The beginning

Freddy wandered between layer upon layer of nightmare curtains, harvesting lives like the Grim Reaper.

Even among those lucky enough to escape, or survivors still clinging to life, descriptions of his appearance were remarkably consistent, however endlessly varied those mind-breaking dreams might be.

He wore a battered, faded brown fedora and a strangely cut red-and-green striped sweater riddled with holes. A heavy leather glove covered his right hand, with several sharp surgical blades gleaming coldly, firmly stitched to its fingertips.

Most terrifying of all was his skin, utterly warped and ulcerated by fire. Vast patches of charred black scabs piled upon one another, dark red new flesh mingling in folds with charcoal-gray dead skin. The skin had split in several places, faintly exposing the whitish fascia beneath.

The agony of flames consuming his flesh had frozen permanently upon his features. His face was twisted and deformed, his eyelashes and hair entirely burned away, his whole face resembling wax forcibly cooled after melting.

Whenever he walked slowly through someone else's dreams, his fire-ravaged skin tugged slightly with his movements, seeping thick, blackish fluid.

He favored lurking in the shadows and excelled at toying with people through fear. The brim of his fedora was always pulled low, hiding most of his hideous face, leaving only those crazed, obsessive eyes staring out through gaps in the shadows.

Countless times, survivors heard the piercing scrape of metal blades against walls in their nightmares, followed by that heavily scarred figure slowly emerging from the fog.

No one could stare at his ulcerated body for long. That ferocity forged in fire had long since been etched deep into everyone's subconscious.

Such a commotion unsurprisingly attracted certain people's attention, yet they still believed Freddy belonged to the same faith as them. They held a grand ceremony to summon him, only to provide precisely the opportunity he needed to invade them.

Such a commotion unsurprisingly attracted certain people's attention.

Those paranoid, ignorant, fanatical cultists still stubbornly believed Freddy was an emissary or incarnation sent by their great master.

For Freddy's arrival, these believers expended immense financial and material resources, including innocent blood and lives, preparing a grand summoning ritual that spanned day and night, extravagant and uncanny in the extreme.

In the hall Freddy had visited before, pitch-black curtains blocked out all daylight. Ancient, twisted, intertwining incantations covered the walls. Young, vigorous blood served as paint for the ritual array, crisscrossing to outline totems of nightmare creatures, while a faint, ghostly blue glow flowed through the gaps between the runes.

A compound summoning array over ten meters in diameter spread across the floor, constantly flickering with eerie blue-green flames that cast the entire hall into alternating light and darkness, filled with looming ghostly shadows.

On the night of the ritual, all the believers wore identical black ceremonial robes and knelt prostrate on the ground, repeatedly murmuring ancient, obscure prayers of communion.

These things were, at most, unsettling enough to send a chill through someone. What truly provoked physical and psychological terror, directly from genetic instinct, were the corpses hanging on the surrounding walls, every one of them drained of blood and killed with their abdomens slit open.

Leading them was the bishop whose face resembled a fat lizard. Low, hoarse chanting overlapped in layers, circling again and again. Perhaps they really did have a little ability, for they actually managed to produce some power from who knew where.

Freddy already drifted in the gap between dreams and reality. All the earlier unrest and disturbances had merely been probes as he gathered power and attempted to break through the shackles of dimensions.

He was trapped in the shackles of the dream dimension, constrained by the barrier between the two worlds, forever unable to invade reality on a large scale. He could only bewitch people's minds and create scattered nightmare disasters. This grand ritual held by ignorant believers was precisely the perfect opportunity he had dreamed of.

An endless stream of pure mental intent, a deliberately activated dimensional fissure, and a summoning array precisely aligned with the source of chaos-the three forces combined like a perfectly fitted key, completely unlocking the dimensional cage that imprisoned him.

When their chanting reached a peak, those twisted melodies actually found a trace of shared harmony amid the chaos. In an instant, the already thin spatial barrier shattered with a crash, and a deep, pitch-black fissure abruptly opened.

Every candle flame suddenly surged. The blue-green fire nearly stained their entire field of vision black. The clamorous chanting abruptly faltered and faded, and the entire hall fell deathly silent.

It was Freddy.

Freddy gazed at the crazed believers before him and the wild joy written across their faces. He seemed infected by it as he began to smile too.

And so Freddy smiled, but whatever expression appeared on her face looked especially hideous and twisted.

The next second, the rules of nightmares took complete control of the hall.

Freddy did not need to lift a finger. With a single thought, the entire real-world environment instantly collapsed and re-formed.

The concrete walls on all four sides of the hall mutated madly, twisting and folding. Countless cold, sharp steel bars erupted from within them, stabbing out and crossing one another, densely filling the entire space. Hard, heavy iron walls suddenly closed in, pressing and contracting at an unhurried pace, with the mocking cruelty of a cat toying with a mouse.

Believers who had no time to rise and flee were impaled by steel bars sweeping across them, severed at the waist, their limb bones shattered. Warm blood instantly splashed across the walls, staining the sacred incantations they had carved with their own hands.

Their screams had barely burst from their throats before suddenly kindled flames swallowed them.

Eerie dark blue flames sprang from nowhere at the hems of their ceremonial robes, climbing madly along the black fabric, spreading and wrapping around their bodies. The fire gnawed at flesh and burned bone, yet would not allow its prey to die immediately.

Some were wedged tightly between iron walls, unable to move, forced to watch the flames burn away their robes inch by inch and sear their skin; others hung suspended with their limbs pierced by intersecting steel bars, struggling desperately in agony and suffocation; still others had half their bodies swallowed by the folding, twisting floor, leaving only their upper bodies exposed between flames and blades to suffer endless torment.

For those believers lucky enough to evade these things, the corpses hanging on the walls suddenly tore free of their nails and ropes and jumped down. Grinning hideously and horribly, they became undead zombies and charged at the other survivors.

The piercing screech of scraping metal never stopped. Steel bars kept contracting, cutting, and crushing, while the flames continued burning, roasting, and tormenting.

In an instant, the place became a hell on earth of mangled flesh and bones burning in fire.

Freddy still stood quietly at the center of the array, his hat brim lowered, concealing most of his crazed smile.

He enjoyed this grand massacre, offered up and set in motion by fools with their own hands. He felt souls that did not seem quite so pure pouring into his body.

He walked up to the bishop, who was kneeling on the floor and had finally realized something, loudly hurling abuse at him.

He bent down close to the bishop's face, then abruptly leaned back.

"Ew~ You're way more disgusting than me, lizard-face."

"What do you know? You damned blasphemer against my lord! My lord will tear your soul into scraps that even maggots would scorn to eat!"

"Really?"

Freddy stretched his mouth into a grin, blood flowing from the cracks his movement opened in his lips.

"I'm so scared... Please forgive me."

Freddy put on a pitiful expression, even pressing his palms together to accompany the performance.

But the next second, several iron wires descended from the ceiling to one side, pierced the bishop's skin, and pulled out his tendons along his arms. Freddy laughed uproariously, admired his wretched state, and skipped two steps forward before suddenly turning back toward him as though remembering something.

"Oh, right. Don't forget to tell him Freddy sent you~"

With that, Freddy walked outside, while the other zombies pounced on the bishop behind him. Excruciatingly shrill screams stabbed into Freddy's eardrums. He snapped his fingers impatiently, and several zombies still gnawing on corpses rose unsteadily and closed the double doors.

"So noisy."

The dim lights outside the doors illuminated his face, making it look even more hideous and terrifying.

The smile on his face formed a bizarre symbol with his features. As he sensed the voices of souls coming from the other rooms, his smile kept widening.

"Welcome to my nightmare."

Just then, the faint shadow beneath his feet stirred twice as though alive, then split into several parts and instantly shot off in every direction.

Within seconds, screams rose one after another amid sounds of chaos.

One, two, Freddy's coming for you.

Three, four, better lock your door.

Five, six, grab your crucifix.

Seven, eight, better stay up late.

Nine, ten, never sleep again...

Freddy hummed a song, as though what surrounded him were not screams and the smell of blood, but birdsong and the fragrance of flowers on a grassy field.

At last, deep within this underground structure, something seemed to finally notice what had happened. The ground began to tremble slowly. A low, indistinct hum like surging tides came from deep beneath the foundations, murky gray mist seeped from cracks in the stone walls, and an aura of decay and hallucination, enough to eat away at reason, spread through the air.

For every believer who still drew breath, boundless waves of hallucinations suddenly surged through their minds. Countless twisted dream visions appeared before their eyes, their mental cognition continuously crumbling until they sank forever into insensible dreams, their brains turning into puddles of slurry.

Layers of rock cracked inward and peeled away. Enormous fissures kept widening as a vast, boundless being, woven from countless writhing tendrils, flowing shadows, and shattered dreams, slowly rose from underground.

It was a single cell of Chaugnar Faugn. Yet even this tiny sliver of power was absolutely not something that could be born in this world.

Phantasmal images overlapped in layers. Countless hazy eyes opened and closed across the surface of a body covered in blood vessels, like a flayed lump of bloody flesh, as surging nightmare power swept through the entire space.