Chapter 523: Abandoned "Memories"

"I suppose. I've always thought of myself as pretty ordinary." Dropping the awkward topic, I turned my attention to the strange city around us. Its architecture was unlike any known city in the world—buildings of varying heights and bizarre shapes.

"Looking for Ye Bing in a completely unfamiliar city is like finding a needle in a haystack." Chu Men walked down the street, glancing into the distance from time to time. "This place is huge, and the buildings are packed so tightly together. I think our first priority should be finding a vantage point to figure out where we are and leave some markers before we even think about looking for anyone."

"Makes sense, though I have another idea." I scrolled through the inbox on my Underworld Live Show Phone, recalling my conversations with Xia Qingzhi and Ye Bing. The isolated city they had described closely matched the place I was standing in. "This might be the edge of the Deep Dream Layer. Better not to wander around blindly just yet. Let's scout the immediate area and secure a completely safe zone first, then look for a vantage point."

In the Dream Realm, no one knew what the next second would bring. Caution was never a mistake.

"Fair enough, I'll follow your lead." Chu Men fell in behind me as the two of us began exploring a city that existed only in the deepest reaches of the Dream Realm.

Crisscrossing streets and pavilions of shifting light and shadow made up this bizarre, fantastical dream city. Beneath a black-and-white sky lay hidden all the memories humanity had lost and abandoned.

"Doesn't this road feel strange to you?" I held up my phone and moved forward slowly, my gaze shifting from the pavement to the walls on either side. The buildings here were modeled on Japanese architecture, their fenced perimeter walls blocking any view of the courtyards inside. All I could see were mottled shadows across the walls.

Just as Ye Bing and Xia Qingzhi had described, no matter which direction we walked, the further we went, the denser the human-shaped shadows on the walls became.

"Are these meant to be decorations?" Chu Men stopped beside a twisted streetlamp. Under its pale light, a child's shadow was imprinted on the steps like a puddle of water frozen into the stone. He crouched beside it and reached out to touch the dark gray figure. As his fingertips met the shadow, it rippled like water. "I think I heard a child crying."

Chu Men fell silent, his eyes unfocused, taking a long time to come back to himself.

"Find anything?" I stepped over to his side. While he was zoned out like that, I had to stay on guard in case something unknown tried to ambush him.

"Try it yourself. This water-stain shadow seems to be a memory embedded in the ground." Chu Men stood up and pointed at the steps.

Out of curiosity, I reached down to touch the human-shaped shadow as well. Ye Bing and Xia Qingzhi had mentioned these things more than once over the phone.

Under the light touch of my fingertips, it felt like brushing against cold concrete, yet also like dipping into a bitter teardrop. It was a deeply strange sensation.

My vision blurred and shifted. A child of about five or six sat all alone by the roadside, wailing as he stared into the middle of the street. There, a young mother lay in a pool of blood, her pelvis bearing the tire marks of a sedan and her body slightly misshapen.

The boy's cries were piercing, until an elderly person hurried over and carried him away.

The scene faded, leaving me standing in the city street once more. Before me was the water-stain shadow, its size an exact match for the child I had just seen.

"This shadow must be a memory fragment." Chu Men's research into the Dream Realm was far more specialized than mine. His gaze moved from one human silhouette to the next. "Every memory humanity forgets or discards eventually gets piled up in the Deep Dream Layer. If I'm right, these shadows are those forgotten memories."

The human body has a self-defense mechanism: when trauma exceeds a certain threshold, the brain actively seals that memory away and slowly forgets it.

The little boy's memory I had just seen was a clear example. Before he was even old enough to understand the world, he had witnessed his mother's fatal car crash. Left unprocessed and unforgotten, that nightmare would have haunted him for the rest of his life, and pain rooted in memory is nearly impossible to erase through outside help alone. So his brain stepped in on its own, blurring the memory, fading it, and letting it slip into oblivion—until it was finally etched into the Deep Dream Layer as an inconspicuous human-shaped shadow.

Standing in the city and looking out at the countless silhouettes, I realized I never could have imagined—had I not come to the Deep Dream Layer myself—just how many unbearable, unspeakable memories lay hidden in the world.

"True enough. Everyone has their secrets, and people need a place like this to put their pain." As we walked down the street, I touched several more shadows one after another. Some were printed across the walls, others steeped into the dirt—men and women, old and young. Every memory was different, except for one constant: nearly all of these abandoned memories were steeped in sorrow and despair.

The shadow of an old man etched into a stone bench stayed with me the most. He was homeless, yet on that day he had dressed neatly and sat on the bench for a full day. No one knew what he intended to do, and no one knew that in his coat pocket lay a bottle of sleeping pills he had happened to find.

He sat there looking back over his entire life, and in the dead of night, he swallowed the rest of the pills in the bottle. He could no longer change how he lived; in that moment, he only wanted to die with some dignity.

The memory cut off abruptly. Watching too many of these could easily make a person start doubting their own existence. I bit the tip of my tongue to keep my head clear and looked out at the countless dark shadows along the street, my feelings tangled. "I wonder if something I lost is hidden among these shadows."

Ever since the Dao Lock on my Kidney Aperture opened, I knew for certain that I had lost something in my past. The feeling of having forgotten my own history was deeply unsettling.

Chu Men and I walked over a hundred meters before finally coming across the first relatively tall building. It stood five stories high and had a bizarre shape—narrow at the bottom and wide at the top, an outlandish structure you could probably only ever see in the Dream Realm.

"Are you sure we should go in? Something about these buildings feels off to me." Chu Men stopped me outside the door. "We still don't know what they represent. What if they're nests for nightmares?"

The strange buildings were baffling to look at. Purely in terms of aesthetics, any one of them would be considered a work of art in the real world, but in the Dream Realm, their grotesque style only left a lingering sense of unease.

"Finding a vantage point to pinpoint our location and get the lay of the city is crucial for us. We'll have to check inside the buildings sooner or later anyway—we'll just be careful." Having Chu Men follow behind me, I held up the Underworld Live Show Phone and led the way inside.

The interior wasn't quite what I had pictured. Each floor had only a single room, with the stairs to the next level right at the far end.

"Are we really going in?" Chu Men glanced left and right. There was only one way in or out.

"Want to keep watch outside?"

"Better stick together. Let's not give a nightmare the chance to impersonate one of us." The mere mention of nightmares put an edge of urgency in us both. The dangers of the Deep Dream Layer were unquestionably beyond those of the Middle Dream Layer; Chu Men and I simply hadn't experienced that terror firsthand yet.

The building had five floors in total. The first and second were completely bare, nothing inside at all. By the third floor, human-shaped shadows began appearing on the walls, and when we stepped onto the fourth, the silhouettes printed densely across the walls and floor made me hesitate to even set foot inside. Just looking at them made both my scalp and Chu Men's prickle.

"If these memory shadows ever walked out of the walls..." With a shiver, I pushed the thought out of my head and pulled Chu Men up to the fifth floor, the highest point in the building. Inside the empty room, aside from the human-shaped shadows, stood a single mirror.

It looked jarring there, uncanny for reasons hard to name.

Chu Men and I exchanged a look. Both of us knew mirrors carried special meaning in the Dream Realm, so we kept as close to the walls as possible to avoid catching our reflections in it.

We both knew curiosity killed the cat. Anything meant to be left alone was best given a wide berth.

The fifth-floor window opened to the west, and Chu Men and I quickly made our way over to it.