Chapter 801: Luminous Meat

The passage connecting the Middle Dream Layer to the Deep Dream Layer was hidden within Zhu Li's memory nodes. My attainments in the Dream Dao were far inferior to Black Robe's, so I could only search for it slowly.

I could, of course, use the Dream Wing Gu to directly enter the Deep Dream Layer, but that would take too great a toll on the Gu and expose my trump card far too early.

After pacing the rental apartment and finding nothing else of note, I pushed open the door.

The outside world was rather desolate. This appeared to be the Laboratory Building of Jinghai Medical University. The corridors formed a complex maze, with a sign hanging on every door.

Not a single person could be seen in Zhu Li's Dream Realm, which drastically increased the difficulty of analyzing his memories.

Checking the laboratories one by one, I found various traces of Zhu Li's time here. He had been admitted to this medical university with absolutely crushing scores, but after enrolling, he repeatedly failed classes and skipped lectures. He was aloof, arrogant, and never interacted with others—a quintessential problem student.

During his college years, this madman's behavior deviated entirely from the norm. He had no real interest in medicine and despised its convoluted rules. What he liked was the human body. He liked pure destruction.

He possessed a profound understanding of human anatomy, a meticulous mind, and highly skilled scalpel techniques. His hands were perfectly steady, entirely unfazed by whatever occurred in front of him.

He possessed the talent to become a top-tier surgeon, but it was a pity he never cherished it, instead using those life-saving skills to murder.

Zhu Li's very first piece of artwork was completed right in the classroom. When he neatly carved up a gross anatomy teacher into a set of flesh-and-blood dominoes and arranged them on the dissection table, both the professor and his classmates were paralyzed with shock.

He went on to do many more crazy things. In his sophomore year, he was finally expelled from the university and sent to a social welfare institution for a psychiatric evaluation.

Zhu Li was a very clever man. He knew exactly how his thought processes differed from ordinary people's. After three separate evaluations, the results unanimously showed that he had no mental illnesses whatsoever.

After his expulsion from the medical academy, Zhu Li's psychology twisted even further, though one had to admit he was a highly unique individual.

During his free time, he successfully tested into a professional fine arts academy. He laid bare the absurd world inside his head for the public to see, and this unprecedented form of art left everyone stunned.

Soon enough, simply drawing on paper could no longer satisfy him. To continue his artistic creations, he snuck back into the medical academy. It was only after multiple corpses were stolen, prompting a joint investigation by the school and the police, that Zhu Li temporarily ceased his operations.

His distorted soul burned with fire. Eventually, he set his sights on the living.

As a rapidly developing city, Jinghai had an extremely high population mobility rate. Zhu Li plotted for a long time, ultimately targeting homeless drifters for his "creations."

The internet was just rising in prominence at the time. To sate his sick inner desires, he anonymously posted his artwork online.

These hysterical pieces quickly drew a certain level of attention. Although his works were always swiftly censored, over time, a number of similarly disturbed individuals began to worship Zhu Li. They treated him as a grandmaster, believing that the flesh and blood he depicted was the truest form of art.

Stepping out of the Laboratory Building, I noticed that the periphery of the dream was blurred, showing obvious traces of artificial interference.

'Someone tampered with Zhu Li's Middle Dream Layer and deleted a portion of his memories!' All of the memories regarding the fans Zhu Li met online and his offline interactions with them had been erased. I strongly suspected that Butcher's true identity appeared somewhere in these lost memories.

'He must have approached Zhu Li as a fan at first, subtly planting his own will into his mind over time.' Of course, this was just my guess. It was also entirely possible that Zhu Li was Butcher himself, and these memories were sealed away because they pertained to the Underworld Live Show.

There were too many uncertain variables. The evidence I currently held wasn't enough to support my deductions.

Leaping over the blurred sections of the dream, I arrived at the deepest depths of Zhu Li's Middle Dream Layer. The building before me was one I couldn't be more familiar with.

Standing upon the barren wasteland was the Red Building.

'The entrance to the Deep Dream Layer should be here.'

The Red Building in the dream was vastly different from the one in reality. It looked like a purgatory on earth.

Entering the stairwell, I found the interior resembled a maze. Casually pushing open a door revealed bloody slaughtering tools behind it. Chopping blocks and bone cleavers were just the most common items; there were also many bizarre torture devices invented by Zhu Li himself.

Ropes and pig cages... the living were penned up like livestock in this place.

I walked past blood-stained rooms and arrived at the apartment he and Bai Ya'er had lived in.

Pushing the door open, I scanned the surroundings with my Judging Eye. 'Strange. Zhu Li's door to the deep world isn't here.'

Dreams were usually connected by memory nodes, and only the most profound, unforgettable impressions could truly be called memories.

'It seems he didn't feel much for Bai Ya'er.' The appearance of the Red Building in the Deep Dream Layer meant Zhu Li must have undergone a major transformation here. But since his main consciousness had been taken away by Black Robe, I could only rely on guesswork to find the way out.

Leaving the apartment he shared with Bai Ya'er, I continued upstairs. I hadn't gone far when the few strands of hair on my wrist—which came from the Faceless Woman—suddenly began to move.

'What's going on? Could she have sensed her missing face?' Following the direction the strands drifted in, I climbed all the way to the top floor in one breath.

Chunks of meat emitting a faint glow hung on both sides of the walls, illuminating the pitch-black corridor.

'It's human flesh...' Pushing open the door to a rental apartment, the sight that greeted me was intensely sickening. This entire floor had been converted into a flesh-and-blood factory.

Zhu Li and his accomplices had raised abducted people like livestock here. By this point, his mindset had undergone a drastic shift. He fed pig slop to living humans as meals. The cheap, inferior feed contained excessive amounts of various elements, including a massive amount of phosphorus that the human body couldn't digest. This was exactly what caused the meat hanging on the walls to glow in the dark.

Lamps made of flesh and blood... This was a sight I hadn't even witnessed in the Yin-Yang Boundary or the Animal Realm.

'As expected, the most cruel things are still found in the mortal world.' Walking all the way to the end of the hall, the Faceless Woman's hair led me to the apartment Kong Ying once lived in.

According to what Kong Ying said back then, this apartment had originally been where the Faceless Woman lived.

Opening the door, I found the furnishings inside completely different from the other apartments, and quite different from what I had seen in reality as well.

This was the only room free of bloodstains. The apartment only carried the faint scent of watercolor and oil wax.

The layout of the apartment was peculiar. A large bed sat squarely in the center of the living room, while the dining table and chairs were all crammed into the kitchen.

'The bed was moved to the living room, facing the front door. So what's the bedroom being used for?'

Driven by curiosity, I stepped into the bedroom. The curtains were drawn tight, an easel sat in the center of the room, and a life-sized painting hung on the wall.

'This is...'

The woman in the painting was meek and frail. She cupped a heart in her hands, her head tilted slightly upward.

Blood flowed all over her body, radiating an indescribable, sickly beauty as she tried her hardest to maintain her posture.

The entire painting was beautiful to an eerie degree. The only regrettable thing was that the woman in the painting had no face, leaving viewers to fill the void with their own imagination.

'Zhu Li's final painting of the Faceless Woman.' I had never seen this piece in Zhu Li's portfolio, and I could safely say Bai Ya'er didn't know about it either. This painting was likely the deepest secret in Zhu Li's heart. Perhaps the woman in the painting was also the only woman he had ever loved; it was just that his love was too much for anyone to bear.

The black hair on my wrist floated toward the painting on the wall, passing right through it.

I froze for a moment, then reached out my hand as well, wanting to touch the canvas.

The instant my fingers grazed the artwork, my entire body was yanked inside by an inexplicable force.

'It seems this painting is the most untouchable place in Zhu Li's memories, as well as the entrance connecting to the Deep Dream Layer.' When I opened my eyes, a bizarre and surreal city stretched out before me. Eerie buildings and shadows resembling water stains filled the area. At first, I was standing outside the city limits, but after taking a single step forward, the surroundings shifted entirely in every direction.

The path I came from was gone. From this moment on, I would officially sever all ties with reality and throw myself into the life-and-death struggle among the live show streamers.

'I need to figure out my location first, and then go find Xiao A.' The memories that surfaced after unlocking the Dao Lock told me that Xiao A and I had known each other a long time ago. It was highly likely she knew something.