The scene in front of him gradually stabilized, and the golden palaces and spires of the City of Dreams appeared in front of Gawain once again.

Looking at the "incarnation" of the Eternal Sleeper coming and going in front of him, as well as this quietly running city, Gawain couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief in his heart.

It seems that the disguises he has set up in the network are working well, and the backdoors he has planted to infiltrate the network have not been detected by the Sleepers.

But think about it – before the advent of computer viruses, who knew what antivirus software was?

It's not once or twice he's sneaking into this world – this is the third time, and the direction of his actions in this psychic network is already clear.

Steal technology, plant backdoors, monitor the Eternal Sleepers' movements, and if given the chance, exert some influence on the Eternal Sleepers through this psychic network - so that this particular cult can continue to develop in the direction he wants.

Gawain bypassed the crowd and arrived at the area where the node crystal was located, and after connecting to the main channel, he first confirmed that the "experimental field" he left behind was as usual, and then quietly exited the secret connection, and began to search for possible technical information with the assistance of the node crystal.

Although he had failed to find effective information in the previous attempts, Gawain had not found nothing in this connection, and through parsing, learning the knowledge of the Eternal Sleepers that had been devoured, and the experience of stealing resources in the psychic network, he had vaguely figured out the principles and structure of the network, and he found that he could do more than he thought by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the network.

This network is directly connected to the mental world of each eternal sleeper, in other words, it can theoretically be directly connected to the thinking and memory space of every eternal sleeper - of course, the eternal sleeper himself knows the risks involved, so they will protect and isolate their conscious world when they connect to the network, so as to prevent someone from invading their mind through the connection, but in Gawain's view, their protection is obviously not enough.

Perhaps it was because the Eternal Sleepers did not expect that someone would infringe on their fellow Church members in their "own" network, or perhaps Gawain's own soul mutation was so severe that he had such a strong control over his subconscious world that it seemed to him that all the deceptive and covert shielding measures in this mental network seemed to him to be non-existent......

The node crystal that emitted a glimmer of light floated quietly in front of Gawain, he stared at the surface of the crystal, and the spiritual power gradually diffused, he could feel the truth hidden under the deceptive appearance of this crystal - a huge amount of data is exchanged, distributed, and reconstructed here, and the thoughts of countless eternal sleepers are undulating and turbulent at the bottom of the sea of data, some of them are strong, some are weak, those powerful thoughts are closely connected with the structure of the entire network, as long as they are touched slightly, there is a risk of triggering a network-wide alarm, And yet those weak thoughts......

They are like seaweed and zooplankton floating between the waves, lacking both protection and vigilance.

That is the lower level of the Eternal Sleepers, the most basic cultist group, and their greatest value in this network is to contribute computing power, and to bear the data pressure as a "buffer" when the network fluctuates violently: for this immature network, fluctuations are very common, and the Eternal Sleepers have chosen the simplest and most crude method to ensure the stability of the network as a whole.

Gawain carefully let his spirit continue to permeate, through the jump of the node crystal, he gradually figured out the context of those thoughts, and roughly judged what the strength of the master behind them was, and he also began to try to read the shallow memories of those thoughts - this is one of the most basic abilities of the Eternal Sleeper, although Gawain obtained this part of the knowledge by devouring, but it is the first time that he has really applied it.

He'll have to be very careful - if his infiltration of the network is revealed, God knows how aggressively the cultists, who have long been nervous about the "Extraterritorial Wanderers", will react violently, and maybe pull all the servers out of the line as soon as they get nervous......

A vague vision appeared in Gawain's mind, and he saw countless points of light flickering and circulating in the hazy outline of this dream city, most of them in the outer layer of the city, a few in the inner layer, and a few exceptionally bright points of light gathered in the large palace area in the center of the city.

He carefully dodged the points of light that were too powerful or too close to the center, and began to make contact with targets that seemed to be a good fit to attack.

He saw some shallow memories that flashed by—some of them were of strange people holding a rally, some of them were dark and desolate of the daily life of the ancient castle, and in these flashes of shallow memories, he suddenly saw a particularly special scene.

An elderly mage who lives in isolation, a paranoid man who goes astray, a man who has been lured into depravity by the Eternal Sleeper and willingly becomes a slave to dreams......

He leaned over slowly......

In the mountains of the southwestern border of the Typhon Empire, the ancient mage tower stood quietly on the top of a strange rocky mountain, and the dim sky at dusk shrouded the black roof of the ancient minaret, and spread all the way along the mottled outer wall of the minaret, outlining a hazy golden rim on the tower's body - but this light did not dispel the gloomy atmosphere of the mage tower in the slightest, but only made the tower seem to tear from the sky.

The mountaineers who lived in the villages at the foot of the mountain were always afraid of the mage tower located on the top of the mountain, they knew that there lived a terrible mage in the black tower, and every night, the figure of the terrible mage would be reflected from the highest window at the top of the black tower, and the ignorant mountain people always regarded the strange winds, lightning, and clouds in the mountains as signs of the mage's anger, and warned the village children not to go near the top of the mountain, lest they be bewitched by the mage and become a stone statue in the mage tower or a talking owl kept by the mage— That's pretty much what the mountain people imagined about magic.

In fact, their fears were not entirely unreasonable, for there was indeed a terrible, sane old mage living in the Black Tower, who was said to be from the imperial capital of Aldenan, who had been banished by the emperor for studying forbidden knowledge, who lived in isolation and had an odd temper, who never communicated with the people of the village, and who had several equally gloomy apprentices, who would only send his apprentices down the mountain to buy food or make some other trade, and in those who wore black robes, the villagers could often smell blood— And so the disturbing and terrible rumors about the Black Tower spread.

The black-haired, thin, thin Mary left the village under the terrified gaze of the mountain people, and the uneasy, speculative nonsense still seemed to hover in her ears, and she walked alone on the mountain path wrapped in her black mage robes and shielded from the cold night wind of the mountains with her hood.

There was only one way from the village at the foot of the mountain to the Mage Tower, but there were countless impulses to escape from it, and Mary looked up at the gate of the Mage Tower that had already appeared in sight, and couldn't help but look back at the road she had come.

She touched the metal clasp around her neck, struggled to withdraw her gaze, and slowly walked towards the mage tower step by step.

The door of the mage tower opened automatically, and the dark and heavy doorway made her subconsciously take half a step back, but in the next second, a thin arm stretched out from the darkness and pulled her into the door.

A hoarse old voice came from the side: "Don't grind, the master will be unhappy." ”

Mary nodded, quickly handed the basket in her hand to the servant who was as gloomy and senile as the entire mage tower, and then walked to the second floor of the mage tower with heavy steps.

The old mage in a black robe sat in the magic laboratory, the walls and floor around him were painted with strange and inexplicable blood-colored runes, light and darkness flickering between the runes, and the old mage himself slowly raised his head as Mary entered the laboratory.

His sparse white head was shriveled as if it had dried out, his wrinkled skin was full of the marks of the passage of time, and he looked as if he were going to die at any moment, but Mary knew that the old mage was long before he died—she even doubted that this old and terrible man would live forever and ever, even longer than she did.

"You're back...... Go to work. The old mage glanced at Mary with a cloudy gaze, his voice was low and slow, as if dreaming, with a peculiar sense of sluggishness, Mary knew that this was because the mentor was in some special state of "connection", she didn't know what this "connection" meant, because the mentor never let her come into contact with this knowledge, she only knew that it was a "spell" that was completely different from traditional magic, and when her mentor Daniel fell into the craziest stage of his life, he suddenly got this "spell", Then he began to study it frantically, intoxicated with it, and even angered the magicians of the imperial capital, and had to come to this desolate and backward frontier land......

Whenever he is in the "connected" state, the old mage's reaction will be so slow, but the slowness is only an illusion, his mind is still agile, his reaction can still be quite fast, if he does not want to be punished, the smartest option is to obey his orders immediately.

Mary complied, and walked briskly to the corner of the lab, where a dissected sample had been placed on the bench and was being kept in the best state of study with a spell, which Mary recognized as a monkey, a common monkey in the mountains.

She began to process the sample as her mentor had instructed her, and though Ben was still twitching slightly, she mechanically began her own movements—peeling off the flesh, connecting the nerves, and dipped in magical grease......

Halfway through these mechanical movements, she suddenly heard a strange noise coming from her mentor's direction.

She looked up in astonishment, and saw that her mentor's eyes had widened, and great fear was rapidly creeping over his old and shriveled face, and the old man, who had never only brought fear to others, seemed to have seen something indescribable that could scare him to death, and opened his mouth wide to make a strange breathing sound, and after two seconds of stiffening, the old mage suddenly straightened his arm, as if trying to block something in front of him, but he said something inexplicable:

"Stand still, I've got you."

That's not the usual tone of the teacher's voice.