Volume 5: Bottomless Sinkhole Chapter 269: Monster in Nightmare
Before Ke Lan and the others could react, it disappeared into the shaft.
"Who was kidnapped?" The hound turned his head and asked.
"It's Cao Feng." Zhuo Ligetu had already unzipped the two body bags he had snatched back and dragged out Ivan and Asano Akira, who were still unconscious.
"Then...should we chase them?" Layton looked at Hound and Ke Lan hesitantly. The meaning of his words was obvious: Cao Feng and Martin were not his own people after all. Risking his life for them was really a bit...
“Even if we don’t chase it,” the hound said in a deep voice, “it will definitely come back… If we don’t kill this monster, we won’t be able to live in peace.”
"From this brief confrontation, at least we got some very useful information," Ke Lan said, "The monster's defense shouldn't be too strong, otherwise it could have taken the bullet head-on without having to use Martin's body to block it ."
"Humph, that's the best." The hound snorted coldly, "A monster that can be killed by a gun is a good monster."
"By the way, old dog, can you smell that guy?" Ke Lan raised his head, glanced at the dark shaft above, and asked.
"...It's strange," the Hound frowned and rubbed his nose vigorously. "Since I woke up, my nose seems to have stopped working. Everything I smell is dull... It's like someone blocked my nose with two pieces of filter cotton."
Ke Lan looked at the hound strangely, then walked forward, smeared some of Martin's blood on the ground with his index finger, got in front of the hound, and asked, "Where's the smell of blood? Can you smell it?"
"Yes, I can..." The hound nodded, "But... I can't find the direction . I can smell the scent, but if you want me to follow the scent to track down the monster, I can't do it."
"Could it be that your sense of smell is disturbed? Just like that circular ice track looks straight no matter how you look at it?" Layton interrupted.
"It's possible... Damn, why is this place so weird? I can't even trust my own eyes and nose..." the hound complained.
"Sensory interference...vision, smell..." Ke Lan pondered. He always felt that there seemed to be something he had not considered, but for a moment he could not think of what details he had missed.
At this moment, Ke Lan suddenly felt someone tugging at his sleeve. He turned around and saw Qin Zhao with her head down, her body shaking constantly. Her breathing was rapid, and her chest was rising and falling rapidly.
"What's wrong?" Ke Lan was a little surprised. Although the monster just now did have a strong impact on the inexperienced rookie hunter, judging from the qualities Qin Zhao had shown along the way, her courage should not be so poor... Could it be that her previous calmness was just an act, and that strange monster happened to be the last straw that broke the camel 's back?
"It...that thing...I...I've...seen...that...monster...before..." Qin Zhao clenched his fists and uttered these few words intermittently from between his teeth.
"What did you say?!" The hound was startled and walked over quickly. "You said you saw it?! That thing? Where is it? Which ruins?"
"...It's not in the ruins...it's...in the dream." Qin Zhao replied.
"In a dream?!" The hound was stunned. "Wait a minute, didn't you say you couldn't remember anything from your dream? Didn't you suddenly remember it after you saw this monster?"
“No, no, no…” Qin Zhao shook his head repeatedly. “I mean the dream I had before, when I was probably only eleven or twelve years old… out of curiosity, I watched a few horror movies that my friends downloaded from the Internet… and then I had a nightmare… That thing was exactly the same as the monster I encountered in my nightmare…”
"The monster in your childhood nightmare has appeared in the real world..." Ke Lan pondered, "Could it be that you remembered it wrongly? Is the memory too vague to cause a deviation?"
"No, because the impression was so deep, I remember it very clearly... Especially those eyes, I dreamed about them more than once..."
Ke Lan and the hound looked at each other, the latter's eyes twitched involuntarily a few times, and he said slowly: "No way..."
"Do you think the monsters in the ruins would suddenly appear in the dream of an eleven or twelve-year-old child who has never been exposed to anything related to the Alpha civilization?" Ke Lan asked back.
"But, but this is also..." The Hound wanted to refute, but found that he could not come up with any reason.
"When we were on the ice track, I already felt something was wrong." Ke Lan said, and suddenly stretched out his hand to cover the hound's eyes, took out a piece of compressed biscuit from his pocket, bit open the wrapper with his teeth, and put it under the hound's nose, "Old dog, can you smell what I'm holding in my hand?"
"I..." The hound paused, then said with some difficulty, "I can't smell it. I can't smell anything."
"You can smell blood because you know it is blood. You have the memory of the smell of blood in your brain. You know what blood should smell like... so you can 'smell' it. But for things you don't know, your senses are completely dysfunctional. What does this mean? I don't need to explain it to you, right?"
Ke Lan continued, "Also, some things in this relic are both unfamiliar and familiar to us... Whether it's the stone chamber, the stone platform or the ice road, we have actually seen them before. And those red flesh worms, because we are afraid of them, they also appeared..."
"But the details of this scene..."
"This is a stitched-together world. All the details come from the memories of the nine of us... It's just that it's well disguised. For each of us, there are too many completely unfamiliar things here, so we think this is a real world. But if we merge the nine of us, we will find that everything here is pieced together from fragments of our memories... The ice road comes from the glacial ruins, the red fleshworm comes from Leviathan, and the monster comes from Qin Zhao's childhood nightmare." Ke Lan said seriously, "And the reason why the monster took hostages is just because we 'thought' it would do so."
"Then we..."
"We are still in a dream, a dream within a dream, just like a Russian nesting doll." Ke Lan pursed her lips and said, "In fact, we haven't woken up at all."
