PD -Chapter 43 The Black Pool in the Dream

I was completely dumbfounded as I stared at Marcus’s true form before me.

For a moment, I actually forgot that I was inside his dream. I needed to conceal my consciousness in order to hide my presence and avoid being discovered.

But just as I realized I needed to be careful, Marcus’s eyes suddenly opened. White light shone from his pupils as well, as though he had seen the fragment of consciousness I had sent into his dream.

A jolt of alarm shot through me.

I immediately withdrew my consciousness from his dream.

The sliver of consciousness returned to my own dreamscape. I instantly severed my connection with the Yin Spirit Pearl floating before me and sealed it with a Spirit-Confining Incantation.

When I opened my eyes, I was sitting alone in the empty hospital room, drenched in sweat.

“Just who the hell is that sissy?”

I asked myself inwardly.

Yet it seemed that deep down, I already knew the answer.

A halo. Wings. That holy power…

Aside from the angels widely described in Western religions, I couldn’t think of any other being that fit that image.

Still, for some reason, I was reluctant to accept that the narcissistic sissy was actually an angel. He felt far removed from the image of an angel that I had always imagined.

I wondered whether he had manipulated his own dream and given himself that appearance and those powers within it.

But the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed.

This had been a surprise attack. There was no way he could have known that I would quietly infiltrate his dream, so he couldn’t possibly have prepared such a disguise in advance.

Besides, when he entered my dream last time, he had appeared in the form of an ordinary person and spent a long time spouting nonsense at me.

If he had appeared before me with that angelic form, wouldn’t it have been far more convincing?

Back then, I knew very little about dreams or dream manipulation. If he had looked like that, I might very well have been fooled.

Yet he hadn’t done so.

That could only mean one thing.

Perhaps what I had just seen was his true form.

In front of others, he was deliberately concealing his identity.

But…

If he really was a Western angel, why was he involving himself in the affairs between Tang Shanshan and me?

Could the Ancient Jade of Extreme Yin really be so attractive that it had drawn the attention of Western divine beings?

In this world, energy is the origin of all things.

Objects that possess special forms of energy and can continuously strengthen that energy within themselves are collectively known as spiritual entities. The energy inside them is called spiritual power.

Gods, in essence, are no different from spiritual entities.

The only distinction is that their spiritual power has reached a certain critical threshold and possesses a much greater degree of divinity.

Long before humanity came into existence, they already had their own duties and domains.

Once one understood this principle, the existence of divine beings was no longer difficult to accept.

China, with its thousands of years of history, has countless legendary gods and deities, many of whom truly exist.

Naturally, the angels of the West would follow the same logic.

However, Eastern and Western cultures differ greatly.

Generally speaking, Western divine beings do not interfere in Eastern affairs.

Likewise, Eastern gods do not extend their reach into the West.

So why had Marcus come all the way here to meddle in our business?

Could it be…

that he was hiding his identity because he feared being discovered by Eastern deities—that they would realize he had overstepped his boundaries?

My thoughts grew increasingly chaotic.

I hadn’t slept well these past few days, and dwelling on questions that I couldn’t possibly solve anytime soon only made my head ache even more.

With a sigh, I rose from the empty hospital room and prepared to return to Tang Shanshan’s ward to check on her.

It was already late at night.

The hospital was quiet.

Just as I reached the door to Tang Shanshan’s room, a sudden scream came from inside.

My heart skipped a beat.

I immediately pushed the door open and rushed in.

Zhu Zhu was sitting beside the bed.

Tang Shanshan, meanwhile, was sitting upright in bed, drenched in sweat and pale as a sheet.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Shanshan seems to have had a nightmare…” Zhu Zhu said while holding Tang Shanshan’s hand.

Tang Shanshan looked terrible. She stared blankly at the white wall ahead of her for quite some time before finally coming back to her senses and looking at me.

I moved closer and asked again what had happened.

Only then did she wipe away her sweat and say:

“I just dreamed that… something dragged me into a river…”

I sat down in a chair beside the bed.

I wanted to pat her shoulder to comfort her, but with Zhu Zhu sitting right there, it felt inappropriate. My hand rose halfway before retreating awkwardly.

Instead, I told her to calm down and explain everything carefully.

Tang Shanshan wiped the sweat from her forehead again and began describing the dream that had felt so vivid, so real, that it had nearly suffocated her.

In the dream, she seemed to have returned to her childhood.

Her body had become that of a little girl again.

She was at a deep pool beneath a dam.

She and several other children were playing by the water when a strange black shadow crawled out of the pool.

Covered in mud, it grabbed the nearest child and dragged them into the water.

Shanshan and the other children panicked.

Yet instead of running away, they jumped into the pool, determined to save the child.

All of them rushed forward together, grabbing the child’s clothes and arms beneath the water.

But the shadow was unbelievably strong.

With a single pull, it dragged every one of them into the depths.

Around them, the pool water slowly turned thick and black, like liquid ink.

No matter how desperately they struggled, they could not reach the surface.

Then, at that moment, a pair of black hands emerged once more from the pitch-black water.

The hands grabbed Tang Shanshan’s leg and dragged her deeper and deeper toward the bottom.

The enormous black pool seemed bottomless.

She could feel the air in her lungs running out.

Her body began convulsing violently.

The thick black water poured into her mouth and nose without end.

Just as she was about to suffocate to death, she suddenly jolted awake.

Only then did she realize she was lying safely in a hospital bed.

“Shanshan, don’t overthink it. Maybe it was just an ordinary nightmare,” Zhu Zhu said softly, squeezing her hand in comfort. “You only just woke up. You’re probably still tense and stressed, so you ended up having a dream like that.”

Tang Shanshan remained pale.

Holding Zhu Zhu’s hand tightly, she shook her head.

“I’ve had nightmares before, but… this one felt far too real. The suffocating feeling… the pain of my lungs being filled with that black water…”

She shuddered.

“It was unbelievably real.”

For a moment, Zhu Zhu didn’t know what to say.

She sighed, gently smoothed Tang Shanshan’s slightly messy hair, and then looked toward me for help.

As I studied Tang Shanshan’s expression, I suddenly recalled what I had just done—using dream manipulation to investigate that sissy.

How strange.

I had only just launched my surprise intrusion into his dream, and now Tang Shanshan was experiencing such an incredibly realistic nightmare.

Could there be some connection between the two?