Chapter 392

"Tch, violent woman!"

Looking up at the night sky blanketed with fragments of dream-world creatures, the Scorpion Chief couldn't help but sneer, then gestured with a finger toward the puppet crawling out of the box.

"Your turn… take a look at every dream-world creature she missed."

Upon hearing the tall, thin man's words, the pale puppet, who had been staring at Li Ang, nodded, its slender body straightening in an unnaturally awkward manner, then mimicking the Scorpion Chief's motion, it tilted its head upward toward the blood-red sky.

"Roar!!!"

At the very moment the pale puppet raised its head, countless tiny black dots suddenly appeared across the sky, thickly carpeted with sharp crimson hairs.

Even though the Red-Haired Chief's killing efficiency was astonishing—countless dream-world creatures were sliced into fragments every second as they passed through the crimson hair-net—the River of Nightmares seemed endless, continuously spewing forth new nightmares.

Under the relentless, fearless assault of the infinite dream-world creatures, the crimson sky barrier stretched by the Red-Haired Chief eventually developed gaps; some elite nightmares, denser in form and more grotesque in appearance, battered and bleeding, broke through the barrier of 【Blood-Slaying Crimson Hairs】 and squeezed into reality, drenched in blood.

Snarling ghosts wrapped in gray mist, headless knights wielding whips made of spinal bones, towering skeletal colossi built from fragile bones, beautiful women clad in thin robes walking through snowstorms… one after another, figures from stories and nightmares appeared before Li Ang's eyes, real and undeniable.

…

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These things… I feel like I've heard of them somewhere before…

Watching the dream-world creatures that had breached into reality and were now rushing desperately toward the capital, Li Ang's eyes darkened with thought.

The snarling ghost wrapped in gray mist… seemed to be the monster from folk tales of the Black Forest Duchy, fond of wandering wildernesses and preying on lost travelers; the headless knight wielding the long whip… appeared to be the emissary who harvested the spines of evildoers and offered them to Death;

The skeletal colossus also seemed tied to some legend—likely formed from the corpses of those who starved to death during famine and war, devouring anything edible; and the beautiful woman with translucent pale skin who arrived with the blizzard… had been part of ancient tales in the Northern Kingdom for countless generations.

Compared to the dream-world creatures easily shredded by the Chief, these nightmares that had successfully breached into reality seemed vastly more famous.

So for these dream-world creatures, the more people knew of them—or believed in their existence—the easier it was for them to appear in nightmares, and the stronger the dream-world entities they spawned became?

"Squeak."

As Li Ang pondered the origins of these dream-world creatures, the pale puppet covered in thorns shook its head, its ball-joints grinding stiffly as its unsettling hollow gaze locked onto the foremost snarling ghost.

"Squeak!" "Squeak!" "Squeak!"

The sound of puppet joints twisting echoed again—but this time, it did not come from beside Li Ang; it came from the night sky above the capital.

To Li Ang's astonishment, the ghost wrapped in hazy gray mist, the one that loved to prey on lost travelers, suddenly solidified into a physical form—and collapsed like a puppet, limp and lifeless.

Next, the headless knight riding the skeletal horse also fell, his armor scattering in pieces, revealing arms and legs as pale as the puppet's, lifeless and dangling amid the broken plates.

Even the skeletal colossus, taller than the capital's bell tower, had somehow transformed into a towering pale puppet—utterly motionless; any slight movement would pierce its body with thorns, causing torrents of blood and agonized roars.

"Fewer slipped through than I thought… Let's kill a batch first!"

After glancing at the nightmares turned to puppets in the sky, the tall, thin man muttered, pulled a slender stiletto from the box, and stabbed the silent puppet beside him—clean, swift, piercing straight through the heart!

Immediately, as if triggering a chain reaction, the elite nightmares "captured" by the pale puppet's gaze all shuddered simultaneously, their chests suddenly splitting open with tiny diamond-shaped wounds, gushing forth torrents of crimson blood.

Whether the gray-mist ghost, roughly human-sized, or the hundred-meter-tall skeletal colossus—all of them screamed in despair the instant the tiny wound appeared, dying instantly, their bodies crumbling and collapsing into piles of floating debris suspended in the night sky.

"Keep watching—don't miss any!"

After instructing the puppet still gazing upward, the Scorpion Chief yanked out the stiletto with a wet *plop*, then, holding the still-dripping blade, rummaged through his box, muttering without turning around:

"You're Li Ang, right? The nightmare that approached you before I arrived—its words were nonsense, but one thing it said wasn't wrong."

Pulling a bottle the size of a human head from the bottom of the box, he uncorked it and poured out its contents—black-gold beetles—then extended his hand toward Li Ang, his expression cold:

"Give me Olivia's hair, then go wherever you please—this isn't a place for a Level Three Cleaner like you!"

"…"

After glancing at the steady, statue-like hand before him, Li Ang couldn't help but look up at the sky.

The corpses of the headless knight and the skeletal colossus still floated in the capital's night sky; this Scorpion Chief demanding hair couldn't be a nightmare in disguise… but still…

"Sorry, my mission is to follow you and notify the Chief the moment I find the Nightmare King."

"Tch… So why not just hand me the hair? What use is a burden like you staying?"

"It's none of my business—but I trust the Chief's judgment. She told me to stay, so there must be a reason."

"Heh, suit yourself."

Glancing at the crimson hair coiled around Li Ang's shoulder, the Scorpion Chief's branch chief sneered, then hurriedly emptied all the beetle-sized black-gold beetles from the bottle, then pinched out the palm-sized mother beetle and stuck it to his chest.

"Hss! Hss! Hss!"

After completing this sequence, the scattered black-gold beetles on the ground let out piercing shrieks; after they had cried for a moment, he pinched the antennae of the mother beetle on his chest, and the palm-sized pure-gold mother beetle joined in the chorus.

Instantly, the scattered black-gold beetles, as if receiving orders, surged like a tide across the dock, each one latching onto a sleeping human—even one crawled onto Li Ang himself.