Seeing that she said nothing, he used both hands to separate the bug from Mi Jingyun again.
After a quick series of moves, Mi Jingyun was back inside the shadowless ant.
When the ant Mi Jingyun controlled began moving again, Ke Meng knew she was back and awake.
After more than a dozen consecutive tests, Ke Meng had a rough idea of what was happening.
When a shadow creature invaded a creature without a shadow, it ended up in the awkward predicament of being unable to leave its body.
As for why this happened, neither woman understood, and Ke Meng was even less likely to know the underlying mechanism.
Mi Jingyun and Wen Yushan had never encountered anything so bizarre. Still, neither had tried switching hosts many times. They lacked experience and deeper knowledge; perhaps the veteran members of Shadow Stream would know something.
"What else do you know about Shadow Stream?" Ke Meng asked.
Shadow Stream was an illegal organization targeted by the authorities. The two ants were reluctant to talk and betray Shadow Stream, but Ke Meng's methods were too formidable.
All it took was one question-"What would happen if you possessed a chair?"-to scare them out of their wits and get their little legs moving.
Watching them start writing frantically, terrified of being put inside a chair, Ke Meng wondered whether doing so would make them stop thinking.
The two women struggled across the tabletop, writing out little bits of information about Shadow Stream.
Anyone who joined the organization was no longer a normal human, but had been transformed into a strange species of shadow.
They had been ordinary people from Octopus City. A fire at a movie theater had disfigured their faces, leaving them feeling that they could not go on living.
That was when someone from Shadow Stream appeared.
Abandon their hideously burned faces, embrace Shadow Stream, choose faces they liked, and start living again.
Ke Meng could guess most of what happened next. They had set their sights on Mrs. Chen and Chen Momo while they were in the car, slipped inside, and become their shadows.
That was their story.
But Ke Meng was still curious about the chair. "Why are you afraid of inanimate objects? Can't you invade one and become its shadow?"
"Don't!"
"Our mentor warned us not to invade lifeless objects that can't think."
Both voiced vehement protests, then began pleading for mercy, hoping Great Cthulhu would not toy with their lives.
But in Ke Meng's eyes, these two shadow creatures no longer counted as humans. They were something else entirely, and the term "human life" had nothing to do with them.
They had once been human, but now they were shadows. It had been their own choice; no one had forced them to do it.
Ke Meng kept pressing them, trying to find out why they could not invade the shadows of inanimate objects.
Neither could give him an answer. They were newcomers and did not understand the mechanics.
Their mentor had merely warned them not to do anything stupid. Once they invaded an inanimate object, they could never come back. Only a fool would try it.
That was precisely the fate the two ants wanted to avoid: being forcibly stuffed into a chair by Ke Meng.
"You really don't need to be afraid. If you stop thinking, I can pull you back out." Ke Meng still had some confidence in his hands.
The two ants trembled, but in the end, they could not defy Ke Meng's will.
The people of Shadow Stream probably never dreamed that someone in this world could forcibly stuff a shadow into a chair.
"Never mind. I'll test it with the bug first." After some thought, Ke Meng decided to hold off on experimenting with human shadows.
He scooped up the poor bug's shadow once again, used his other hand to scoop out the chair's shadow, then tossed the bug's shadow into the chair.
A moment later, the chair had acquired a bug's shadow.
He tossed the chair's shadow onto the bug, where it remained motionless.
Ke Meng waited for a while, but the chair did not move.
"Its entire structure is fixed in place. There's no point testing it like this," Ke Meng muttered.
He needed to find an inanimate object that could move for the test to mean anything.
"Forget it. I'll test it tomorrow." Ke Meng checked the time. It was nearly eleven at night. He was not in the habit of staying up late, so he got ready for bed.
He tossed the two poor ants into a small cardboard box, with Tangyuan standing guard beside it. At the slightest sign of trouble, Tangyuan would be able to handle it.
Ke Meng took a shower, lay comfortably in bed, and logged onto Bilibili for a quick look before going to sleep.
The video had passed review, and the round, fluffy Tangyuan had finally made a debut before the viewers.
Since the video had only just gone live, it had not gathered many views. Ke Meng decided to leave it alone for now and check again tomorrow.
"Tangyuan, keep an eye on them."
After giving that instruction and hearing a bark in response, Ke Meng closed his eyes, reassured.
Before long, he drifted off to sleep, the sound of surging seawater reaching his ears.
Orange Star.
Ever since someone had dreamed of that strange blue sea, people throughout Mech City-or rather, all across Orange Star-had begun having the same strange dream.
The researchers in Mech City were overwhelmed, their bloodshot eyes fixed on their screens.
On the screens were research reports sent in from various cities.
"It's out of control. Whenever anyone dreams, they enter that dreamscape."
"But why haven't some people dreamed of it? Why?"
People at the research institute began shouting.
But shouting was useless until they found a solution.
"Those who hadn't dreamed of it started dreaming of it later. Why is that?"
The mysterious dream left everyone bewildered.
Worse still, the dream was not confined to the game.
People who had not dreamed in the Game Pod also experienced that eerie dream during ordinary sleep.
When the first report of a dream outside the Game Pod reached the research institute, everyone was stunned.
It shattered the understanding of every researcher!
Their entire worldview collapsed!
Some thought it was all in people's imaginations, but as more and more similar reports came in, the researchers finally accepted the truth.
The blue ocean dream had broken free of the Game Pod's mechanisms, linking everyone together into a massive online dream game.
???
Countless question marks swirled through the researchers' minds. They truly could not understand it. They really couldn't.
So far, the worldwide tally of people experiencing the nightmare had exceeded one hundred thousand.
How the dream spread was still under investigation.
Reaching a hundred thousand people in a single day made it a catastrophe. If it kept spreading, it was hard to imagine what it would be like for the entire world to have the same blue dream at night.
The Orange Star People had yet to find a way to eliminate the biological need for sleep. As long as they slept, they could dream.
Orange Star had sounded a level-one alert, and the entire world had entered a state of crisis.
The authorities publicly announced that Orange Star was experiencing a dream disaster that science could not readily explain, advising everyone to sleep as little as possible.
Researchers everywhere began investigating the dream's cause, studying its documentation and reading accounts of the nightmare.
Little did they know that this would spread the nightmare even further.
It would still take some time before they realized the nightmare could spread through speech and writing-perhaps a few hours, perhaps a day.
Before you continue