The Butterfly Dreamed of Zhuang Zhou (V)

Clutching the shard of glass, Yang Jian stood up and looked at his mother. Zhang Fen had yet to wake. Although this mother was an illusion the dream had manifested from his experiences, Yang Jian could still feel her maternal love, exactly as he remembered it.

After tucking the blanket around Zhang Fen, Yang Jian got up and walked to the entryway of his home, pressing himself against the door to listen carefully for any movement outside.

Although ghosts had no supernatural powers in the dream, Yang Jian was only a high school student now. To successfully subdue an adult man, he had to catch him off guard and win with a single strike.

Yang Jian waited silently. Suddenly, footsteps rang out, as though someone had appeared out of thin air outside his home and was approaching the door.

Then came the sound of a key entering the lock. Yang Jian stepped back, readying himself to strike.

Click. The lock opened.

Before the door could open all the way, Yang Jian yanked it open and lunged forward, aiming the sharp shard of glass straight at the newspaper in the hands of the person before him!

Rip!

The newspaper was instantly sliced in two, revealing a deathly pale face. Yang Jian was startled.

The face beneath the newspaper was extremely unnatural. There was something indescribably strange about the entire face, as though someone had forcibly pieced it together from the features of seven or eight corpses.

"Woof!!!"

A snarling bark sounded beside him. The large black dog leaped at Yang Jian and knocked him down, its sharp fangs snapping toward his neck.

In that instant between life and death, Yang Jian jammed the shard of glass in his hand firmly against the black dog's teeth. But the dog was terrifyingly strong, and cracks actually began to appear in the glass beneath his biting jaws.

Yang Jian struggled to curl up in the corner, minimizing the area of his body exposed to attack.

The black dog was enormous, weighing nearly twice as much as Yang Jian. Its weight left him struggling to breathe.

Just then, the ghost actually turned around and retreated through the doorway. Yang Jian watched with eyes straining as though their corners would split. If he was bitten to death here now, all his efforts would go down the drain.

"Get off!"

Yang Jian had been fighting for over a decade and had never lost. At that moment, he unleashed every ounce of strength in his body and slashed fiercely, cutting a wound into the black dog's face so deep that bone showed, while viciously kicking it in the groin.

The black dog howled in pain, the force of its jaws instantly slackening.

Seizing that fleeting opening, Yang Jian kicked off the ground and hurled himself at the ghost, clamping tightly onto its ankle.

The black dog reacted remarkably quickly. Even with its groin kicked bloody, it could still immediately turn around and pounce at Yang Jian.

But suddenly, it stopped, low growls rumbling in its throat as its eyes fixed viciously on the ghost's head.

He did not understand. This was clearly his master's body, so why did it have a different face?

But his master had given it an order: whenever it saw this face, it was to bite it to death.

The next second, the black dog lunged headfirst at it. Its sharp teeth instantly pierced the ghost's neck, clamping down savagely and tearing madly.

The ghost died, but Yang Jian did not wake.

Just then, something abnormal suddenly happened to their surroundings. Torrential rain actually began pouring from the sky.

Through the unbroken rain, Yang Jian actually saw his father-or, more precisely, the anomaly that possessed his father's memories.

Heavy rain was also falling over Meishan Village in reality. Yang Xiao walked to a fishpond and plunged headfirst into it. Before long, he swam back up with a heavy wooden box in his arms.

He opened the wooden box. Inside were two deathly pale human legs. Despite having soaked in the water for over a decade, they showed no signs of decay, as though they had just been sawed off a corpse.

Yang Xiao took the human legs and continued walking through the downpour. But Yang Jian distinctly saw another stiff figure reflected on the surface as he passed the fishpond, identical to that ghost.

"The dream and reality are beginning to overlap... The Ghost Dream seems capable of superimposing itself to attack different people at the same time..."

"It's only because of Lin Bei that the ghost can no longer distinguish reality from dreams. It can only use the rain as a medium to carry out physical attacks."

"My deduction was right. As long as the ghost's three parts in reality are brought into the dream, my plan can succeed."

Yang Xiao noticed the figure as well, but he did not stop. He continued toward another location.

The rain grew heavier and heavier, until it was practically pouring down in sheets. This nightmare seemed on the verge of invading the other side.

In the rain, the stiff figure was gradually approaching Yang Xiao, but Yang Xiao ignored it. He knew he would not have much time left and continued striding forward.

Yang Jian watched Yang Xiao enter a dense stretch of woods. In its deepest reaches stood a small wooden cabin.

Yang Xiao went inside the cabin and took out a shovel, then began digging beside it.

With the trees blocking the rain, the figure within it began to grow fragmented. Taking advantage of this opening, Yang Xiao dug a wooden chest out of the earth. It looked heavy.

Without lingering, Yang Xiao hoisted the wooden chest onto his shoulder and set off in another direction.

Once he left the woods, the stiff figure in the rain solidified again, slowly approaching Yang Xiao.

The ghost was drawing closer and closer to Yang Xiao. Within the dream, Yang Jian stared at the reality refracted through the downpour. He did not panic. His father had been entangled with the Ghost Dream for so many years; he could not possibly lack even this much preparation.

Sure enough, just as Yang Jian had thought, Yang Xiao suddenly turned around and pulled open his coat, revealing a mass of gleaming mirror shards beneath it. Then Yang Xiao actually stepped forward of his own accord to make contact with the malevolent ghost.

The next second, the instant the mirrors touched the ghost, it vanished into thin air.

"Lin Bei's ghost... It looks like he went to see Lin Bei. That great Buddha at the school was Lin Bei's handiwork... It has the supernatural power to make ghosts lose themselves in mirrors, but this approach is too dangerous..."

"The Ghost Dream's terror far exceeds that of the Buddha statue. Right now, he's merely using the properties of that World in the Mirror to briefly restrict the Ghost Dream's movements. Once the dream completely covers reality, the Ghost Dream might invade the entire World in the Mirror instead. When the Ghost Dream appears in reality, blanketing heaven and earth, no one will be able to stop it."

Yang Jian watched the torrential rain before him. Even knowing how dangerous this approach was, there were no other options now.

Yang Xiao had already reached a small temple. Without any hesitation, he used the wooden box in his hands to knock the heads off two statues standing inside.

The two human heads rolled to the ground, looking as though they had just been chopped off. There was no sign at all that they had been sealed away for over a decade.

One looked exactly like the ghost, while the other was actually Yang Xiao's own head. Yang Xiao tucked a head under each arm, then walked out of the small temple.

Amid the downpour, Yang Xiao raised his foot and stepped lightly into a puddle on the ground.

Instantly, from Yang Jian's perspective, the entire real world flipped over. Using the medium, Yang Xiao forcibly stepped into the dream.