The dark silver light slipped through like a fish darting through water, passing through the brief opening in the void by a hair's breadth. The instant they were through, the wall of flesh snapped back into place, becoming even thicker and more grotesque than before. But it was already too late.
Behind them, the pursuing torrent of will let out a silent roar. Wherever it passed, the flesh walls split apart on their own, the rune bands went dark, and the monstrous phantoms retreated. Yet Ian's utterly unconventional escape, finding a precise "system loophole" and exploiting it in an instant, had slowed its pursuit by half a beat.
They crossed the flesh wall, and the scene before them changed again.
They seemed to have entered a winding, twisting passage made from the constantly opening and closing inner walls of enormous shells. Holes covered the walls, oozing with slime. Every so often, they spewed clouds of highly corrosive acid mist laced with mental interference. Beneath their feet was slick, fleshy ground that looked like the inner lining of some creature's esophagus, writhing constantly as though trying to swallow them whole.
"Stay close. Don't step on anything that's glowing!" Ian's voice was short and clear. He pulled Lina along as they raced through the narrow, twisting passage, changing direction and sliding at speeds that seemed to defy the laws of physics. At times, they even seemed to briefly cling to the ceiling to precisely avoid every opening that spewed acid mist.
"Parlor tricks like this aren't going to stop me!" Every step Ian took landed precisely in the brief moments when the fleshy ground rippled into a stable trough. His movements were so smooth they looked rehearsed countless times, his ability to predict and exploit the environment reaching an almost absurd level.
This wasn't simply about speed; it was an extreme understanding of, and ability to exploit, the loopholes in the rules of the dream. It was like the dream in 'Inception', where architects could manipulate physics to construct impossible environments and pathways. Ian, however, was doing the reverse. He was exploiting the inevitable imperfections and contradictions in the hastily constructed trap rules created by his pursuer to find a way out.
"Is that the monster we woke up? What exactly is chasing us?" Lina asked as Ian dragged her along. She felt as if she were riding a roller coaster with no safety restraints. The scenery raced past her eyes, her stomach churning violently, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to trust every command Ian gave her, desperately trying to keep up with his incomprehensible movements. She could feel the cold malice behind them drawing closer and closer, clinging to them like a parasite that refused to let go. It felt as though they would be caught and devoured at any moment.
After narrowly dodging several clouds of acid mist and bone spikes that suddenly thrust up from the floor, they reached a three-way junction. Each passage beyond it flickered with a different, deeply unsettling light, radiating its own distinct sense of danger.
"This way!" Ian didn't hesitate or waste time sensing which path was safest. He came to a sudden stop in front of the junction, the dark silver light around him contracting instantly.
Then, Ian did something that made Lina's heart nearly stop. Instead of choosing one of the three paths, he pulled Lina backward, taking a small step in the direction their pursuer had come from. He turned sideways and slammed his shoulder into the wall beside the junction, a wall embedded with countless tiny bones.
BANG!
It wasn't the sound of the wall breaking. At the instant of impact, Ian drove a highly compressed surge of Raven power into the wall like a drill, infused with cognitive interference and information overload. He sent it directly into an extremely well-hidden energy node deep inside the wall, the node that supplied power to all three paths.
In an instant, the dangerous lights inside all three passages began flickering wildly and falling out of sync, interfering with one another. The dream structure around the junction briefly filled with static-like distortions, as though the signal had suddenly gone bad.
'Now!'
With Lina staring in stunned disbelief, Ian didn't rush into any of the three passages. Instead, he pulled her straight into the wall of the junction itself, which had temporarily become unstable due to the overloaded node, developing a crack in its logic.
It was like Neo in 'The Matrix', seeing through the virtual nature of the Matrix's code at a critical moment and gaining the ability to defy physics. That was exactly what Ian was doing now: forcibly deceiving and overloading the local logic of this temporarily solidified section of the dream. He had created a brief system error window and was using it to perform a theoretically impossible act, walking straight through a wall.
The world before them instantly became abstract and distorted, as though they were looking through a shattered prism. Lina felt her body stretch and break apart, only to reassemble itself a moment later. When they finally materialized again, they were no longer inside the passage.
They had arrived somewhere even stranger: the previous layer of the dream. Cthulhu had wanted to trap Ian and the others, so it had created multiple dream layers.
This place looked like a massive, empty plaza, but its ground was made of countless slow-pulsing, translucent substances resembling cerebral cortex tissue. Above them hung clouds that looked like rotting organs, constantly dripping thick black liquid. At the center of the plaza stood a stone tablet covered in countless screaming human faces carved into its surface. Atop the tablet, a constantly shifting mass of dark purple light slowly rotated, radiating an aura that was unmistakably of the same origin as the pursuing will.
This seemed to be some kind of control node or energy core for the temporary dream trap.
Almost the instant they appeared, space around the plaza rippled. The pursuing torrent of will broke through the obstruction behind them and manifested once more, taking the form of a far more solid and terrifying shadow made from boiling darkness and countless tiny tentacles. It blocked their retreat. At the same time, the dark purple mass atop the stone tablet flared brightly, projecting pillars of light around them like the bars of a cage.
"What do we do?" Lina gasped. The node blocked their path ahead, while their pursuer had cut off their escape behind them. There seemed to be nowhere left to run.
Lina's heart sank as she stared at the hopeless situation before them. Ian, however, was staring at the stone tablet and the glowing mass at its center. A faint glimmer, almost imperceptible, flashed through his cold eyes. It was the look of someone who had finally found exactly what he was looking for.
"Finally… a proper backdoor interface," he murmured so quietly that only he could hear.
From the very beginning, his goal had never been simply to escape. Once he realized that his opponent could manipulate the rules of the dream, Ian knew that running blindly would only allow the ever-changing traps to wear them down until they died. He needed to find somewhere he could either counter or exploit this temporary dream system. A place that was heavily protected and clearly served as a core would often have higher-level interfaces, or, because of its excessive complexity, be even more likely to contain a loophole.
The stone tablet and the glowing mass before them were saturated with the aura of Cthulhu's will, clearly serving as key supports for this temporary dream. Attack them? No. That would only trigger an even stronger backlash.
But what if he simply borrowed their power and created a small logical contradiction?
Just as the pursuing shadow was about to pounce and the cage of light was about to close, Ian moved! He didn't attack the shadow or try to break through the pillars of light. Instead, he suddenly raised his right hand, spreading his fingers toward the twisted stone tablet at the center of the plaza.
The cold, orderly information stream of Raven power that he had previously used to awaken Lina and scatter the information seeds gathered wildly in his palm once again, compressing at an incredible rate. But this time, he wasn't compressing Raven power alone. He also incorporated the fragments of rule code and energy frequencies he had quietly collected while fleeing through the shallow layers of the dream, information belonging to the dream trap itself.
Then he fused everything together. He condensed the resulting mass of complex, contradictory information into a logic bomb and hurled it straight at the dark purple control light atop the stone tablet.
"Take this, system error command!"
Dark silver and dark purple light collided!
There was no earth-shattering explosion. Instead, the entire world seemed to freeze, as if it had suddenly crashed.
The dark purple light atop the stone tablet jerked to a halt, then began flickering and twisting violently as countless contradictory streams of data collided inside it. The cage of light it projected instantly became unstable, flickering in and out of existence before breaking apart.
The pursuing shadow was affected as well. Because of the temporary disruption to the control center, its movements suddenly became sluggish and unresponsive, its solid form beginning to disperse. The dream structure of the entire plaza started violently fluctuating as the core node's logical contradiction spread through it, large sections twisting and fading in and out of existence.
'Now!' This was their only chance, a fleeting opening that would disappear in an instant.
The thought flashed through Ian's mind like lightning. At the same time, it struck the mind of the elderly Saruman, who was struggling to hold on in the outside world. Inside the dream, Ian seized the brief chaos created by the core node's logical conflict and prepared to make his final escape.
Outside the dream, Elder Saruman sensed the same opportunity. His pale, exhausted face suddenly lit up, and his deep silver eyes sharpened.
'Now… This is the exact opening that, according to history, My Lord was deceived by. He thought he'd found a way out and forced his way through, only to fall into an even more concealed trap created by Cthulhu's will. Behind that crack was an even deeper dream corridor, one that would drag the victim into an even more hopeless and time-consuming loop…'
The fused fragments of memory and the conclusions he had reached through a thousand years of research gave him an unusually clear understanding of the historical trajectory about to unfold. Even if it was only a tiny, unconscious torrent of Cthulhu's will, its cunning and control over dreams were far beyond anything humans could imagine. It was particularly skilled at exploiting a prey's instinct to survive, laying down successive layers of deadly traps.
So they couldn't simply charge through! They had to change their strategy. He needed to warn My Lord inside.
But he couldn't enter that deeper dream battlefield. His strength was barely enough to maintain the anchor in reality and keep the external pressure at bay. What could he do?
Saruman's gaze suddenly fell upon the fragile field of energy he was maintaining, the one threaded with dark silver light and clockwork runes, more precisely, on the section that faintly resonated with Ian's Raven power.
A bold, almost insane idea emerged. He couldn't transmit complex information, nor could he send power inside. But he could use that faint resonance to transmit the simplest possible thing: a concept. A directional hint.
Like sending a specific code across a battlefield drowned in radio interference, it might be impossible to decode completely, but it could still convey the sender's intention to an ally.
Once the idea occurred to him, Saruman didn't hesitate. Through that faint resonance bridge, he desperately aimed toward Ian's approximate location and sent it through. The act was extremely dangerous, causing the already unstable field of energy to dim considerably, but Saruman gritted his teeth and held it together, his eyes filled with grim determination.
Inside the dream, Ian was preparing to unleash Raven Return, forcing his way through the crack that had appeared at the top of the dream due to the logical conflict. Just as his power was about to erupt, a line of text suddenly appeared in the empty space before him, word by word.
It appeared without warning. It wasn't a product of the dream itself, not one of the distorted profane runes or maddening whispers. The letters were formed from extremely fine yet remarkably stable and clear points of dark silver light. They arranged themselves into familiar English, simple in structure, carrying a sensation that seemed to originate from the same source as his Raven power, yet was somehow older and more deeply settled.
Mixed within it was a faint but unmistakable aura of time, something that clearly did not belong to this dream, nor to Lina's soul.
'Saruman?'
A trace of surprise flashed through Ian's eyes. He immediately recognized the source of the message: the silver-robed wizard in the outside world. That strange man whose soul was in an abnormal state, and who had previously displayed knowledge and power far beyond what his apparent level should have allowed while resisting Cthulhu's will.
He had actually managed to transmit information into this deep dream battlefield at a moment like this? The method was crude and the cost enormous, but the feat itself was remarkable.
That Saruman… he clearly had more secrets than Ian had imagined.
But now wasn't the time to investigate them.
"Let's get out first!" Ian quickly scanned the line of text.
> 'Dreams are born from imagination, My Lord. As a wizard standing at the pinnacle, imagination should be the one thing you have no shortage of, right?'
Imagination?
Ian froze for a moment. Then understanding dawned across his cold face. It was as if those words had gently shattered an invisible layer of thin ice, a mental rut formed by his obsession with finding loopholes in the rules and escaping through technical means.
Of course! He had been so focused on one thing that he'd lost sight of everything else.
What was this place? A dream. A non-real mental space built upon Lina's soul and the information of Cthulhu's corruption. Its rules were certainly influenced and reinforced by Cthulhu's will, but ultimately, its very nature was that of a dream, something that could be distorted and redefined by a sufficiently powerful consciousness and will.
Ian had been acting like an elite hacker, frantically searching for system vulnerabilities and backdoors, trying to slip away at the lowest possible cost. But he had forgotten something.
As a wizard, especially one possessing such immense mental power and a unique Status, one of his greatest weapons had never been technique. It was imagination. Imagination so wild that it could even distort reality.
And especially on someone else's turf, trying to outplay an Old One who dominated the rules of the dream, trying to beat it at cunning and manipulation… wasn't that simply playing to the enemy's strengths while abandoning his own?
If they were going to compete, then he should compete over who could be more unreasonable. Whose imagination could be more outrageous, more powerful, and more capable of tearing apart the very structure of this dream?
"That guy…" Ian's eyes lit up. "You're right!"
There was an almost childlike excitement in his gaze, like someone who had just discovered a brand-new toy. He couldn't even resist giving Lina a light tap on the forehead.
"Imagination? Who said I was afraid of that?!"
Ian immediately abandoned his original plan of using Raven Return to force his way out. The dark silver light no longer tried to break through upward; instead, it suddenly contracted back around his body.
An overwhelming confidence practically radiated from him.
(End Of This Chapter)
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