Chapter 1043
The Box of Nothingness
“Why did they keep that Mad King alive?” Arsen didn’t understand. “Is it just to prevent him from becoming a god? Even if the Mad King achieved the position of Heavenly Envoy, what would he do? Would he drive all the Children of the Moon out of the kingdom?”
But during the reign of the Swan King, the Children of the Moon had maintained a low profile. There were too many nobles who behaved inhumanely, to the point that even the Children of the Moon had become anthropomorphic. At that time, the Swan King could not have had such strange demands. In fact, the Children of the Moon and the Swan King were almost on the same side—at least they both wanted those nobles gone. If the Children of the Moon were in power, they would at least obey the Swan King’s orders and would not openly assassinate him.
“Perhaps, in the beginning, they just wanted to prolong his life,” Eivass speculated. “I guess… maybe they wanted to resurrect him, giving the Children of the Moon a chance to become high-ranking officials in the Iris Kingdom. Since the three Grand Dukes didn’t know the truth, they might have thought the Swan King’s death was related to the three of them. They might have seen it as an opportunity.
“It’s also possible they just wanted to forcibly transform the Swan King into a Child of the Moon. This is not an impossible feat… As long as the Swan King’s head developed adaptability to the Path of Love, even with only First Tier power, the Children of the Moon could use the ‘corpse’ of this head to create a complete Child of the Moon Swan King.”
“For the Children of the Moon, who have always craved a country of their own, this would be a way to fulfill their wish.”
He was genuinely guessing. Because Eivass’s missions were mostly fast-forwarded, and CGs were mostly skipped, he knew some plots that were either unskippable CG openings or those that, even with fast-forwarding, one could roughly understand by catching a few words.
For example, this mission occurred because a wild “Dream Weaver” appeared in the Iris Kingdom. Dream Weavers are those who are born with the ability to have lucid dreams. They are extremely rare, and most of them are Ordinary Persons. Although there are some Extraordinary Persons among them, they have mostly become Dream Traveling Monks.
Because they can have lucid dreams, they can distort their dreams at will and create an entrance to a specific area in the Dream Realm out of thin air. Through this entrance, Extraordinary Persons in the Material Realm can directly enter the Dream Realm by entering the dream. Dream Weavers can also often enter the Dream Realm themselves… Although the Dream Realm is extremely dangerous, they might also be accompanied by some friendly creatures, thus receiving protection. After all, they can enter and exit at any time. Therefore, some deceased individuals would also use Dream Weavers to relay messages to people in the Material Realm, or conduct illegal cross-border transactions that “do not comply with the principles of the Hourglass.” They could be called “immortal realm smugglers.”
In this mission, the protagonists needed to go to the Dream Realm to investigate something—the Crown Lord had suddenly lost responsiveness, and even the Pope could not summon Him. Thus, one of the Cardinals used his connections to find a Dream Weaver, hoping they could take the protagonists to the Dream Realm to check the situation. At that time, the mission used the Dream Realm passage opened by Arsen’s dagger.
During their first adventure, they did not find the Crown Lord—or rather, the Dream Weaver had mentioned before they set off that he hadn’t been able to enter the Dream Realm for a long time, and it had been like this recently, with “poor signal.” But the Cardinal naturally didn’t believe him… because no Dream Weaver would need a “signal” to enter the Dream Realm. As a result, when they tried to enter the Dream Realm, they understood why the Dream Weaver had said that—because the “dreams” of the entire Iris Kingdom were tied up.
People’s dreams were extracted by some power, twisted into vortexes, and unable to flow into the Dream Realm. Eivass remembered the scene very clearly—the end of the gray-white sky in the dream was distorted into a funnel-like rainbow color. It was like an aurora above dark clouds. This was actually a very dangerous signal.
The Dream Realm is a reflection of the Material Realm; it is shaped by the collective subconsciousness of all intelligent life in the Material Realm. Without these consciousnesses, the Dream Realm would be a void of chaos. Only when the first spark of intelligence was ignited in the void did the Dream Realm gain order and color, and then heaven and earth, sun and moon. It was like a virtual network built by the computing power of all machines—this is also why the Pillar Gods of the Dream Realm generally aim to maintain the stability of the Material Realm… at least they don’t wish for large-scale disasters or wars to occur in the Material Realm.
The current situation was that the dreams of the Iris people were being gradually stripped away from the Dream Realm by someone. In other words, someone was trying to firewall the subconscious network of the Iris Kingdom. So they were forced to return to the Material Realm to investigate the situation. As a result, they discovered that the incidence of “nightmares” within the Iris Kingdom was extremely high, so high that people considered it normal. Even travelers from other regions who had nightmares in the Iris Kingdom only thought it was because “the nights in the Iris Kingdom are unsettling,” and they had a bad night’s sleep due to fear.
But that was not the case. Every time people dreamed, their spirits were being extracted by some grand ritual. As is well known, Extraordinary Persons can recover Mana while dreaming. The principle behind those fast-acting Mana-recovery alchemy potions is basically to induce immediate dream sleep, skip dreamless sleep, and directly contact the Dream Realm at high intensity to recover Mana.
But even Ordinary Persons do gain some Mana when they come into contact with the Dream Realm. Strictly speaking, their souls cannot properly store Mana. Therefore, if a person constantly dreams, they will feel very tired. This is because the faintly surging Mana has caused slight damage to their souls, just as stones polished smooth in a river have also been “slightly damaged” to become smooth.
The grand ritual in the Iris Kingdom was designed to direct all overflowing Mana to one place whenever everyone dreamed. For Extraordinary Persons, this would not make any difference—the Ascension Ritual did not enter the Dream Realm through this passage, and ordinary Extraordinary Persons would not need to enter the Dream Realm, and their Mana was recovering normally. That is, Dream Weavers would occasionally feel “the network connection feels a bit unstable today,” but since they could connect correctly on normal days, it was not a big deal.
But for Ordinary Persons, this would increase everyone’s mental burden. Mana that they would not have absorbed before now had to be actively absorbed, and this process undoubtedly exacerbated mental exhaustion… leading to the mental instability of the Iris people. However, this indirectly increased the probability of Extraordinary Persons appearing—people who were half-crazy were usually more likely to become Extraordinary Persons, and prolonged absorption of Mana made their souls easier to be opened up as vessels. In Xianxia or Wuxia novels, it would be like those whose meridians were already unblocked, making their development easier.
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– From a theoretical standpoint, someone was using their brains to mine.
Once this was realized, the matter became serious. It wasn’t that it caused much irreversible damage to people… but rather, because it required the brains of the common people of an entire country to mine, and they didn’t know for how many years. With this amount of accumulated Mana, what did they intend to do?
Assuming that this “dream vortex” only opened for one month a year, and it only opened for ten years—that would mean a terrifying amount of Mana had accumulated, enough to easily blow up the entire Iris Kingdom! This amount of Mana was already enough to create a god out of thin air!
And later, the players discovered… someone was indeed creating a god. The Swan King, as a former Fourth Tier being, possessed the ability to write scripts and manipulate fate. He was at the critical point of ascending to godhood, and the grand ritual was halfway through… At this time, he could easily exert extraordinary abilities far beyond his usual. This was because he was a “Heavenly Envoy reserve” at this point. As soon as his Ascension Ritual was completed, he would attain the position of Heavenly Envoy.
“As a result, that Child of the Moon Count intervened at this juncture… He sealed the Swan King, who was a ‘demigod’ with only a head, in the ‘Box of Nothingness.’ It was a magic box filled with Void Power, which would cause the person inside to lose all thoughts and abandon all dreams with the press of a button.”
“And because the Swan King was not actually dead, he could hypnotize the Swan King’s head, whisper information to him, and make the unconscious Swan King have corresponding dreams, thereby using his subconscious to write the ‘script’… indirectly guiding the future of the entire Iris Kingdom.”
Eivass said slowly, “He only needed to press the button to turn the Swan King’s dream into nothingness, thus preventing the future from getting out of control.”
“—Ever since the Third Rebellion, the subsequent continuous rebellions were caused by the Swan King constantly having that dream.”
And at the end of that dungeon raid, when the Swan King, in a critical state, finally opened his eyes and woke up from his dream, his name changed. It was no longer “Box of Nothingness.” Instead, it was “Severely Damaged Void Vessel.”
That Child of the Moon Count had no idea how foolish and terrifying a thing he had done. Just one step away… the Swan King was about to transform from a Heavenly Envoy of the Path of Beauty into a Pillar God of the Void Path.
(End of Chapter)
