Chapter 847 - 846: Daybreak

Chapter 847: Chapter 846: Daybreak

A sense of awkwardness quietly gathered in the safe house surrounded by shattered mirror fragments, and for a moment, no one spoke.

The vampire girl, who had successfully overcome her rational self, elegantly sat by the round table, maintaining her usual graceful demeanor from gesture to expression, and took a sip from the teacup before her.

Yu Sheng couldn’t help but admire how a vampire could drink red tea so calmly under such circumstances; Baili Qing’s face, cultivated through years of facial discipline, was delicate in comparison...

Of course, he kept this thought to himself, knowing it would take Erin to speak up —

The puppet, whose arm had just been attached, pointed at Red: "Still drinking! You’ve almost drained Yu Sheng dry!"

Yu Sheng quickly tried to smooth things over: "Not drained dry, not drained dry. I managed to recover at the end, didn’t I..."

Red finally put down the teacup, a slightly stiff expression on his face: "So, therefore..."

Yu Sheng sighed and recounted what had happened to the director Miss in front of him in detail—including the attempt to "Blood Transfer" the blood-colored spear, the powerful suction from within the spear leading to profuse bleeding, nearly passing out and needing to take three Blood Replenishing Pills to recover, and how each pill costs 80,000 from Qianfeng Ling Mountain...

Except for Red correcting that the pills were 80 a box, buy 2 get 1 free, everything Yu Sheng said was true...

After accounting was aligned, Red clicked his tongue and pondered, mumbling with realization: "So that’s how it is... No wonder the taste felt familiar."

Yu Sheng’s mouth twitched a bit, then he forced his thoughts back on track, pondered for a moment, and a theory began to form.

"So, my ability to enter this ’nightmare’ might be related to this? This spear strengthened the connection between us after the Blood Transfer, granting me access to your dream realm? As for Erin, she might have been dragged in due to my involvement... After all, it’s not her first time falling haphazardly into my dream realm."

Red gently nodded: "It seems very likely."

Yu Sheng rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looking up at the floating shattered mirrors in this space.

In some of the mirrors, were reflections of the ruins of the small town—the massive blood-colored moon almost obscured the sky, the twisted living chapel blindly strode through the ruins, with remnants of earth monsters struggling to crawl up from every corner, howling as they charged toward the towering Moonlight Church.

Further away, in the vast wilderness outside the town, everything seemed to be enveloped by a hazy curtain, the red moonlight like silk draped across the land, making the entire ruin seem like a caged enclosure.

"So, let’s talk about this ’nightmare’ then. Is this merely fragments of your memory of the hometown world called the Dark Moon Royal Court?" Yu Sheng turned and looked at Red across, "If these are just memory fragments, why did Erin and I transform upon entering? Does your memory fragment possess some sort of adaptive compatibility?"

"...In my view, there are two possibilities," Red paused for two seconds, then slowly spoke, "The first possibility is as you mentioned, perhaps this ’nightmare’ is indeed adapting to you two as uninvited guests. Although this is my dream realm, I’m actually not very aware of its underlying rules. As for the second possibility..."

Red paused and slowly walked to a floating mirror reflecting the outside scenery.

"Perhaps this place truly ’connects’ to some faraway place, perhaps it’s truly a projection from afar... This isn’t my dream realm, nor anyone else’s; like you two, we’re all merely influenced by historical fragments of the Blood-colored Royal Court."

Yu Sheng furrowed his brow tightly and remained silent.

He heard Red continue after a brief pause—

"Long ago, the director once said that the entire Boundary Land is like an isolated island floating on the sea of time’s ruins, built from small debris extracted from the dregs of history, forming who we are now. Every person in Boundary Land is constantly drawn by the sea of time below, and one day we’ll sink, with this island dissolving into history."

Yu Sheng raised his eyebrow, finally breaking the silence: "When he made that judgment, he probably didn’t anticipate a sudden crack at the ’seabed’, causing all the historical residue from Boundary Land to leak to the other side of the world, and there caught by a foreign Dark Angel."

"...Your description is truly exquisite."

"Absolutely, I’m actually a writer," Yu Sheng waved his hand, "Anyway, now it seems even the time fragments falling to the Old World side are still chasing after you all, at least chasing after you.

"But that’s not necessarily bad, since our next plan is to contact that Mirror Rift on the Old World side. If this ’nightmare’ is indeed a mapping of the situation in the rift, then the intelligence we gather here will greatly aid future actions."

Erin lay beside the table, looking up at Yu Sheng and then at Red—now she couldn’t run around atop the table, seemingly a bit uncomfortable: "Hey, speaking of intelligence, Yu Sheng and I heard the earth monsters shouting in the square at the end, saying ’kill the moon, kill the moon’, what does that phrase mean?"

"...I’m not sure of the specific meaning, I only have fragmented memories of the hometown world," Red furrowed his brow slightly, thinking as he spoke, "However, based on my limited impressions, the moon... is indeed some kind of dangerous and terrifying existence.

"I still remember some images, in those images, the massive moon consistently approached the ground, and blood gushed from its surface, dripping onto the earth, dissolving mountains and rivers, nurturing unseen monsters.

"I also saw the moon shatter; it was a hollow shell, many people were drawn into that shell, gathering inside to form a lake of blood.

"These images are fragmented and lack a clear sequence, and I can’t discern which ones genuinely happened in the Old World and which are fantasies caused by memory disorder.

"But there is one thing I can be sure of—my hometown ultimately perished in a blazing blood-colored moonlight that illuminated everything."

Red said a lot in one breath, finally exhaling lightly, speaking as if to herself, "So in this context, it’s not hard to understand why ’they’ keep repeating ’kill the moon’."

"But isn’t your country called ’Dark Moon Royal Court’?" Erin blinked her eyes, "Naming your country after something bizarre and dangerous, something that even ended up destroying itself? I feel like that’s a bit nutty."

"Sorry, I can’t answer that question either," Red shook her head, "From my earliest memories, it was already called that."

Yu Sheng looked down at his own attire.

"So, Erin and I are dressed as ’Moon Hunters’—those tasked with ’killing the moon.’ The announcement in the square earlier referred to this matter..."

"Isn’t that absurd!" Erin’s eyes widened, swiftly drawing her slim lady’s sword, "Just counting on this thing? Or relying on the power of courage and bonds? A bunch of Moon Hunters in leather coats brandishing cold weapons to kill a planet—this plan is less feasible than strapping a fox tail on Yu Sheng and launching him for excitement!"

"Don’t even joke," Yu Sheng leaned over and whispered, "If they really launched me, maybe it’d work..."

Erin: "True, there’s a success story on your end."

Yu Sheng touched his chin, returning to his original seated position, pondering.

He indeed could not imagine how the ’Moon Hunters’ from Red’s Hometown World intended to ’kill the moon,’ but he recalled the apocalyptic scenes he saw in the memories of Anka Aela and Inference Star Body, as well as his "hometown" streaked with the red twilight glow—

The destructive red light tore through the universe; when the apocalypse descended, the order of all things twisted into chaos, collapse began with the breakdown of mathematical order, manifesting in the distortion of all worldly things, and a frenzied, nightmarish remolding of laws.

This process varied in length.

So perhaps during that brief period when all things were distorted, the moon turned into a monster, moonlight flowed upon the land like blood, and mortals wielding swords and knives tried to hunt a planet from the ground.

But all this was inevitably meaningless—like a segment of code desperately finding a process loophole that wouldn’t be erased before a computer physically loses power.

On the fractured mirror at the edge of the safe house, the town once shrouded in moonlight was almost leveled to the ground, with the earthen monsters in the town crushed into ruins. Finally, the moonlit living church gradually came to a halt.

It crawled to the high ground on the other side of the town, where its outer walls and windows cracked inch by inch, like countless horrifying wounds. There it lay prone; half of the "face" it portrayed—the church door—was completely torn off by the attacks of the earthen monsters. The remaining half of the door swayed in the night, with a scarlet little moon flickering within the empty door frame.

From inside this "church," a kind of oppressive and low rumbling could be heard, sounding like a sigh, or perhaps a mournful whimper.

The hunters did not kill the moon, and they couldn’t even kill a church occupied by moonlight.

"What happens next?" Yu Sheng frowned, watching the scene, suddenly asking softly.

Red’s voice appeared from behind:

"Next, the clock will chime, everything will return to the way it was, repeating endlessly in the nightmare—and in the real world, day will break."

Yu Sheng turned his head, but saw Red’s figure starting to gradually blur.

The distant and low clock chime came from the fragmented mirrors surrounding them, seemingly arising from the town ruins yet resonating across the entire wilderness.

The "Mirror Safe House" began to collapse silently. In the final lingering image on a nearby mirror surface, Yu Sheng saw that the ruined town had returned to how it was at the beginning of this dream realm—the unnamed abandoned church standing at the end of the town, turning back into a bleak, lifeless structure, quietly resting in the night.

And then he opened his eyes, seeing sunlight pour into the room; outside, it was already daytime.