Five more days had passed since the incident of Rest, and it was mid-November.

After returning to Beaver City, I had a quiet time. Hu Ma would occasionally come to the door and ask me out for a walk, but now he is still in the period of suspension, and the whole person is very idle, but he is idle. And has an unusual focus on my mental health issues and always wants to take me around in sunny places. Although I rejected him several times, he didn't seem to understand what it meant to give up. Once when he came to the door, Xu Shengxing happened to be there, and Xu Shengxing persuaded me to simply agree to him, and I really had no reason to refuse.

One day at noon, we were walking by the river. He walked ahead of me, and because his pace was faster than my cane, he would sometimes accidentally distance himself from me and stop to wait for me to catch up. Coldly, he seemed to have finally reacted, opened his mouth wide into the air and said "ah" dumbly, then turned his head and asked, "Xu Fu, don't you have to go to school?" ”

"It's still going to be up." I say.

He said bluntly: "But you seem to be very idle." ”

"The private high school I went to had such a rule." I replied, "As long as you can prove that you have mastered all the courses in the next stage, then you can choose to skip a grade or skip class to develop your extracurricular interests." ”

"So your grades are very good?" Hu Ma asked admiringly.

"Sort of." I say.

But I'm not as idle as he is, nor as idle as he imagined.

These days, I've spent a lot of time training on the secret technique of "turning pieces into wholes". The "Dream within a Dream" experience was really rewarding for me, and on the day I returned to Beaver City, I found that I had done nothing, and the bottom line of the duration of "Break into Zero" mode had increased from "nine seconds" to "eleven seconds". And in the process of training, it is easy to grasp the tricks. If in the past, I was just moving forward in the dark, and it was easy to walk into an inexplicable fork in the road, now it seems to have entered a straight path of light. There's no need to worry about falling and getting lost, just keep your head held high on the path of light. It's going to be so smooth that it makes me uneasy. Although I have also been successful in martial arts training in the past, "turning parts into wholes" is a technique of another dimension after all.

Perhaps I am not that far from the idea of recreating the body with the technology of "turning parts into wholes" that I once thought about in my nightmare in a small town.

It's just that even now, I can't mobilize the "blood power" that the last blood sacrifice ritual brought to me.

The power of blood flowed through my body like real blood, but it was as illusory as an illusion with no real effect. Sometimes I can't help but forget that this force exists. I suspect that this force has some kind of response condition, but I can't really figure it out without any prompting. It's clearly the closest real "supernatural power" to me, but there's nothing I can do about it. It's a feeling I can't put into words.

Speaking of supernatural powers, I have to mention another item - the dagger I used to kill the violent in my dreams.

The dagger followed me into the real world.

It is admittedly rare for objects in dreams to be brought into reality, but not to the point of incomprehension. Anyone can do this as long as certain "non-fixed conditions" are met. I heard that some advanced dream technicians are even able to forcibly carry out dream objects without meeting the conditions. It's just that this kind of thing is put on me, but it is inevitably puzzling.

Could it be because this short knife once killed my doppelganger?

Five days later, in the afternoon, I received contact from a doctor in Turin. She's settled here in Beaver City, and she's sent me her address.

She lives on the fifteenth floor of a high-end apartment, which is simple and elegantly decorated, but like a model house, it is clean and refined, but lacks the taste of life. When I saw her again, she was still lying peacefully on the bed in the bedroom with her petite body without limbs, and she looked at me with a friendly, or rather kind smile, given her age. Just with her blindfolded black cloth, no matter how friendly this smile is, it also has a lingering mysterious smell. I mentioned the matter of the short knife to her, but I hid the part where the doppelganger Xu Fu committed suicide.

She thought for a moment, then replied, "Although the conditions for bringing dream objects to reality are not fixed, almost all of them have a rule that can be called 'theme'. ”

"What is it?" I took the opportunity to ask. This is a dream knowledge I didn't know before.

"Fate." She said.

"Fate." I repeated.

"Or rather, relevance." She said, "This dagger has nothing to do with you, it's just an ordinary object that can be seen everywhere in dreams. But with something as the dividing line, it has an extremely strong correlation with you. It's this correlation that makes it chase you into the real world. ”

Chasing me - that's an alarmist statement. It was as if the short knife contained the possibility of getting up on its own while I wasn't looking, and then plunging itself into my heart.

But then things are clear. The "something" she said with something as the dividing line is undoubtedly the suicide of the doppelganger Xu Fu. At that time, Xu Fu, the doppelganger, had basically completed his personality independence, and the significance of his suicide through this was almost the same as that of my own suicide. If this kind of correlation is not close enough, then I really don't know what it means to be close.

Sadly, the dagger did not have the strong poison that the Turin doctor had added to it. Now that I think about it, I'm afraid it's because it was not a "short knife used to kill the violent", but only as a "short knife used by the doppelganger Xu Fu to commit suicide", chasing me to the real world.

It's just that such an ordinary short knife, even if it is a dream item, no matter how strong the "relationship" with me is, what can it be used for?

"What are you going to do with that?" She asked.

"By 'after', what do you mean?" I asked rhetorically.

"According to Tyrant, you are now coveted by the Church of the Earth, and I would like to know what you think about it."

"If what he says is true, then I will have to evacuate Beaver City."

"Even if you have to give up your current life?"

"Yes." I let myself say without hesitation.

"But in my opinion, you don't have to." She said, "As far as I know, some time ago, a withered believer set foot in Beaver City, secretly controlled the Beaver Pharmaceutical Company, and developed the so-called Spirit Transformation Medicine, but in the end, it fell short, and it also attracted the combat experts of the Demon Suppression Bureau to enter Beaver City. Now, the Blighted Cultists probably won't be roaming around Beaver City at will. Even if they covet you, they don't run the risk of being discovered by combat experts. ”

"Do you know why the Blighted Cultists covet me?" I could hear her outside the strings.

"They believe that people who are different from others even in the structure of their souls have certain differences from ordinary people, and that this difference can be reflected in certain rituals." She explained, "People who are good at art, people who are good at scientific research, people who have achieved wonderful things when they first enter the business world, and people who know martial arts as soon as they learn them...... Anyone who has risen to prominence in a certain field is likely to be targeted by them. This is especially true for a martial arts genius like you, who can be called a once-in-a-decade martial arts genius across the league. If I saw you in a dream within a dream, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it was a once-in-a-century event. There is probably no one alive in the martial arts today who can compare with you, and if you want to find it, you can only look for it in the history books. Of course, they don't know this, otherwise they might have taken the risk of capturing you, even if Beaver City had combat experts. ”

"You know their style very well."

"After all, I was one of them."

"But they are all madmen who are not afraid of death, and are they really afraid of the so-called risks?" I asked.

"They exalt death. But because of this, they have a romantic quest for death. They won't accept this kind of death if they were crushed to death by the 'demon suppression expert' because they were stupid. "In the words they like to say, the ultimate value of life depends not on the way you win, but on the form of destruction." ”

As she spoke, she seemed to have a memory, and said slowly, "We can't choose our birth, or even our lives. However, we can at least choose how our lives come to an end. ”

There was a faint sense of nothingness in her tone like smoke. At this moment, she seemed to finally reveal that she once belonged to the withered believers. But it's hard to think that she still has the roots of withered believers in her heart. It's like the starlight we see when we look up at the starry sky, some of which may have traveled countless light-years to come to Earth, and the stars that are the main bodies have been destroyed for one reason or another. The color of the withered believers she exudes now is more like the light cast by a ruined star.

"There's something I want to ask you." I digressed from the subject.

She came back to her senses, "What's the matter?" ”

"Are you visiting Beaver City for the first time?" I asked.

"Yes." She admitted.

"My reputation shouldn't be as well-known outside of Beaver City, but you recognized me when you first saw me." I looked at her.

"Since I had planned to come to Beaver City, I naturally had to do a round of research on the well-known people here before I got here."

"There must be other reasons."

"Yes. Someone has mentioned you to me in particular. She said.

"Who?" I asked.

She paused slightly, then replied, "Sonya. Shangri-La. ”