Wearing wet clothes and tying up her wet hair with a Touch Tentacle, Clara walked cautiously through the corridor of the pitch-black abandoned school.
“This is the elementary school I attended when I was a kid.”
She needed to chat to relieve her inner unease.
“So it’s familiar, but completely different.”
“Is that school really abandoned?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not impossible. After all, it was just a country school, and that was over a decade ago.”
She had never gone back, nor did she want to.
Yet she ended up experiencing a “return to school” in her nightmare.
“It’s not strange that it feels familiar. Dreams are woven based on your memories,” Nyx explained.
“You mean… the Supreme Leader and President Qiexiya can read my memories?”
“No, it’s guiding you to reveal them yourself. A person cannot dream of something they’ve never seen. Even if there are truly bizarre things, they are inevitably a mixture of cognitions.”
Nyx’s explanation made Clara re-evaluate her surroundings. Although everything was shrouded in a terrifying and grim filter, every object was familiar, even if she had no memory of it.
“A Dream Walker merely intervenes, causing the dreamscape to develop in the direction she desires. Sometimes, long-forgotten memories also surface.”
Similar words had been explained before, so Clara didn’t ask further.
However, the corridor of this school was a bit too long.
If it was supposed to be spooky, nothing frightening had popped out for a long time. Even if it was punishment, there should be a goal, just like a game must have conditions for clearing it.
All there was was silence, the stillness of a world that only had Clara.
Clara was unsure what the Supreme Leader or Qiexiya wanted her to do.
“Where exactly does she want me to go?”
“This corridor is looping.”
“Huh?”
“The exact same class number appeared just now.”
“…It’s a ghost wall again?”
Back at the Fourth Calamity’s subsidiary company, Qiexiya had played the same trick.
Come to think of it…
The Fourth Calamity attacked Yuehai Resort, indeed as revenge for the subsidiary’s destruction?
That company building was clearly demolished by them themselves. How unreasonable.
“Treat it like an escape room. Find some clues from your memory.”
“Clues…”
Clara looked up at the class number on the classroom door.
“Then let’s go check the classroom I was in.”
“Isn’t it the first one?”
“No…”
Even as she said that, Clara couldn’t recall her elementary school class number.
No, it wasn’t just the class number.
Clara’s memories from before a certain point in time were very blurry.
“Nyx had a doubt earlier. Clara, have you undergone brainwashing surgery?”
“No.”
Clara answered decisively and explained:
“I have memories of both before and after the Modification… My memory confusion shouldn’t be related to the Modification surgery.”
When she tried to recall, Clara felt a faint headache.
“Naitemel’s Modification is based on the principle of voluntariness. My situation shouldn’t be related to the Modification surgery.”
“What the hell, this is supposed to be a dream…”
Whenever she tried to recall something, she had this reaction.
It was as if there was a wall of infinite height and width in her memories, sealing away her past memories, preventing even herself from peering behind it.
“If you can’t remember, then look through each room one by one.”
“Since the number of classrooms is finite, using this brute force method isn’t impossible.”
Perhaps having adapted to the dark environment, Clara’s unease diminished quite a bit.
She pushed open the door of a classroom.
“Huh!?”
The layout was the same as the previous classroom, but behind the desks sat full of people… dolls.
Dolls dressed as students all simultaneously “looked” at her as she entered the classroom.
Clara felt a chill run down her spine.
Their faces, woven from coarse hemp, had button eyes sewn on, and mouths embroidered with red thread that were brightly unsettling.
“…Looks like this isn’t my classroom.”
Since there were no empty seats, Clara had no need to enter.
As if afraid of disturbing these dead doll objects, she retreated from the classroom as if walking on thin ice.
When she turned around again, although it was still the same corridor, the atmosphere had become even more dilapidated…
“Nyx, has the environment… changed a bit?”
The entire town school was a wooden structure.
Wooden floors, wooden walls, wooden desks and chairs, and wooden… students.
But now, these wooden surfaces were covered in some kind of black substance, mottled and sparse, crawling all over the walls of the corridor…
“That’s mold, common on moldy wood.”
“But how could it appear all of a sudden…”
The air was filled with the stench of mycelium. She could feel the humid air eroding her skin, and even seemed to hear the sound of mycelium constantly spreading.
“This is a dreamscape; there’s nothing impossible about it.”
“…Then the next classroom.”
This time, Clara didn’t recklessly open the door and walk in.
Sure enough, the classroom was again filled with eerie wooden puppets, and still no empty seats.
There was no place for Clara.
“…Not this one either.”
Clara gently closed the classroom door.
But in the time it took to open and close it, the door was already covered in black mold.
“It seems opening the wrong door makes the dreamscape worse.”
“…Really?”
Although over a decade had passed, she couldn’t even remember her own past classroom…
Clara endured the headache to recall but soon gave up.
“Next one!”
“What am I scared of! Even if the dreamscape really collapses, the worst that can happen is death—”
Clara kicked open the door of the next classroom.
“Huh?”
As it turned out, this time was different.
Black mycelium had formed a thick, soft mycelial carpet, wet and slippery underfoot.
What’s worse…
Not long ago, at the Resort, Mossima, who came to support, had covered the rainforest with such a mycelial carpet in an extremely short time, punishing the lawless Moon Rabbits.
Why would Mossima’s mycelium appear in a dream?
“It means you subconsciously fear the mycelium that covered the rainforest back then.”
“So, it’s being used as material here.”
Clara felt that didn’t quite add up.
When she first met Mossima, it did make Clara’s skin crawl.
But now, she shouldn’t be afraid anymore.
In this classroom invaded by mold, there was a seat whose surroundings were still clean.
“Is that your seat?”
“I don’t know.”
Clara shook her head, but there seemed no other explanation for now.
Everything was indicating that she should check that desk, which hadn’t even decayed.
On the desk lay a cloth doll, palm-sized.
Clara picked it up to examine.
It was a girl doll.
The craftsmanship was exquisite, with button eyes sewn on just like those puppets earlier. The doll wore a miniature school uniform and had a single ponytail made of cloth strips, just like Lucia…
The moment she saw this doll, her heart began to pound violently.
A severe headache struck again.
“Th-this…”
Clara fell to her knees, clutching her forehead.
“Are you okay?”
Clara gritted her teeth and didn’t answer.
When she looked at the cloth doll in her hand again, the originally clean doll had become tattered, the button eyes dangling askew, the surface burst open revealing the stuffing inside…
It was writhing mycelium.
Above, a round white eye opened.
The tattered doll also looked at her, with its remaining “eye.”
Clara screamed and tried to throw the doll away, but found the doll in her hand had disappeared.
Instead, she was now wearing the same school uniform as the doll.
She had the same single ponytail.
Click—
Clara’s consciousness once again fell into darkness.