Chapter 524: Floating "Thoughts"

I pushed the window open. A black-and-white sky hung overhead. As far as the eye could see, buildings of every height crowded my vision. We probably just weren't high up enough, because the city's edges were completely invisible from here.

"All the roads seem connected..." Chu Men looked terrible. What he really meant was that this place was a maze, making it nearly impossible to find a way out.

Finding a way out on the first try was definitely unrealistic. I forced myself to memorize the roads and buildings within a hundred-meter radius, then patted Chu Men on the shoulder. "Let's go. There's a high-rise a little further west, over a dozen stories tall. If we climb it, we should be able to get a full view of the city."

Height naturally offered a better vantage point. Chu Men and I had too little information, and the Plush Bear remained completely silent, so we had to rely on this clumsy method to find our way out.

"Be careful. Don't let that mirror catch your reflection."

"Should we go take a look? A mirror appearing out of nowhere like this might hold a clue."

"Better to have one less trouble. We can always come back if we hit a dead end." Having hosted so many live streams, my intuition for danger went far beyond an ordinary person's. "It's best not to touch it if we don't have to."

But just because we didn't approach the mirror didn't mean it wouldn't reflect us. It sat alone right in the middle of the room, facing the entrance, making it hard not to glance at it inadvertently.

"It's probably just a normal mirror," Chu Men muttered, his gaze landing on the glass. The surface seemed to faithfully reflect this illusory world. "Let's go to that building you mentioned."

Chu Men led the way. As I left the fifth floor, I subconsciously glanced back at the mirror one last time.

My Judging Eye swept over it, and I abruptly halted. "Hold on!"

"What is it?" Seeing me turn to stare at the mirror, Chu Men grabbed me tight. "Streamer, don't do anything suicidal!"

"Have you noticed something strange?" I waved my hand at the mirror, and the figure inside made the exact same motion. At first glance, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. But after looking at it for a moment, I realized that the person in the mirror had a shadow!

I pointed behind myself. "Ever since we entered the Dream Realm, I haven't seen my own shadow once. But our reflections in the mirror cast shadows. Does this mean the other side of the mirror is reality?"

"That's too much of a stretch," he argued. "The other side of the mirror is the illusion."

"Then how do you explain the shadows?"

I shot back, and Chu Men couldn't come up with a reason either. "Should we go take a closer look?"

The mirror sitting in the center of the room was definitely bizarre. Chu Men and I both felt something was wrong with it and were bursting with curiosity. But then I recalled Sakurako's warning before we entered the dream. "Forget it. Let's stay away from the mirror for now."

Not lingering any longer, Chu Men and I passed through the floors filled with humanoid shadows and ran out of the strangely shaped building.

The moment we left the building, an inexplicable sense of relief washed over me, though I couldn't say exactly why.

Chu Men and I proceeded to check a few other buildings, but we didn't find anything special, nor did every building house a mirror.

"Streamer, what do we do next? Should we head back to the first building with the mirror?" Chu Men strolled down the streets of the Dream Realm, occasionally reaching out to inspect the memory fragments etched into the city roads. He had completely accepted the situation. For him, the worst-case scenario was being trapped in the Deep Dream Layer forever—which was exactly what he'd been pursuing in the first place.

"No rush. Let's go find that tall building we saw earlier." Comparing the route against my memory, we took a long detour before finally arriving at the entrance of the high-rise.

"There's something special about this place," Chu Men muttered, gazing up at the building.

Truthfully, I could tell even without him saying it.

This high-rise looked entirely out of place compared to the surrounding structures. The complex web of roads intersected here, and even stranger, not a single humanoid shadow could be seen within a thirty-meter radius.

Every single detail seemed to scream that this building was exceptionally unique.

"I get the feeling this isn't a good place."

The building was tall, but it didn't look like the commercial office high-rises from reality. Instead, it resembled a prison. Its outer walls were a faded black, its tiny windows completely fitted with security bars, and the higher floors were tangled in coils of barbed wire. The entrance was relatively narrow, only wide enough for two people to enter side by side.

Chu Men cracked his neck and patted my shoulder. "Streamer, stop looking around. I'm practically risking my life to accompany you this time. Are we going in or not?"

"We're already here, so naturally we have to check it out." I had been looking all around along the way not out of fear, but because I was searching for something critical.

Both Ye Bing and Xia Qingzhi had mentioned a very specific object in their calls—a telephone booth. I had no idea how many phone booths were in this eerie city; I simply wanted to see for myself how they could dial the Underworld Live Show Phone from a telephone booth in the Deep Dream Layer!

Based on what we knew so far, the Live Show phone could only be reached by the dead or those trapped in the Deep Dream Layer. Could there be some connection between the two?

A lot crossed my mind, but in reality, only two or three seconds had passed.

I reined in my thoughts, gave Chu Men a nod, and walked into the prison-like building with the Plush Bear on my back.

"Let's hope we find something here."

The interior space was much larger than I had anticipated. Every floor was composed of rooms of all sizes. All the doors were closed but completely unlocked, ready to be opened at will.

Unlike the first building Chu Men and I had entered, every single room in this high-rise was filled with a chaotic mess of items, making it look as if people still lived here.

The doors were unlocked, and the layout behind each one was entirely different.

One door opened up to a foul-smelling indoor swimming pool. Another led to an abandoned classroom, and yet another revealed a hospital operating room.

It was incredibly bizarre; without opening a door, it was impossible to know what lay behind it.

"Every room has a different layout. What on earth is this building used for?" I had been in the Deep Dream Layer for a while now, and this was the only place I'd seen utterly devoid of humanoid shadows. "Not even fragmented memories are willing to attach themselves here. Could this place be used to imprison something?"

The building looked exactly like a prison, with security bars installed over all the windows, yet not only were all the doors inside unlocked, but the entrance to the building was left wide open and completely unguarded.

"Streamer! Get over here!"

While I was deep in thought, Chu Men made a new discovery. He had casually pushed a door open, but upon seeing the scene inside, he froze in his tracks.

Behind the ordinary wooden door was a standard bedroom. The bed, table, chairs, and bookcase were neatly arranged. The place seemed to have been cleaned, as it looked completely spotless.

However, right here in this painfully ordinary bedroom lay something that absolutely shouldn't exist.

Resting flat on the clean, unwrinkled blankets was a human head.

It was a man's head, his eyes shut tight as if he had fallen asleep.

"Why isn't there any blood? A plastic prop? No way! This is way too realistic." I could understand Chu Men's shock. Standing outside the door, I used my Judging Eye to observe it. Below the head's neck was not a body, but a thin, tail-like string.

"What the hell is this thing? Some kind of human-head balloon?" Suppressing my discomfort, I prepared to enter the room to investigate, but Chu Men stopped me. He gently closed the door and pulled me into a corner before he dared to speak up.

"Streamer, I've seen this thing before in the Middle Dream Layer of a lab volunteer."

"You've seen it?!" I was somewhat surprised. "What exactly is this human-head balloon? Some variant of a nightmare?"

"It's not a nightmare; it's simply a product of human cognition." Chu Men shoved his hands into his lab coat pockets. "Have you ever heard the term 'thought'?"

"Thought?"

"When humans are stimulated by certain things, they think, and the collision of cognitive processes generates a thought. For example, when I witnessed my wife cheating on me, an uncontrollable thought of murder was born in my mind." Chu Men's tone was wooden, but his explanation was perfectly clear. "That head you just saw is most likely an abandoned thought."