Chapter 315: Nightmares 4

But it didn’t go as it was supposed to. Asher remembered who he was in those nightmares, even if he was given the experience of those whose nightmares they were. And then everything went south. Asher got access to bodies with mana cores, and in those nightmares, he killed everyone he saw—even those who were close to the one whose nightmare it was, and those he was supposed to be close to.

Making a mess of the Nightmares.

Asher stood atop a corpse—the corpse of a Master rank rock golem. Around him stretched a rocky mountain terrain, and all across it, humans and demons clashed with one another. The demons outnumbered the humans almost two to one, and it was clear that, the way things were going, the humans were sure to lose.

Asher watched the battle calmly from atop the demon corpse. Two mana blades extended outward from his hands, both of them smeared with blood—blood that, of course, did not belong to the golem, but to the demons he had killed before he killed the golem. The golem beneath Asher had a large, gaping hole through its right shoulder, exactly where its mana core was situated.

Right now, Asher was inhabiting the body of a Master rank soldier of the Astrean House, a man who had died sixty years ago in one of the previous wars with the demons, and to whom this nightmare belonged.

Asher stood atop the corpse of the rock golem for a moment and looked at the ongoing battles for a moment. Then he suddenly vanished, appearing some distance away, where a group of humans and demons were fighting each other. Before they could even understand anything, he claimed the lives of both the demons and the humans who were fighting each other in just a flash, and then he disappeared again, appearing somewhere different, where another battle was taking place, and again he also killed that group without discriminating whether they were demons or humans. He kept doing this until only he and a woman were left alive.

Asher teleported right in front of the woman. She stumbled backwards as he appeared before her so suddenly.

She looked at Asher, her face a mixture of panic, fear, and confusion. "C-Cian, what are you doing? Why are you killing our comrades!?"

Asher slashed his mana blades toward the woman’s throat and severed it from her body instantly, before she could even understand what was happening.

Asher looked at the woman’s corpse and then muttered in annoyance, "Annoying illusion. Can’t she just shut up while dying?"

The woman Asher had just killed was the wife of the person whose body he had taken over in this nightmare.

"This person had bad decision-making," Asher muttered while yawning, and then looked around him. All around him, there was not a single being alive; it was finally peaceful without any sign of killing and fighting, just the way Asher preferred.

Then the nightmare slowly began to crumble, and Asher found himself at rest, as his consciousness was no longer being sent into any other nightmare.

Asher had experienced thousands of these types of nightmares. Some belonged to the demons, some to humans, and some to beasts.

In every nightmare, Asher would find himself in an unfamiliar body, along with many memories, experiences, and emotions that did not belong to him. They would try to affect Asher’s sense of self, but none of them were able to. It did not even take a moment for Asher to get used to the unfamiliar bodies, because he had long been accustomed to using many bodies with different physical dimensions.

After getting hold of a body, Asher would still have his mastery of his real-life abilities, and then Asher would simply kill everything in the nightmare, using the nightmare as a way of training and fun, until it finally collapsed.

...

The Nightmare Saint, who had been watching everything from the start, till Asher had entered his domain, was growing frustrated, as well as curious, about Asher.

He had never seen a being like Asher. His sense of self was unlike anything he had seen in any creature. Most creatures would struggle to remember who they were inside the nightmare, and then they would flow the way nightmares were supposed to go—feel the experience exactly as the one to whom these nightmares belonged, and then slowly break as they experienced that emotional pain, and then eventually get lost and die in those nightmares.

But here was Asher, who was unaffected by the emotions and experiences of every person’s nightmare he experienced.

And even now, he still could not access Asher’s consciousness, no matter how he tried, no matter what he did. Asher did not crumble mentally. Instead, with every moment that passed, he seemed to be getting stronger instead.

Even though the Saint of Nightmare kept losing his nightmares continuously as Asher cleared them, he still did not try to kill Asher or throw him out of his domain. The reason was simple—watching Asher inside those nightmares was fun for him, and beyond that, he wanted to see what Asher’s consciousness contained. For that, even if he had to sacrifice some of his nightmares, he did not care about that sacrifice at all.

The Saint of Nightmare was just about to send Asher inside another nightmare, but then he suddenly stopped, as he sensed a crack in Asher’s consciousness. The Nightmare Saint did not know how this crack had appeared, but he did not care. He instantly entered the consciousness, and when he entered it, he found something that he had never even expected to be possible.

The Nightmare Saint instantly used his ability to conjure a new nightmare with what he had found in Asher’s consciousness.

Asher’s consciousness, which was floating in the Domain of Nightmare, sensed his surroundings change. When Asher noticed this, he thought, ’It took the bait, as expected.’

And then Asher closed his eyes and muttered, "Time to relive some moments of life that I never wanted to live again, and use that cursed ability again."