Qiu Mian opened his eyes and felt around his body. The seatbelt was still securely fastened, but the thermal blanket had vanished into thin air, and his ears were filled with the terrified, panicked cries of weeping.
He observed outward through the window shade. Within the visible range, the world had returned to normal. There was no Jupiter, only moonlight. The thick fog had dispersed, the worm had vanished, and flight LA1718 had flown back to the human world from the edge of the netherworld.
He let out an imperceptible sigh of relief.
“Mianmian, is it over?”
Wei Pu clutched his seatbelt and phone tightly, his face as chalk-white as a freshly plastered wall.
“Yeah.”
“Too, too good. I knew you would definitely make it!” He wept with joy, his entire body going limp from the momentary relaxation as his phone slipped into the distance. “I’ve already written my will, along with what I wanted to say to Grandma and Xinyao. But it won’t send! It doesn’t matter if I die, but what should they do? If I can’t even leave my final instructions and die just like this without rhyme or reason, I!”
Wei Pu’s tears flowed like a burst dike, almost completely beyond his control. Yet, knowing Qiu Mian’s abilities, he still held onto a sliver of fortune in his heart. The other people on the plane were the ones truly collapsing, even growing so desperate they couldn’t breathe and passing out cold.
Qiu Mian didn’t know how a normal person should react at this moment. He simply unbuckled his seatbelt, retrieved the phone and blanket that had fallen aside, and silently handed them back to Wei Pu.
Wei Pu couldn’t care about all that. He used the blanket to wipe away his tears and was just about to speak when the aircraft body suddenly emitted a loud crash, tilted ninety degrees, completely flipped sideways, and plummeted downward vertically at an unimaginable speed!
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“I don’t want to die ahhhhh!”
Unfastened and caught off guard, Qiu Mian lost his balance and slammed hard against the window. He pressed his aching left arm, tried his best to steady the handrail, and after calming his breathing, closed his eyes once again.
Less than two seconds later, Qiu Mian opened his eyes anew, but his posture had abruptly changed. He agilely stood up from the cabin side, stepping across the aisle littered with scattered items as if walking on flat ground, completely ignoring the tilted slope and the intense sensation of weightlessness.
Not a single one of his screaming, wailing fellow cabin passengers noticed anything unusual about him.
He walked all the way outside the cockpit and calmly pulled open the cabin door. He saw that the captain in the primary pilot seat had somehow fallen unconscious, while the co-pilot was frantically patting and calling out to him while attempting to maintain the aircraft’s balance, though it seemed to be a futile effort.
“Wake up! Wake up! The giant thing just now was just a hallucination!”
Sure enough, although the worm’s dream had ended, the impact brought by the fused dream had not completely vanished. Perhaps it was the fog, or perhaps it was the light of Jupiter, but they had inflicted damage on the aircraft’s components and the captain, indirectly causing the loss of control at this moment.
Having no time to overthink, Qiu Mian glanced at the instrument panel. He didn’t know how to fly a plane and couldn’t restore the aircraft’s stability through normal means, so he could only resort to a roundabout rescue.
He tapped the captain’s temple, urgently concealing his memories from five minutes ago, and then stared fixedly at the ground. His gaze seemed to pierce through the aircraft body and cut through tens of thousands of feet of high altitude, expanding layers upon layers of fantasy space within the infinitely vast expanse. The plane plummeted rapidly by 2,000 feet in the fantasy space, yet in the real world, it had only dropped one-fifth of its height, thereby buying manifold more reaction time than originally available.
The captain quickly snapped out of his unconsciousness. Although missing a chunk of memory prevented him from recalling the source of this disaster, the situation was urgent and left no room for thought. He hurriedly searched for the cause of the plane’s loss of control, exerting every ounce of effort to right the tilted fuselage.
One minute, two minutes, three minutes. Everyone lost all perception of time; a single instant seemed longer than eternity. Amidst desperate waiting, the bone-shattering pain never arrived. Finally, when the altitude gauge hit 3,200 feet, the captain successfully wrenched flight LA1718 back to a normal flight angle.
“Keep going.”
Not a single person dared to relax their emotions. The co-pilot hurriedly contacted the tower to request an emergency landing, while the captain operated the control stick, steering steadily forward in the directed direction.
Qiu Mian pressed his right hand firmly against his bruised left arm, leaning against the cabin wall with all his might to maintain a posture ready to enter the fantasy space at any moment, until the plane successfully landed on the airport runway and slowly taxied to a shutdown after a long slide.
Inside the cabin, there was first a dead silence.
Only then came the sobbing wails and the hoarse, choked screams of ultimate relief, because all the screaming and sorrow had already been completely vented during the ten-minute vertical plunge. Everyone had lost the strength to produce sound, let alone stand up and walk around.
Only Qiu Mian slowly returned to his seat, closed his eyes for a moment, and exited dream-travel.
Everything about him remained unchanged, save for a slightly messy hairstyle. He unconsciously took a staggering step and adjusted his breathing with a hint of fatigue.
“Mianmian.” Wei Pu was a mess of snot and tears, smiling uglily through his tears. “Sorry, I have no strength left. I can only let you take care of yourself later.”
Qiu Mian once again picked up the dropped phone and handed it back to him: “You should focus on yourself instead. Send a safe-arrival message first.”
“Wuwu un.”
Emergency doctors, firefighters, police, and reporters had long since swarmed in a tight circle outside the plane. The moment cabin pressure equalized and the door opened, they rolled out stretchers to assist the injured.
As vitality re-emerged, the whimpering cries grew loud once more. In such a situation, being able to cry out completely was actually a manifestation of emotional health.
Qiu Mian took the initiative to fall behind, letting the others go first. Wei Pu had already been rescued and taken away. Looking around at the remaining people, Qiu Mian suddenly walked up to a seated female fan.
The sasaeng fan’s limbs were deformed, clearly suffering a fracture due to failing to return to her seat in time and slipping improperly, though it didn’t seem too severe. Aside from her leg injury, she didn’t utter a single cry of pain, instead remaining stunned on the spot as if she had lost her soul, showing no reaction even when she saw Qiu Mian approaching.
Ignoring this, Qiu Mian said of his own accord: “I didn’t deliberately ignore you, but I genuinely don’t remember the appearance of unimportant people.”
The sasaeng fan twitched her eyebrows.
“Thanks for the support, thanks for the liking, but I’m a person who hates trouble. If fans make too much fuss, I’d rather have none.”
The sasaeng fan’s mouth twitched, her frightened-away soul dragged back by pure anger.
“But I didn’t handle things well this time, and you suffered an undeserved calamity.”
Qiu Mian shook out the thermal blanket, gently draped it over her legs, and then pulled a pen from his bag, neatly signing the print-like characters Qiu Mian onto her boarding pass before adding a letter Q at the end.
“Let’s skip the group photo. I don’t like showing my face, but autographs are fine. I’ve practiced.”
Qiu Mian stood up, thought of something else, felt around in his backpack, and handed over a package: “Dried duck meat. Eat it after your leg heals. It’s extreme spicy.”
After a momentary daze, the sasaeng fan’s face instantly flushed bright red. Just as she wanted to say something, she was lifted away by medical personnel.
As for Qiu Mian, after confirming the condition of the remaining crew members, he walked out of the cabin on his own.
The moonlight was hazy, yet the airport was brilliantly lit like a ribbon of neon colors, accompanied by the flashing of cameras and shutters.
He loosened his collar, slightly tugging back his tightened sleeve cuffs, letting the night breeze brush through his hair. Then, he raised his head to gaze at the rapidly shrinking fused dream thousands of feet above, as if sensing the aura of a certain dream-traveler who had just departed.
Linshi, villa district.
Jiuying detached himself from the dream. When he opened his eyes, he was greeted by the familiar ceiling. He lowered the hands that had been crossed over his chest, turned slightly to the side, and pressed the recording equipment on his bedside table.
Unless the special creature East accompanied him, dream contents were not broadcasted in real time to the real world; the dream-traveling process required personal reporting upon awakening.
However, Jiuying was an exception. The duty dates of Dream Decoding Squad Nine were affected by him, spanning a continuous schedule from Friday evening until Monday evening, during which he experienced hundreds of related dreams. It was virtually impossible to explain them clearly in a few words, so he could only pick out the deepest, most impressive key points to report.
After a slight hesitation, Jiuying stated briefly: “There is another mastermind behind the worm.”
Usually, when the dream decoding squad operated together, task reporting was left to the talkative Wuyang to summarize, with the more meticulous vice-captain Shouwu supplementing alongside; he never needed to consider phrasing himself.
For a moment, he found himself somewhat at a loss for words.
After describing this sentence, he paused for a moment before speaking again: “Encountered the Passerby, who provided clues related to Guanyang South Road, Beibei Stationery, and Mermaid of the Sewer.”
“Dream control was assisted by him, specifically including the concealment of Jupiter and the safeguarding of flight safety.”
When the plane accident occurred, Jiuying had also prepared to intervene. He could have made the plane land safely by splitting gravity, but to account for the broader picture, he could only take measures once the flight altitude dropped below the low altitude of 3,000 feet. Fortunately, before that, the crisis had already been resolved jointly by the Passerby and the flight crew.
“The Passerby’s thoughts are unfettered, and he acts as his heart desires, but he is not cold; instead,”
Quite cute.
Jiuying was momentarily startled by the thought that had suddenly popped into his mind. He stopped talking, pressed pause on the recording button, and re-examined the contents of the fused dream, attempting to organize new phrasing.
Yet memories were slipping away as swiftly as sand through fingertips; sometimes, the more one wanted to recall something, the harder it was to remember, leaving behind only vaguely impressed outlines.
He unconsciously spread open his left palm. There was no playful signature from the Passerby, only several twisted and terrifying scars, raised and numerous, extending all the way from the base of his fingers to the back of his wrist, as if sliced open by sharp blades multiple times.
Jiuying remained silent. Less than a minute and a half after waking up, he involuntarily closed his eyes.
A moment later, he opened them again, looking at his clenched left hand with the momentary daze characteristic of just waking from a deep dream.
He first checked the time.
July 10, 19:36.
Chi Jianying put on his gloves, quickly unplugged the monitoring equipment from his body, pressed stop on the recording, and ignored it completely, showing not the slightest intention of listening to it over again.
He swallowed a nutrient pill, kept his face cold, and walked out of the room without looking back, officially exiting the dream.