Rules-related weird stories: 4016

"Boom, boom, boom… …"

Under the violent impact of the air waves, the skin on Lin Yi's face rippled like the surface of a lake.

He felt as if his eardrums were about to be pierced, his ears filled with sharp, painful buzzing sounds, and he was pressed down so hard that he couldn't lift his head, his spine almost bent… …

"Don't resist! Accept the impact of the 'Sanctuary'! Its torrent will take you to every corner of the Arts Building!"

Terrifying air waves continued to oscillate, violently washing out in all directions, and the Watchman's body was once again shaken, exhibiting some 'stuttering' frame drops.

And Lin Yi's body also showed a tendency to be annihilated, with countless fine particles like flying dandruff floating out of his body.

Inside his body, the golden skeleton, as if cast in gold, had a layer of hazy aura floating on its surface, condensed and unyielding no matter how the air waves crashed against it… …

He kept his head down, looking at the time on the watch on his wrist, trying to relax some of the mental pressure and accept the impact of the 'Sanctuary'.

But this one glance down made him notice some strange patterns appearing on the face of his watch under the impact of the 'Sanctuary' air waves.

He seemed to recognize those patterns, as if he had seen them somewhere before.

After a moment of stunned silence, he suddenly remembered that the pattern now appearing on the watch face was the pattern of the giant clock face on the first floor of the Clock Tower?!

The marks on the watch face also perfectly matched the intersection points of the stars on the Clock Tower!

"This… …?!" Lin Yi's heart was filled with shock, but he couldn't say anything.

At this moment, another air wave crashed down fiercely, pouring into his spine like a thunderbolt!

"Boom—"

Lin Yi felt like he had exploded!

A white light appeared before his eyes, and his consciousness seemed to be violently pulled out of the familiar three-dimensional world by a pair of invisible giant hands.

In an instant, the scene before him collapsed like a mirror shattered by countless heavy hammers at the same time.

Space no longer followed any logic.

Originally straight lines twisted and缠绕 like mad snakes, devouring and splitting each other.

The outline of the Clock Tower was like waste paper crumpled into a ball and then forcibly torn apart, with bricks, glass, and steel beams suspended and interspersed in a way that violated gravity and structural logic… …

The black sky was like a canvas splattered with chaotic paint, with azure and crimson, pitch black and blindingly pale interwoven and rotating in disorder.

The clouds turned into monstrous beasts with bared fangs and claws, and then instantly melted into droplets of shimmering mucus, pouring down from the sky, only to suddenly turn in mid-air and shoot in various unpredictable directions.

His body was stretched, flattened, and twisted by invisible forces.

His limbs bent at unimaginable angles, his head swelled like a balloon, and his features flowed and merged wantonly on his face.

His eyes flickered with chaotic light, sometimes empty and lifeless, and sometimes bursting with chilling madness… …

His movements were no longer coherent, like a broken puppet being pulled around haphazardly.

Every joint creaked, as if it would fall apart in the next second, but it continued this deformed dance with a strange resilience.

He found that the stone slabs beneath him sometimes became like an undulating sea, and sometimes were covered with sharp saw teeth and bottomless ravines… …

The whole world became a surreal geometric figure filled with golden aura and brilliant white light.

All the edges of the buildings were composed of pure white lines, but they had all lost their original outlines.

Space seemed to have collapsed.

There was not a single decent straight line in the whole world.

The originally flat wall lines now resembled living vines, twisting wildly.

They intertwined with each other, forming complex knots that made people dizzy, as if to tighten the entire space… …

The tile seams on the floor, those originally parallel lines, began to branch out in all directions, like countless paths leading to the unknown, only to devour each other and disappear in the moment of intersection.

"Boom, boom, boom—"

Lin Yi's ears were filled with狂躁 wind, as if he had fallen into a huge, rolling whirlwind cave, being hit against the walls until he was disoriented and unable to find his bearings… …

Tunnels, countless tunnels, began to appear before his eyes, as if he were a speedster speeding through countless passages, twisting and entangling with each other, or filled with corners… …

His consciousness was expanding rapidly, like water flowing into a field, and then covering the entire field at a terrifying speed… …

Countless details began to feed back to him, and he felt like his brain was about to explode.

"Very successful… …" An ethereal voice sounded in his ears.

In these countless collapsing scenes, he seemed to see a hazy lamp, like the kind of LED lighting most commonly seen in operating rooms… …

"Very successful… …" The voice sounded again, but this time it was louder, "Rote learner… … Rote learner… … Can you hear me?"

The hazy light kept converging, eventually becoming a somewhat illusory figure, a… …golden, glowing, ethereal sphere, in which seemed to be the Watchman's blurred face… …

"'02'?" Lin Yi tentatively opened his mouth, the excess sound echoing and fading away in the form of "02… …2… …2… …".

"Rumble, rumble… …"

The violent wind sounded in his ears again, and the twisted and bizarre scenes before him seemed to show signs of collapse when he uttered the Watchman's designation.

This strange and somewhat hyperdimensional scene showed a tendency to reject him.

"It's me… …but don't focus your attention on me… …that will cause you to leave the 'dream'… …"

"Treat my voice as background music, now I need your 'consciousness' to leave the Clock Tower and go to the Arts Building… …"

The Watchman's voice at this moment seemed to have some kind of magic, with a bewitching power, urging Lin Yi to take action.

He slowly got up, glanced at his twisted body sitting in the dimension, and then flew away without looking back… …

His current state was very similar to the 'My World' when he repaired the gymnasium wall, but this time he left his main body without constructing a 'world'.

"When I repaired the city wall, even if I almost exhausted myself, I didn't encounter a situation where I couldn't return to my main body.

Could it be that the premise of 'safe dream building' is that you must build a world similar to 'My World'?"

In the dream, overlapping 'My World' with the real world forms a map, so you can advance and retreat, and there is no risk of getting lost.

Lin Yi seemed to have discovered some secrets about dream-weaving, but then he thought, even though he didn't know anything, his instincts had formed a framework from the very beginning, allowing him to act within that framework and preventing him from losing his way home.

Thinking about it, he couldn't help but break out in a cold sweat.

He needed to remember that when he hadn't yet developed a cognition of "My World," the first time he awakened that ability was when he was exploring the teaching building with Li Huiyuan. At that time, he almost crossed that corridor and went to the other side.

And at that time, the trend of him losing contact with his main body had already faintly appeared.

If he hadn't returned to his main body at that time but had gone to the other side of the corridor, wouldn't he have been lost in the layers?

There was also the time when he looked at the green belt. His consciousness continuously delved into the green belt, eventually reaching the intersection of light and shadow, vaguely seeing the outline of the behemoth entrenched within.

It wasn't until recently that he learned that the behemoth should be the "Shadow of Origin," but at the time he didn't know and almost got lost in it. If an enraged angel hadn't happened to intrude into his perception, allowing him to escape from the state of "dream-weaving" in time, he might have been lost…

His body shuddered violently, and he didn't dare to think further.

This journey had been fraught with crises… and many crises had actually been avoided by him inadvertently.

Sometimes, if he had taken a few more steps, it might have been a place of eternal doom!

He retracted his thoughts and began to spread his perception outwards…

“Theoretically speaking, wherever the aura of the 'Sanctum' reaches, it can become an extension of your perception…”

The Night Watchman's voice was like an echo in an empty valley, intermittent. Lin Yi knew that this was the Night Watchman's way of processing his voice—"backgrounding" the sound to avoid affecting the stability of his "dream-weaving" state.

In the dream-weaving space, the regular shapes had completely lost their original forms. The clock face on the wall of the first floor of the clock tower, the once perfect circle, was first stretched by an invisible hand, turning into a distorted ellipse, and then the center was concave, and the edges were warped, like a vortex being sucked into a black hole. Mysterious symbols rotated wildly in the vortex, and the original meaning of time seemed to have completely lost its meaning…

The four corners of the clock tower seemed to have been melted by high temperature, the right angles became rounded, and then they seemed to have been hit hard by something, the walls bulging outwards, forming a strange arc. The whole room looked like a deformed balloon about to explode.

He couldn't help but glance at his wrist. The watch was as sturdy as ever, seemingly becoming the only object in the dream-weaving space that still possessed geometric form and basic logic.

He was moving, but everything his eyes observed had become greatly different from everything in his perception.

Just then, the chimes of the "Sanctum" suddenly rang, and a pure white aura emitting golden light rapidly spread out in this twisted and collapsing dimension. As it spread, the originally illogical dimension suddenly seemed to be smoothed out by a pair of invisible hands, like a wrinkled bed sheet, but after being smoothed out, the wrinkles immediately returned to their original state.

Lin Yi seemed to understand something. The Night Watchman wanted to find something but kept his mouth shut, so the only thing he could do was to first find the corresponding logic in this layer of dimension, and the only way to do this was to capture a certain "path" through the aura released by the "Sanctum" and then conduct a carpet search.

And that aura… didn't seem to ring out every time the Night Watchman struck the bell, but rather rang out once, and then the aftershocks followed one after another, waiting until the last aftershocks were about to disappear before the Night Watchman struck the quantum giant bell again.

“Since I don't know what the Night Watchman is looking for, I might as well take this opportunity to explore the art building! I'll return here when it's 3 o'clock!” Lin Yi's heart was clear. The aura of the quantum giant bell was stirred up by the Night Watchman as the center, so at that time, he only needed to go back against the direction of the aura's diffusion.

So, when the next aura was generated, his mind turned, and then his consciousness drifted out, coming outside the walls of the clock tower!

Then he saw the viscous black colloidal liquid organisms crawling all over the outer walls again. When the aura spread out, many black colloidal substances were annihilated on the spot, but those that had persisted until now became extremely condensed…

Moreover, when his consciousness drifted, those black colloidal substances seemed to be able to sense it, constantly sending out "hissing" roars towards his location, and some even seemed to show the fangs of a solid-liquid hybrid state.

In the twisted layers, those small mouths were like the xenomorph's mouthparts covered in corrosive liquid.

Lin Yi could even sense some dangerous auras from them, like a deep-sea diver seeing large patches of twisting seaweed growing on the seabed.

“What exactly are those things…?”

The question popped up in Lin Yi's mind subconsciously.

The Night Watchman's "narrative"-like background voice sounded leisurely: “They are the descendants formed after countless iterations of purebred Nightwalkers… a type of nest-type Nightwalker with strong contamination ability…”

“Their difference from traditional Nightwalkers is that their formation means the appearance of a 'nest'…”

“Could this be the 'Serpent's Nest'?” Lin Yi asked softly.

The Night Watchman's voice continued to sound: “Their scale is far from reaching the level of a 'Serpent's Nest,' and around the 'Angel,' they have no chance to become a 'Serpent's Nest.' At best, they can only reach the hazard level of an angel statue… You can think of them as the most dangerous type of 'Super Nightwalker' among Nightwalkers, or a malformed angel.”

“But isn't the 'Serpent's Nest' a type of malformed angel? How can…”

“This is no longer within the scope of what you need to consider… I'm reminding you, don't let your will leave the art building. When you're near me, I can still cover for you, but if you wander around when you leave the clock tower, you will be attracted to the 'Angel.'

“Although the aura of the 'Sanctum' will suppress the activity of the malformed angel, the further away you are, the worse the suppression will be. Be careful yourself…”

“Dream-weaving is not an invincible state. After leaving the protection of the field, you are playing hide-and-seek with death.”

“Don't be careless at any time. The crisis of 'time'… is just one of the crises you will encounter in the process of 'dream-weaving'.”