Petru chose the latter.
He once asked the Pastor what to do if he encountered a powerful opponent like Pastor on the battlefield.
The Pastor said he wasn't a strongman and warned Petru never to provoke a true Mental Awakening master. If he were to encounter one on the battlefield, he should instinctively shoot and kill him immediately, without thinking, using tactics, or calculating the probability of success, because all his mental activity would be exposed to them.
Firing at the opponent with the instinct honed on the battlefield is the only chance to kill a Mental Awakening powerhouse. Once you miss it, you will never be able to kill them again, because you will likely fall into a dream without realizing it. Even if you have lucid dreaming abilities, as long as their Mental Power is stronger than yours, nothing in your brain can be hidden from them, and you will not be able to escape their control over your consciousness.
You could very well spend your whole life in your dreams:
Perhaps you'll complete the mission brilliantly, perhaps you'll get injured, but in any case, you'll make some money and retire from the trade. You'll have romantic trysts with your lover in Paris or Venice, and one day you'll marry your soulmate and have children. After your woman has drained your body and your family has depleted your savings, you'll begin to toil and struggle. You might return to the mercenary world, or you might grow tired of fighting and prefer to work as a dockworker. Only when your children grow up will you have the chance to play golf and enjoy life.
When you, old and frail, are with your equally old wife, reminiscing about your life as the sun Seine River, you think you've lived a magnificent yet ordinary life like most people. But in reality, you've only been crouching in the trenches for a few minutes before someone slits your throat. Only when blood spurts out do you realize that your life was just a dream, and the moment you wake up is the moment death comes.
Petru believed the Pastor's words. So he knew that even if he deliberately let the dream collapse and struggled to wake up, he might not be able to fire at his opponent. Even if he did fire, it might not be real, because you can't tell if you're truly awake. And once the other side realized his intentions, there would be no chance left.
Among his pirate brothers, there were perhaps a few with keen minds and naturally strong Mental Power, but none of them understood Mental Awakening. He was the only one with a chance of survival, so he couldn't afford to take any risks.
When Petru boarded the ship, the pirates had already inspected the deck and other cabins. Apart from the cargo hold, which they hadn't yet had time to check what the cargo was, there was indeed only one person sitting in the wheelhouse.
This person must be the kind of awakened master the Pastor was talking about, or at least very close. The Pastor couldn't possibly handle so many people at once back then, otherwise their team would have been an invincible force long ago, although the Pastor did bring the team many incredible victories.
The pirates on the ship, like Petru, were probably hypnotized and entered their respective dreams. The passage of time in dreams is completely different from reality. To be precise, there is no passage of time in dreams; the unfolding of dreams is just a continuous superposition of spaces. The time you experience is not real time, but merely a human's inherent concept and feeling.
Although the dream had been going on for a long time, in reality at this moment, it was probably still stuck at the moment when Petru turned around to leave after entering the driver's seat; at most, that person had stood up from the chair.
Will he get up? Petru wasn't sure.
Theoretically speaking, hypnosis wouldn't be fatal, at least not instantly. That man seemed so disdainful of them, a group of pirates, that he probably couldn't be bothered to kill them one by one with a knife or gun. He was alone on the ship; for him, dealing with corpses and cleaning up blood would be a hassle.
He could also control the pirates' dreams to make them jump into the sea. The Pastor said that a true master of hypnosis can put a person into a sleepwalking state, meaning that the person dreaming is responsive to the external environment. They won't go astray or bump into walls, but the scenes they experience are those in their dreams.
However, pirates are all water monsters. The huge impact of jumping into the sea and the stress response when choking on water will definitely wake them up. Unless they can continue to be hypnotized through the water, how long can that last? As long as they don't drown immediately, they have a chance to survive.
Petru had been waiting for this opportunity.
The dream continued, with Petru whipping his beloved Lawiye's body with all his might. His subconscious was filled with a contradiction of love and hate, and he didn't know why.
Lawiye's groans echoed in the dimly lit room.
Seeing the wounds and blood flowing from his delicate skin, and hearing the indescribable erotic music, Petru's body inexplicably became excited.
He followed the course of the dream without daring to resist in the slightest, even though something deep within his subconscious frightened him. He was afraid that if he used his Mental Power even slightly, that person would notice.
After a while, Lawiye's face became blurred and slowly transformed into the appearance of an Arabia, the Saudi Arabia tycoon who had competed with him for Lawiye.
Anger flared up in Petru's heart, but suddenly he couldn't wield the whip. He put all his strength into every movement, but his arms were limp and powerless.
The tycoon grinned menacingly as he stepped down from the cross. His laughter filled the room, while Lawiye's sobs could be heard nearby.
Petru turned his head and saw Lawiye being led through a doorway, bound and disappearing around a corner.
He quickly chased after them, dropped the whip in his hand, and pulled out an AK rifle with a casual touch.
Outside the doorway, everything was a blur of white, obscuring everything. Petru knew that was the boundary of the dream. He passed through the doorway and saw a path along the wall to his left, with Lawiye's figure not far ahead.
Petru followed, and at the end of the path was a spacious terrace. After descending a few steps to the left of the terrace, there was a narrow path. Following the path for a short distance, they came to a large open lawn. Opposite the lawn was a flat building that looked like a large warehouse.
Someone opened the warehouse door, and Lawiye was pushed and shoved into it. As he went in, he looked back, his eyes seeming to say, "Come save me!"
Petru maintained a sliver of clarity in his mind, but he dared not let it show too much, lest it disrupt the natural progression of the dream. As the dream scenes shifted, he clearly sensed that the other party's mental suppression was weakening. This allowed him to use more Mental Power to think, because thinking also requires recalling memories, which could easily manifest in dreams. However, the other party had only hypnotized and controlled them, without entering their dreams, so as long as he didn't experience significant mental fluctuations, his dream wouldn't arouse suspicion.
Petru gradually realized that the path he was following Lawiye was actually the route the ship took from the bridge to the cargo hold. The doorway was the bridge door, and the white light outside was from the sky. The path to the left was a passageway outside the bridge, and the terrace behind the passageway was the living deck. The path down from the terrace was the ship's side, the lawn in front was the main deck in the middle of the ship, and the large bungalow at the end of the lawn was the cargo hold.
Petru realized that he and his companions were sleepwalking, their destination the cargo hold. The group of pirates who had gone missing earlier were probably also locked in the containers in the cargo hold; no wonder their bodies hadn't been found.
He didn't know what was in the cargo hold, but it certainly wasn't a pirate party; there wouldn't be red wine or champagne. What awaited them was most likely death, and probably the most pathetic way to die in the world.