Chapter 349: Death Sahara (28)

Yin-Yang Butterfly described what had happened in the nightmare. The crippled old giant’s vital point was also the enormous eye in the center of its face, but injuring the eye only sent it into a berserk rage; it simply wouldn’t die. He had tried attacking the eye, cutting off the head, tearing open the abdomen; the wounds covering his body were exactly how he had gotten them.

The most horrifying part was what happened when he finally cut the crippled old giant into pieces, thinking it would at least need time to reconstitute and give them a window to think. But the giant, its head halved and separated from its body, reconstituted in a way that had the half-skull attached to the separated body mass forming into a second giant.

A giant that couldn’t be killed.

“Killing the giant is not how you break out of the nightmare. Killing it doesn’t wake you.”

Yin-Yang Butterfly’s assessment made everyone’s hearts tighten. If they couldn’t break out by killing the giant because it was already dead in the real world, then the way to break out from the inside was something they could all figure out: either the Yu twins were killed by the giant and history repeated itself, or Yin-Yang Butterfly killed the Yu twins and bought his own escape.

Or all three of them were killed by the giant. Looking at the pattern of giants splitting, if they kept refusing to make a choice, they would eventually be forced into one.

“In the nightmare, the Yu twins woke first and then you woke afterward, correct?”

“That’s right.”

While listening to Yin-Yang Butterfly’s account Wei Xun was also asking about details. Zhu Yuande and the Yu twins were in a completely different league from the three new arrivals; if they’d woken at the same time in the nightmare, it would have been nearly hopeless. With the twins waking first, there was an opportunity to flee or set a trap in advance.

Yin-Yang Butterfly also confirmed that the nightmare’s setting was essentially identical to reality, and besides the three of them no one else was visible.

“Did you try leaving the bunker and going outside?”

“No, too little time, no opportunity.”

He had to watch out for the giant while protecting the Yu twins, Yin-Yang Butterfly couldn’t split himself in two. He wouldn’t have cared about the Yu twins’ lives before, but since His Grace wanted them protected, he was going to protect them with everything he had.

“It wasn’t easy, the giant’s blood is intensely corrosive.”

Yin-Yang Butterfly rolled up his sleeve; his arm was covered in pits of all sizes, corrosion marks throughout. His constitution was good and none of them had festered, but Yu Hexuan, who had bitten the giant with his own mouth, had a jaw that was essentially destroyed.

“Chen Cheng, yes, you.”

Mid-account, Yin-Yang Butterfly suddenly moved close to Chen Cheng and grabbed his clothing, studying him. Tang Shuang and Cheng Tianbao had gone next door to look after the injured Yu twins; Chen Cheng was worried too, but as captain he needed to know what had happened in the nightmare so they could take better precautions going forward. He had stayed by the fire listening to Yin-Yang Butterfly’s account.

“What is it?”

Chen Cheng stood cooperatively in front of Yin-Yang Butterfly and asked with confusion.

“I saw you in the nightmare.”

What Yin-Yang Butterfly said next was surprising to others but entirely within Wei Xun’s expectations.

“There was ice on you, it sheltered that woman.”

Remarkable; after Wei Xun pressed further, he found that Yin-Yang Butterfly was describing something that had happened before he triggered the Ancient Oasis butterfly fragment through Stargazer, which meant it had nothing to do with the Captain Chen on the battlefield. The Chen Cheng of this scene re-enactment had been sheltering his own team member without being aware of it.

“Is that true?”

Yin-Yang Butterfly’s account left Chen Cheng in stunned silence for a moment and he instinctively reached for his sword. Wei Xun glanced at it and found it was nowhere near the same as the unfinished Cold Mountain Sword Half-Life Daoist was holding; neither in appearance nor in presence were they similar. It had presumably been reforged at some point in the following ten years.

No wonder Half-Life Daoist had never tried to hide the Cold Mountain Sword from Chen Cheng; Chen Cheng hadn’t shown any recognition of it.

“It was, but it didn’t hold them long.”

Yin-Yang Butterfly didn’t elaborate.

“He wasn’t there as a presence, he didn’t exactly appear in the nightmare. It was just the frost from him making the giant reluctant to get close.”

The Red Sand settlement’s giants carried flame energy, the crippled old giant having an aversion to cold was entirely understandable. It was Chen Cheng’s unknowing protection that had given Yin-Yang Butterfly the opening to tear the crippled old giant apart.

Unfortunately, this had simply resulted in one more giant and one new enemy.

“Then we saw a light, very small and faint, closer to the candlelight.”

On the other side, Yu Hexuan was throwing anxious glances at his sister being treated, while recounting what had happened in the nightmare. Yin-Yang Butterfly had been at the front fighting the giant throughout; they had been assisting and dodging at the side, trying not to drag him down. So, for certain details of the nightmare, Yu Hexuan actually knew more than Yin-Yang Butterfly.

“The ice from the captain melted very quickly when the new giant came and couldn’t hold them back anymore. I almost got grabbed.”

Yu Hexuan still looked shaken recounting this.

“Right at that moment, I saw the candlelight. It was burning on a black crow’s beak. It was strange cause I hadn’t been planning to go near it, but I saw a dragon in the candlelight.”

He glanced carefully at the little Dreamchaser dragon curled in Zhang Xingcang’s arms. What he had seen in the candlelight was this very dragon, though a different color from its current form; much more ethereal, more like a beam of light, a dim, warm orange light, brighter than the black crow’s candlelight, like a small bedside lamp in the night, quiet and lovely, the kind of thing that made you think immediately of a warm blanket and sweet dreams.

With nowhere to retreat, Yu Hexuan had made the decision and charged into the light holding his sister.

Zhang Xingcang understood. The black crow’s candlelight and the warm orange dragon-light they had seen were Lily and Dreamchaser reaching in to protect them. Lily’s ability to enter dreams was honestly only average, her strength was in re-enactment. And Dreamchaser’s power was limited; he could only construct a small safe zone within the nightmare, not dispel it directly.

Time in the nightmare seemed to run longer than in reality. Yu Hexuan described how he had seized the time to draw talismans on the spot, using large quantities of frost-descent talismans to temporarily hold back the giant and give Yin-Yang Butterfly a chance to rest. At this point Half-Life Daoist frowned and took Yu Hexuan’s hand; the man’s body was ice-cold and he had been trembling throughout, his palm soaked in cold sweat.

Yu Hexuan specialized in heavenly fire talismans; fire and frost were irreconcilable, and forcing out large numbers of frost-descent talismans had caused him severe backlash. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] This backlash was agonizing, yet Yu Hexuan hadn’t said a word about it, talking only about saving his sister.

Half-Life Daoist cut in forcefully, and with limited materials he pressed and massaged several acupoints on Yu Hexuan’s body with a specific technique, then took out the peach wood sword, coated it with blood from his fingertip, and pressed it to an acupoint at Yu Hexuan’s lower abdomen.

After the time it took to drink a cup of tea, some color finally returned to Yu Hexuan’s face; Half-Life Daoist told him to keep applying pressure himself, and let him continue.

Although the dragon-light and candlelight had formed a small safe zone, without Yin-Yang Butterfly at the front holding off two crippled old giants bearing down simultaneously the candle would have been snuffed, so Yin-Yang Butterfly had barely rested before returning to fight. Yu Hexuan meanwhile had wracked his brain for a way out.

“You know how it is, all of us from Metaphysics know at least some Metaphysics methods, so I thought I’d try burning some paper. Fire is generally the bridge between the living world and the realm of the dead.”

On top of which the overwhelming darkness in the nightmare had made Yu Hexuan feel that light would bring some kind of change.

“But I couldn’t light a flame at all,” he said helplessly.

“It was as though something was pressing down on it. The nightmare’s campfire was clearly out, but it felt as hot as if it were still burning; the blisters on my hands came from touching it.”

Just as “Bai Xiaosheng” had said, Zhang Xingcang thought. The campfire in reality was still burning, so the campfire in their nightmare couldn’t be lit.

“And then?”

“And then the captain moved!”

Yu Hexuan’s voice rose sharply, his emotions suddenly soaring.

“I watched the captain swing his sword just like that. I’d never seen anything like his presence; one sword swing and the temperature dropped instantly, the campfire went cold, I could light a flame again, and that single stroke shattered both giants and cut off the top of the bunker entirely! That sword light looked like it was going to fly up into the sky, I even saw stars!”

Half-Life Daoist barely suppressed a laugh. Sword light chasing stars; Yu Hexuan had described it perfectly.

What Yu Hexuan described also matched their real-world assessment. That sword stroke had weakened the nightmare’s seal to some degree; the pitch-black bunker they were trapped in was like a physical manifestation of the nightmare itself. When the roof was cut off and fire blazed up in the darkness, an enormous orange dragon mouth and a crow’s beak like a shadow pushed in through the top and grabbed them, flinging them out of the nightmare and back to waking reality.

“But, but—”

The next moment, as though remembering something, Yu Hexuan’s face went white again.

“At the very end, I saw the giants inside the bunker. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] They looked like they had become four.”

Chen Cheng’s sword had shattered the giants, but it had also multiplied their number.

“Six giants.”

By the campfire, Yin-Yang Butterfly’s count was one more than Yu Hexuan’s. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Yu Hexuan’s power had its limits; Yin-Yang Butterfly had seen more.

“Four giants had risen up, but behind them, on the ground, there were two more giant faces.”

“Six giants total. The strong probability is that they correspond to you six people.”

Wei Xun frowned. Six against six followed logically, but nobody knew whether cutting the giants up again would make their numbers increase further. By Yin-Yang Butterfly’s account the nightmare would come back, when they fell into it next time there would be six giants waiting from the start. Wei Xun was particularly worried about He Yunlai, who according to Half-Life Daoist was meant to die in tomorrow’s sandstorm.

If He Yunlai’s death time came and went tomorrow and he still hadn’t died, would the nightmare pick up a sandstorm in addition to everything else? The dangers were multiplying, and it would absolutely not go as smoothly as tonight.

“Whether or not there’s a sandstorm tomorrow, we have to kill the Star Borer Insect.”

Wei Xun settled it. Seizing the butterfly fragment would restore some of Dreamchaser’s power, which would better equip them to handle the nightmare’s dangers. And besides, the West District people, after tonight, would certainly have thought of their own straightforward solution for lifting the nightmare. Yin-Yang Butterfly hadn’t encountered them tonight, but tomorrow night was another matter.

He hoped David’s group had managed to collect at least one of them; that would make things at least somewhat simpler.

A quarter of an hour later the Stargazer returned with David and the others, and from Stargazer’s dark expression it was clear things hadn’t gone smoothly.

“God damn it, that black werewolf is the Silver Moon Killer!”

David came in and immediately began gulping water in large swallows. The little fire dragon on his shoulder flew down, ate a few chunks of ember, then started tending to its own scales.

Wei Xun noticed David and the fire dragon both had numerous blade cuts on them; centaur Katie’s orange-title specialty weapon, the longbow, had its string cut clean through, and Katie hadn’t bothered with her own wounds but was already grimly re-stringing her bow.

Seeing that Yin-Yang Butterfly and the others had already woken from the nightmare, David and the group still felt some relief. And at the same time Wei Xun was listening to Baby Corn’s report. When the Infected and the others had gone out, Wei Xun had sent a segment of Baby Corn underground to follow at a hidden distance; the Infected was an Evil Insect Master’s fragment, and something going wrong with him wasn’t an option.

‘Father, Father! Baby Corn brought something delicious! Absolutely uniquely delicious!’

Baby Corn was almost vibrating with excited agitation underground, twisting about, desperately wanting to report. Wei Xun listened to David’s account with one ear and Baby Corn’s chatter with the other.

“So, you came back with nothing?”

Having heard the full story, Yin-Yang Butterfly, seeing nobody behind them, couldn’t help asking.

“Who says nothing! We almost hauled the Silver Moon Killer back!”

David protested loudly, then received a cold sideways glare from the Stargazer and immediately deflated.

“There was just a small mishap.”

What mishap?

Originally everything had gone smoothly, they had quickly found the unconscious black werewolf outside the settlement. Because they suspected his identity was unusual, David had been about to tie him up and restrain him, and right at the moment of binding—

“Who would have thought he’d have a tokay gecko tucked inside his clothes against his skin?”

David said with exasperation.

“The little thing reacted too intensely; it bit me, I flung it away, and then—”

“Its tail came off, and the Silver Moon Killer went insane.”

The Stargazer said coldly. When the small golden gecko’s tail detached, the Silver Moon Killer had snapped awake from the nightmare instantaneously. Then he had dropped all pretense of identity and immediately started fighting them, and kept going until the Stargazer arrived. The Silver Moon Killer withdrew and the night’s plan to collect a body was entirely ruined.

“I suspect it isn’t the Lizard Duke’s avatar, the tail came off far too cleanly.”

David sighed.

At the same time, Baby Corn’s tendril quietly and stealthily emerged from underground and pressed something into Wei Xun’s hand.

Long and slender, cold to the touch, the feel of something living, moving back and forth in his palm.

Wei Xun opened his fingers a crack to look, then immediately closed his fist, his expression neutral.

What Baby Corn had brought back for him was a severed, golden, small tail.

The detached tail of what was possibly the Lizard Duke’s small golden tokay gecko.