Chapter 132: The Stranger (End of Volume)

【CLOSED FOR THE DAY】

A wooden sign hung outside the most talked-about clinic in Comfort Harbor scattered the morning queue into a throng of noisy people.

"Yes, yes, the doctor is unwell today—please go home," said the man with a page hammer at his waist, forcefully shoving the crowd back, but his deliberately muted voice never reached the whole group, and the armor plates beneath his robes held no震慑 over this band of sea rogues.

He was glad he hadn't spent his bonus like the sailors, on meaningless luxuries, but instead bought lighter armor: a breastplate with buckled straps and forearm plates, commonly issued to mercenaries who needed protection without sacrificing mobility.

The intent was to learn from battlefield lessons, yet its first real use gave him an edge in physical clashes.

In fact, the situation would have spiraled out of control long ago if not for the clinic owner's reputation; the patients were mostly sailors with limited time in port, and if they came again, it might be months later—unacceptable to them.

It was now nearly impossible to trace how the rumor spread. It likely began with the legendary bearded captain, William, who'd found treasure in the southern hills, who mentioned his friend's new clinic while recruiting crew.

In Comfort Harbor, rumors spread in two extremes: dull content died where it was born, unable to leave the room even without a single curtain; but once it found the right port and met the public's most urgent needs, it became piercingly contagious.

Some insect-like gossip slithered between cups and beds, drilled through wooden partitions and window lattices, tunneled through stone walls, and leapt from one shop to another along streets adorned with cheap glass.

Eventually, these baseless tales ended up on tables, trending as the next hot topic after the treasure hunt.

Many men who'd flaunted their wounds as proof of toughness were exposed within days, revealed to have visited the rumored clinic.

Meanwhile, those who came hoping to test the rumor gathered at the door of a storefront on the city's edge, absurdly clean, becoming witnesses, firsthand observers, and spreaders of the tale.

【The One Who Takes Illness Away in Sleep】

No more jokes about the "First Fast Knife of Comfort Harbor" or "Second Fast Knife"—barbers, the times have changed!

Those who heard it secondhand eagerly asked patients, and those who'd been treated kept replying: yes, exactly as rumored—even better.

It matched every fantasy of a high-end place: floors cleaner than a church's, top-tier white glass instruments, expensive liquor wasted to clean skin, incomprehensible diagnoses that sounded impressive, ritualistic procedures, and finally, a paper certificate no one could read—perfect for boasting.

And the heaviest point—the price was within reach. Treatment fees were held just above competitors' levels, but not so high as to be unaffordable.

How Kraft compressed costs need not be elaborated: all core drug and consumable tech was in his hands, glass suppliers were old acquaintances like Vechum, labor was mostly himself, perhaps only the metal tools were made by the blacksmith, and the building was bought outright.

Perhaps this was why Kup now faced such hardship. He desperately blocked wave after wave of people—those inside couldn't get out, those outside couldn't get in, and he'd prematurely experienced the agony of a hospital reception desk.

If he hadn't foreseen this and told Yin Feng to lock the interior gate, he'd have been crushed through the door with the crowd long ago.

This was a complete emergency; he couldn't even explain it to yesterday's scheduled patients, because he himself didn't understand what had caused the scene he'd witnessed last night.

While the outside world raved about the "miracle doctor who removes pain in dreams," only a few close to the "miracle doctor" knew that this legend of Comfort Harbor was haunted by nightmares.

It seemed a corresponding cost had been paid: the one granted the power to induce slumber had long lost the ability to sleep himself.

At first, Kup noticed Kraft radiating extraordinary energy—his blade and pen never stopped moving, ink and blood mingling, and Kraft had resumed his academy habit of staying up late with manuscripts.

Beyond endless work, the most relevant consequence for his attendants was the increased academic burden. Kraft even found time to supervise their accelerated progress, trying to expose them to clearly advanced material, like the latest anesthesia procedures.

But soon unsettling tendencies emerged—signs had been there since their shipboard talks linking past experiences to dreams, to his repeated orders: never approach or disturb him while he sleeps.

Though Kraft still meticulously followed his refined, ritualistic daytime procedures, the increasing frequency of revisions on his manuscripts revealed he wasn't as fine as he claimed.

Not to mention the sudden, violent noises from the master bedroom at night—far from leftover rats.

When Kraft moved out of the master bedroom and announced he'd sleep in a ground-floor room for convenience, even Yin Feng—who slept soundly and had heard no strange sounds—noticed something was off.

Yet no one questioned it; the two only knew Kraft rolled up his bedding and slept in a small corner room downstairs, now with a habit of locking the door from within.

The late-night noises followed Kraft's move—like a rat colony relocating—disappearing from the adjacent room, now lurking in the shadows beneath the stairs. Kup had glanced toward the source several times, but the silent pacing made him retract his foot each time.

The cold, salty sea breeze at night couldn't rouse his drowsy mind or eyes; Kup vaguely felt the hallway's darkness had gained the layered depth of southern hill nights—like murky water obscuring vision, blurring the ground-floor scene visible under thin moonlight.

He wasn't sure if it was the night blindness Kraft had mentioned, or some other visual anomaly. This sensation was shattered by another sudden crash of wooden furniture shifting—the pacing footsteps resumed, unceasing through the night.

Whatever Kraft was doing, it wasn't stretching his legs after writing.

Kraft noticed Kup's daytime performance had declined, apologized for the nighttime disturbances, yet offered no further explanation. Kup knew what kept him restless wasn't the muffled, almost negligible sound through walls, but some atmosphere—only felt by instinct—behind it.

Kup tried discussing it with Yin Feng, absorbed in her new lessons; the girl felt no resonance, only thought abandoning the master bedroom brought no convenience—just a hollow, ritualistic excuse.

Because Kraft's academic way of explaining had become so ingrained, this kind of forced justification failed to make the behavior reasonable.

He hesitated whether to ask—whether it was necessary, and from what position: just to resolve doubts about something unnecessary to understand?

The tangled thoughts finally reached an end.

Last night, another sleepless moment, Kup heard the familiar, unsettling commotion downstairs—this time unusually brief… yet violent.

He heard a sound like a breath from another world exploding at his ear—a dark liquid bursting through a weak dam, gushing forth just one wall away beneath his feet.

Without hesitation, Kup leapt from bed and reached the stairwell. Inside the locked, dim ground-floor space, widespread, unnatural transformations were occurring: a translucent, double-layered surface, like melted fat, coated everything.

He rubbed his bleary eyes, trying to refocus—but the illusion didn't fade; it intensified.

His mind had to accept it as reality: around the small room on the ground-floor edge, the scenery was undergoing varying degrees of edge-blurring displacement.

Like two sheets of paper forcibly pressed together, the second layer's strokes imprinting into the first, adding blurred, extraneous lines that made the original recognizable forms complex and alien.

Some force he couldn't comprehend was driving this process, pulling a damp, dark, barren layer closer to the real world—similar yet distinct images on two oil paintings merging into amorphous shapes, seeping into each other.

Objects, caught in unstable intersections, were subjected to chaotic forces—like semi-solid sludge in a storm, stretched into sharp, stalactite-like elongations.

This force was uneven, erupting from a central point outward. Whether vessel, chair, or wall, asynchronous transformation meant each part existed in a different state—like raw eggs beaten into a bowl, violently stirred, gradually disintegrating.

Kup watched wall cracks swallowed by rippling folds, glass containers' necks writhing like living snakes, the wooden door near the center swelling and contracting like a curtain in a windless storm, the metal doorknob dissolving into the wood grain, stretching into copper-colored filaments.

The scene emitted the familiar scent—the crawling Bai Guang, the floating surface and hunched shell-creatures from the mountain path—the peculiar aura of another world.

His lower-back scar throbbed faintly, reminding him how the dagger had appeared behind him, accompanied by this same aura—now, as this phenomenon was magnified countless times and laid bare before him, no learning or explanation was needed: he understood the principle—rapid immersion into another world, then return to the present.

What his eyes now witnessed was similar in speed, yet different.

All terrifying scenes unfolded in seconds, then swiftly subsided. Kup braced himself, mustered courage, and crashed through the warped wooden door—brittle metal filaments and curled, root-like stones made his shoulder ache even more.

At the epicenter, all man-made objects had lost all original form, sucked into a solidified vortex, fused and seeping into one another, glowing under moonlight through the broken window with an impossibly rich, complex, and deeply repulsive coloration like oil sheen on sewage.

A potted plant transplanted the day before to improve the environment—its roots still embedded in a half-elliptical pot—its stem fibers woven into the wooden frame and spiral rocks, its alien leaves, shimmering with fragments of transparent glass, hung from chaotic ripples of unknown origin.

He couldn't imagine what would happen if a person were caught in it. Even death would be mercy, better than witnessing a body torn apart yet still somehow alive, like this plant.

In the heart of the twisted chaos, he saw a frozen figure.

The figure retained human form; the spirit that commanded it seemed to have exhausted all strength, freezing mid-motion: alert posture, left hand grasping something inside its sleeve.

This eased Kup's heart slightly—not the worst outcome. Whatever had happened, at least Kraft hadn't been consumed.

He stepped cautiously, circling the twisted, suspended matter, trying to move Kraft out of the chaotic vortex with its jagged protrusions and into safety.

Murmured whispers rose beside his ear; Kup strained to distinguish them, finally hearing the few words flowing from Kraft's mouth:

"I understand..."

In the tossing, turning nightmare where reality and illusion were indistinguishable, Kraft finally comprehended the portion his own mind could explain.

Those dreams, the deep entities pressing in within confined spaces, the limited three-dimensional spaces where escape was difficult, the dim situations where vision was inconvenient—none failed to force the subconscious to employ means nonexistent in the present world.

Extraordinary memory, mental senses, plane traversal; through repeated use, they solidified into conscious cognition and neural conditioned reflexes, transforming from "non-self" into "self."

The wounds from the Face-Stealers were not the cause, but the trigger, giving a push to the accumulation of each embrace of the deep's gifts, deepening the connection.

The mind had long been altered; the subjective consciousness gave tacit permission to use these new senses, so of course it would not regard a mere scratch from a deep "kin" as "non-self" requiring cleaning and disinfection. This is the essence of so-called "forgetting."

The speed of sinking and rising accelerated, yet it always required a stable environment and time to initiate, and could never match the ease with which true deep beings came and went, not even reaching the level of the Half-Transformed Ghouls.

The ability Kup described—vanishing before one's face and reappearing behind—required Kraft ten times the duration to achieve in steps.

The mind, increasingly deeply connected to the deep, mixed with a body entirely a creation of the present world, forcing the process to accelerate. The more frequently nightmares induced the use of deep-related abilities, the deeper the connection became, which in turn spurred the mind to generate more nightmares.

A vicious cycle; or, regarding those changes within the mind, a positive cycle returning to its source.

But if it were only this, it would be a dead end.

Suppose the movement of those deep beings is like a fish leaping out of the water and returning to it, the two intimately united. Then the current situation is a failed dive by a land creature: no posture control, the speed of approach between planes pushed to the extreme, water splashing everywhere, a complete mess.

A mistaken plane shift; in the dream, it appeared to be an attempt to flee the Burrowers, the subconscious summoning all its energy to achieve a traversal like that of a deep being.

Yet the human body firmly dragged behind, failing even after exhausting the limit of endurance; all the uncontrollable "surplus energy" turned into spreading "splashes," generating some kind of inter-plane chaos, nearly dragging the body into it.

Kraft tried to move his body, but his depleted mind could not support it; the slight twitching of his muscles only caused him to lose his balance.

Kup hurriedly reached out and grasped his stiff left arm; both men cried out in pain simultaneously.

"What is this?" The squire, rich in experience with injuries, reflexively let go from the sharp pain, but quickly reacted and grabbed again.

Piercing his palm were several pieces of dark, dull stone, likely embedded in Kraft's left arm during the recent chaos; blood dripped down along the fingers holding the clenched fist in place.

The question received no answer. He helped Kraft sit on the edge of the bed; after a long silence, the latter suddenly began speaking of content that sounded entirely unrelated.

"I have heard such a story," Kraft said, pinching a shard of stone and trying to pull it out, but failing. "A man woke alone in a strange place where there stood a tower, a black tower."

"Do you need some bandages or warm water?" Kup wanted to urge him to rest, but Kraft did not look like someone who could be persuaded.

"In despairing loneliness, along a narrow path wide enough for only one foot, he climbed that tower without steps." Kraft continued the tale in a treacherous tone, seemingly merely to satisfy his own urge to express himself, or like a priest conveying some fable by the fire.

"He reached the tower's summit, pushed aside the stone slab blocking the way, and saw the moonlight... and beneath the moonlight, an endless familiar plain."

"Stepping onto the ancient road buried by wild grass, wading through rivers, the ruins of a stone bridge made him feel a sense of déjà vu."

"Finally, he entered a castle both familiar and strange, joining a brilliantly lit banquet where guests let out the most terrifying screams, fainting in terror or scattering in flight."

"The culprit stood before him within an archway, its alien, grotesque visage of abomination utterly inhuman."

"Did he escape?" Kup felt a chill that even thick clothes could not ward off.

"No. He walked to that archway and extended his finger; the monster also extended a bone claw to touch it. In that moment, memories avalanched upon him, the truth capable of destroying everything shattered him."

"That was..."

【A Mirror】

Two days later, the legendary clinic in Consolation Port opened as usual. Only a curtain blocking the other half of the main hall had been added; the beloved doctor's left hand seemed somewhat inconvenient, confirming the earlier claims of physical discomfort.

Everything was normal.