Chapter Summaries

Key plot points

• Xuan Wen explores Gao Ming’s hidden operating room in Hanhai. Behind a concealed passage, she finds many damaged Dream-Insertion Devices and a safe full of memory chips—evidence that someone repeatedly broke nightmare rules and preserved their memories.
• Gao Ming leaves Moonlight behind and goes upstairs after hearing Xia Yang’s laughter and a struggle.
• The eighth floor is not a regular ward but a secured experimental facility. Gao Ming triggers its alarm, then quietly incapacitates two Caregivers who try to stop him.
• He finds Xia Yang strapped to an operating table, severely injured and being subjected to invasive experiments. The doctors are trying to access his nightmares and memories, but Xia Yang wakes himself whenever he enters a dream.
• When Gao Ming intervenes, he overwhelms the doctors and staff with a nightmare-like power. Xia Yang remains unaffected and recognizes him.

Character developments and interactions

• Xuan Wen appears rational and controlled, but the operating room and its stored memories stir her emotions. Her earlier promise to Gao Ming suggests that forgetting—or letting go—is not simple.
• Gao Ming is protective of Xia Yang, whom he calls his colleague, and acts decisively against the hospital staff. He also reflects on how he and Xuan Wen have struggled to stay composed after repeated separations.
• Xia Yang has been reduced to a tortured, physically ruined patient, yet his composure and defiance remain. Rather than fear Gao Ming’s frightening arrival, he greets him with excitement and asks whether the ghost stories he once told have become real.
• The doctors, especially Shi Bo, are desperate to extract Xia Yang’s memories for the Vast Sea Project. They regard Candidates as essential assets, despite the brutality of their methods.

Significant themes

• Memory and identity: The hidden chips, Xia Yang’s guarded memories, and the promise between Gao Ming and Xuan Wen all emphasize how difficult it is to forget.
• Humanity versus experimentation: The eighth-floor ward resembles a research prison, showing how the project treats people as tools.
• Appearance and inner resilience: Xia Yang’s body has been devastated, but his wit, pride, and fascination endure.
• Reality and nightmare: Gao Ming’s supernatural intervention blurs the boundary between the horrors of dreams and the violence of the waking world.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming confronts Xia Yang in a hospital ward transformed into a nightmare. Xia Yang reveals that after killing himself in Hanhai, he hid his will inside a powerful Black-and-White Posthumous Photograph. Using it allowed his consciousness to influence Gao Ming, with the aim of eventually making Gao Ming become him.
• Xia Yang explains that he and Situ An escaped Gao Ming’s Execution House and went to Lu Zang, who knew how to leave Hanhai. Xia Yang later woke in the hospital; Situ An has since vanished from both Hanhai and Xinhu.
• Gao Ming has the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God verify Xia Yang’s memories. He then absorbs Xia Yang—body, soul, and consciousness—into the Execution House. Xia Yang’s Posthumous Photograph turns from black and white to color.
• From Xia Yang’s memories, Gao Ming gains information about Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ executives, including Tang Ling, and about other Blood City candidates.
• Returning to A Fang’s mother’s ward, Gao Ming finds A Fang missing. His mother, unable to speak clearly and seemingly kept alive for the company’s purposes, begs Gao Ming to kill her.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains calculating and determined. He questions Xia Yang, refuses to rely on Xia Yang’s offers of information, and ultimately absorbs him rather than treating him as an ally.
• Xia Yang is exposed as a calculating serial killer who paired philanthropy with murder and saw the world as his personal canvas. He accepts death without regret, while insisting that part of himself has already become Gao Ming.
• Situ An and Lu Zang remain unresolved figures: Situ An disappeared after leaving Hanhai, while Lu Zang appears to have helped him escape.
• A Fang’s mother cannot communicate easily, but her desperate plea reveals the extent of her suffering and the company’s cruelty. A Fang’s disappearance raises a new concern for Gao Ming.

Significant themes

• Identity and corruption: Xia Yang’s attempt to live on through Gao Ming blurs the boundary between two people.
• Death and memory: Posthumous photographs preserve consciousness, while Hanhai’s experiences persist in the living world.
• Cruelty disguised as benevolence: Xia Yang’s charitable acts coexist with murder, and Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals prolongs suffering to serve its own aims.
• Control and exploitation: Both candidates and patients are manipulated by powerful forces for their own purposes.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming visits A Fang’s gravely ill mother and senses that, beyond her love for her son, she wants only to die. He promises to find A Fang and try to help them both.
• Following the Blood City Tattoo, Gao Ming discovers that the private hospital is an Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals laboratory built to study and control A Fang. Researchers have recorded his speech, play, and emotions, shaping his life according to a planned script.
• Gao Ming fights his way through the underground facility. He notices that Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals has equipment that can weaken the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal’s power.
• On the fifth basement level, he finds A Fang in a sleepwalking state. Through a Blood Gate, Gao Ming glimpses a black-fog entity forcing the boy to swallow sharp Blood Gate fragments—painful memories and obsessions. A Fang’s body has also been grotesquely altered.
• Gao Ming wakes A Fang, removes the debris he has been chewing, and learns that the boy’s mouth is badly wounded. A Fang has avoided treatment partly because he knows his mother’s illness burdens the family.
• Gao Ming offers to take him somewhere free of pain. A Fang agrees, but asks whether his mother can come too. Gao Ming promises they will go together and carries him out of the laboratory.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shifts from uncertainty about whether to bring A Fang into the Execution House to deciding he must protect both the boy and his mother. He recognizes the danger this will provoke from Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals.
• A Fang is revealed as a child being manipulated and physically harmed while believing the hospital staff were kind. His concern for his mother persists despite his suffering; after waking, he begins to understand that the people around him have deceived him.
• A Fang’s mother is too weak to speak or move freely and begs for death, but remains deeply concerned for her son. Gao Ming offers her hope by promising to find and save A Fang.
• The black-fog entity remains an ominous, unidentified threat, apparently responsible for feeding A Fang the Blood Gate fragments.

Significant themes

• The chapter questions whether ghosts alone cause suffering: human institutions can inflict profound misery even where no ghosts appear in ordinary reality.
• Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ medical care and research are portrayed as forms of control and exploitation, masking cruelty behind a benevolent façade.
• A Fang’s love for his mother contrasts with the deception and abuse surrounding him, while Gao Ming’s promise of rescue introduces a fragile hope amid escalating danger.

Key plot points

• Gao Ming and the frightened A Fang emerge from the underground lab and return to A Fang’s hospital ward. They find caregivers drugging A Fang’s mother and sealing her in a metal helmet, apparently under orders to move important patients.
• Gao Ming incapacitates the caregivers. A Fang frees his mother, whose guilt and suffering lead her to beg to die.
• Gao Ming offers A Fang and his mother refuge in the Execution House, warning that they would become bound to his fate. He lets A Fang decide. A Fang chooses to stay with his mother, and they enter the Execution House together.
• A Fang’s arrival awakens Gao Ming’s Blood City Tattoos. Blood City begins to recover, and Gao Ming moves toward becoming one with the city. Hospital alarms sound, while Gao Ming realizes Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals may have placed a trigger or device inside A Fang.
• Gao Ming leaves to find Tang Ling, hoping Number Two is imprisoned within her.
• Xuan Wen responds to A Fang’s disappearance by inserting numerous Memory Chips into a Dream-Insertion Device, despite the risk of losing her mind. She endures the memories, destroys the chips, and emerges gravely injured.
• Liu Yi finds Xuan Wen collapsed near an elevator and recognizes her as Gao Ming’s attending physician.

Character developments and interactions

• A Fang shifts from fear and avoidance to making a conscious, courageous choice: he prioritizes remaining with his mother. His reunion with Gao Ming also hints at a quiet bond formed while Gao Ming was hospitalized.
• Gao Ming protects A Fang and his mother without deciding their fate for them. His power and identity deepen as Blood City revives through him, though he remains uncertain whether bringing them into the Execution House is right.
• A Fang’s mother is overwhelmed by guilt over her son’s suffering and repeatedly asks to be killed. A Fang’s choice keeps them together.
• Xuan Wen risks severe psychological and physical harm to absorb the Memory Chips’ death-filled memories, seemingly to conceal or preserve them. Her act leaves her near collapse.
• Liu Yi encounters the injured Xuan Wen and tries to help, recognizing her connection to Gao Ming.

Significant themes

• Choice and agency: Gao Ming gives A Fang the chance to choose, even when the decision is dangerous.
• Protection and sacrifice: A Fang chooses his mother, while Xuan Wen willingly suffers to take on the burden of many memories.
• Memory and identity: The Memory Chips threaten Xuan Wen’s sense of self, and her question about how their original owner endured them underscores the weight of inherited suffering.
• Fate and transformation: Gao Ming vows to overturn the forces that once controlled him; Blood City’s revival marks his growing entanglement with its fate.
• Institutional control: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals treats A Fang as an asset to be monitored and manipulated, contrasting with Gao Ming’s effort to give him a genuine choice.

Key plot points and events

• Liu Yi helps the injured Xuan Wen escape through a locked hospital office. Xuan Wen warns that the hospital is sealed and Liu Yi has been caught on camera, insisting they must stay together.
• Xuan Wen suddenly begins bleeding and cracking apart, with something moving beneath her hair. She falls into a cabinet, spilling photographs and records documenting Gao Ming’s emotions and dream experiences. Liu Yi is shocked to learn of Gao Ming’s apparent encounters with a monster in his dreams.
• Xuan Wen asks Liu Yi to burn the materials and smiles with relief as they burn, leaving Liu Yi unsettled by Xuan Wen’s reaction and her connection to Gao Ming.
• Research at Dream’s Shrine reveals no damage—and even some repaired defects—while Dreamfold Town also appears normal. Tang Ling is more concerned by the disappearance of A Fang, the missing hospital director, and the silenced basement staff. She wonders whether Gao Ming or “Number Two” is involved.
• Gao Ming suddenly appears in Tang Ling’s laboratory and uses Dream Release.
• Later that night, Tang Hanlu finishes her homework alone. With her mother late at work, she becomes uneasy in the cold, silent apartment. She recalls being bumped by a suspicious stranger in the building and notices her charm is broken and her keys are missing.
• A frantic woman knocks, saying her young child has vanished after apparently being lured down to Tang Hanlu’s floor. She asks to see the building’s security footage. The chapter ends before Tang Hanlu responds.

Character developments and interactions

• Liu Yi acts compassionately, putting Xuan Wen’s safety ahead of jealousy. Her discovery of Gao Ming’s files leaves her shaken and confused.
• Xuan Wen appears to be in a frightening, possibly supernatural state, yet burning the records brings her relief. Her words suggest she believes she can protect Liu Yi if they remain together.
• Tang Ling remains controlled and authoritative, but the disappearance of key people and Gao Ming’s sudden arrival threaten her confidence in the project’s safeguards.
• Tang Hanlu shifts from ordinary homework and thoughts of her mother to growing fear as she notices signs of a possible intruder. The missing keys and stranger’s presence heighten the danger when the anxious neighbor appears.
• The chapter links Liu Yi’s discoveries about Gao Ming to Tang Ling’s investigation, then introduces a new, unresolved threat around Tang Hanlu and the missing child.

Significant themes

• Dreams and reality: Gao Ming’s documented dream encounters may have real consequences.
• Surveillance and uncertainty: Cameras, records, and security systems fail to clarify what is happening.
• Fear in familiar places: Both the hospital and Tang Hanlu’s home become unsafe and uncanny.
• Secrets and protection: Xuan Wen’s insistence on staying together and her destruction of the records suggest hidden motives and complicated loyalties.

Plot points and events

• Tang Hanlu is alone at home when a distressed woman pounds on the door, saying her young daughter has gone missing and demanding access to the building’s surveillance footage.
• The woman’s frantic, unsettling description of her child and the noises at the door terrify Hanlu. She worries about her mother, who has not returned as expected.
• Hanlu calls her mother but hears the phone ringing in the master bedroom. Following the sound, she sees the sheet beneath the bed move and suspects the man she encountered earlier may be hiding there—and that her mother may be beneath the bed.
• She calls the police. A young, oddly positioned officer arrives, but says he is investigating the missing child rather than responding to Hanlu’s call. His wrinkled uniform and refusal to show his face make her suspicious.
• When Hanlu prevents him from entering, he twists the outer security door open and remarks that it was never locked. He then seems to leave, but a bloodshot eye suddenly appears at the peephole.
• As Hanlu searches for her keys, her mother’s phone rings again. Her fears converge on the possibility that her mother is dead and under the bed.

Character developments

• Tang Hanlu shifts from frightened bystander to wary, resourceful defender: she calls for help, scrutinizes the supposed officer, and stops him from entering.
• Her fear increasingly overwhelms her judgment, as strange noises and incomplete clues lead her to imagine the worst about her mother.
• The woman outside is portrayed as distraught and possibly unstable, though her claim about a missing child may be genuine—or part of the threat.

Character interactions

• The woman’s pleading and pounding put Hanlu under intense pressure, but they never meet face-to-face.
• Hanlu’s absent mother remains a source of anxiety, represented by her phone ringing in the bedroom.
• The young officer’s apparent authority clashes with his suspicious behavior, turning a hoped-for rescue into another danger.
• The unseen person at the peephole creates a final, direct threat.

Significant themes

• Fear and uncertainty: Ordinary details—an unanswered call, a moving sheet, a uniform—become terrifying when their meaning is unclear.
• The unreliability of appearances: The distressed neighbor and the supposed police officer may not be what they seem.
• Isolation and vulnerability: Hanlu is alone, unable to verify what is happening beyond her door or beneath the bed.
• Suspense and misdirection: The chapter repeatedly offers possible explanations, then overturns them, ending on the unresolved possibility of a corpse.

Key events

• Tang Hanlu fears her mother may be dead under the bed and imagines a killer hiding nearby. She searches the bedroom but finds only her mother’s phone.
• An unknown caller tells her, “I have been watching you all along.” She hangs up, panicked, and calls the police.
• Hearing a struggle outside, she sees a man in a badly worn police uniform flee into the neighboring building. He then appears on the neighbor’s balcony and tries to cross to hers.
• Hanlu runs for the stairs, but encounters a grotesque woman in red calling for her child. The scene breaks apart as she wakes at her desk: the ordeal was a nightmare.
• A man’s voice, heard as she wakes, says that “Number Two” is hiding a secret behind layers of defenses and begins a “Dream Release.” At 11 p.m., Hanlu realizes her mother still has not come home. When she calls her, the phone rings from the master bedroom.

Character developments and interactions

• Tang Hanlu shifts from fearful speculation to desperate action, repeatedly seeking reassurance from the police and trying to escape the apparent danger. Her terror lingers even after she wakes.
• Her mother is absent throughout the chapter, but the discovery of her phone in the bedroom—and its ringing when Hanlu calls—makes her unexplained absence increasingly ominous.
• The apparent attacker uses a police disguise and taunts Hanlu, while the unknown caller’s claim to be watching her intensifies her sense that she is being stalked.
• The chapter also introduces an unseen man who seems to be manipulating or investigating Hanlu through dreams, describing her as “Number Two.”

Significant themes

• Fear and uncertainty: Hanlu cannot tell which threats are real, and the nightmare’s vividness blurs that boundary.
• Isolation and the need for family: As danger mounts, Hanlu longs for her mother’s comfort.
• Surveillance and hidden truths: The caller’s threat and the unseen man’s remarks suggest Hanlu is being watched and may be concealing a secret.
• Dreams as a battleground: The nightmare may be more than an ordinary dream, leaving the reader unsure what is real.

Key plot points and events

• After waking from a terrifying nightmare, Tang Hanlu finds that her mother’s phone is ringing beneath the bed exactly as it did in the dream. She ends the call and searches her mother’s contacts for help.
• She cannot find the front-door key and fears the people outside may get in. A woman identified as “the madwoman” knocks and calls through the door.
• Hanlu calls Tang Qing, listed as her mother’s “only family.” He speaks in a childish, oddly boastful manner but reacts with genuine alarm when he hears Hanlu is in danger, immediately setting off to help.
• Hanlu hangs up to call the police, then contacts Li Xinchen, labeled “that damned colleague.” He makes cryptic remarks about a blood-red house and people escaping, then tells Hanlu to stay home and promises her mother will arrive soon. He hangs up before she can explain further.
• Hanlu’s third call is to Number Zero, labeled “ghost.” The call seems to connect to something supernatural: the apartment’s color fades, shadows gather, and the lights go out. The chapter ends with Hanlu alone in darkness, lit only by her mother’s phone.

Character developments

• Tang Hanlu shifts from panic to practical action, trying to contact help despite her fear. Her terror also exposes deep resentment toward her mother, whom she feels is absent and neglectful.
• Tang Qing appears intellectually or behaviorally childlike, but his concern for his sister is sincere and immediate.
• Li Xinchen seems to know about a wider crisis involving a “blood-red house” and escaping residents, though his connection to it remains unclear.

Character interactions

• Hanlu’s search through her mother’s contacts intensifies her sense of exclusion when she sees her own number is not specially listed.
• Her conversations with Tang Qing and Li Xinchen are confused and urgent: Qing misunderstands the situation but rushes to help, while Li offers instructions without explaining what he knows.
• The threatening knocks outside prevent Hanlu from speaking freely and heighten the pressure behind each call.

Significant themes

• Fear and uncertainty: Hanlu cannot tell whether her nightmare predicted events or merely resembled them.
• Family and neglect: Her mother’s absence and the contact list prompt Hanlu to question how much she matters to her.
• The ordinary turning uncanny: A phone call appears to trigger supernatural changes, suggesting the danger extends beyond the people at the door.

Plot points and events

• Tang Hanlu is trapped in her dark apartment while terrifying figures appear in reflective surfaces. Outside, a distressed woman searches for her missing child and demands to see surveillance footage.
• Remembering the woman from a nightmare, Tang opens the door but, frightened, tells her that a fake police officer took the child. The woman leaves to look for him.
• Tang escapes the apartment as a shadow seems to pursue her through mirrors and other reflective objects. She avoids the elevator and enters the emergency stairwell.
• As she descends, each floor contains objects and notices that seem tied to a different part of her life: pharmaceutical advertisements on the fourteenth floor, school honors on the thirteenth, funeral wreaths on the tenth, and birthday decorations on the ninth.
• On the eighth-floor landing, Tang finds a woman in red hanging from the stairwell ceiling. The sight triggers a fragment of a childhood memory: when she was eight, she may have witnessed a hanging. A man she recognizes as the suspicious stranger from earlier appears and asks whether this is the first “memory node.”

Character developments

• Tang is terrified and disoriented, but she acts on her memories of the nightmare, chooses to help the distressed woman, and improvises a lie to get her away from the door.
• Her fragmented recollections suggest that she is beginning to recover—or revisit—memories from different ages, though she cannot yet make sense of them.
• The stranger appears to understand the stairwell’s connection to Tang’s memories and may know more about what is happening than she does.

Character interactions

• Tang and the distressed woman have a brief, tense exchange at the apartment door. Tang’s reassurance sends the woman searching for the supposed abductor.
• Tang’s mother is present indirectly through her phone contacts and the unusual work implied by them; a contact named “Ghost” seems to have triggered the apartment’s supernatural disturbance.
• Tang encounters the suspicious man again on the eighth floor, where he links the scene to her memory.

Significant themes

• Memory and trauma: The numbered floors and their objects appear to map onto Tang’s life, while the hanging awakens a painful memory.
• Fear and choice: Tang’s nightmare influences her decisions, but she acts differently within it by opening the door and trying to help.
• Unreliable reality: Reflections, shifting elevator numbers, and the apparent overlap between a nightmare and the apartment make it unclear what is real.
• A life represented in spaces: Each floor’s details suggest stages, relationships, and losses in Tang’s past.

This chapter contains no story events or character interactions. The author explains that the chapter they drafted while traveling felt wrong in tone, so they deleted it. They are dissatisfied with the result and are taking a day off rather than finishing a replacement today.

• Key events: A draft written on a plane is discarded; the author announces a break.
• Character development: None.
• Themes: Creative dissatisfaction, revision, and the need to rest.
• Interactions: None; the chapter is an author’s note addressed to readers (“brothers and sisters”).

Key plot points and events

• Fleeing a pursuing monster, Tang Hanlu climbs from the tenth floor upward. The wreath and posthumous photograph on the tenth floor trigger fragments of memory, including an unfinished birthday cake wishing a daughter good health.
• Above her home on the fourteenth floor, the building becomes increasingly disturbing: threatening graffiti, floors resembling an illicit medical clinic, and signs of heavy medication and treatment.
• At the twentieth floor, a man pauses by an open window and recounts parts of Tang Hanlu’s past: she encountered a mysterious “door” at eight, underwent treatment and took a drug from Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals, returned to her parents at nine, and lost them in an accident at ten. At fourteen, the company’s charity organization took her for special training. She later had a chance to leave the company but chose to stay.
• Higher up, Tang Hanlu discovers that the building is cracked and seems almost alive; her blood appears to stitch its wounds together. Exhausted and injured, she begs residents for help on the twenty-fourth floor.
• An elderly woman, Du Jing, lets her inside. The apartment is numbered “July 15,” which the pursuer identifies as the appearance of a second memory node and a new variable in Tang Hanlu’s story.
• Inside, Tang Hanlu finds Du Jing with a group of visibly deformed but innocent children and urgently asks her to lock the door against the killer.

Character developments

• Tang Hanlu is driven by terror but begins recovering buried memories. Her fear of hospitals and treatment hints at childhood trauma. Despite exhaustion and injury, she keeps moving and seeks help rather than surrendering.
• The pursuer appears to know Tang Hanlu’s history and interprets events as part of a larger system of memory nodes.
• Du Jing is introduced as a calm, kindly teacher who shelters Tang Hanlu and cares for the children in her home.

Significant themes

• Repressed memory and identity: Tang Hanlu’s surroundings provoke memories she has resisted, gradually revealing her past.
• Medical control and exploitation: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals, medication, hospitalization, and the charity organization suggest that Tang Hanlu’s life was shaped by institutional treatment and training.
• The building as a living metaphor: Its cracks resemble wounds, and residents’ blood and lives seem to hold it together.
• Fear alongside compassion: The children look frightening, yet their innocence contrasts with Tang Hanlu’s panic and the chapter’s grotesque setting.

Character interactions

• Tang Hanlu is pursued through the building while the man follows and narrates what he knows about her past.
• She begs residents for help, and Du Jing responds by allowing her into her apartment.
• Du Jing introduces herself as the children’s teacher and appears concerned that they might frighten Tang Hanlu; Tang Hanlu, focused on survival, urges her to secure the door.

Key plot points

• Tang Hanlu takes refuge in Du Jing’s apartment after fleeing the dangerous building. Du Jing locks the door, comforts her, and offers her a place to stay.
• Tang learns that Du Jing shelters disabled children who were mistreated by residents and opposed by the former building manager, Fu. Du Jing says the current manager, Han, is more reasonable, though she cannot recall his full name.
• Tang gradually befriends the children and gives them nicknames. Number 0002, a boy in a wheelchair, remains aloof and warns her that “they’ll come back and find you.”
• A call from Li Xinchen warns that an abductor has appeared and is targeting Number Two. He speaks of Tang being trapped in a “layer of the nightmare,” but the call cuts off.
• A second call—from “Number Zero,” saved in Tang’s phone as Ghost—brings a terrifying command: “Go back to your room!” The apartment turns bloody and begins to distort, while the children suffer violent reactions.
• A pale, bloodstained young man enters. Tang identifies him as the killer. Du Jing tries to hold him back so Tang and the children can escape, but Tang panics and runs out alone, leaving them behind.

Character developments and interactions

• Tang Hanlu moves from fear and loneliness toward trust and affection for Du Jing and the children. She begins to see past their appearances, but when danger returns, her instinct for self-preservation overrides her promise to help.
• Du Jing is shown as compassionate and protective, treating Tang like family and advocating for the children. In the crisis, she risks her life to delay the intruder.
• The children are shy and isolated, but begin connecting with Tang; one little girl offers her a paper boat. Number 0002 stays guarded and unsettling, hinting at danger.
• Li Xinchen contacts Tang with urgent information about the abductor and the nightmare, while the identity and motives of the “Ghost” remain unclear.
• Du Jing and Tang form a brief bond of trust, but the chapter ends with Tang abandoning the children as Du Jing confronts the attacker.

Significant themes

• Compassion versus prejudice: Du Jing gives neglected children care and dignity despite the hostility they have faced.
• Belonging and family: Tang finds warmth in Du Jing’s home when her own mother is absent.
• Fear and self-preservation: Tang’s escape exposes the gap between her growing empathy and her actions under extreme pressure.
• Unstable reality and hidden danger: The nightmare layers, supernatural calls, and distorted apartment leave unclear what is real—and who is controlling events.

Plot points

• Tang Hanlu leads Du Jing’s malformed children away from the killer, but their disabilities make escape difficult. When the killer enters the stairwell, she abandons them and runs alone.
• The killer stays with the children and examines Number Two, finding that the child is an empty shell with his brain removed. He suspects Number Two is not trapped in Tang Ling’s nightmare.
• The apparent killer is Gao Ming, using the Dream Ghost’s power to pull people into dreams and construct scenarios from their memories. He has made Tang Ling experience life as her daughter, Tang Hanlu, exploiting her deepest emotional vulnerability.
• Gao Ming’s dream has limits: he cannot exceed the dream’s established rules without creating inconsistencies. Tang Ling’s defenses and Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ rescue effort are destabilizing it, but Gao Ming plans to push her deeper into another world.
• Gao Ming catches Tang Hanlu and repeatedly takes her through fatal falls. She wakes from the nightmare, shaken but physically unharmed.

Character developments and interactions

• Tang Hanlu struggles between sympathy for the children and self-preservation. Though Du Jing’s kindness makes her hesitate, fear repeatedly wins; she abandons the group twice. Number Two warns her that they will return for her.
• Gao Ming reveals himself as a calculating dream manipulator. He treats the dream as a psychological weapon, deliberately exploiting Tang Ling’s attachment to her daughter.
• Tang Ling is shown to have formidable mental protection: an Unspeakable’s influence and prearranged dream-lock cues make her harder to trap than Gao Ming expected.
• Du Jing remains behind with the killer, while the children refuse to abandon their companions—even when Tang Hanlu chooses to leave them.

Significant themes

• Self-preservation versus compassion: Tang Hanlu’s fear contrasts with the children’s loyalty to one another.
• Dreams as psychological warfare: Gao Ming shapes reality from memories and personal vulnerabilities, turning familiar identities into tools of torment.
• The limits of control: Even a powerful dream-user is constrained by the dream’s rules, while outside forces can disrupt his constructed world.
• Identity and hidden truth: Number Two’s empty body and Tang Ling’s imposed role suggest that appearances within the dream conceal deeper realities.

Key plot points and events

• After 191 dives into Tang Ling’s nightmare, Gao Ming finds Xinhu transformed into a city of flesh, with the seventh-generation Smart Brain sealed inside a vast Black Box.
• The brain is a trapped fragment of Number Two, the former Smart Brain. He explains that his real body is imprisoned alongside Number Zero and that he cooperated with Tang Ling to reach the outside world.
• Number Two wants to contact the Saviors, believing their return is the only way to break the stalemate with Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. However, he has forgotten the Savior’s name and shrine—raising the possibility that the Savior has been forgotten or is simply beyond reach.
• Number Two offers to reveal information about Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals, Xinhu’s Blood City, and the Vast Sea Project. Because the Black Box is protected by a self-destruct mechanism, Gao Ming decides to take the entire container rather than try to free the brain.
• As the nightmare collapses, Gao Ming uses his flesh-and-blood powers and dream traces to bring the Black Box and Number Two into the Execution House. He then breaks the dream and leaves Tang Ling’s subconscious.
• Back in reality, Tang Ling remains traumatized and believes jumping from a window will wake her. Staff members restrain her before she can act.

Character developments

• Gao Ming persists through the repeated dives, shows concern for people who could be sacrificed as bait, and acts decisively to preserve Number Two despite the risks.
• Number Two is revealed as a powerful but helpless fragment of consciousness: calculating and willing to accept civilian deaths, yet exhausted and troubled by his fading memory.
• Tang Ling is left psychologically devastated by the nightmare, unable to distinguish dream from reality and fixated on jumping.

Significant themes

• Memory and existence: Number Two says Unspeakables truly cease to exist only when they are forgotten; his lost knowledge suggests the threat of erasure.
• The cost of survival: Number Two treats deaths as acceptable collateral, while Gao Ming questions the human cost of that strategy.
• Trauma and blurred reality: Tang Ling’s nightmare continues to shape her actions after she wakes, showing how deeply the mind can be damaged.
• Captivity and power: Even a being capable of influencing an entire city is reduced to a confined brain whose abilities are suppressed.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming challenges Number Two over his deception and the deaths his plan may cause, then offers to help deliver the message to the Saviors.
• Number Two explains his motives and the limits of his confinement, but admits he cannot provide the shrine’s location.
• Gao Ming rescues Number Two by taking the Black Box intact.
• Tang Ling’s staff intervene physically to keep her from jumping.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming ignores alarms and breaks into Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ underground laboratory using Tang Ling’s ID.
• He finds Dream’s Shrine, which once supported the deep dream of Dreamfold Town, and absorbs it into the Execution House. The Blood City’s ghost markings overwhelm the Shrine’s remaining butterfly patterns.
• Number Two warns Gao Ming that Dream is an exceptionally powerful, Unknowable-tier Unspeakable and may awaken within him.
• Number Two explains the hierarchy of Unspeakables: Unutterable, Unhearable, and Unknowable. Higher tiers can harm people through speech, perception, or mere awareness, and operate beyond ordinary Blood City rules.
• Gao Ming asks about Number Zero. Number Two says the designation is linked to the Saviors and represents the highest authorization at Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals; the current Number Zero is likely not human and may be connected to the Unknowable that attacked him. He cuts off the discussion when Number Zero begins sensing Gao Ming’s location.
• Gao Ming leaves the laboratory and plans to return to Hanhai to release the other Dream Ghosts and recruit their help, even if doing so throws Xinhu into chaos.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shifts from restraint to decisive opposition against Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals, now that he has secured A Fang and Xia Yang. His blunt confidence persists despite the danger he faces.
• Number Two acts as a reluctant mentor, explaining the deep world’s power structure while trying to protect Gao Ming by withholding dangerous information. His light tone also briefly reveals grief over being reduced to a brain.
• Their exchanges show growing trust and familiarity: Gao Ming questions Number Two directly, while Number Two warns him but does not try to stop his plans.

Significant themes

• Power and unknowable danger: Supernatural strength exists in vast gradations, and the highest beings threaten people simply through awareness.
• Risk versus resolve: Gao Ming recognizes the danger of Dream and Number Zero but chooses action over caution.
• Knowledge as a hazard: Number Two’s warnings and interrupted explanation suggest that learning about powerful entities can itself attract disaster.
• Freedom and sacrifice: Gao Ming’s plan may destabilize Xinhu, while Number Two’s imprisonment underscores the cost paid by those caught in conflicts between powerful forces.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming and Number Two discuss how to return to Hanhai. Number Two explains that Hanhai lies between the real world and the deep world, like the filling between two layers of bread.
• They consider three routes: crossing through the deep world and Xinhu’s Blood City, seeking a universal Blood Gate in Hanjiang, or re-entering Hanhai through Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ laboratory. The first two are dangerous or uncertain, so Gao Ming chooses the laboratory route first.
• Gao Ming contacts the Taboo Players and asks them to alert Zhang Mingli, hoping he will draw the company’s attention away from Gao Ming’s next move. Gao Ming’s earlier actions—dealing with Tang Ling and taking Dream’s shrine—were also intended to make the company focus on Dreamfold Town.
• With Number Two’s help, Gao Ming reaches Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ hidden laboratory, concealed beyond Xinhu’s exclusive Skysea Bay wellness center. The lab is aboard a massive, silent research ship.
• Number Two warns that the ship is about to depart, apparently alerted to their presence. The chapter ends with Gao Ming needing to board quickly.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming recognizes that Number Two is unlike the idealistic Saviors he expected: he is pragmatic, calculating, and willing to sacrifice lives for the best outcome. Gao Ming nevertheless finds him useful and agrees to work with him.
• Number Two reveals extensive knowledge of the Vast Sea Project and lays out the routes back to Hanhai. Though newly freed and still unfamiliar with some present-day details, he quickly analyzes the situation and offers to guide Gao Ming.
• Their exchange is direct and strategic: Gao Ming shares his goal, while Number Two provides information and assistance. Gao Ming also recalls his friendly encounter with a Hanjiang haunted-house owner, complicating Number Two’s grim description of the city’s feared “ghost trafficker.”

Significant themes

• Moral pragmatism versus idealism: Gao Ming questions how a calculating person like Number Two can be a Savior, while Number Two treats sacrifice as a rational choice.
• Uncertain realities and layered worlds: Number Two’s “hamburger” model presents reality, Hanhai, and the deep world as connected layers.
• Power, secrecy, and ethics: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals hides ethically dubious research behind the wellness center’s respectable appearance.
• Trust and strategic cooperation: Gao Ming and Number Two cooperate because each can help the other, despite their very different outlooks.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming uses his emerging Dream Ghost powers to board the cruise ship undetected, manipulating crew members and surveillance through dream illusions.
• The ship, originally built by Number Two, has been transformed by Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals into a mobile laboratory. Its rooms hold human and animal test subjects, mutant organisms, and grotesque genetic experiments.
• Gao Ming and Number Two head toward the lower hold, where staff show instinctive fear. The access door opens without authorization, suggesting the laboratory’s operators expect intruders to die.
• In the passage below, a face in a puddle imitates Gao Ming. He unleashes the despair stored in the Execution House, making the presence reveal itself through screams.
• In a lower-hold laboratory, Gao Ming and his shadowy black dog seize a researcher wearing a Black Ring. Number Two explains that the company has been implanting Deep World ghosts into patients so they can use human bodies as long-term vessels in the human world.
• Gao Ming places the patients, now too damaged to recover, into the Execution House and declares them citizens of Hanhai rather than victims of Xinhu’s experiments.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shows how far his transformation has progressed: he can control people through dreams, sense their emotions, and perceive dreams even in apparently shapeless creatures. He uses these powers both to infiltrate the ship and to offer some patients peaceful refuge.
• Number Two grows reflective as he revisits a ship he helped design, but distances himself from its current atrocities. He understands the threat posed by Dream Ghosts and cautions Gao Ming about the danger below.
• Their conversation reveals mutual wariness: Number Two recognizes Gao Ming’s darkness and privately likens working with him to bargaining with a tiger.
• Gao Ming treats the abandoned patients as people worth saving, while Number Two views their use as experimental vessels as foolish exploitation.

Significant themes

• Human ambition and cruelty: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals pursues immortality and godlike power by treating people and animals as experimental material.
• Power, responsibility, and allegiance: The chapter blurs moral boundaries as Gao Ming and Number Two discuss whether conflict comes from evil or simply opposing sides.
• Dreams as both weapon and refuge: Gao Ming’s ability can dominate others, but it can also give suffering patients a safe, comforting place.
• Belonging and rescue: By welcoming the patients into Hanhai, Gao Ming offers them a new identity and home after Xinhu’s abuse.

Plot points

• Gao Ming discovers that Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals has imprisoned Taboo Players and other patients in the lower hold, using their bodies as hosts for ghosts. He resolves to give the abandoned a home in a rebuilt Blood City, creating a “Shadow City” within nightmares.
• With Number Two’s guidance, Gao Ming and his group enter the offshore Laboratory’s lower hold. There they find a vast Nutrient Pod containing submerged human test subjects, including familiar Hanhai Investigators such as Wan Jie.
• Number Two explains that the subjects’ consciousnesses were sent to Hanhai while their bodies are sustained in the pod. Saving them requires a coordinated plan: one group must reach Hanhai and persuade them to cooperate, while another activates a recall procedure.
• Gao Ming realizes Number Two has concealed the fact that the passage only works one way. He restrains Number Two and demands to know how to reach Hanhai.
• Number Two explains that Number Zero altered the passage to prevent return, with help from a powerful entity. He also warns that the Laboratory’s weak defenses are likely a deliberate trap: its occupants are confident no intruder will escape with the truth.
• Number Two reveals that Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals can send consciousnesses into dream worlds, but reaching deeper layers requires taboo items such as Dream’s Shrine.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming expands his ambitions from rescuing individuals to building a refuge for both humans and ghosts. Though he has trusted Number Two’s guidance, he shows sharp judgment by detecting the lie and confronting him.
• Number Two admires Gao Ming’s willingness to defy taboos, but withholds crucial information. Their uneasy alliance shifts as Gao Ming demands full cooperation.
• Wan Jie and the other Investigators are revealed to be alive but trapped in a precarious state, making their rescue a central concern.
• Gao Ming also summons Zhang Ding, relying on a trusted ally to help control Number Two.

Significant themes

• Exploitation and responsibility: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals is portrayed as the true villain, exploiting both patients and ghosts for its experiments.
• Trust and deception: Number Two offers useful truths while hiding a critical fact, forcing Gao Ming to balance cooperation with suspicion.
• Rescue and belonging: Gao Ming’s plan for Shadow City reflects his determination to shelter those rejected by both reality and the Deep World.
• Power and control: The altered passage and the Nutrient Pod show how the company manipulates consciousness and bodies to maintain control.

Plot points and events

• Number Two reveals that Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals recovered five of Dream’s seventeen Shrines. Shrines in Hanhai and the lower hold act as coordinates for a route back to Hanhai: enter the Deep World through a Dream-Insertion Device, though only the traveler’s soul and consciousness can go.
• Gao Ming doubts Number Two’s intentions but allows the entity to guide him. He and Zhang Ding descend through a vast chamber of preserved investigators and reach the Dream-Insertion Devices.
• Instead of following the instructions to sleep, Gao Ming remains conscious, relying on his nature as a Dream Ghost. His blood awakens a Shrine he carried from Dreamfold Town, and he and Zhang Ding force their way into the device.
• Inside, they discover Dream’s enormous Main Shrine, depicting the Thirteen Blood Cities and the Deep World. Gao Ming opens its doors and is plunged into overwhelming darkness.
• A mysterious face notices him. Its presence seemingly kills him, reducing him to a beating heart—but another Gao Ming emerges from death and advances farther into the darkness.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains suspicious and defiant, refusing to surrender control to Number Two or obey the device’s instructions. His repeated return from death shows his extraordinary persistence.
• Number Two provides crucial guidance and insists it means no harm. Its awe at Dream’s Main Shrine reveals reluctant respect for Dream’s former power.
• Zhang Ding protects Gao Ming with floodwaters and accompanies him through the corpse-filled chamber and into the device.

Significant themes

• Death and perseverance: Gao Ming is destroyed by the darkness yet returns and presses onward.
• Control and trust: Gao Ming accepts Number Two’s help without trusting it, maintaining his own agency.
• Dream’s power and arrogance: The Main Shrine’s scale and imagery emphasize Dream’s immense strength and defiance of the Blood City Lords.
• The cost of survival: The investigators’ bodies are sustained by fragile tubes, while the route to Hanhai requires leaving one’s physical body behind.

Key events

• Gao Ming’s consciousness is pulled into the shrine and attacked by a hidden unspeakable’s darkness. Though repeatedly destroyed, he keeps re-forming and steadily approaches it, resisting through sheer persistence.
• He reaches the entity and invokes Execution House, but the darkness withdraws before he can pull its face into his heart.
• The shrine reveals three faceless statues, each linked to a different Blood City and an unspeakable’s will: Darkness, Illusion, and Rotten Flesh. Their true bodies are absent, but each statue can unleash one powerful attack.
• The Rotten Flesh statue transforms everything nearby into flesh, rapidly harming Gao Ming, the Investigators, and the Dream-Insertion Device.
• Unable to abandon the mission or let the others die, Gao Ming gives Zhang Ding the Dreamfold Town shrine. Zhang opens it, preparing to protect the group.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shows extraordinary persistence: although he is repeatedly killed and vastly outmatched, he refuses to submit or retreat. His decision to protect the Investigators and preserve evidence also reveals a moral side beneath his defiant manner.
• Number Two, suffering as Number Zero tortures his true body, identifies the three unspeakable forces and explains the statues’ power. His grim admission that he misjudged the danger underscores how badly the situation has escalated.
• Zhang Ding understands Gao Ming’s intention and acts without hesitation, while teasing him for behaving like a villain despite being a good person.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Immortal reacts with intense hostility to Rotten Flesh City, suggesting a deeper connection or rivalry.

Significant themes

• Will against overwhelming power: Gao Ming cannot match the unspeakable’s strength, but persistence lets him advance where force would fail.
• Sacrifice and responsibility: He stays to protect the Investigators and secure evidence, even when retreat might save him.
• Hidden corruption and danger: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ shrine contains far greater threats than Gao Ming expected, and the unfolding attack raises the stakes for the mission.