"I see it!" Huang Liang exclaimed excitedly, "I see the Heavenly Road!"
Hong Kui seemed even more excited than him. He gripped the rope tightly, as if afraid Huang Liang would run away.
"Go over there, go over there and get that piece of ice," he said.
Huang Liang glanced at the Heavenly Road in the void again and said, "Then what are you going to do? Wait for me here?"
Hong Kui said, "I'll wait for you here." Then, after thinking for a moment, he added, "No, I'll go with you anyway."
Huang Liang said, "Don't you think you can't see it or step on it?"
Hong Kui said, "You see, you can stand on it, that's enough! You can take me there. Now, just let me become one with you, and you can take me there."
"What... become one?" Huang Liang was startled.
"Don't overthink it," Hong Kui laughed. "We just need to unite our consciousness. That way, our spiritual qualities will match, and if you can cross the Heavenly Road, I can cross it too."
How can we achieve a unified consciousness?
"To combine each person's dreams into a unified dream."
"Isn't this the legendary Group Dream?"
"That's right, it's Group Dream. But we don't have a wizard to conduct the ritual, so we have to rely on ourselves."
"So what do I do now? You dream first, then I come in, or I dream first, then you come in?"
"No, no, that's not it. That wasn't a unified dream; it was just a consciousness invasion. Like when you saw the white wolf in my father's dream, you were just an observer, an intruder. That wasn't your dream. Now we need two people to have the same dream. Remember, our dreams must be exactly the same, without any discrepancies in details. Otherwise, the two dreams won't merge."
"This is a bit different from the Group Dream I've come across!"
Huang Liang suddenly remembered hearing Howard mention Group Dream in Amsterdam. The organization did indeed have this training method, but each time someone would preside over the ceremony, and the group would follow the presiding person's spiritual guidance, constructing their own dreams—a honeycomb-like method where each person was only responsible for a part of the dream, forming a vast dream around a central theme. Hong Kui's method, however, involved two people having identical dreams, overlapping them. The latter seemed simple, but it was much more difficult to execute.
Hong Kui said, "I only understand some things from my genetic memory. I don't know how to guide it, and there are only two of us. It's unrealistic to build a dream like bees building a hive. Moreover, the Heavenly Road must believe that I am a part of you before I can step onto it. Therefore, our dream cannot have the slightest deviation."
"So what kind of dreams should we have?"
"Of course, it should be a scene we're all familiar with, preferably with exactly the same details."
But what kind of scene would they both be familiar with, and know every detail of? This made them both start to think.
Before Huang Liang came to live at the Wolf Manor, their experiences were completely different. The only shared memory they had was of life at the Wolf Manor and the people there. But even in the same place, everyone's memory of it is different. Even the same person's dreams are different each time.
"Memory is always distorted," Huang Liang said. "How could my dream be exactly the same as yours?"
Hong Kui said, "It just needs to be roughly the same, there can't be any fundamental differences. For example, the chairs in the living room, it doesn't matter if the position you dreamed of is a few centimeters different from the position I dreamed of, but it can't be that I dreamed of a sofa while you dreamed of a rosewood chair. The patterns on the chairs also can't be different. We can correct slight differences with our Mental Power. Which corner of the manor are you most familiar with?"
Huang Liang's deepest impression was, of course, his and Martha's bridal chamber, followed by Old Wolf's room. After thinking about it, he decided to choose Old Wolf's room. He believed that it was also the room Hong Kui was most familiar with.
When he used self-hypnosis to quickly enter a dream and replicated the room in his dream, he saw the sickly Wolf lying on the hospital bed, with Martha serving him beside him.
Huang Liang knew, of course, that this was his dream, but when he saw Martha, his heart still fluttered, as if they had been separated for a very, very long time.
After arriving in Alaska, he often worried that this separation from Martha might be their last, and that he would only be able to meet his beloved in his dreams from then on.
Martha's face lit up with surprise, just like a woman waiting at home for her husband to return from war. She skipped over, put her arm around Huang Liang's shoulder, and kissed her on the cheek, saying, "You're finally back! I was so worried about you while you were gone."
She then looked behind Huang Liang and asked, "Where is young Little Wolf? Hasn't he returned?"
Just as Huang Liang was about to speak, he heard a knock on the door behind him. With a thought, the door opened. Hong Kui walked in with a smile.
At this moment, Huang Liang sensed that something had appeared in the space, like air—you couldn't see it or touch it, but it was there. The objects and people in the room appeared as if they were shadowy figures, like a camera lens trembling slightly.
He knew this was a dream space formed by Hong Kui's spiritual essence. Their dreams had overlapped and were merging. He felt a tingling sensation on his scalp, as if someone was filing away his body with a file, scraping away the excess bits and pieces.
Huang Liang also tried his best to adjust his mindset and conform to Hong Kui's dream as much as possible.
Before long, their dreams finally aligned. The room stabilized, and Martha and Old Wolf's faces became clear again. But for the sake of the dream's stability, he had to maintain Martha's appearance, as if casting a spell to freeze her in place; Martha stood there motionless.
Hong Kui said, "That's enough. Now, you need to connect this dream to reality, and then lead me onto that Heavenly Road."
Huang Liang nodded, glanced silently at Martha, and turned to walk towards the door. He closed his eyes, placed his hand on the door, took a deep breath, and then pushed it open forcefully.
The door opened, and a gust of cold wind blew in. Outside was the icy world of the Mount Denali. Before them lay the Heavenly Road Heavenly Road, and at its end, an icicle hung upside down from the sky.
Huang Liang embarked on the Heavenly Road. Hong Kui gripped the rope tied around his waist tightly, following in his footsteps. Behind them, the barking of Alaska Malamutes echoed.
The Indian guide nearly barked like a dog. He watched as his two clients, acting mysteriously on the edge of the cliff, did something inexplicable, then seemingly walked out of thin air and vanished.
At that moment, he felt that his intelligence was no different from that of his dog. He couldn't understand what was happening in front of him, so he could only stretch his neck, stand there blankly, and make some inexplicable sounds in his throat.
Having experienced this extraordinary adventure, the Native American became even more convinced of the ancient prophecies of Denarii. He planned to tell his wife and children about his adventure as soon as he came down the mountain, but he was unaware that they had just experienced something even more incredible and dangerous than what he had seen on the mountain.