Chapter 579: Cultivation is Creation - Chapter 574: The Sunken Dream Palace

The air was different as they flew north, it changed gradually, what had been comfortable spiritual energy around them became heavier and thicker and it carried something in it that made the skin prickle unpleasantly. Below them, the landscape stopped being green forests and winding rivers and became gray wastelands with twisted, dead-looking trees scattered across them.

“The Nightmare Sea starts at the horizon,” Song Wei called out from his position at the front of their formation, his single arm pointing toward a wall of black mist that was rising up from the ground as far as anyone could see in either direction. “We descend before we reach it. Nobody flies over the Nightmare Sea unless they want to die.”

Hou Hongyun had done extensive research before agreeing to join this expedition and he had found detailed records in the Slumbering Scholars’ archives about the Sunken Dream Palace and its history, which stretched back more than fifty thousand years.

It had been built by a Dreamgod Ascendant named Shen Mohai who had become consumed by his desire to merge dream and reality together into a single unified thing, he had believed that the boundary separating the two wasn’t actually real, that everything in existence was ultimately just consciousness experiencing itself in different forms.

The palace had been his greatest achievement. A structure that existed in multiple states at the same time, physical and dream together, real and imagined at once. He had spent four thousand years building it and had pulled materials from dozens of different dream realms he had visited over his lifetime, and the architecture of the place was supposedly impossible by any normal standard, with corridors that connected to places they had no business reaching, and rooms whose interior dimensions were far larger than their outside walls should have been able to contain.

Then something had gone wrong.

The records became vague and unreliable after that point.

Some accounts said Shen Mohai had actually succeeded at merging dream and reality, but that the result of succeeding had driven him insane. Other accounts said he had discovered something deep in the palace, some truth about what dreams actually were, that his mind simply couldn’t process or hold. A few suggested he had pushed too hard against the fundamental laws of reality until they stopped bending and broke something in him instead.

What every single account agreed on was that he had disappeared, and the palace had partially sunk into the Nightmare Sea and become a ruined, corrupted place that killed nearly everyone who attempted to enter it. For fifty thousand years, cultivators had tried to reach its center and almost all of them had died trying.

Hou Hongyun had developed his own theory about what had actually destroyed Shen Mohai’s mind.

What if Shen Mohai had realized at some point that all those dream realms he had been visiting throughout his long life weren’t actually dreams at all, what if he had discovered they were real worlds with real people living in them?

Most dream cultivators treated the realms they entered as though they were playgrounds with no real consequences, they saw the people living in those places as constructs rather than as actual people, no more meaningful than characters written into a story.

Hou Hongyun had heard accounts of dream walkers casually destroying buildings, manipulating the minds of inhabitants, and even killing people without any hesitation because they believed it didn’t matter since none of it was real.

But if Shen Mohai had understood the truth of it, that he had been walking between actual worlds all along, that every person he had encountered was a real person, and that all the destruction he had caused across dozens of realms had created real victims who had suffered real consequences, then that knowledge alone would be enough to break most people who had any conscience left in them.

Cultivation didn’t eliminate conscience the way mortals sometimes assumed it did, which meant the weight of that guilt would be enough to crack even a mind as powerful as a Dreamgod Ascendant.

Hou Hongyun found himself wondering how many dream cultivators would stop what they were doing if they actually knew the truth. How many would develop heart demons or lose their minds from the weight of actions they had believed were harmless?

“We’re descending,” Xie Ling announced. She had said almost nothing during the entire flight.

Song Wei brought them down in a controlled spiral and as they dropped, the temperature fell sharply, and Hou Hongyun’s breath became visible in front of his face even though his spiritual energy was keeping his body warm.

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The black mist of the Nightmare Sea was directly ahead of them now, a vertical wall of darkness that seemed to push light away from itself.

They landed on a large stone platform that extended out from the wasteland, and the rock beneath Hou Hongyun’s feet was smooth from thousands of years of exposure to whatever came off that wall of darkness. There were symbols carved into the stone surface, protective formations that had been placed there at some point, though most of them had degraded far enough that they were no longer functioning in any meaningful way.

“Everyone stay close,” Song Wei said, his spiritual pressure expanding slightly outward as a reminder of where the authority in this group actually rested. “Before we go any further, I need to explain what we are dealing with here.”

Pan Jun was shifting his weight nervously nearby. The thin cultivator had been quiet for the entire flight, that made sense given what had happened between him and Sun Tao before they left, he had probably spent the whole journey questioning whether joining this expedition had been a fatal mistake or not.

Xu Feng was standing with his arms crossed, and his expression was interested rather than concerned, the earth cultivator seemed unbothered by the atmosphere pressing down on all of them.

Xie Ling had placed herself slightly apart from the rest of them and was staring at the Nightmare Sea with an expression that gave nothing away.

“The entrance to the Sunken Dream Palace is hidden by Night Domains,” Song Wei said, his face even more serious than it usually was.

Pan Jun frowned at that. “Night Domains stopped being a concern for me when I reached Oneiric Sovereign. They shouldn’t be able to affect any of us at this level.”

“Under normal circumstances, that would be correct,” Song Wei said. “But these are not the Night Domains you encounter during regular cultivation. They carry remnants of Shen Mohai’s power in them, warped by his madness and by the corruption of the Nightmare Sea over fifty thousand years. They have an awareness that normal Night Domains do not have. These particular Night Domains can trap even Lucid Lawbearers if we are not paying attention.”

He gestured toward the black mist, and Hou Hongyun looked more carefully at it and realized he could see movement inside. Shapes that were not quite solid, darker patches within the darkness drifting through it the way predatory things move through deep water. Each one pulsed with a rhythm that felt too biological, and they varied in size from a few feet across up to enormous voids that could have consumed entire buildings without difficulty.

The larger ones had features visible in them, what looked like faces pressed against something thin and almost transparent, mouths open, and hands reaching outward with fingers moving against nothing. Others showed fragments of different scenes inside them: burning cities, crowds drowning, battlefields, all of it in shades of black and gray.

“The last time I came to this place,” Song Wei continued, “we lost three people before we even reached the entrance. The Night Domains pulled them in, and we couldn’t get them back out. Their spiritual projections were destroyed and their physical bodies never woke up again. For all practical purpose, they were dead.”

Nobody said anything for a moment, and even Xie Ling’s face shifted slightly, something that might have been concern moving across it briefly.

Xu Feng was the one who spoke. “How did you actually get through the Nightmare Sea on your last expedition? There has to be a method, or you would never have reached as far as you did.”

Song Wei’s mouth moved in something that was almost a smile. “This is where our demonic cultivator becomes essential.”

The whole group looked at Hou Hongyun at the same time, who kept his expression neutral.

“Demonic dream cultivators,” Song Wei said, speaking to the group but watching Hou Hongyun while he did it, “form pacts with nightmare entities that live in the deepest and most corrupted layers of the nightmare realms. These entities are ancient and powerful and unlike anything a normal consciousness would recognize, but they have one property that is very useful to us, which is that other nightmare constructs are afraid of them.”

He pointed toward the Night Domains again. “When a bonded nightmare entity is present, it creates an effect that repels other nightmare constructs because they sense something stronger than themselves and they move away from it. When I came here the previous time, I brought three demonic cultivators, and their combined presence created a path through the barrier, though it was still extremely difficult, and we still lost people during the crossing.”

Hou Hongyun was nodding along but his actual thoughts were elsewhere, specifically on the question of whether these nightmare entities that demonic cultivators supposedly bonded with were actually entities at all, or whether they were something else.

Maybe cultivators from other worlds whose consciousness had become trapped in these nightmare realms during their own journeys and had warped into something unrecognizable over long enough periods of time. Ancient world walkers who had lost their connection to their home reality and had become something that was no longer quite human and no longer quite anything else either.

It wasn’t an impossible idea. World walking was dangerous, and he knew that from his own experience, if someone became caught between realities without the right techniques to anchor themselves, then whatever they were could fragment and reform into something that only barely resembled what they had been.

“Brother Hou,” Song Wei said, pulling him back to the present. “If you would show your ability for us, we can see whether it will be enough for the crossing.”

Right. They needed him to prove that he could actually push these Night Domains away from them, he had implied strongly enough through the fight with Sun Tao that he was a demonic cultivator and now he needed that claim to hold up when it was tested against something real.

The problem being that he wasn’t actually a demonic dream cultivator. He had no pacts with any entities. What he had was red sun energy, which was aggressive, domineering and treated other forms of spiritual energy as things to be consumed or pushed aside, but whether these Night Domains would respond to it the same way they responded to an actual nightmare entity was a question he couldn’t answer until he tried.

There was only one way to find out.