[3] Dream of Kalksa

The "I," or rather Hunt's awakening of self-consciousness, does not bring about psychiatric symptoms similar to those of the dual personality. Now to go back to an earlier question: why did it take me so long in my dreams to find out that my name was Hunter? because I mean, before Nina wrote that letter, I didn't think to refer to myself by a certain name.

I can still enter the dream world and become Hunter on certain nights, but those distracted thoughts don't bother me anymore. It's really weird. In my dreams, my name was Hunter. My memory tells me that I spent many of my holidays wandering into the abandoned gardens on the banks of the River Marbset, meditating on the ever-changing vegetation that seemed to be eternal, and silently watching the abandoned flowerbeds withering in the autumn breeze at dusk. But recalling these experiences did not evoke corresponding emotions in my mind.

At the time, however, my attention after waking up was focused on some of the more obscure and disturbing hints that these memories brought about.

Perhaps as a compensation for my uneventful life, I wandered at night in the strange, ancient, and unworldly town of Woodford, wandering in some lovely and uncanny garden on the other side of the unknowable realm that separates reality from fantasy[2]. I could feel the comforting freedom, but I couldn't be sure if it was the real experience of "me" in the dream world, or if it was another wonderful dream.

Ah, how ridiculous! I was suspecting that the experience in the dream was another dream!

On a few occasions when my rational mind was well maintained, I examined the subtleties of the world. Even though there was no such thing as particle physics, I still used a microscope to look at the specimens in the Academy's collection, as well as the leaves and insect carcasses that I picked up at random. I chose species that I wouldn't cover in my middle school biology class, and I was amazed at how colorful the details were and how unreasonable the laws of biology were.

I began to wonder – in a more rigorous way – whether the world was real. In reality, as a human being, I would never be able to use my brain to calculate such a huge amount of information, I don't think I can even do it with a fictional character like Yitong, and if I think it's some kind of real-time dynamic generation algorithm, it must be the most powerful algorithm I know.

Brain-in-a-jar, hacker empire, these hypotheses that cannot be verified by scientific paradigms have not stopped me from continuing to dream. The knowledge and skills of the academy are still forgotten when they wake up—to be precise, I think they are only recorded in Hunt's mental organs. Soon after, I became obsessed with an online game called League of Legends, and I had fun with my friend Du Mu every weekend, coupled with my interest in hot-blooded online literature, and the work of exploring the truth of the dream world was put on hold.

During this time, the memories left behind by the new dreams became more and more blurred. I didn't pay much attention to this question at the time, and it wasn't until I was about to leave my junior high school alma mater that I suddenly realized it, and in extreme chagrin and remorse, I recorded my early dreams in case of an emergency. I started to learn meditation, adjust the time I fell asleep, and gradually return to the way I was more than a year ago. Entering Hunter's dream world is still a matter of luck, and I can't guarantee that I will be able to do it when I fall asleep. It was then that I woke up and became aware of something more obscure and disturbing.

The first hint came when a garden reminiscence. I was walking alone in the twilight, and somehow remembered walking side by side with Nina on the sidewalk along the riverbank. The setting sun shone obliquely behind me, dragging a long shadow on the ground in front of me. I imagined the shadows of me and the girl blurring more and more in the sunset, until we merged into one, and could no longer distinguish each other, even though there was actually nothing around us.

The abandoned garden was so desolate that it seemed that no other children had come to play since the two of us. I remember that there was an elderberry tree growing in a small garden over here, and an old willow tree growing in another small garden a little further away. The scenery has never been as intimate as it is now, but it has never been as cold as it is now. The lawn that used to pass through the black-smut gooseberry and gooseberry bushes, the lawn between the elderberry trees and ferns, and the shade under the willow trees where you could smell the scent of wildflowers and the moist smell of grass when you lay down, seemed to me so deep and eerie, abrupt and harmonious.

At this moment, the sunset, which was already faintly visible on the horizon, seemed to beat, and the whole sky suddenly became dark and deep. I had a sudden throbbing of looking up, and immediately followed it. A full moon hangs high in the night sky, and countless stars twinkle in a clear canopy rarely seen in the real world. No, there seems to be a problem with memory. I saw things I never knew before, other worlds and other galaxies...... Dark...... The stars looked as if they were black, and the darkness that enveloped me looked as if they were light[3].

I screamed, maybe it was the fear of the unknown, maybe the joy of what my heart was looking for, but some emotion that was too strong tingled every nerve in me. Then I woke up on my real-world bed, covered in cold sweat.

In the following dreams, I woke up in a similar way, and my dormant sanity was not enough to sustain me in finding the essence behind the phenomenon—at least some of the causes that caused it. It wasn't until one day, seven months later, when I entered the world with an intellect almost equivalent to waking up, that I finally advanced my quest to the next level.

I had just graduated from the academy and before I decided to leave for the Duchy of Andrés, I had the idea of looking in the forest. The next morning, I left my house and walked along the familiar road to the countryside through the bazaar, which had been bustled by the trading day. The hustle and bustle of the crowd was soon left behind me, and as I walked farther and farther away, the voices of the people faded away, and the last moment was finally drowned in the silence of the wilderness.

The pavement began to become dilapidated, with lush vegetation on both sides, and finally only a trail that extended deep into the forest. The rough ground and exposed tree roots and rocks caused me a lot of trouble on my journey, and I had to choose each of my landing points carefully. It was a cloudy day, and the already weak sunlight had not been left after cutting through the dense canopy, and the dark forest felt colder than usual.

The tall trees and shrubs that are layered with barriers form an invisible barrier that fragile mortals cannot overcome. I suddenly had a strange feeling that the inaccessible path under my feet had a life and consciousness of its own, and that it was happily moving through the labyrinth of branches and leaves with its unique, incomprehensible mind, leading me to the unknown world with curiosity walking on it.

I don't know why, but I felt a little flustered. I should be familiar with this path, from coming with Nina as a child, to walking alone in the woods after separation, I should not have any kind of strange feeling in any way. Stranger to the fullest, the wilderness that I could not see in the real world did not relax in the slightest, but on the contrary, it evoked in my mind an inscrutable emotion that made me feel like I was becoming smaller and smaller, while the foliage of oak, hazel, and rowan trees around me was twisting and growing taller.

Feeling a little dizzy, I followed the path I remembered to the glade in the woods, which was also my "secret base" for Nina and me. My brain seems to be a little undersupplied, and my vision occasionally becomes blurry. I had walked too far too far to turn back, and despite the unexpected abnormality of my body, my reason reminded me that I had to go there and rest for a while, or I would fall into this lonely wood, and no one would come to save me. I stumbled along the trunk of the tree, and finally reached the clearing, as my limbs went limp, and I felt like my mind was about to be swallowed up.

Before my vision was completely lost in the darkness, I found the bed I used to rest, made of bark and hay. Last year's hay smelled musty, but I didn't have the energy to replace it with a new one, so I just fell on it. A moment before my eyelids were fully closed, the reflection of the sun on some kind of mirror surface came into my eyes.

What's going on? I don't remember the creek here. The faint sound in my ears faded in, and my consciousness began to fall asleep.

When I woke up, I subconsciously pulled the non-existent quilt on my body and found that I had not returned to the real world.

I looked around and saw a small stream meandering through a clearing in the woods, the crystal clear water reflecting like a mirror in the morning glow. Look at the "bed" beneath me—it's not the bark and hay I trimmed and renewed last year, it's just a pile of hay that someone else has piled up haphazardly.

Where am I? Oops, it's completely off.

Thinking that most of the streams in this area flow into the Mapset River, I decided to follow the direction in which it flows. I walked briskly through a long stretch of bush and struggled up a hill to try to look into the distance from a high vantage point. Surprisingly, the scene in front of me was not familiar to me - standing on the edge of a cliff, with an endless sea of forests at my feet, lush and overlapping, with no end in sight.

The forest is made up of unusually large trees, these unknown behemoths are dense and lush, with thick branches intertwined with each other, and broad and thick green leaves stretch out luxuriantly, weaving a green curtain. I concentrate and descend the steep slope with absolute precision, stepping into primeval realms that no one seems to have set foot in since time immemorial.

I can't see the sun yet, but I think it's not far away when the sun rises. The air was cold and cold, but I thought it was a conscious inference rather than a physical sensation, because I didn't feel the slightest chill. Low, lead-colored clouds loomed over the gloomy forest in front of us, and everything as far as the eye could see seemed like a threat or an omen—a hint of evil, a prophecy of calamity. Neither birds, animals, nor insects were nowhere to be found, except for the wind that blew like a sigh through the dead branches of dead trees[4].

I suddenly felt a terrible feeling. The trail outside Woodford, though abandoned for many years, still occasionally shows a crooked oak sign or two as I walk, but here, though I can't measure the time in my dreams, I don't see a single one. Never before have these trees, these towering trees, these trees that exude the most primitive beauty of life, have never made me palpitate, alarmed, and made me more and more desperate to find any trace of human activity—even if it was just a broken sign, two shallow ruts.

As I walked along, the terrain beneath my feet became more and more treacherous, and the winding path made it difficult for me to determine my direction, and the tall and strange plants in all directions seemed to turn into a towering rock wall, squeezing and squeezing me into the depths of it, as if they were trying to crush this tiny creature of the primordial fragment that had rushed into the edge of the world out of curiosity. I jerked to a halt and held my head high, trying to draw some fresh breath from the palm-sized sky above me that would sustain me as I walked.

Two black stars hung high in the sky. No, what was the morning glow I saw earlier? The clouds took on an absurd leaden gray...... Gray, the gray weeds at his feet hung their heads down, as if they were whispering some terrible secret to the earth. However, no sound or movement could break the chilling silence that shrouded this bleak place[4].

My spirit seemed to have broken through the shackles of my body in fear beyond the limit, and my body flew swiftly through the ominous forest. Everything in view was passing away at a rapid pace, and the inferior human vision of movement could not capture such a rapid change of scenery. I don't know how long it took, but I stopped to look around, and from all around me stretched out a desolate flat land, covered with tall and dense withered grass, the blades of grass rustling in the autumn wind, and some withered trees sparsely popping on the ground. Many oddly shaped, dark-colored rocks stood in the grass at great distances, but they seemed to have a silent understanding of each other, exchanging unsettling information, and holding their heads up, as if waiting for some kind of foretold event to occur.

Scattered across the grass were weathered stones, apparently carved with tools. Now they have long since cracked, broken, covered with moss, half-buried in the earth, and tilted at various angles, but they have not remained upright. The larger stone blocks scattered here and there are undoubtedly the remains of magnificent mausoleums and magnificent monuments [4]. Time has erased the words that might have existed on the broken stone carvings, but after a careful search, I was able to read the words in the ancient language: "Kalkesa" from one of the relatively well-preserved steles.

Hunter has this information in his memory. All I can remember and describe is the name "Kalkesa", which represents a place that has been neglected, abandoned, forgotten, an ancient capital that has been famous in forbidden books, and a prehistoric site that no archaeologists have ever found. I walked along the old path, faintly recognizable among the ruins—I still don't know the motive for doing so, and perhaps the original dream of what I thought was "almost the same as waking sanity" was false.

What happened next is vague in my memory, and even from a dream point of view, it is too bizarre. I will never forget Kalsa with black stars hanging in the sky, and the shadows lingering in my heart in the afternoon when the abyssal twin stars sank into Lake Harry[5]. The relative relationship between "big" and "small" has been completely turned upside down, and the concepts of "gravity", "space" and "time" have been fragmented at the level of the most basic units of information that compose them...... No, information is a manifestation of order, something more appropriate to call "essence", infinite combinations, infinite possibilities. "Existence" is infinite, and "emptiness" is eternal......

I have no way of knowing what blasphemous power was acting on my mind at that time. After the two suns had been submerged in the black mirror-like lake, I, confused in my mind – I wasn't even sure if it was me – summoned up a frenzied and unorderly courage to reach the edge of the ruined city of Khalksa and peer into the terrifying abyss.

The reflection on the surface of the lake is my figure - not Hunter's exotic face, but the face of me named Xu Mingshan in reality, with black hair and black eyes. No, it's not just a reflection, it opens its mouth, it speaks...... Ia! Ia! Hastur! Hastur……

I jumped out of bed, crying and laughing, trembling with fear, turning on all the lights I could, and staggering back into the messy bed, through the pre-dawn darkness in a mushy mind.