Chapter 827: Consciousness Anchoring in the Dream World
Inside the villa
“Have you asked your Xiao Han yet? How did she respond to you?”
“I haven’t asked,” Bai Yu shook her head and replied.
“You didn’t ask? That doesn’t sound like you. Or do you think you know her well enough to answer that question for her?” Sheril asked with a smile.
“Xiao Han has her own rhythm, moving forward constantly… so-called schemes and plots can’t keep up with her.”
“Even I can’t? You really have that much confidence in Xiao Han?!” Sheril’s expression was quite striking at that moment.
She naturally understood what Bai Yu meant. It was as if Xiao Han developed so quickly within the academy that no one could react in time. In fact, before anyone even got close to her, she had already reached the very top of the academy; any schemes and plans seemed like mere jesters in the face of absolute strength.
So has Xiao Han, in her current state, developed to a level that could disrupt her plans?
Her first thought was that it was impossible.
She was a Betrayer Witch and had already reached the top tier upon arriving in this main world.
Devising a scheme against a Little Witch and leading her into her meticulously designed trials was supposed to be an easy feat, right?
“If you aren’t confident in Xiao Han, then just keep your little schemes to yourself. Why go through all this trouble to deal with a Little Witch you don’t even believe you can handle? You might as well give up early and dissolve the contract peacefully.”
“What are you saying? Of course, I have confidence in her!” Sheril replied with a laugh, not feeling that she had almost fallen into a verbal trap earlier. “But I’m really curious… What is Xiao Han planning to do? Has she gone to the Expanding Realm?”
“I’m also curious about what you intend to do. You keep saying you want to test Xiao Han, but how do you plan to do that?”
“That’s not in the contract, so I don’t intend to tell you!” Sheril directly refused.
“Let me guess, based on what you’ve said before, you dislike comfort and prefer radical approaches, trying to make everyone experience the same hardships you have. So what you want to witness is Xiao Han’s courage, means, and determination…”
“Although that’s not quite right, so then?” Sheril looked at Bai Yu with interest, as if she were expecting her to analyze further.
“To achieve such a goal, it’s almost impossible in the main world, unless… you plan to incite an academy war.”
The history in the main world clearly records the history of academy wars; this is no trivial matter, but a full-scale war!
Instructors against instructors, students against students; no one can be spared from this war! Historically, if an instructor loses, the students face slaughter, but now the Extraordinary can’t arbitrarily massacre students.
Even so, such wars have never ceased, though the current academy wars are merely small conflicts between Extraordinary academies, small regional wars in the world.
Top-tier academies have always turned a blind eye to such wars, only voicing their opinions on the principle of non-interference.
Perhaps some academies need to constantly engage in life-and-d*ath battles to witness the enhancement of strength.
But more academies are just dragged into the fray unwillingly.
Why are there so many small Extraordinary academies in the main world?
Because someone always needs to bear the load and become the sacrificial lamb to resolve conflicts.
Some Extraordinary academies even have affiliated academies, which can essentially be considered cannon fodder production bases.
Meanwhile, wars between some Extraordinary academies fall under proxy wars, where you can see the influence of certain top-tier academies either directly or indirectly behind the scenes.
Even the Witch Academy is no exception; the “peace” in the surrounding areas is a result of wars happening in other academies.
Occasionally, the academy system also has special emergency tasks, which are battlefield support tasks.
And students lacking strength won’t even see such tasks refresh on the list.
Currently, these wars are still at the student stage, and the Extraordinary cannot intervene.
After all, once they intervene, the nature of the conflict changes.
Many small Extraordinary academies have only one principal and a few Extraordinary mentors, while the rest are upperclassmen acting as teaching assistants and proxies to impart extraordinary knowledge.
Such Extraordinary wars typically don’t make it to news reports; ordinary people have no channels to learn about the brutal circumstances, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have the ability to stop them, perhaps even sparking uncontrollable social discourse.
Even top-tier academy students generally don’t care about the plight of these academies.
However… families from the outside world are aware.
If their children can’t enroll in a top-tier academy, even if they enter an ordinary one, they wouldn’t want them to join those small Extraordinary academies when returning home in a few years to inherit the family business.
Because those are all cannon fodder.
Those students will silently d*e, entering the cycle of soul material, and then the society in the main world encourages proliferation and continuous acceleration of talent circulation and birth.
“Incite an academy war? Does such trivial squabbling even qualify as war?” Sheril chuckled lightly, not worried at all.
As a Betrayer Witch who has witnessed countless world invasions, she cannot even count how many times she has experienced the tragedies of the world collapsing.
Compared to such battles that can lead to the extinction of races and shattering worlds, these confrontations in the main world seem trivial in her eyes.
They don’t even make it to the news reports.
“That’s right, although your ambitions don’t lie in the main world, as a Betrayer Witch, you equally wish for this main world to belong to witches. Plus, the principals have mastered restoration techniques for the main world, and since the ‘navel of the world’ is currently in the hands of those races, from that angle, you wouldn’t utilize such radical means as inciting an academy war in the main world.”
“So…” Sheril began, prolonging her voice as if guiding Bai Yu to reveal the answer.
“So you must take the battle elsewhere, redirect the fire to another place: that game world. Xiao Han has already severed the world shackles in advance; you want to bring Xiao Han to the game world to fulfill the promise made by Principal Mei and harvest the game world.”
“Oh~ I didn’t expect you to remember that I mentioned it last time! You’re not saying you linked all these thoughts based on what I said, are you?”
“Aren’t you?” Bai Yu asked confidently.
“Isn’t there another possibility, that is, without all this trouble, just help Mei find the navel of the world and directly incite the academy war?”
“You found the navel of the world?!” Bai Yu frowned at Sheril, somewhat incredulous.
“Just guess~”
Sheril did not respond directly, making Bai Yu a bit uncertain.
“Hmph~ Look at you, with such a level, don’t expect to pry anything useful out of me!”
“Since you’re unwilling to say, then please leave.”
“You’re kicking me out like this?”
“I have things to do; I’m preparing to find Principal Mei.”
“What do you want to see her for? You’ve signed a Witch Contract; you can’t tell her anything, including subtle expressions, as they’ll also be bound by the contract.”
“I’m well aware of that. I just want to communicate with Principal Mei on behalf of Xiao Han regarding the proposals and suggestions for promoting concepts like self-generated magic and transformation magic within the academy.”
“Is that what you should be concerned about right now?”
“Anything related to Xiao Han is important to me.”
“Alright~ Alright~” Sheril sighed helplessly and said, “How about… I go with you?”
…
Expanding Realm.
“What? Sister Xiao Han has actually come to the Expanding Realm?”
Ninglan Qiuyue’s first reaction upon hearing this news was shock!
But she quickly accepted it.
The principal instructed her not to worry about this matter, to just be aware of it as usual, and that she didn’t need to tell anyone else about Xiao Han’s arrival.
Unless Xiao Han contacts her personally; then they can discuss the situation.
This time the principal contacted her specifically to inform her that if Xiao Han causes too much of a stir in the Expanding Realm, there’s no need to panic. If the situation becomes too extreme, other academies will come to back her up.
This information made Ninglan Qiuyue curious about what Xiao Han was doing to stir up such a commotion.
At that moment, beneath the fissures of the Expanding Realm.
A phantom maze enveloped the area; its enormity shaded the entire mountaintop, and beneath a massive boulder, I stood on a platform conducting a dream experiment.
After setting up the dream maze, dream creatures lured by Soul Crystals wandered through the maze, their numbers increasingly growing.
However, under the consumption of my experiment, their numbers were also continuously decreasing.
Upon entering the dream world and using the dream creatures as experimental materials, my first action wasn’t to verify the possibility of the soul dream state, but to use soul drawing on the dream creatures, attempting to understand whether soul drawing could grant them the possibility of life.
However, the result was as expected: Dream creatures with only consciousness couldn’t form what I recognized as a complete “soul” under the influence of soul drawing.
Thus, directly applying soul drawing on fool dreams wouldn’t turn them into true life, which left me disheartened from pursuing that path.
Yet this did not leave me without any discoveries.
While experimenting with dream creatures, I found that they seemed to possess more than just “consciousness.”
They shared another concept that I was already familiar with, although I had almost forgotten it.
Nightmares.
When I severed the nightmares from the fool dreams initially, I utilized the momentum of the script.
Now, this gave rise to a new thought.
What if these dream creatures could be severed from their nightmares? What would separate them from fool dreams then?
With my understanding of dream creatures and fool dreams, it seemed there wasn’t much distinction?
It was akin to removing the body, cutting away the racial concept and bloodline information, and what remained was the soul; what difference would there be?
It seemed… not much difference.
Is that possible?
Is there something special about fool dreams…
Did they once bear the burden of Extraordinary Knowledge? Did they once long to become true life?
It seems that only these additional concepts could define the differences between fool dreams and dream creatures.
But within the dream creatures, there were no clear conceptual divisions; there were neither races nor bloodlines. They all seemed very similar, merely differing in posture, yet they were all dream creatures…
So… could they transform into fool dreams?
In theory, it should be possible.
After all, humans can transform into witches, holy angels, and elves, so race is merely a definition; fool dreams seem to be like that as well.
“That doesn’t seem quite right…”
In the dream, I suddenly realized this issue and slowly returned to reality.
The problem I recognized concerned consciousness entering the dream, and it was also a problem that shouldn’t be overlooked—the method for consciousness to return to its original body.
With the soul as my medium of accessing the dream, if consciousness ventured too deeply into layers of dreams, there could be a chance of becoming lost.
That is, dream misplacement!
So I needed to ensure a method for pulling my consciousness back immediately; an anchor must be set up in reality or a shallow layer of dreams…
“No, that’s not safe. It should be a continuous anchoring process from reality to shallow dreams, and then to deeper dreams to form a complete awakening mechanism, ensuring safety.” After all, I don’t engage in things without certainty, nor do I make a joke of myself.
The reason I need to enter deeper layers of dreams is to connect with what’s beneath the surface of the dream… the Primordial Dream World!
That is the essence of the dream; the shallow dream is merely coexisting with reality, the two sides maintaining stability against each other.
It’s also where life dreams when asleep, the place where consciousness inadvertently extends.
To put it metaphorically, the Primordial Dream World is the deep sea, while shallow dreams are the shallow sea and beach, where countless visitors play as if dreaming when they sleep at night, posing basically no risk at all.
What I need to do is secure a safety line that can return me at any moment and then resolutely explore the deep sea, to uncover the principles of how the Primordial Dream World births dream consciousness.
To verify whether dream souls exist, or whether this hypothesis is feasible.
If they exist, then there is hope for everything.
If not, I will attempt to create a soul, much like when the Void had no concept of soul before the fourth Life Interpretation, using all my thinking ideas and inspirations to shape it.
Until I succeed or fail.
I looked at the peculiar runes floating in my hand; they are composite runes formed around the core of the Primordial Dream World runes, completed using my more intense memory nodes as a ritual, meant for forcibly communicating with my soul and consciousness.
This composite rune serves as my consciousness anchorage in the dream world; if uncontrollable accidents occur, I can follow these anchors to continuously transmit dream consciousness until I am safe.
Everything is “fully automated.”
Intense memory nodes can quickly stimulate my consciousness to make instinctive reactions, after all, when faced with a crisis, I won’t have time to react, so special cases require special measures.
“Let’s try again…”
Diving back into the dreams, I captured a few dream creatures in the dream maze as experimental materials after this depth-exploring into the Primordial Dream World. Regardless of whether they are useful, it’s fine to bring them along.
Then I entered the Primordial Dream World once again…
