Ryan stood in front of the cave entrance once again, not moving immediately.
Because he suddenly realized he could no longer tell how many times this had been.
Dozens of times? Hundreds of times? Or even more?
A vast amount of fragmented memories lay like silt settled at the bottom of the sea—blurry, chaotic, and overlapping with one another. Sometimes he even had a strong illusion that his cerebral cortex was aching faintly, as if his skull were stuffed with the gruesome scenes of his countless deaths inside the cave. Yet, the moment he closed his eyes, those images dispersed like soap bubbles.
He was standing on the razor's edge of sanity and madness.
Just then, a voice suddenly rang out from the depths of his mind.
“...Don't go in.”
Ryan's body froze instantly.
In the next second, the glow of his left eye flared instantly. He instinctively took half a step back, staring intently at his surroundings.
“Who is there?!”
Silence reigned in his mind for two seconds before the owner of the voice let out an incredibly long sigh.
“We can finally talk... That wasn't easy.”
Ryan's expression darkened bit by bit. He was all too familiar with this voice—so familiar that he almost gritted his teeth as he uttered, “Chris.”
“It's me.”
The air suddenly fell silent.
Ryan slowly clenched his fists, his gaze as cold as ice.
If there was anyone he wanted to settle scores with most in this lifetime, Chris was definitely in the top three. From the conspiracy in East Port to the trap of the White Door, and finally to this dead end of a dream. Looking back now, he had been like a puppet controlled by threads, and Chris was the puppeteer hiding behind the scenes.
“You still dare to show yourself?” Ryan sneered in his mind.
“Why wouldn't I dare?” Chris retorted. However, his voice lacked the smug, calculating tone of the past, leaving only a hollow, shell-like numbness.
“I thought you would keep hiding from me.”
“Hide?” Chris suddenly laughed, a strange and raspy sound. “Do you have any idea... how close I came to being driven completely insane by you just to bypass the memory block and speak this sentence to you?”
Ryan frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Literally,” Chris said, his voice terribly hoarse. “You have died too many times.”
Ryan's pupils contracted slightly.
“With every loop, the Lantern within you instinctively tries to record your death,” Chris continued, a faint tremor in his tone. “And each record brings back some residue of sanity. Under normal circumstances, these garbage memories would be suppressed into your subconscious. But you've died too frequently... so frequently that your vessel of consciousness has begun to leak everywhere.”
Ryan fell silent, pondering the truth of these words.
Seeing him hesitate, Chris added, “Did you... see yourself in the deepest part again?”
Ryan whipped his head up. “How do you know that?”
“No kidding,” Chris spat in annoyance. “Because you've already gone in and died over a thousand times with those short-lived companions of yours from the outside!”
“...How many?”
“To be precise, about one thousand six hundred and seventy-three times,” Chris repeated. “There might be an error margin of a few dozen times, since even I lost count toward the end. Every time you go in and get dissolved, my spiritual body gets stuffed with your ashes. Do you think I'm having a good time?”
One thousand six hundred and seventy-three times.
The air fell into a complete, dead silence.
Ryan stood in place, silent for a long time. This number had completely exceeded his range of comprehension.
What did that mean? It meant that on this bone beach, he had been swallowed by that cave, dissolved by time, and bloated to bursting by memories over a thousand times.
And yet, prior to this, he had been completely unaware, believing every time he woke up was the first. This silent terror was far more destructive to one's sanity than directly facing any evil deity's ritual.
“How is that possible...” Ryan murmured. “Why don't I remember?”
“Because you died completely every single time. Dead men don't remember, obviously,” Chris said coldly. “Only a bit of residue can be brought back. That's why you feel this place is familiar and that something is off, yet you can never recall everything.”
Ryan closed his eyes, forcing down the spasm rising in his stomach. Suddenly, he caught a loophole. “If I can't remember, how can you keep count?”
His mind fell silent for two seconds.
“I'll tell you later. Don't be so distrustful of me. You think I'm the Chris who plotted against you, but in truth, even I don't know if I can be considered 'Chris' anymore.”
Ryan's brow furrowed deeper. “What do you mean?”
“Because a long time ago, I was already sliced into pieces many times,” Chris said in a matter-of-fact tone, speaking words that made one's skin crawl. “There was something wrong with the original me. The more vicious version of me, who gained the upper hand, left me in the dream while he went to reality, and another part of me was lost somewhere unknown.”
“Then, when this soul of mine left in the dream followed you to escape, it couldn't withstand the shock of the occult forces and split yet again.”
Chris's voice carried a hint of neurotic self-deprecation. “Right now, there are probably four Chrises in this world. Do you understand? Even my own soul is incomplete.”
Ryan felt his scalp go numb.
“You're saying... you're not even complete?”
“Of course not. If I were complete, I would have gone mad long ago. It's precisely because I'm shattered enough that I can barely maintain my sanity,” Chris continued. “So the me you're hearing right now is just one of the more normal pieces. As for the rest... it's hard to say.”
“But it doesn't matter. Once we get out of this damn place, I will definitely kill him first.”
Ryan's eyelids twitched violently. “Kill whom?”
“The me in reality,” Chris's voice grew increasingly dangerous, laced with heavy resentment. “That damned beast... How dare he discard me in the deepest dream layer like a doormat? For hundreds of years, I couldn't even find a single person to talk to. What does he take me for? Leftover trash from a ritual?”
Ryan quickly barked in his mind, “Stop! Don't go crazy!”
“Oh.”
Chris fell silent for two seconds, instantly snuffing out his malice and returning to his lifeless, exhausted tone.
Ryan's lips twitched as he looked back at the bone cave in the distance.
“So, is that place really a dead end?”
“Obviously,” Chris answered with absolute certainty. “The smarter you try to be, the faster you die. The more you try to understand it, the more thoroughly you dissolve. The best way is to stay far away from it.”
Ryan remained silent for a long time before slowly asking, “What do we do now?”
This time, it was the Chris in his mind who fell silent.
Only after a good while did he speak in a low, raspy voice that was almost pleading:
“First of all... don't go back in. Seriously.”
“If we keep dying, we really won't make it in time.”
Ryan frowned slightly. “Won't make it in time for what?”
Instead of answering immediately, Chris countered with a question, “You've woken up so many times. Haven't you noticed anything wrong with this place?”
“Noticed what?”
“Look up at the sun.”
Ryan was taken aback, then instinctively looked up.
High above the thick gray fog, the pale, dim sun indeed seemed slightly different now. He had previously assumed it was a visual illusion caused by his frequent deaths, but looking closely now, the sun's position was higher than when he had first woken up.
The cold air that originally clung to him like bone-deep rot also seemed to have a faint hint of dry heat mixed in.
“Time is passing, Ryan. And it's passing faster than you think,” Chris said softly. “The rules of this domain have been distorted. Every time you die in here, a whole day passes in the real world outside.”
Ryan's pupils contracted violently. “What did you say??”
“When we were dragged in, according to the original timeline, it was the winter of 1860.”
Chris paused, his voice sounding exceptionally clear yet exceptionally cold in Ryan's silent mind:
“But now, it is already almost the autumn of 1864 out there.”
“If you go back in to die again, once the real temporal node passes... you will truly never be able to return.”
Rate on N.U.
