’s barrier, raising questions about the boundary between dream and reality.
• Chunniang saves him with her blood and drags him to safety. She declares their original debt settled, then says Gao Ming owes her a life in return. She gives him a perfume sachet to summon her at any well, but returns to the underground river to pursue her own scores.
• Gao Ming returns to the Schoolhouse and confronts Zhang Mingli about the scripture, the shadow souls, and his real intentions.
• Zhang offers Gao Ming a valuable modification method that could unlock his nightmare and restore lost memories, in exchange for the scripture and another task: finding someone at Madam Xi’s residence.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming survives a near-fatal ordeal and displays unsettling powers, while remaining wary of Zhang Mingli and questioning whether he is the complete person he appears to be. He agrees to hear Zhang’s proposal because it may help recover his memories.
• Chunniang shifts from uneasy ally to self-interested rescuer: she saves Gao Ming, negotiates a new debt, and leaves to settle matters beneath the town. Their relationship remains transactional and distrustful.
• Zhang Mingli stays composed and claims he expected Gao Ming to return. He says he can read fate and describes Gao Ming as belonging neither to the nightmare nor reality, suggesting he may know more than he admits.
• Wan Min and Wan Yang are surprised by Gao Ming’s return. Wan Yang senses a threat in him but puts away his knife as the confrontation with Zhang begins.

Significant themes

• Dream versus reality: The breach in the nightmare’s barrier and Zhang’s remarks blur the distinction between the two worlds.
• Life, death, and transformation: Gao Ming’s near-drowning reveals strange changes in his body and the persistence of his heart.
• Debt and trust: Gao Ming and Chunniang repeatedly renegotiate what they owe each other, while Gao Ming remains suspicious of Zhang’s motives.
• Memory and identity: Zhang’s offer to restore Gao Ming’s memories ties the next task to Gao Ming’s uncertain nature and past.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming confronts Zhang Mingli over being sent into the dangerous Xi Residence. Zhang argues that revealing the risk proves his honesty and offers Gao a bargain: the scripture scroll in exchange for partial instructions on releasing Gao’s inner nightmare, with the full method promised after Gao retrieves someone from the estate.
• Zhang gives Gao a small, blood-red box he calls an unclaimed shrine, one of the three requirements for releasing a nightmare. The other two are a dream guide and soulfire. He later hands Gao an ornate vanity case for the mission.
• Gao trades Zhang the copied scripture scroll. Zhang says it contains Lord Tang’s dream, with each word representing a person, and claims it will let him destroy Lord Tang.
• Gao’s assignment is to find someone in the Xi Residence who has Zhang’s face—whether human, animal, or even an object—and bring them out.
• Gao returns to the Xi Residence at night. Though the courtyard appears empty, he hears a lively wedding banquet and is pulled among invisible guests. In the main hall, he notices birth-date cards under the Kitchen God statue and spots the name Bai Huang, apparently chosen as a groom by Madam Xi.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming is increasingly wary and independent. He doubts Zhang’s motives, refuses to accept the shrine immediately, and recognizes that it could be both valuable and dangerous. He nevertheless takes the mission, balancing risk against the chance to gain the nightmare-release method.
• Zhang Mingli presents himself as candid but remains calculating and secretive. He gives Gao useful resources while withholding details, and his plan to retrieve a lookalike suggests a strange personal connection to the Xi Residence.
• Wan Min recognizes the shrine’s significance and watches it with open interest, underscoring its value to others.
• Gao also hopes to speak with the Old Night Watchman, but the latter avoids him.

Significant themes

• Trust and manipulation: Gao must decide whether Zhang’s apparent honesty is genuine, while knowing that survival in the nightmare demands suspicion.
• Power and dangerous bargains: The shrine offers a path to freedom but may attract danger, making every gain potentially costly.
• Hidden realities: The Xi Residence appears empty yet teems with unseen guests, showing how deceptive the nightmare world is.
• Identity and transformation: Zhang’s search for a being with his face—regardless of its form—hints that identity in this world may be unstable.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming attends the Xi Residence’s uncanny wedding banquet while trying to learn why Bai Huang’s name appears on a marriage card and to complete Zhang Mingli’s task.
• Invisible guests celebrate as a wedding procession carries out chests, sacrifices, and auspicious offerings. A faint smell of blood and an influence that urges Gao Ming to join the festivities make him fear he is being assimilated.
• A middle-aged woman’s unseen force keeps him seated and encourages him to drink. Gao Ming pretends to have a stomachache to slip away.
• He finds a bronze mirror and discovers that it shows the banquet’s hidden reality: the guests are mutilated figures who cheer until they collapse, dissolving into blood that seeps into the residence.
• In the mirror, a bed becomes a jar containing several handsome men fused together. Their bodies are steeped with herbs and strange objects, apparently being used to make the fragrant wine served at the banquet.
• The men plead for Madam Xi’s return. They say they were misled by the Taboo God and stole from the Fortune God, after the Useful God proved weak. Gao Ming recognizes these as concepts from Chinese divination, and starts connecting them to Dreamfold Town’s layout.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains cautious and observant, resisting the residence’s seductive atmosphere through pain and refusing to drink or eat. The mirror gives him his first clear glimpse of the banquet’s horrific truth.
• Bai Huang, though absent from the scene, is described as gallant, capable, and reassuring; her missing children remain central to her story.
• Madam Xi is an unseen but powerful presence. The guests’ devotion to her suggests she is the focus of the wedding and may embody joy or love.
• The fused men address Madam Xi with remorse and longing, revealing a history involving the Useful, Taboo, and Fortune Gods.

Significant themes

• Festivity masking horror: The joyful wedding is a façade for grotesque suffering and death.
• Assimilation and temptation: The residence draws Gao Ming into its mood and pressures him to consume its offerings.
• Obsession and sacrifice: The men remain devoted to Madam Xi despite being mutilated and used as ingredients.
• Fate and imbalance: Divination terminology hints that the town’s supernatural order may be organized around competing forces and deficiencies.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming explores a side room in the Xi Residence and finds several men fused together inside a wine jar. They resent Madam Xi and fear that their brothers’ faces and emotions will consume what remains of their sanity.
• The men recognize Gao Ming as an outsider—and therefore a Tester—when he speaks. One claims to be a fellow Tester who has mastered the Filling Method, a process involving fusion with an anomalous object. He offers his method and object if Gao Ming will free him.
• Gao Ming pretends to consider the offer but keeps his distance, using questions to learn about Dreamfold Town’s supernatural order.
• The man divides its entities into three broad groups: useful gods, which perform necessary roles; the mysterious fortune god, associated with Madam Xi and good luck; and the taboo gods, linked to catastrophic misfortune.
• He says many useful gods, including the Butcher and Lord Tang, have gone mad, while the Old Night Watchman is the only one who has remained sane—and likely the strongest.
• The man claims that he and other abandoned Nightfolk once married Madam Xi, but none ever saw the fortune god. He says he was punished after the taboo god tricked him into stealing something belonging to the fortune god.
• He directs Gao Ming toward the abandoned road behind the Xi Residence, where the taboo gods are said to dwell, warning that seeing them is fatal and hearing them often drives people mad.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains wary and observant. Though the Filling Method is presented as a tempting opportunity, he has no intention of trusting the trapped man; he feigns interest to extract information.
• The man in the wine jar shifts from a false show of humility to bitterness and desperation. He tries to entice Gao Ming with promises of power and an anomalous object, while revealing his resentment toward Madam Xi and his fear of losing his sanity.
• Their exchange is a contest of manipulation: the man seeks rescue, while Gao Ming controls the conversation through cautious questions and measured responses.

Significant themes

• Deceptive appearances and unreliable testimony: The man’s account may be self-serving, and roles that sound benevolent or monstrous are not straightforward.
• Corruption and madness: Even entities that keep the town functioning can deteriorate, while the trapped men face psychological and physical dissolution.
• Fortune and calamity intertwined: The fortune god’s blessings appear connected to the taboo god’s dangers, suggesting that pursuing luck may invite disaster.
• Power at a cost: The Filling Method promises strength through bodily fusion, but the chapter’s grotesque imagery frames such transformation as perilous.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming confronts a Nightfolk man fused with other bodies inside a wine jar. The man explains the Filling Method, which turns human flesh into a vessel and refines souls into divinity, and offers to help Gao Ming in exchange for cooperation.
• Looking for the Schoolhouse teachers, Gao Ming learns they were killed by earlier Testers seeking their modification method. When he asks about Zhang Mingli, the man reacts with terror and warns that Zhang is a taboo of Dreamfold Town, imprisoned there after coming from outside and supposedly dead for many years.
• The man’s fear turns to violence: he attacks Gao Ming with a mass of fused flesh. Gao Ming cuts off his head with the Butcher’s Knife and escapes the room as the creature pursues him.
• The wedding guests, absorbed in festive energy and obsessed with good fortune, refuse to help. The monster breaks into the banquet and drags guests away to eat them, while the celebration carries on around the killings.
• Seeing that the monster’s seal is weakening and Madam Xi has not intervened, Gao Ming turns his attention toward the forbidden main hall and Madam Xi’s bedroom.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains focused on finding answers about Zhang Mingli, but the encounter reveals that Zhang’s reputation in Dreamfold Town is far more frightening than Gao Ming expected. Gao Ming also acts decisively when threatened, even though using his knife may attract danger.
• The wine-jar man begins as a cautious, manipulative recruiter, offering the Filling Method and information. His fear of Zhang Mingli exposes how dangerous the name is, before he transforms into a predatory monster and attacks Gao Ming.
• The wedding guests show no solidarity or awareness: they prioritize festive energy and blessings over the immediate danger, leaving Gao Ming to fend for himself.
• Gao Ming’s exchange with the man shifts from bargaining to interrogation and then combat; the guests’ collective indifference contrasts with the man’s direct hostility.

Significant themes

• Corruption of human ambition: Earlier Testers destroyed the Schoolhouse for power, leaving later generations without its shelter or knowledge.
• The blurred line between human and monstrous: The Filling Method literally turns human bodies and souls into something divine, while the wine-jar creature embodies the horrifying cost.
• False joy and moral blindness: The banquet’s celebration continues as guests are consumed, suggesting that imposed happiness can suppress reason and compassion.
• Taboo and hidden power: Zhang Mingli’s status as a taboo reframes Gao Ming’s understanding of someone he remembered as a benefactor and raises new questions about what happened to him.

Plot points

• Gao Ming realizes the wine-jar monster is secretly eating guests to weaken its seal. He leaves it behind and slips into the Xi Residence’s main hall.
• In the hall, he discovers twenty-four grotesque beings seated at a banquet. They call themselves the Joy Immortals and correspond to the figures in a mural. Their chilling presence explains why the other guests avoid the room, so Gao Ming retreats before provoking them.
• He investigates Madam Xi’s bridal chamber, a restricted room reserved for her, Yelang, and the Fortune God. There he finds Bai Huang dressed as a bride—but she believes she is Yelang, and that Dreamfold Town is her true home.
• Gao Ming tries to restore her memory by mentioning the Deep Nightmare and her children, Bai Xiao and Bai Qiao. Bai Huang briefly wavers, but questions whether those people belong to reality or merely to a dream. She ends by reaffirming her identity as Yelang and describing life as a passage between illusion and truth.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming stays alert and cautious: he recognizes the Joy Immortals as a major threat, withdraws rather than confronting them, and approaches Bai Huang carefully. His attempt to reach her through her children falters when he realizes he met them in a nightmare too.
• Bai Huang/Yelang appears to have lost—or rejected—her former identity. She treats Gao Ming as a stranger and interprets his memories as dreams, though mentioning her children briefly unsettles her.
• The wine-jar monster takes advantage of Gao Ming’s absence to feed and pursue freedom.
• Gao Ming and Bai Huang’s encounter shifts from recognition and urgency to a philosophical dispute over what counts as real.

Significant themes

• Reality and illusion: Bai Huang’s uncertainty challenges Gao Ming’s confidence that the waking world is reality.
• Identity and memory: Bai Huang’s apparent transformation into Yelang raises the question of whether a person is defined by memory, role, or present belief.
• The danger beneath celebration: The wedding banquet and its auspicious imagery conceal monstrous guests and lethal intent.
• Caution and uncertainty: Gao Ming must make decisions with incomplete knowledge, retreating from danger while confronting the limits of what he can prove.

Plot points and events

• Bai Huang claims that Gao Ming’s memories of Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals, the Testers, and his search for her child are illusions, and that Dreamfold Town is his only reality. A supernatural festive aura in Madam Xi’s room begins overwhelming Gao Ming and filling him with happiness.
• The aura tries to consume Gao Ming’s painful memories and impose Bai Huang’s version of events. But when it reaches his deepest despair, it cannot erase it.
• His memories of happiness reveal how much Liu Yi means to him: she is his anchor to reality and, in his eyes, Fate’s gift. The aura then tries to drag his memories of her into the abyss in his heart.
• Gao Ming resists. His heart’s fissure opens, releasing the resentment of the many versions of himself who suffered horrific deaths. Their force shatters the festive aura and frees Bai Huang from its influence.
• Gao Ming notices that the Blood City Tattoo on his chest has darkened, with his heart at the city’s center. The ordeal also restores fragments of his memory.
• Bai Huang explains that after entering the passage, she appeared in a ruined house, later fled into the Xi Residence, and was chosen as the Nightfolk after competing with three other Testers. The others died, and she remembers little after drinking tea marked with “joy.” She suspects the Fortune God possessed her.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming discovers that happiness alone cannot overwrite his profound despair. His love for Liu Yi gives him a reason to cling to reality, while the resentment bound up in his past deaths proves powerful enough to break the supernatural influence. He also realizes that, unlike the other Testers, he seems to have crawled out of a grave.
• Bai Huang shifts from trying to convince Gao Ming that their memories are false to regaining her own senses and helping him. She is horrified to learn she may have attacked him while possessed.
• Gao Ming and Bai Huang compare what they remember and conclude that the voice and actions that manipulated Gao Ming were not Bai Huang’s own.

Significant themes

• Memory and identity: The chapter questions whether memories define reality, especially when supernatural forces can distort them.
• Despair and resilience: Gao Ming’s despair cannot be erased by manufactured happiness; confronting it instead releases strength.
• Love as an anchor: Liu Yi’s presence is the central source of Gao Ming’s happiness and his connection to the real world.
• Possession and deception: Bai Huang’s apparent beliefs and actions may have been controlled by an outside force, leaving the Testers unsure whom or what to trust.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming asks Bai Huang about Zhang Mingli and learns that a man matching Zhang’s face—but with a different body—is being kept in a wine jar in the Xi Residence cellar. He is said to be Madam Xi’s first husband and the first Nightfolk.
• As the wedding attendants call them to the ceremony, the bridal room’s supernatural red cords try to bind Bai Huang. Gao Ming tears them away and burns the room’s wedding character with a candle, deliberately using the Fortune God’s power to probe the sealed contents of his heart.
• The ritual triggers intense pain and a vivid response from Gao Ming’s Blood City Tattoo. He glimpses fragments of what may be hidden inside him, including Bai Xiao and Bai Qiao, and wonders whether uncovering his past will restore suffering he has escaped.
• Bai Huang urges him to continue: if he refuses to carry his own despair, innocent people may bear it instead. She then distracts the guests and attendants by proceeding to marry Madam Xi, giving Gao Ming a chance to reach the cellar.
• Gao Ming enters the cellar and finds it built from corpses. The dead lie embracing one another, appearing content as they inhabit idealized scenes of love, family, and friendship. Touching them draws Gao Ming into their joyful memories.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains determined to find Zhang Mingli, but his growing memories make him question whether recovering the truth is worth the pain. He actively uses the wedding’s supernatural forces to break into his sealed past.
• Bai Huang continues to resist the force controlling her, though her struggle is visible. She chooses to risk the wedding as a distraction, helping Gao Ming despite her own danger.
• Gao Ming and Bai Huang share a candid exchange about the burden of suffering: she challenges his wish to avoid pain, while he admits uncertainty about what his memories contain and what their return might cost.
• Madam Xi remains an offstage but powerful presence; her unusual care for the first Nightfolk suggests the imprisoned man is important.

Significant themes

• Memory and the cost of truth: Recovering the past may restore both identity and unbearable suffering.
• Responsibility for despair: Avoided pain may be displaced onto innocent people.
• Distorted happiness: The cellar’s corpses embody fulfilled relationships, but their blissful appearance rests on death and entrapment.
• Appearance versus reality: The ornate, fragrant residence conceals a foul cellar, while apparent happiness may hide something horrifying.

Key plot points

• Gao Ming reaches the end of the cellar, where the corpses’ joyful memories have failed to tempt or transform him. Instead, their happiness has been tainted by his despair, and they have absorbed some of his pain.
• He finds rows of wine jars containing memories treasured by the Fortune God. A disembodied man’s head speaks to him from the darkness.
• The head resembles Zhang Mingli. Its owner asks Gao Ming to retrieve a white Ring Communicator from his jar as proof of his identity.
• The man reveals that he is a designer of the nightmare, the youngest person in charge of the Brain-Domain Game, and the creator of Dreamfold Town.
• He explains that Perfect Life—now called the Forbidden Game—was created by his grandfather, Fu Tian, founder of Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. The game opened a passage to the deep world, whose beings sought to draw reality into it.
• The man recounts that a Savior once fought Butterfly and Dream, apparently perishing with them. The people and ghosts the Savior left behind later entered the deep world to try to bring him back.
• He suspects Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals and city administrators fabricated a threat from an unknown being to justify destroying the passage and abandoning the Savior’s forces in the deep world.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains composed and skeptical amid the cellar’s horrors. He recognizes that the Fortune God’s apparent gift of happiness is rooted in death and suffering, and presses the stranger for direct answers.
• The trapped designer is weary, self-mocking, and fearful, yet his sincerity and regret show through as he shares the history he remembers. Though he warns Gao Ming that knowledge is dangerous, he ultimately trusts him with evidence and secrets.
• Gao Ming’s resemblance to the forbidden aura associated with Zhang Mingli links him to the designer’s past and raises questions about their connection.

Significant themes

• Joy entangled with suffering: The Fortune God’s happiness is an illusion built upon corpses and painful memories.
• The cost of knowledge: The designer was mutilated and imprisoned for learning too much, and warns Gao Ming that truth can bring danger.
• Betrayal and abandoned allies: The alleged destruction of the passage may have protected those in power while leaving the Savior’s followers trapped.
• Uncertain memory and history: The designer is forgetting the Savior, and the account of the past is incomplete, suggesting that truth has been obscured or lost.

Key plot points

• The imprisoned man explains that after the passage was destroyed, Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals outlawed Perfect Life and subjected over a million people to brain-domain corrective surgery, restoring its control of the company.
• Fearing the return of the saviors and other supernatural threats, the company secretly studied powers such as ghosts, theology, and mental will. Its experiments with Dream and Butterfly led to the Brain-Domain Game.
• The man helped create Dreamfold Town: a shrine left by Dream forms its core, while Zhang Mingli’s altered consciousness became its shell. The company forced Zhang to bear countless nightmares, turning the town into a secret research base for the company’s Thirteen Transformation Methods.
• Zhang refused to cooperate, so the company divided him into nine parts: greed, anger, conscience, despair, heart, obsession and love, promise, and malice. The man identifies the Zhang Mingli in the Schoolhouse as the embodiment of malice.
• The company imprisoned the man after he learned its secrets, trapping him in a cage he had designed. Gao Ming believes his account and decides to carry him out in the wine jar, despite the man’s warnings that escape is impossible and that their families may be endangered.

Character developments and interactions

• The man’s hurried confession reveals both his complicity in creating Dreamfold Town and his regret at being discarded by the company. His fear makes him urge Gao Ming to escape alone.
• Gao Ming shifts from questioning the man to trusting him, then takes decisive action to rescue him. His strength in the dream world lets him lift the heavy jar, even after the threat to his family gives him pause.
• Their exchange highlights their opposing instincts: the man sees resistance as futile, while Gao Ming is willing to risk the consequences. Zhang Mingli’s gentle reputation also makes Gao Ming curious about what he would be like reunited.

Significant themes

• Power and exploitation: The company tries to control supernatural forces and treats people—including Zhang—as experimental materials.
• Fear disguised as ambition: The company’s research is driven by terror of what may return, even as it claims to protect the city.
• Fragmented identity and sacrifice: Zhang’s divided self shows the human cost of the company’s efforts to harness Dream.
• Resistance and hope: Gao Ming’s decision to rescue the prisoner challenges the man’s belief that no one can escape.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming rescues a limbless man from a wine jar in the Xi Residence cellar, disguising him with corpse clothing and gauze.
• The cellar’s jars begin to burst, releasing mutilated people used by Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals to feed the Fortune God. The man explains that these victims were once Testers chosen for their exceptional “Five Blessings”—wealth, longevity, health and peace, noble character, and a natural death.
• The corpses merge into a vast mass of flesh as Gao Ming escapes the cellar. The commotion draws attention from the banquet, where Bai Huang is struggling to hold off the twenty-four Joy Immortals.
• Gao Ming cannot escape over the residence wall: it is formed from joyful faces that consume whatever touches it. The man says the Fortune God’s power traps anyone who still has good fortune, and its will is awakening.
• With pursuit closing in, Gao Ming takes shelter in a sinister ancestral-hall-like room and hides inside the red Wedding Sedan used to bring Madam Xi home.

Character development

• Gao Ming remains resourceful, bold, and defiant under pressure. He acts quickly to escape, but his improvised plans are rough, and he ignores the man’s warnings whenever they conflict with his instincts.
• The limbless man shifts from anger and sarcasm to urgent cooperation. He provides crucial information about the jars and the Fortune God, while fearing that their escape attempt will end in capture.

Significant themes

• Exploitation and dehumanization: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals strips its victims of identity and uses their blessings as resources.
• Corrupted good fortune: The Fortune God’s auspicious power is revealed as predatory, turning happiness and blessing into a means of control.
• The limits of rescue: The man stresses that the cellar’s horrors reflect experiments in the real world and that the victims may not be savable.
• Defiance amid confinement: Even when every route appears blocked, Gao Ming keeps choosing dangerous alternatives rather than surrendering.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming and the rescued man clash over Gao Ming’s reckless decisions, but the man’s knowledge helps them understand the danger.
• The man repeatedly warns Gao Ming about the cellar, the Fortune God, and the sedan; Gao Ming listens but acts in defiance of the warnings.
• Bai Huang’s struggle with the Joy Immortals provides a parallel threat, as their pressure helps drive Gao Ming’s escape into the sedan.

Key plot points and events

• The Xi Residence erupts into chaos after someone enters the cellar, where the Fortune God’s memories and power are held. Bai Huang conceals the truth, telling the Joy Immortals that they are dealing with a dangerous offering—not the Fortune God’s awakening will.
• Bai Huang persuades the Joy Immortals to seal the cellar creature and then focuses them on retrieving Madam Xi before the third night watch. She silences doubts by accusing a questioning Joy Immortal of wanting to steal the Fortune God’s favor.
• Gao Ming and Fu Tian’s grandson are hiding inside the bridal sedan meant for Madam Xi. The procession leaves the Xi Residence, heading toward the Joy Temple outside town.
• Fu Tian’s grandson explains that the wedding is a ritual through which the Fortune God gathers joyful qi and good fortune from nightmares, growing stronger with each ceremony.
• Hoping to create a chance to escape, Gao Ming smears wedding wine onto his butcher’s knife and cuts the sedan’s embroidered decorations. The procession abruptly stops before he can see why.

Character developments

• Gao Ming remains composed and improvisational, willing to damage a dangerously enchanted bridal sedan to provoke a distraction. Its sinister joyful qi cannot overwhelm him because of the “abyss” within him.
• Fu Tian’s grandson shifts from despair toward cautious hope. Though he doubts Gao Ming’s plan, he has learned not to challenge him and secretly hopes he can escape.
• Bai Huang shows strategic control and political cunning. She hides what she knows about the cellar and uses religious authority and accusations to keep the Joy Immortals obedient.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming questions Fu Tian’s grandson about the Joy Immortals and the wedding ritual; the man provides crucial knowledge but remains wary of Gao Ming’s methods.
• Bai Huang directs the Joy Immortals, deflecting their concerns and compelling them to continue the procession.
• The Joy Immortals act as the Fortune God’s followers, obeying Bai Huang because challenging her could be treated as challenging their deity.

Significant themes

• Faith as manipulation: Bai Huang controls the crowd by shaping what it believes about the cellar and the Fortune God.
• Ritual and exploitation: The wedding is presented as a ceremony, but its real purpose is to harvest joy and fortune from nightmares.
• Defiance within a hostile system: Gao Ming uses the oppressive supernatural environment against itself, while others survive by obedience or cautious hope.

Key plot points and events

• The Butcher attacks the wedding procession, furious because he believes the Fortune God stole his knife. He crushes one of the Joy Immortals, whose red threads scatter and spread through the street.
• Bai Huang rides into the confrontation, pretending to channel the Fortune God and deliberately provoking both sides. The Joy Immortals try to overwhelm the Butcher with their joyful aura and seize his flesh; the Butcher counters by mutilating himself to escape their influence. The two forces begin devouring and attacking each other.
• Watching from the sedan, Gao Ming realizes the conflict may reveal Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ real purpose. He accuses the captive man of helping the company use nightmares, Testers, and laboratory subjects to create a god through the power of the Unspeakable.
• The man explains that Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals is pursuing thirteen transformation methods—potential paths to becoming Unspeakable—and has devoted roughly half its resources to that work. The other half funds an even higher-priority secret project called Vast Sea.
• The name triggers a painful memory in Gao Ming: a lightless city called Hanhai, a black ocean full of the dead, and a sense that he alone escaped. He recognizes this as part of his lost past and agrees to protect the man in exchange for help uncovering the project.
• With the Butcher and Joy Immortals still fighting, Gao Ming hides the Butcher’s Knife and the sedan’s ornaments in Chunniang’s robe, secures the captive, and prepares to leave the sedan.

Character developments

• Gao Ming shifts from observing the supernatural battle to investigating the larger conspiracy. The word “Vast Sea” unlocks a powerful fragment of his past, making his personal search for lost memories central to the mystery.
• The captive man reveals more about Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ plans and admits he was used by the organization too. He becomes more cooperative when Gao Ming offers protection.
• Bai Huang shows herself to be a calculating provocateur, exploiting the fact that the Joy Immortals do not know the Fortune God’s will has already been drained from her.
• The Butcher is shown to be savage and pain-driven, while the Joy Immortals remain eerily cheerful even amid death and violence.

Significant themes

• Institutional ambition and human exploitation: Testers, experimental subjects, and even the man who helped create Dreamfold Town are treated as resources in the pursuit of power.
• Transformation and the Unspeakable: The thirteen methods suggest that nightmares are being used not merely to strengthen people, but to create godlike beings.
• Memory and identity: Gao Ming’s reaction to Hanhai suggests that recovering his past may reveal his connection to the Vast Sea Project.
• Distorted joy and madness: The Joy Immortals’ blissful devotion contrasts with the Butcher’s brutal rage, while Gao Ming’s companions conclude that no one in town is sane.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming confronts the captive man about the company’s true motives; the man responds with increasingly sensitive disclosures and asks Gao Ming to help him escape.
• Bai Huang uses her assumed divine authority to urge the Joy Immortals into conflict with the Butcher.
• The Butcher’s violence and the Joy Immortals’ invasive influence escalate into a mutual struggle, giving Gao Ming cover to conceal the knife and prepare an escape.

Key plot points

• Gao Ming escapes the Fortune God’s bridal sedan with the limbless man, Fu Shu, while the Butcher distracts the Joy Immortals. The Joy Immortals’ red threads fail to affect Gao Ming.
• Gao Ming returns to the Schoolhouse and demands Zhang Mingli teach him the complete Dream-Release Method, keeping a knife at Fu Shu’s neck.
• Zhang Mingli reveals that Fu Shu was once his close friend and helped him rise within Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. Their relationship collapsed after Fu Shu used a neighborhood’s residents as the cost of a dream curse that imprisoned Zhang Mingli.
• Zhang Mingli agrees to guide Gao Ming through releasing his nightmare. Inside the Schoolhouse, he discovers that Gao Ming’s heart contains a shattered, unnatural inner chamber—and a chained Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God formed from Gao Ming’s own corpses.
• A voice from within the chamber orders Zhang Mingli to leave. Recognizing signs of a rare, savage Calamity God, Zhang Mingli nevertheless keeps his promise and begins drawing out some of Gao Ming’s buried memories.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains decisive and difficult to affect with supernatural rules. Though he cautiously holds Fu Shu hostage, he eventually lowers his defenses enough for Zhang Mingli to begin the ritual.
• Zhang Mingli moves from astonishment to renewed confrontation with Fu Shu, then chooses to help Gao Ming despite the danger revealed in his heart.
• Fu Shu accepts his defeat but is burdened by guilt and bitterness over his past actions. His history with Zhang Mingli emerges as a friendship destroyed by betrayal.
• The Wan siblings watch Gao Ming’s unexpected return and bargain with confusion, since their father’s notes had suggested a far more dangerous path.
• The Butcher’s attack disrupts the Joy Immortals and creates the opening Gao Ming needs to escape.

Significant themes

• The cost of betrayal: Fu Shu’s actions sacrificed innocent lives and shattered his bond with Zhang Mingli.
• Trauma and buried memory: Gao Ming’s inner self is literally fractured, with memories concealed in his body and guarded by chains.
• Will and identity: Gao Ming resists supernatural influence so completely that even Zhang Mingli struggles to reach him.
• Promises and responsibility: Despite the threat within Gao Ming, Zhang Mingli persists because he takes his commitments seriously.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming uses the Dream-Release Method, but the manifestation nearly traps Zhang Mingli: Gao Ming’s heart-room exerts a powerful pull and almost consumes Zhang Mingli’s soulfire. Zhang escapes by sacrificing part of it.
• Zhang Mingli’s soulfire illuminates the room inside Gao Ming’s heart, revealing the Execution House, its captive spirits, and the chained Ghost God. The Ghost God’s flesh and blood are drawn into the Empty Shrine Zhang Mingli gave Gao Ming, forming a four-faced, eight-armed deity.
• Gao Ming gains a connection to the shrine and the room in his heart, allowing him to wield supernatural flesh-and-blood powers and recreate certain nightmare scenes. His Blood City Tattoo spreads onto the shrine, which may serve as a link between Blood City and reality. He recognizes the deity as the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal, and buried memories begin to surface.
• Zhang Mingli warns that the Dream-Release Method comes from the Unspeakable Dream. Using it may call to Dream and risk awakening it. He also says Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals may have stirred Dream through its experiments.
• The discussion turns to the fading memory of the Saviors: Gao Ming realizes that even people who have encountered the Savior cannot recall his name. Zhang Mingli then tells Fu Shu that Greed has returned and demands that Fu fulfill his promise.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming gains a powerful new means of defending himself in nightmares, though he underestimates the danger and scale of what he has released. The recovered memories suggest his past is close to becoming clear.
• Zhang Mingli is shaken and weakened after nearly being consumed, and now regards Gao Ming as an equal rather than simply a Tester. Despite his anger over losing part of his soulfire, he cautions Gao Ming about the method’s risks.
• Fu Shu is astonished by Gao Ming’s success and explains how rare and perilous the method is. He challenges Zhang Mingli’s account of Dream’s fate, prompting a dispute over whether the Unspeakable is truly gone.
• Gao Ming thanks Zhang Mingli, while Zhang insists the soulfire he lost was not part of their original bargain. Gao’s newfound power changes the balance between them.

Significant themes

• Power carries a cost: Gao Ming’s new abilities come from exposing others—and himself—to dangerous forces.
• Memory and identity: Gao’s past is returning, while the Savior’s name is fading from collective memory.
• The boundary between worlds: The Dream-Release Method turns pain, memory, and will into a bridge that can bring nightmare entities into reality.
• The danger of forbidden knowledge: Pursuing Dream’s power may revive the very threat researchers hope to control.

Key plot points and events

• Zhang Mingli extracts something from Fu Shu, regaining the resolve tied to a promise. He admits that he may have to use one of the Thirteen Transformation Methods despite fearing that the dream within him could be reborn.
• Gao Ming offers to take the risk himself, but Zhang dismisses him as inexperienced. As Zhang leaves the Schoolhouse, the surrounding courtyard’s ordinary objects transform into curses and spirits that merge into his body, revealing that his curses had been protecting the school.
• At the third watch, Dreamfold Town grows more dangerous, filled with ghostfires, anomalous objects, and awakened divine statues.
• Wan Min confirms that Fu Shu was meant to be helped and was considered a suitable successor to Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. She and Wan Yang became Testers partly to search for their missing adoptive father, Wan Jie, whose research involved the company.
• Wan Min warns Gao Ming that Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals treats Testers with level-five clearance as valuable “medicine” for its pursuit of eternal life and godhood.
• Fu Shu explains that the Fortune God’s joy can be undone either by overwhelming it with despair or by driving its pleasure beyond its limits into madness and destruction.
• As Gao Ming sets out to rescue Bai Huang, he encounters a terrified Black Ring Tester whose body is coming apart. A yellowed human skin approaches, and the Tester insists he was not responsible for stealing its organs.

Character developments and interactions

• Zhang Mingli moves from fear and resistance toward accepting that he may need a transformation method to fulfill his promise. His exchange with Gao Ming shows their contrasting attitudes toward risk.
• Gao Ming remains focused on rescuing Bai Huang and takes responsibility for carrying Fu Shu. He offers to teach Wan Min the Dream-Release Method, while learning more about the Fortune God and the danger posed by the pharmaceutical company.
• Fu Shu, weak and limbless, proves knowledgeable about Dreamfold Town and the Fortune God. His explanation gives Gao Ming possible ways to confront it.
• Wan Min and Wan Yang reveal their connection to Wan Jie and their distrust of Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. Wan Min warns Gao Ming about the cost of gaining power.
• The Black Ring Tester appears desperate to survive, apparently trying to contain his organs with an anomalous object, but is pursued by a human-skin entity.

Significant themes

• Promises and identity: Zhang Mingli sees his vow as inseparable from who he is.
• Power and its cost: Transformation methods and high clearance bring danger as well as strength.
• Joy, despair, and destruction: The Fortune God may be defeated by either extreme despair or pleasure pushed into madness.
• Exploitation and survival: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals turns powerful Testers into resources, while the town’s horrors force characters into desperate choices.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming witnesses the Butcher’s aftermath: eight Joy Immortals hang mutilated at Dreamfold Town’s entrance, their heads replaced with those of pigs and dogs. Fu Shu says the Butcher was once gentle, making his present brutality especially unsettling.
• A Yellow Weasel and other creatures gather outside town, drawn to the Joy Immortals’ corpses and their Fortune God blessings. The weasel cannot enter because it has violated the town’s rules.
• Despite Fu Shu’s warning, Gao Ming takes the blessings for himself. The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God inside his shrine absorbs the joyful energy and devours the eight Joy Immortals’ hearts, turning their blessings into nourishment.
• The act provokes an ominous reaction from the Fortune God, but the ghost god appears eager rather than afraid. Gao Ming realizes that consuming powerful beings could help it recover.
• Fu Shu urges Gao Ming to keep a low profile and avoid attracting Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. Gao Ming instead proposes devouring Dreamfold Town’s other twelve monsters to become an “unspeakable” existence.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shows boldness and opportunism, treating the Joy Immortals’ dangerous blessings as medicine. His ambition escalates from survival to challenging the town’s supernatural order.
• Fu Shu becomes increasingly anxious and blunt. He warns Gao Ming about breaking the rules and provoking powerful forces, but cannot control his reckless choices.
• The Butcher is absent, but his massacre reveals a startling transformation from the man Fu Shu remembers as honest and good-natured into a sadistic killer.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God displays renewed hunger and strength after consuming the Joy Immortals’ blessings, though its recovery remains incomplete.
• The Yellow Weasel and the creatures outside town are drawn to the corpses, underscoring how valuable the Joy Immortals are to the supernatural world.

Significant themes

• Power and transgression: Gao Ming gains strength by breaking rules that even the Butcher respected.
• Corruption and transformation: The Butcher’s changed nature and Dreamfold Town’s grotesque customs suggest that people and beings can be reshaped by their surroundings.
• Ambition versus caution: Fu Shu seeks escape and discretion, while Gao Ming embraces a dangerous plan to rise above the monsters.
• Consumption as survival: Healing, power, and advancement come through devouring others, making nourishment inseparable from violence.