Passerby stood poised atop the fuselage, his back straight and posture resolute. He carried the elegance of a crane and the confidence of a peacock, remaining completely unmovable amidst the howling gale and churning clouds.
As the turbulence battered the aircraft, the cabin shook violently. The wind tugged at the hem of his clothing, outlining his broad shoulders and narrow waist. He wore a classic luxury designer outfit, one that even Jiuying, who had long been out of touch with reality, recognized, though he had never seen this particular model before. His sleeves were rolled up casually to expose a high-end designer wristwatch. Passerby crossed his arms with a hand supporting his chin, riding out the turbulent vortex with total composure. While the wingtips vibrated rapidly, his meticulously styled hair remained untouched by the wind, looking as though it were caught in a gentle spring breeze. He seemed to be enjoying nothing less than a grand runway fashion show all by himself.
Dozens of seconds later, the violent shaking temporarily subsided, and the aircraft briefly regained its balance. Passerby gently stepped forward, moving with a steady, floating grace as naturally as if he were walking on flat ground. He paced across the iron fuselage as if treading on the wind and clouds, continuing until he found an angle to his liking, whereupon he stopped and assumed a posture of critical inspection.
His profile canted slightly downward. His faceless visage still seemed expressive, and his gaze appeared to pierce through the dense fog, perspective-scanning the world ten thousand meters below. Without turning around, he spoke with the easy familiarity of an old acquaintance: “You are here? Why are you alone?”
Jiuying instantaneously flashed in from afar, landing on the fuselage beside him and staring at him expressionlessly.
Passerby remained unperturbed by his silence, offering an unprompted assessment: “Looks like you are a bit better than last time, at least you managed to lock onto the right coordinates.”
Jiuying coldly spat out three words: “Same to you.”
When they had bumped into each other last time, one was dosed with potent anesthesia while the other had downed three catties of baijiu, meaning both had indeed struggled just to figure out the way. However, Qiu Mian had no intention of offering any explanation as to why he happened to be on this exact airplane.
Although his critique was stated as a matter-of-fact observation, hearing it bounced right back at him produced a subtle sensation. Without changing his posture, Qiu Mian let out a lazy, mocking chuckle: “Why are you not issuing a warning this time? I took quite a long vacation for myself, yet the bugs are still making such a racket.”
Within the mere two-minute span of mistakenly entering a convergent dreamscape and being battered by its violent dream currents, the aircraft had experienced a severe drop of four thousand feet before finally stabilizing slightly. The surrounding wind remained fierce, accompanied by thick fog and a gloomy sky. Visibility was exceptionally poor; radar and radio communications had completely failed, distress calls could not be transmitted, and the crew was effectively flying blind. Flight LA1718 was entirely cut off from the world.
Yet in the midst of this isolated environment, the sole creature keeping the flight company added an even more hair-raising layer of horror to the surrounding atmosphere.
Through the heavy haze, a discerning observer could make out a massively fat worm writhing within the clouds just beneath the aircraft. Stretching over ten thousand meters in length and wide enough to shroud an entire town, it resembled a legendary dragon manifesting in the world. Yet no dragon in existence could ever be this repulsive. Its segmented skin bulged with countless fragile, ready-to-burst pustules and fleshy tumors. With every single peristaltic contraction, these nodules ruptured, spilling yellow-black pus and rotten sludge that continually spewed toward wherever it passed.
Qiu Mian focused intently on every movement of the worm, yet his posture remained entirely casual. Rather than acting as though facing a formidable enemy, he looked more like he was studying the underlying mechanics of its behavior.
Was he even appreciating it a bit?
Jiuying, who had been observing Passerby from the side, suddenly recalled that every single time they had encountered this giant worm, Passerby had been present.
The first time, the worm had not yet fully grown; it possessed a tender, delicate white body and numerous companions. Not only did they refrain from attacking Passerby, but they even seemed to obey his commands, launching an assault on Jiuying’s team instead. The second time, the worm revealed its ferocious nature, yet Passerby not only coasted through the entire scenario while slacking off, but also intentionally uttered unbearable, vulgar banter to disrupt Jiuying’s mental state.
Jiuying watched Passerby’s unguarded posture, yet remained unable to determine whether he was a friend or an enemy.
Passerby paid no heed to his scrutiny, nor did he care about the suddenly intensifying hostility. Instead, as he stared at the disgusting worm, he offered a thought of his own: “Feels like we are acting in Slime City, though unfortunately there probably will not be a chance for a remake.”
“Never seen it.” Jiuying had little desire to take up the conversation. Although he had heard of the notoriety of this bizarre, avant-garde film, he had no self-destructive urges and figured his real-life self would not have any interest in watching it either.
For reasons unknown, Passerby genuinely looked a bit regretful.
“It is an environmental protection film, though probably nobody would create a continuous dream like this just for environmentalism, would they? More likely…”
“The dream owner suffers from a disease with similar symptoms,” Jiuying picked up the thread. “We found relevant clues back at the hospital last time, and it is already been incorporated into the scope of our investigation.”
Passerby nodded and offered an honest evaluation: “Quite slow.”
Yet he launched no criticisms or challenges. After all, he could never accomplish such a feat entirely on his own, nor had he ever considered approaching the matter from the offline end. But at that thought, Qiu Mian experienced a sudden flash of inspiration: “Guanyang South Road and Beibei Stationery.”
“What?”
“When the continuous dream first started, those two place-name signs were next to the elementary school.”
When they had first crossed paths by chance, the continuous dream was merely an ordinary dreamscape. To dream travelers who passed through countless dreams daily, there was truly no need to memorize such minute details. Had Qiu Mian not possessed a photographic memory, coupled with the worm’s excessive hostility toward Liang Rui, which caused Liang Rui to exaggerate the danger when relaying it to Qiu Mian, he would not have paid any attention to the constructed elements within the dream anyway.
Thinking back on it now, the worm from back then seemed to still retain the consciousness of living as a human.
“Fine, I got it.” Jiuying frowned as he tried to recall, yet apart from Passerby’s provocation, he retained almost no impressions of the initial dream, let alone environmental details. He could only tentatively choose to believe what he said.
As for the possibility that Passerby was intentionally feeding them false directions to disrupt official judgments, after weighing it repeatedly, Jiuying decided to ask directly:
“The chaos on the plane, was that stopped by you?”
This was the easiest way to judge Passerby’s stance.
If he wanted to exploit this dreamscape, it was unlikely he would not make use of Flight LA1718. Yet while he had arrived earlier than the official dream travelers equipped with the Huashu satellite monitoring network across the country, he had not taken the opportunity to commit evil acts; instead, he even seemed to have lent a helping hand.
Accomplishing this required expending mental energy and was exceptionally difficult. The space they occupied right now was a convergent dreamscape where the real world and the dream world intersected, intertwined like milk and honey, forming an inseparable whole whose underlying rules defied simple summarization. Take time, for instance. The passage of time in the dream world was governed by the dream owner’s consciousness, but in a convergent dreamscape, it was jointly defined by the people existing in the real world and the fantastical entities residing in the dream world. While generally consistent with reality, if the dream consciousness were powerful enough, individuals outside the convergence zone could even witness the bizarre spectacle of everyone inside the convergent dreamscape moving at triple speed.
However, this altered not physical time, but purely a special temporal flow affecting everyone within the convergent dreamscape’s sphere of influence. Therefore, wanting to alter a dreamscape was far more difficult than handling the black holes or white holes still confined to the dream world. It was so difficult that the rest of the dream-clearing team members could not arrive immediately; their methods for bartending a convergent dreamscape were not yet sophisticated enough, and even imagining oneself freely walking at an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet posed quite a challenge. Furthermore, a larger number of dream travelers were obligated to prioritize other affected individuals within a thirty-kilometer radius. After all, important though an airplane might be, it only carried around a hundred people, whereas tens of thousands of others were being impacted by the convergent dreamscape and suffering through dire straits.
Upon hearing the question, under normal circumstances Qiu Mian would have simply given a brief acknowledgment. Yet this time, it happened to strike a raw nerve: not only had he been innocently dragged into the mess, but people had apparently overestimated the competence of certain official dream travelers, bringing out that trace of faint yet unabated hostility within his indifferent, sluggish perceptions.
And they had the nerve to ask?
“Hah.”
During his break, while admiring a collection of beautiful hand photos, he had been inexplicably lectured by a strange fan, followed immediately by this massive uproar. Qiu Mian belatedly realized that his mood right now was probably less than stellar.
Thus, he let out a gloomy hum and mimicked the tone right back: “What status do you think you have to look down on me and break my heart? Do you have any idea how many nights I stayed up for you, solving how many dreamscapes? You betrayed my youth and wasted my emotions.”
Jiuying: “…”
He could not help taking half a step back, fighting down a stronger urge to flee while clumping his hand into a ready combat posture. Bewilderment and trance coexisted within him, leaving him unable to determine whether Passerby was an enemy who had deliberately set out to disrupt their morale, or someone whose will had suddenly been hijacked by the dream owner.
What on earth was that reaction?
Qiu Mian felt somewhat disappointed, yet also a bit relieved. It seemed normal people really did freeze up when faced with sudden emotional venting from strangers; his own response toward the stalker earlier probably could not be faulted either.
“I have already given you the clue, hurry up and solve it,” he lazily raised a hand to block the sunlight. “I do not want to see it a fourth time.”
“I do not wish to run into you ever again, either.”
Jiuying coldly squeezed out those words, preparing to deal with the will of the dream owner, the worm, when he suddenly narrowed his eyes, wincing and turning his head reflexively away from an intense glare of sunlight.
At that exact instant, both he and Passerby simultaneously noticed something bizarre: where on earth had the sun come from?
Ever since they entered the convergent dreamscape, the surroundings had been shrouded in dense mist, obscuring everything except the airplane itself and the worm. Yet right at this moment, the thick fog was actually parting gradually, exposing something else entirely in the sky.
It was a colossal celestial body occupying ninety-five percent of their field of view. Its light-brown sphere was encircled by churning storms and roiling cloud layers, while a dark-red vortex resembling the eye of a deity overlooking the world emitted a blinding yet chilling radiance, illuminating all things under heaven with a cold, fervent glare.
Under the illumination of that massive celestial body, their figures appeared as insignificant as a drop in the ocean, exceptionally minuscule. Time itself seemed to have stopped at this very moment.