On this beautiful night, Helena the goth girl with tired, bloodshot eyes craving sleep, pale skin like a ghost, and thick black hair spent her time reading fantasy novels in her old apartment with peeling walls.
She was reading that novel out loud, like she was reciting some kind of sacred book, pacing back and forth, trying to hype herself up to dive into its repetitive plot.
Dragons, fairies, the handsome prince, the Middle Ages... all the archetypes that define fantasy novels.
She stopped in front of a drawing on the wall of a dragon breathing fire on a village, reading it aloud while rocking her body forward and back with the last page of this third novel she'd read that day.
She slammed it shut at the ending and straightened up. She made sure she was wearing the necklace of one of her favorite characters from those novels around her neck, then lay down on the bed and recited her improvised incantation:
"O faithful wardens of imagination's flame,
Draw me upward call my name.
Lift me now into the sky,
Where time and place dissolve and die.
To realms where clocks are torn apart,
To kingdoms folded from forgetting's art.
O boundless dream no walls confine,
Stretch out your bridge of light to mine.
Take my being I refuse the clay of man,
I spurn the dust, the mortal span.
Bear my spirit, let it soar,
To Fantasy's eternal shore.."
She fell asleep repeating one phrase:
"O Kingdom of Fantasy, drag me away."
Despite her exhaustion, Helena focused on pulling her consciousness completely out of reality, like pulling a hair from dough. The sounds outside faded, her eyes grew heavy, and trying to open them in reality turned into the dream world.
Helena wandered in her lucid dream, which manifested as her room.
She took her book, tore it up, and stuck the pages vertically on the wall, then chanted:
"Kingdom of Fantasy..."
Over and over, then clasped her hands together in a pleading pose and crossed her eyes. Those pages turned into a portal. She imagined an Ontometer device in her hands, which she'd bought when she entered last time, and it registered the following reading:
100 + 1.5i + 67.6j + 69.7k Ontometers
Like,
The number 100 is the reality level of Helena's body outside.
The number 1.5i is a complex number that determines the dream's reality level, specifically its surrealism, and since this is a clear dream free from uncontrolled surrealism, it approached zero, which is the waking point.
The number 67.6j + 69.7k is a quaternion number representing the reality frequency in the Kingdom of Fantasy, and it's the most important number because changing it could cause problems, especially since people here don't wake up in normal ways.
"I've succeeded... hmm, should I change my appearance... nah, who's gonna recognize me? The people around are boring."
She kept her eyes crossed and entered...
A vast fantasy city with huge buildings in weird architecture. That castle rose up with its adjacent structures in strange spatial geometry, and there were several disguised dreamers from various countries of TERRAVASTA, along with their egregores[1] and tulpas[2] that they made with the power of their belief...
Helena didn't change her appearance when entering these collective dream worlds like most people did, and even though this world was a dream within a dream, it was super stable compared to the fog and glitches of regular dreams sometimes it felt more real than reality.
She focused and created a tulpa imaginary communication device:
"Sayorin, where are you guys?"
"You were late falling asleep, so we thought you weren't coming... We're waiting for you near the Guild of Imaginers south of King FableKeeper's castle, just hurry..."
The communication device evaporated before Sayorin finished talking. Helena's Egrinoric Energy the faith energy that creates tulpas and egregores from dream matter was at level D-9, meaning it was weak and unstable.
Helena hurried toward the group made up of Sayorin, who took the form of a white angel with wings around her head and two on her back, and Rory. He was a guy but chose the form of a goth girl with short black hair hiding his eyes, lips covered in black, and a skinny body, but his voice was still manly he didn't want to change it. Rory was a dream walker, meaning he spent days asleep leveling up until he reached level B-3. Helena had never met these two in real life and didn't know their actual appearances; they were from different countries anyway, but their shared sense of adventure brought them together here.
Rory said:
"Aren't you tired of that avatar, Helena?"
"No."
"Let's keep expanding the world from where we left off. It's a safe zone, Helena do you have a weapon?"
"Check this out."
From her weird bag, she pulled out a sword longer than her.
"Haha, that's a sword made just for show it's not practical. Good thing the enemies aren't that tough."
Rory snapped his fingers, the place went black, and they teleported to insanely vast lands with purple grass and huge white rocks, and in the distance, pretty much a massive tornado reaching thousands of kilometers high but without stormy winds. They hacked their way toward it.
On the way, they fought some creatures like geese and little girls carrying swords, black transparent dogs where you could see their bones under glass-like skin, crow birds that gathered into a giant monster and that was the hardest one; they had to kill each bird separately...
Their weapons absorbed Egrinoric Energy from those creatures and compressed it into stable coins. These coins were used to make weapons and stuff by using them instead of a person's weak Egrinoric Energy, and coin levels ranged from weak E that most people tossed away to S, which are super concentrated and stable, extracted from egregores that lots of dreamers agreed to make strong for challenge. Whoever gets them can create their own pocket worlds and universes and legendary weapons, up to SSS-level legendary coins that supposedly let the owner cut the waking cord and stay alive in these collective dreams, and they're also absolute coins anyone who gets them can supposedly manipulate the entire explored Kingdom of Fantasy. Coins starting from SS require at least a billion people agreeing to make an egregore with an average of 100 SS coins, and that's happened once it was 9 epic days of marathon fun fighting, and the coins were distributed based on damage each one dealt.
These monsters were only C-level difficulty, which upgraded Helena to level C-0. Leveling up is easy at first but becomes hell later. The highest level in the world right now is the person called the Absoluter, who's reached S-9.
The group found an abandoned hut, indicating someone got there before them, which hit them with disappointment. Rory entered cautiously inside the hut was a return reference marker. Rory destroyed it while laughing because that marker let the person return to that point after waking up.
Sayorin found fresh wheel tracks heading toward the cloud tornado.
Rory got annoyed and created a tulpa in the form of a jet plane, fueled it with his coins to boost its stability, then they headed to the tornado's heart.
Rory said:
"We gotta loot before him."
Sayorin said in panic:
"Turn back, Rory there's a Hecatyon nearby."
Rory turned and backed up. Sayorin said:
"I hope it didn't see us."
The Hecatyons are the original dream inhabitants they're dreams without dreamers, made from fluctuations in dream matter itself. Unlike humans here, whose ontometrics have a real value tying them to reality and an imaginary one tying them to the dream world, Hecatyons have only imaginary ontometrics. They're gods of this place contact with them means cutting the waking cord, instant death. Hecatyons move freely between kingdoms and can ascend their imaginary dimensions to numbers in hypercomplex sets beyond quaternions, which is the max dimensional number for humans in the dream core.
At a certain distance, Rory dissolved the plane, and they dropped to the ground to hide. From the hill, they spied on the creature and saw a horrifying scene... The creature was in the form of a girl in a school uniform, parts of her skin flayed off exposing red flesh underneath, a metal frame around her head with metal pieces piercing her skull, and a visible black aura around her body. But the most terrifying was that she was eating one of the people, and her breathing sounded like a fuel engine, sometimes emitting a high-pitched sound like an electric saw.
Sayorin said:
"No no no... We gotta go back and tell the guild this is one of the Hecatyons from the Meat Core kingdom."
Helena said:
"Let's wait just a bit prep the safety trigger so we can wake up."
That Hecatyon didn't notice them and continued its path until it suddenly vanished with a sound like an explosion. Rory stood up and said:
"It's safe now it's transferred."
"Oh my god, that's terrifying we gotta tell the guild about losing a player."
Helena said:
"I think that's the hut owner's look, his cart's wrecked over there."
"Damn, always spoilers for the fun. I bet from fear he forgot to pull the safety trigger to wake up, haha."
The group continued toward the fake tornado, which now looked like a wall of clouds. After an hour of walking, they arrived. Rory hid a reference marker there, then they penetrated the tornado for two hundred meters of thick fog after Helena created a light source with her new, more stable level.
The fog cleared to reveal a huge metal door that doesn't open with normal force. They tried smashing it with imagination-powered attacks and failed. Helena said:
"We're not strong enough to open it i think we gotta go back."
Rory replied:
"We'll just peek at what's inside."
They decided to squeeze themselves and try entering under the door. Of course, Helena was the riskiest person in the group the one you shouldn't turn your back on. First, pro Rory went in, then Helena, and finally Sayorin. Suddenly, Helena's device beeped:
"Beep beep."
"The ontometry of the place has changed it's..."
"Let me see... 67.9j and 69.5k."
Rory pulled out a huge guidebook full of reference markers, read it, and said:
"We're still in the Kingdom of Fantasy, but we've entered a sub-pocket dimension for it. Its ontometry is between that of the Northern Plains King's dimension and the Crimson King's. I think it's unexplored because it's not in this Egrebook (the dream book that auto-updates with every discovery or indexing)... What do you think should we keep going? Maybe we'll find treasure?"
Everyone agreed.
[1] imaginary beings agreed upon by several people to create
[2] imaginary friends