Chapter 14: Experiment
Chapter 14: Experiment
Paradoxically, having something concrete to do had calmed my mind.
It beat scouting the Academy, hunting for men and women to tear each other apart just to score a single item from the shop. Digging into the nature of Authorities was far more productive.
One thing had to come first, though—
"Yeah, yeah... you worked hard."
"Ugh... Constellation."
Soothing Han Ye-ji, now wilted wordlessly the moment she walked in, like a steamed spinach leaf.
She'd been up around 6 a.m., starting her day with light exercise, then got dragged around by instructors nonstop until 10 p.m., excluding only mealtimes. Of course she'd be exhausted. The instructors were right in her face the whole time, so she couldn't even slack off. Normally she'd be working on tasks past midnight before collapsing into bed, but today she'd come straight back, washed up, and launched herself onto the mattress before eleven.
Two straight days of being worked over by instructors hadn't just worn her out physically—mentally, too. The state of her dream world made that painfully obvious.
The bedroom, always kept neatly arranged, now looked like a studio apartment that hadn't been cleaned in a month.
Same apartment as the first day, but the shoe rack was a mess of sneakers and heels, kicked off every which way. The bathroom door hung open, water splashed across the threshold, a wet towel abandoned in a heap just outside. I hadn't checked the master bedroom or the smaller room, but I'd bet clothes were strewn everywhere. The sight of Han Ye-ji lying sideways on the couch in comfortable-looking training underwear pretty much said it all.
The one saving grace was that this was still a dream, so there was no stench or bugs crawling around. Clothes and books and backpacks, school notices, newspapers, all scattered about—but no half-eaten leftovers. I could live with that.
I gently lifted Han Ye-ji's head where she lay sideways on the sofa and settled myself underneath. She didn't stir even when I offered my thigh as a pillow. She really must have been wrecked. Just a few days ago, she couldn't shed her embarrassment around men—one hug and the back of her neck and ears would blaze crimson. Tonight, a lap pillow got zero reaction.
I thumbed the remote and shut off the static-filled TV.
Whenever Han Ye-ji, the lucid dream's owner, fell asleep or zoned out like this, a certain degree of control over the dream seemed to drift toward me. Stroking her head where she lay limp and boneless, I took a look around and felt that control sharpen.
The way this awareness kept creeping in on its own was strange. As if I'd always known how, I reached out and touched Han Ye-ji's dream.
The discarded underwear, the thrown-off school uniform, the wet towel—gone. The floor, gritty with hair and dust, wiped itself clean with a damp mop. The dim, murky world brightened a little. I made it a drowsy place where soft summer sunlight and a cold air-conditioner draft coexisted.
Han Ye-ji's arms snaked around my waist, as if the pleasant air met with her approval. She was draped on her side, hugging me the way you'd clutch a pillow at the head of the bed.
Sleeping like that's going to make her back hurt. I gently freed her limp arms and laid her down in a proper position.
While Han Ye-ji had been suffering under her instructors, I'd shut my eyes in the one-room, attempting to dream up a Nightmare. The result was, predictably, failure. Which probably meant the Nightmare fragments themselves could only be acquired through a lucid dream. If that was the case, then what if I fell asleep inside a lucid dream before Han Ye-ji did—would the Nightmare just not manifest? I'd have to test that later.
Warm sunlight streamed through the window. There was no air conditioner, yet a cool draft poured down from the ceiling. Han Ye-ji lay in a proper sleeping posture, letting out tiny, rumbling nasal breaths, her warm body heat seeping through my thigh. I leaned back into the soft sofa and let my own eyes fall shut.
Falling asleep was one thing I had absolute confidence in.
※
The hypothesis I'd constructed was simple.
I was a Dream Demon, and a lucid dream was the foundational Authority for manipulating dreams. Authorities priced below 3,000 pt could only let someone dream, which meant Sweet Lucid Dream was likely the most basic Authority of all. And the Nightmare I'd had last time had seemed like a jumbled fusion of mine and Han Ye-ji's Nightmares. Maybe the mechanism absorbed the Nightmares of everyone who entered the lucid dream.
The old underground tunnels and concrete maze had been laid out exactly like the place I used to live—but the monster had been nothing like the creatures I knew. Those creatures were masses of flesh grotesquely warped by radiation and pollutants, their bodies collapsing inward. They hadn't looked like that monster, a chiseled muscle-man... muscle-woman? thing.
"I thought I heard something..."
"Find it properly. Otherwise, we're the next offerings."
The moment I opened my eyes, I found myself hunched in an old corridor with my head cradled in my arms. Dust clawed straight down my throat, and a cough leaked out. The two women right in front of me didn't even consider ducking their heads—they just stomped away, footsteps booming.
The sound of their receding steps, the lantern light fading with them. This was exactly the situation, right down to the dialogue, from the horror game playthrough Han Ye-ji had been watching on her phone aboard the passenger ship during our last outing.
In the game, avoiding the lantern beam meant they couldn't find you even if you made noise. The anxiety clutching at one side of my chest dissolved with a sudden exhale. If I remembered right, it was about a man who'd lost his memories, woke up under a desk, and had to solve puzzles to escape an old mansion. Was she feeling psychologically pressured by the instructors' overeager approaches? Two straight Nightmares about being chased by someone.
Still, I figured evading a couple of lantern-carrying guards beat being hunted by a three-meter-tall giant monster like last time.
Ten minutes ago, I'd thought that. I wanted to kill my past self.
'Is this dream just a bust?'
The Nightmare's difficulty, in itself, was easy. It was a puzzle-focused game rather than an action game, so as long as the lantern light didn't hit you directly, they'd ignore you even if you were right behind them. When I had to touch creaky old doors or desks to solve a puzzle, the appalling shriek they produced was similarly ignored. The two patrolling women weren't pursuers chasing me so much as obstacles who wasted your time if they happened to block your path.
I tailed one of the guards as she crossed the corridor. The old wooden floor shrieked underfoot, but she didn't react to the noise. She only shone her lantern straight ahead, so if I split off here and took the stairs down, there was no way they'd notice me. I could wander freely until the guard descended the staircase herself.
An old mansion full of spooky atmosphere and nearly zero actual threat.
The problem was the puzzles.
Inside a decrepit instrument panel, I found a set of small pipes that could be rotated. A basic pipe-connecting puzzle, linking a start point to an end point. The horror-game streamer I'd watched had just grabbed them with a mouse, spun them briskly, and cleared the thing with a neat click in under thirty seconds.
That was when you were using a mouse, though.
"Fucking piece of—vivid goddamn shit!"
In a horror game about being chased by monsters, does the protagonist ever trip over a rock mid-sprint and flat-out eat dirt because the game decided they suck at running? But in yesterday's dream, sharp concrete shards underfoot and cracked, broken puddles had done exactly that—sabotaged my sprint.
And this was no different. True to the old-mansion theme, the metal plate was aged and rusted, and inside it sat twenty-five rusted pipes in a five-by-five grid. I grabbed them one by one with my fingers and tried to turn them, but they only ground out a hideous scree-scree-screech without actually moving. The joints were caked in rust. No way they were turning without lubricant. A puzzle that even knowledge couldn't solve.
Was this really what a Nightmare was? Getting attacked, chased, falling somewhere, wandering lost for no reason at all—was that the definition?
I considered abandoning this and hunting for a different puzzle, but then I remembered: the key to the next door was inside this one. Motivation flatlined. Some anti-cheese design decision, apparently—open one door to get the key to another. So failing this instrument-panel puzzle meant I couldn't even get near the others.
The pipes were finger-sized, yet they refused to budge even when I threw the weight of a healthy adult man against them. Pissed off, I ripped a chunk of window frame from inside the mansion and bashed at them. It barely left a scratch. I made up my mind to give up on clearing the puzzle.
So it wasn't just about finding Nightmare fragments inside a dream. Wonderful. With time to kill, I huddled in a corner and tried to work out why this was happening. What was different between yesterday and today? Han Ye-ji's clinginess was the same. We hadn't talked much. And we hadn't had sex yesterday either. Even racking my brain, nothing obvious surfaced. Surely it wasn't something trivial like the air-conditioner draft.
The two patrolling women passed in front of the puzzle zone more than ten full circuits while I sat there, and I still couldn't reach a conclusion.
If it really was just a product of Han Ye-ji's own Nightmare like I'd first thought, then there was nothing I could actually do. I couldn't exactly order her to control her own Nightmares from inside a lucid dream. Or was this happening because she was the one who'd activated the Authority? Would I need to use the Authority myself and directly control her Nightmares to prevent this?
The patrol routes never came all the way up to the puzzle panel—probably to keep you from being caught and game-overed mid-puzzle—so I could think in peace. Hurling myself into the lantern light just to wake up from the Nightmare wasn't an option; I was way too much of a coward for that.
I let the rhythmic clack-clack of footsteps lullaby me, used the old carpet as a blanket, and settled into the corner. Inside a Nightmare, inside a lucid dream, I curled up again and shut my eyes—telling myself there was no way there'd be a dream inside a dream inside a dream.
...When I woke up, Han Ye-ji was being held captive by some weirdo, a gun being forced on her as her primary weapon.