Infinite Nightmares

Amidst the rubble of the Tower of Babel, Hu Maomao cautiously poked her head out from a low stone cave and scanned her surroundings.

Once she confirmed there was no danger, she pulled back into the recessed stone cave.

She walked over to Zhang Wenda and said softly, "It’s okay. He didn’t follow us. We’re safe for now."

She then saw him staring at her blankly. "Who?" he asked, as if in a daze. "Who didn’t follow us?"

Hu Maomao wasn’t too surprised to hear this. He hadn’t seemed right ever since they’d escaped.

Song Jianguo, who was standing nearby, also saw this and immediately walked up to him. "Hey," she asked curiously, "do you know who I am?"

"Who are you? You’re... a cat?" Zhang Wenda stared, his eyes glazed over, at her single cat ear.

"It’s over. Haozi’s mind is shot."

Her brow furrowed, Hu Maomao floated in front of him and gently pressed her hands to his temples, sensing the changes within.

After a moment, she spoke. "It seems like there’s a breach in his brain. I don’t know much about Trial No. 2, but I’ll try to repair it. Jianguo, you keep watch."

"Okay." The Black Cats quickly blocked the cave entrance, and the space inside grew dim.

Taking a deep breath, Hu Maomao slapped away Zhang Wenda’s hand, which was stroking her hair. She picked up her tinfoil pot and placed it on his head. Then, she leaned in, pressing her forehead to his through the pot, and slowly closed her eyes.

The moment their foreheads touched, Zhang Wenda’s swaying body froze. His black pupils dilated until they filled his eye sockets completely. He and Hu Maomao both began to float in mid-air. The sight was as bizarre as it was unsettling.

After a long while, a deathly pale Hu Maomao opened her eyes. She took the tinfoil pot off Zhang Wenda’s head and tapped his cheek lightly. "Wake up, Wenda. Come on, wake up!"

"That’s not going to work. Let me do it!" Song Jianguo walked over, raised her hand, and swung a hard slap at his face.

But Zhang Wenda’s hand suddenly shot up and blocked her slap. His expression flickered between surprise and confusion as he struggled to his feet.

Hu Maomao didn’t know if her method had worked, but it looked like he had at least remembered how to walk.

Zhang Wenda looked at the two strangers before him, but after shaking his head, he felt a flicker of recognition.

Suddenly, he moved. He raised the blue scythe and slashed at the stone wall, cutting open a direct passage to the Inner World.

The dazed Zhang Wenda stepped through. The two women exchanged a glance and quickly followed.

He staggered along for a while, eventually leading them to the devastated Prefrontal Strait. Long, thin bookshelves were knocked over everywhere. Even the ones still upright were leaning precariously against each other.

If the bookshelves were in this state, the books inside were even worse. Most had been scattered into the water and were completely soaked.

"Fix... fix it," Zhang Wenda said, pointing at the Prefrontal Strait and managing to form a barely coherent sentence.

As Hu Maomao and Song Jianguo got to work, the scattered, translucent books were gradually collected and shoved back onto the shelves.

The Black Cats gathered together again, merging into a giant, cat-eared Godzilla that waded into the water to set the bookshelves upright.

As the books were gradually collected and returned to the shelves, Zhang Wenda’s memories began to return, bit by bit. His detached consciousness slowly started to come back into focus.

He shook his head hard again, then yelled up at Song Jianguo, who was on top of a bookshelf, "Can you at least look at the books before you shove them back in? You’ve got kindergarten right after the college entrance exams! Does that seem reasonable to you?"

"I’ve never been to school, how would I know!" Song Jianguo shot back, completely unabashed.

"You two carry on, I’m going to get some help!" Zhang Wenda turned and left the Prefrontal Strait. When he returned, he had a group of Little Black Cats trailing behind him.

It wasn’t just the Black Cats. Zhang Wenda had also run to the Dream Circus and roped in all the clowns and animals to help restore the Prefrontal Strait.

With everyone’s help, the Prefrontal Strait was quickly restored. After sifting through his memories again and again, Zhang Wenda confirmed that most of them had returned. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief.

’Thankfully, Lakov only wrecked the place and didn’t completely destroy these memories,’ he thought. ’If he’d destroyed everything, I’d probably have ended up like a second Song Jianguo.’

He had won the battle against Lakov, but it had come at a great cost. It wasn’t just the issue with the memories in the Prefrontal Strait; it was also the Hippocampus.

"Right, there’s still the Hippocampus." Zhang Wenda led the others back to the front of the Hippocampus’s house. His Hippocampus was gone, as if it had never existed at all.

Zhang Wenda had no time for grief. Without the Hippocampus, none of his future experiences would be recorded as memories. Aside from his old memories, he would be perpetually living in the now.

With no other choice, he could only pick up the Hippocampus’s pen and tentatively begin to record his memories himself.

Although he had no memory of the Hippocampus disappearing, the other two had fortunately witnessed the entire event.

With Hu Maomao and Song Jianguo helping him recall the events, Zhang Wenda managed to piece together most of the missing memory.

"Okay, we were in the Old Cortex Layer, hiding from Lakov, and everything in our path was being destroyed," Zhang Wenda noted, writing continuously with the pen.

"And then? What happened then?" As the blue text was written, images of the memories he was recording gradually surfaced in his mind.

However, when Zhang Wenda got to the part where he recorded himself grabbing a giant red scar, his pen stopped. He looked at Hu Maomao in confusion.

"Are you sure? Are you telling me that I, along with the Black Cats, literally pulled out the Red Canyon? And that it could inflict massive damage on Lakov? Is that even possible?"

"You’re the one who did it. Why are you asking me?" Hu Maomao said, crossing her arms and looking at him with dissatisfaction.

"The Hippocampus was off the clock during that time, wasn’t it? I’ve forgotten everything that happened. Tell me again, in more detail."

As she recounted the events, Zhang Wenda gradually recalled the experience and understood why he had done it.

Once he realized this, Zhang Wenda looked up at the sky. With a mere thought, an incredibly long and narrow red chasm appeared before him, as if it had always belonged there.

Zhang Wenda simply closed his hand, and he lifted the chasm into the air. It was like holding a giant’s massive spear.

This red scar could actually be used as a weapon—one that could even harm a master like Lakov.

’No, not just Lakov,’ he realized. ’If it can harm him, that means it can be used to harm the Thought Wave World of any other master... including Qianxi!’

Zhang Wenda stared at the object before him with a complicated expression. He had never imagined that this experience of utter despair and suffering could become a divine weapon in his hands, one that could allow him to easily surpass so many others. The irony was almost too much to bear.