Lonely shelters, hideous bloody handprints, bloody words filled with pain and curse, the living and the dead who are nowhere to be found......

For a second or two, some vague fear seemed like a mixture of ice water had been injected into my tail vertebrae by a syringe, and then down my blood ducts all the way to my brain, into the ravines of the cerebral cortex. Sometimes this subtle fear is more penetrating than the obvious fear. It is not directly placed in front of people's eyes to be viewed, but maliciously drives people's imagination to sketch ambiguous silhouettes. Although I haven't been able to fully grasp the truth of what these bloodstained words mean, my imagination has already set itself in motion, painting a picture of people falling into hell for unknown reasons – and placing themselves in it.

It has been said that dreams are a metaphor for reality.

Then "dream within a dream" is undoubtedly a metaphor for "dream".

I think these messy bloodstained words are hinting at me "what will happen in the future". Simply put, it is "prophecy". After sorting it out in my mind, I came up with two possibilities for the future: either the prophet had harbored evil intentions from the very beginning, he didn't want to save the survivors at all, and then the vault fell, and he really didn't fulfill his promise to kill the survivors; Either the prophet told the truth, but he was too weak to do what he promised, and the survivors were left to hell.

No, there is a third possibility—that is, these words are not a metaphor for the future, but a metaphor for the past and the present.

In other words: the people of the Vault were dead from the beginning, and Hu Ma and I unwittingly walked into the cave of the undead's revelry. Whether it is the Prophet Xiu Lady Soldier or the other survivors, they are all dead. Of course they must have died in reality, but I thought they were at least alive in their dreams. However, in the dream, they may also be dead.

This possibility makes my scalp tingle. But since you have entered the "dream within a dream", you can't return to the "dream" at will. I can only focus on the things in front of me first.

I remembered the soldier's reference to the "secret room of the prophet and the nun." The soldier thought that the two men regularly entered the secret room in the corner of the vault to make it together, but I was never gullible. This is just the right place to check it out.

I found the room in the corner of the vault, the door was hidden. I pushed it slightly, and the door opened in a stiff movement that was extremely unlubricated.

The scene that intrudes into view is not a place where men and women meet, but a bloody and dark place that makes you want to turn your head just by seeing it. In a word, it was an "empty room stained with blood". Although there were no bloody handprints everywhere outside, there were also traces of a large amount of blood splattering, as if someone had once tortured another person with a whip here, and the blood splattered onto the ground, walls, ceilings, everywhere in the fierce blows.

The dream within the dream also seems to form a metaphor here, and some of these dense blood stains look like words. If you look at it carefully, although the lines of all the words are inconsistent, they are all one sentence repeatedly, that is, "I'm sorry".

I'm sorry - who said that?

Prophet? Or the same nun who entered this room?

What have they all done here? Why say "I'm sorry"?

I have some speculation in my mind, but I suffer from the lack of conditions for verification. I had to close the door first, turn around and leave.

*

The entrance to the vault was originally a closed iron door, but now it seems to have been hit through by some kind of behemoth, forming a huge gap. I exited the shelter through the gap. The streets of the town outside were also empty, not only were there no living people, not even the living dead, and even the undead had disappeared. The sky was still night, but it was not dark around it, for in the distance hung a huge full moon, and the moonlight sprinkled the land.

This Full Moon is really too big, twenty or thirty times bigger than a normal moon. It doesn't even look like the moon, but rather like a huge mountain creeping beyond the horizon. And at any time there is a possibility of conflict with the world on this side.

This is the month of oblivion. It is a moon that can only be seen in dreams, dragged into the abstract universe by the gods of doom. If all the matter in the dream is just an illusion of the person concerned, then this full moon is undoubtedly the real matter. The dream I experienced before was a "deliberate dream" created by the memories of the dream monster, so I couldn't see the Moon of Forgetting, and this dream within a dream seemed to be closer to the original appearance of the dream.

I closed my gaze and clinged to the side of the road, sneaking without saying a word. There seems to be no danger around, but you must not let your guard down because of this. I don't know if there is a Turin doctor in the direction of travel, but sometimes it's more efficient to move first than to look ahead.

As time went on, the surrounding scenery gradually became stranger.

Not a "gestalt collapse". I've been experiencing a lot of "gestalt crashes" lately, but this time it's really changed. Blood stains are showing on the pavement and walls, public facilities such as buildings and street lamps are becoming more and more dilapidated, and dry street trees are becoming more and more bizarre. Aware of these changes, I tried to turn back the way I came, only to end up on a stranger street, and the scenery became more strange.

At this moment, there was a faint sound of footsteps in the distance, more than one person.

Is it the living dead? No, the footsteps of the living dead will be a little more messy.

This is the sound of the footsteps of a living man.

I hid my body behind the corner and looked cautiously over there. I saw more than a dozen people coming from a distance, wearing uniform gray uniforms and equipped with guns and ammunition. Although his demeanor is expressionless, it is very different from the face of a dead man, and no matter how you look at it, he is a living person. And according to my eyes, they are all "real world people".

This was really beyond my expectations, I didn't expect so many outsiders to be in a place like this. For a moment, I almost felt that this dead town was actually quite human, and these unknown people seemed more friendly.

Two of the men were at the front, dressed like the others, but they looked like they were of higher status, and they didn't have any firearms on them. One of them was about 30 years old and the other was about 50 years old. For the sake of convenience, let's call these two people "thirty years old" and "fifty years old".

The two were talking, and the thirty-year-old's tone was faintly anxious, "The surroundings are getting weirder and weirder, is this place really okay?" ”

"No problem. Didn't Violent say it? There are no dead in this dream-within-a-dream. Fifty-year-old is like a slow man, with a compass in his hand, "Then we can all leave as soon as we catch the Turin doctor." ”

"So, where is that crucial Turin doctor?" The thirty-year-old said gloomily, "It's less dangerous here, but it's more chaotic." Even if you have a map, you can't rely on it, and you can get lost at any time. We can only secure a means of returning to our stronghold. Now that Turin doctor is hiding in a dumpster somewhere in the middle of town, is this how we have to look for it? ”

I eavesdropped on their conversation, and the name Violent naturally entered my ears. It turned out that it was not only the Turin doctor, but even the withered believers were also caught up in the dream.

Or is it the act of withering believers that I, and I, and the Doctor of Turin, were drawn into dreams?

Are these people withered believers too? But I've never heard of withering cultists ever having gray uniforms.

"So didn't Violent give us this item?" Fifty-year-old holds a compass-like object and says, "Just ......."

"Wait." The thirty-year-old suddenly covered his ear on one side, "There is communication." ”

Fifty closed his mouth.

After a few moments, the tense face of the thirty-year-old gradually relaxed. He turned his head and said to the fifty-year-old, "Caught her." ”

"Doctor Turin?" Fifty-year-old asked.

"Yes." The thirty-year-old said, "I was caught in the stronghold and locked up." ”

"Violently?"

"No, it was caught by the other squads."

"It seems that as Violent said, the Turin Doctor, despite his super-level psionic powers, is a strange person with no fighting power." Speaking of this, the fifty-year-old looked quite strange, "A normal psyker can strengthen her physical performance, why can't she do this?" ”

"God knows. Maybe it's at the expense of strengthening the talent in medicine at the expense of the talent in combat. The thirty-year-old didn't care about that, "Let's hurry back to the stronghold." I don't want to be in this kind of place anymore. ”

"Have you contacted Violent Spirit?" Fifty-year-old asked.

"Nope. He didn't feel comfortable letting my psionic energy into his body, so he couldn't join my communication network. The thirty-year-old replied, "But he will return to the base regularly, and I guess he will go back in a while." ”

"The ......," said the fifty-year-old, pausing suddenly, "wait—"

"What's wrong?" Thirty years old also paused.

"This item flags when it detects the presence of an unregistered living person in the vicinity." Fifty stared at the compass-like object in his hand, "You said the Turin doctor had been caught, right, but what about this mark now?" ”

He turned his head abruptly, his gaze shooting at me like an arrow, "There! ”

I was discovered.

Evacuate for the time being—the option only popped into my mind for a split second. I decided to fight them here. The doctor in Turin is not only the real goal of my trip, but also how I will get out of my nightmare in the future. I don't know why Violent wanted to arrest her or what he was going to do to her afterward, but I had to take it back. Obviously, my time is running out.

I'll have to dig a way out of their mouths to get to the stronghold before they storm back to what they call it. And once I retreat here, it will be difficult for me to find them again in the dreams of this terrain chaos.

The next moment, I rushed out of the corner. And everyone behind the thirty and fifty took out their guns. More than a dozen guns were pointed at me at the same time, and they spewed fire.

The fierce gunfire instantly tore apart the silent air of the dream within the dream.