Hu Xing knew she had entered Xia Wenyuan's dream. The figure sitting on the shore fishing was Xia Wenyuan's consciousness, and she couldn't tell whether the reflection in the water was the intruder or a normal shadow.
She knew she couldn't disturb him at this moment. A person in a dream, once disturbed by external factors, will have their dream space collapse like building blocks accidentally knocked over by a child.
Hu Xing asked Qingmu what to do next, but when she turned around, she realized that Qingmu wasn't behind her at all.
This terrified Hu Xing, like a child wandering the street and suddenly realizing their parents have disappeared.
She wanted to go back along the original path, but she couldn't find the door connecting the two time periods. At this moment, she couldn't disturb Xia Wenyuan, and she had nowhere to go. A feeling more terrifying than being unable to wake up from her lucid dream came over her.
She dared not take another step forward, lest she disturb Xia Wenyuan. When she tried to back away, she found there was no way behind her. No matter how she turned around, her view remained the same: the azure reservoir and Xia Wenyuan always in front of her, and even if she walked backward, the distance in her line of sight would not change.
Hu Xing stood there quietly, not really knowing where she was standing; it was as if she were on the edge of Xia Wenyuan's dream.
After an unknown amount of time, a dark shadow flashed across the distant mountaintop. A bird flew swiftly towards them, and only when it reached the lake did Hu Xing realize that it was a Crow, not some water bird.
Hu Xing smiled as if she were seeing a long-lost relative. That chattering, gluttonous Crow, who always took advantage of her weaknesses to ruthlessly fleece her, now seemed so dear to her.
Crow skimmed the water's surface, circled above Xia Wenyuan's head, and Guagua a few times. The reflection in the water seemed to sense danger and suddenly darted into the deeper water. However, the reservoir was so clear that one could see right to the bottom, leaving no room to hide. Hu Xing could clearly see Xia Wenyuan's shadow swimming along the pebbles at the bottom of the reservoir into the distance. But its feet remained firmly in the spot where Xia Wenyuan had been fishing, so the shadow on the bottom of the water stretched longer and longer.
The Crow cawed, took flight, then turned and plunged into the water, quickly following the head of its shadow. From the water's surface, it looked like the reflection of a black airplane gliding through the sky, the elongated shadow and the book forming the airplane's contrail.
The shadow seemed to have run out of strength. The longer it stretched, the farther it was from Xia Wenyuan's consciousness, and the slower it swam. The Crow, however, was in no hurry to catch it, following it at a leisurely pace. When they reached the opposite bank, the shadow braced its hands on the rocks of the lake shore, its head emerging from the water, as if it were panting.
Only then did the Crow caw and swoop down, grabbing the shadow's shoulders with its claws. It skimmed across the water and flew up, circling for a while before soaring into the sky.
The Crow flew higher and higher until it was just a tiny black dot. The shadow stretched longer and longer like a wide black noodle, and as it increased in altitude, the shadow became fainter and fainter, slowly turning from a black shadow into a mist, like the smoke from a farmhouse. Finally, it was blown away by the wind like wisps of smoke, disappearing from Hu Xing Xing's world along with the Crow.
"Finally eliminated!" Hu Xing muttered to herself, still waiting foolishly for the post-credits scene, as if she had just finished watching a thrilling movie.
"Not yet. It's intertwined with your grandfather's consciousness. I haven't found a way to completely destroy it without harming your grandfather." Qingmu suddenly appeared in front of it.
"You're finally here." Hu Xing breathed a sigh of relief. "I thought you'd left me here until my grandfather's dream collapsed before I could leave!"
Qingmu laughed, "You're still too nervous. If you can find the way you came, you can find the way back."
"So, do I need to sense the brainwaves I'm emitting?" Hu Xing asked.
"From a scientific point of view, talking about brainwaves is incomplete; it's just that we haven't found a better, easier-to-understand explanation." Suddenly, Professor Mei appeared. He looked a bit strange, a spitting image of Einstein. This was probably his subconscious self-image or ideal.
"This dream is really nice. It's my first time entering someone else's dream." Mei Yiqiu looked around and then said to Hu Xing, "You're already quite good. You were able to find the passage to another dream on your own, while I can only enter with Qingmu's help."
Qingmu said, "The professor's deep self-hypnosis is something ordinary people can't do; he just takes a different approach. In terms of Mental Power alone, you're already very strong, much stronger than some people who have studied for a long time but still can't grasp the basics."
Hu Xing said, "How can I compare to the professor! But the professor is so amazing, why doesn't he study lucid dreaming and entering a dream state?"
Mei Yiqiu her head and said, "I don't want to waste time dreaming. I'm learning self-hypnosis to improve the depth of my thinking and to be able to cope more easily with the difficulties of working for days and nights without rest in the lab. However, today's experience is very helpful for me to better understand human consciousness."
"Professor, you just said the brainwaves were inaccurate, so what exactly is it? How can I find my way back?" Hu Xing asked.
Mei Yiqiu said, "When a person is dreaming, the subconscious mind needs to retrieve a large amount of brain memory to construct the dream space. At this time, the various memory areas of the cerebral cortex are very active, and brain waves are also very active. But I think that brain waves are just signals; they don't form a channel that you can walk through. This channel should be generated by the unstable fluctuations in space when constructing the dream."
"The space in dreams is more like a temporary space created within our three-dimensional world. It should have evolved from a singularity, like a miniature Big Bang. Only, it's too small for us to perceive. The energy fluctuations caused by the explosion would form many tiny wormholes. These wormholes are so small that they have no impact on the real material world, but they can allow consciousness to pass through. The energy required for consciousness to pass through comes from the human body's Mental Power, or what is called consciousness energy."
"In a sense, if someone can stabilize their dreams, that's an ever-expanding universe, and their subconscious is the master of that universe," Mei Yiqiu said after a moment's thought. "I think that in different dimensions, the birth and Annihilation of space are constantly occurring, which is actually the birth and Annihilation of universes. The universe we live in is one of them."
Hu Xing had just read a few books about the universe, relativity, and quantum mechanics, and only vaguely understood what she was saying. She asked, "Professor, are you saying that this world is actually someone's dream?"
"That's one way to understand it," Mei Yiqiu said. "If God exists, aren't we living in the dream He created?"