Chapter 804: Looking Up

"There's a hole in the sky?" Wang Shi had also noticed the jarring sight. Across the otherwise brilliant sky, only the northwest held a slowly shrinking hole. "Is this normal in the Deep Dream Layer?"

"Someone must be fighting over there. They pierced the halo enveloping the city." I shook my head. "Let's go take a look first."

"They punched a hole in the sky?!" Wang Shi was dumbfounded.

"This is a dream. Anything is possible." I didn't tell him about the Live Show or the live show streamers. Sometimes, knowing too much wasn't a good thing.

Direction confirmed, Wang Shi and I left the black-and-red building and walked toward that broken patch of sky.

Seeing a mountain makes you run a horse to death. After walking for nearly an hour, we still hadn't reached the area directly beneath the hole, but as we closed the distance, I could already feel a subtle change in our surroundings.

The light dimmed, as if enveloped by a massive shadow, and the surrounding buildings began to look even more crooked and abstract.

"Hey, should we lay low for a bit? You said it yourself, the people fighting up ahead can shatter the sky. If we go over there, aren't we just serving ourselves up on a platter?" Wang Shi made a gesture, trying to dissuade me.

"If you're scared, you can stay behind by yourself later." I glanced at Wang Shi and, catching him off guard, slipped that fingernail-sized Dream Dao Talisman onto an inconspicuous spot on his back.

"Forget it, I feel safer sticking with you. This place is breathtakingly beautiful—so beautiful it's unreal. I keep feeling like it's going to shatter at any second." Wang Shi didn't insist further, though his footsteps slowed as he shrank behind me.

Seeing him like this, I wasn't angry. On the contrary, I thought it was only natural. In the Deep Dream Layer, Wang Shi was just an ordinary person. The shockwaves from the clash between those two live show streamers might just obliterate him.

The brilliant halo in the sky vanished. The surrounding buildings seemed to be draped in a thin veil, gaining a weighty sense of history that had never appeared in other areas of the Deep Dream Layer.

"What's going on?" I lightly pressed my hand against a wall. Dust coated my palm, and with a slight push of my fingers, cracks actually spiderwebbed across the surface. "What happened to this area?"

We walked further in for about half an hour. For the first time since entering the dream on this trip, I saw a creature of the Dream Realm.

Inside a building with tightly shut doors, a woman's head rested on a windowsill. She had a slender face and delicate, pretty features, though her skin was somewhat withered, much like a traveler who had wandered the desert for too long.

The woman also noticed Wang Shi and me. Her head rolled along the windowsill like a rubber ball.

"What is that thing?" Wang Shi stood a meter or two away from the window, rising on his tiptoes to get a better look.

The thought inside the room sensed someone approaching. She weakly opened her eyes, the long threads of rumination dangling below her neck propping up her head like ropes.

"She is a thought, sitting at the bottom of the food chain in the Deep Dream Layer. They're formed from humanity's simplest malicious intents." I considered it for a moment, then added, "Whenever someone in the mortal world generates a passing thought and then forgets it, that thought will appear here, symbolizing a fragment of that person's memory."

"She's just a fleeting idea accidentally generated by a human in the real world?" Intrigued, Wang Shi walked up to the window, staring at the woman's beautiful face. "What a cute little thing..."

Before he could even finish his sentence, the originally weak and listless thought suddenly sprang up, slamming heavily against the window!

Her pretty face pressed ferociously against the glass as she let out a suppressed, guttural hiss.

Startled by the sudden outburst, Wang Shi stumbled back several steps before regaining his footing. He looked somewhat embarrassed. "She was perfectly fine a second ago. Why did she suddenly get so mad?"

"Looks like you've encountered a malicious thought. Stay away from them. Some of these things are highly aggressive and brimming with murderous intent. Most importantly, they usually move in packs." I wasn't just trying to scare Wang Shi; my own experience last time was the best proof of that.

"Move in packs?" Wang Shi probably pictured a massive swarm of flying heads. His eyelids twitched, and he shot a few more wary glances at the thought.

The woman's head continued to bash against the windowpane. Her face was pale, and the threads of thought below her neck steadily shed and fell away. After slamming herself into the glass a few more times, she dropped weakly back onto the windowsill, gasping for air with her mouth wide open like a fish out of water.

"These things get tired, too? Aren't they made of thoughts and memories?" Wang Shi's casual question made me stop in my tracks.

I turned to look. The thought inside the room was indeed quite different from the ones I had encountered during my last trip into the Deep Dream Layer. The thoughts that had chased Chen Jiuge and me before had known no fatigue, and they had displayed a clear pack mentality. If they weren't dealt with quickly, it wouldn't take long for them to swarm in droves.

"Could it have something to do with the halo in the sky being shattered?" The thought was weakening at a visible rate, its skin shriveling like dead leaves. Seeing this, my unease only grew. "Wang Shi, since entering this block, have you felt anything unusual?"

Caught off guard by the question, Wang Shi stepped away from the window and glanced around. "It is a bit strange. I keep getting the feeling that this entire place is coated in a layer of ash. The first impression other parts of the Deep Dream Layer give is twisted and absurd, steeped in an indescribable, bizarre beauty. But it's different here. It feels like everything is slowly growing old."

"Slowly growing old..." I stared at the weakening thought, my eyes suddenly going wide. "The flow of time in this place is different from the rest of the Dream Realm!"

Running a finger through the dust on the wall, I drove a fist through the window, shattering the glass. I wrapped my arm in willpower and yanked the thought out from inside the room.

The thought was extremely light. Perhaps sensing the threat I posed, the woman's head became entirely docile, remaining perfectly still. She was acting completely different from how she had behaved in front of Wang Shi.

I touched the thought's cheek, and my finger effortlessly pierced right through it. The threads of thought beneath its neck shed in huge swathes. About half an hour later, the thought shattered completely, crumbling into dust that scattered across the ground.

It was my first time watching a thought die up close. I rubbed a pinch of the dust from the ground between my fingers; it felt identical to the dust I had wiped off the wall.

"If all the dust coating every building in this entire block is just the residue of dead thoughts, then just how many thoughts have died here?!" I followed my earlier train of thought. In the real world, the lifespan of a thought varied. Some were generated in an instant and forgotten just as fast, while others took root in the heart, impossible to forget. Only in the Deep Dream Layer were their lifespans significantly extended, simply because the flow of time here was incredibly slow.

"There were no wounds on the woman's thought, nor was she attacked by any other will. You could say she died of old age." I stared at the torn sky above us, gazing at that massive, funnel-like hole. "The flow of time in this block has been altered."

My sharp gaze tried to pierce the pitch-black hole, but I realized I couldn't see through it at all. "Could the other side of that hole in the Dream Realm's sky be reality?"

Nobody knew exactly how much distance separated the Deep Dream Layer from reality. Looking up at the hole above, I began to wonder if this was the work of the Black-Robed Anchor or the Traitors.

"What are you thinking about?" Wang Shi poked at the dust left behind by the dead thought, scooping up a small handful as if he intended to carry it with him.

"The flow of time in this block is different from everywhere else. I suspect that hole in the sky connects to the real world. Someone is trying to build a bridge between the two worlds." I was well aware of the methods used by the Black-Robed Anchor and the Traitors, so making that leap in logic was perfectly normal, but Wang Shi's perspective differed from mine.

"The Dream Realm is a world where memories exist. It's an illusory world. How could illusions connect to reality?" Wang Shi stood up from the ground. "If it's just a difference in the flow of time, there's no need to panic. Even in reality, there are plenty of situations that can alter time. Take gravitational time dilation, for instance, which is covered in general relativity. Regions of the universe with different gravitational potentials will cause time to pass at different rates, because the greater the curvature of spacetime caused by gravity, the slower time passes. Personally, I think the anomalous flow of time here has little to do with the real world. Instead, it's because this place itself has undergone some kind of change."