Chapter 132: The Stranger (End of Volume)

【CLOSED FOR THE DAY】

A wooden sign hung at the door of the most talked-about clinic in Comfort Harbor scattered the morning queue into a noisy crowd.

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

He was grateful he hadn’t squandered his bonus like the sailors, spending it on meaningless luxuries, but instead bought lighter armor: a breastplate with buckled straps and forearm guards, standard issue for mercenaries who needed protection without sacrificing mobility.

The intent was to learn from battlefield experience—but its first real use gave him the upper hand in physical clashes.

In truth, the situation would have spiraled out of control long ago if not for the clinic owner’s reputation. The patients here were mostly sailors, with limited time in port; if they missed this chance, they might not return for months—and that was unacceptable to them.

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

In Comfort Harbor, rumors moved in two extremes. Boring content died where it was born—even without a single curtain barrier, it couldn’t leave the room. But once it found the right harbor 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 lined with cheap glass.

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

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

Meanwhile, those who came seeking to test the rumor gathered at the door of a spotless shop on the city’s edge, becoming eyewitnesses—and thus spreaders—of the tale.

【The Man Who Takes Illness in Sleep】

No more jokes about the First or Second Fastest Knife in Comfort Harbor—barbers, the times have changed!

Those who heard the rumors kept asking 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 piece of unreadable paper to take home and brag about.

And most importantly—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 didn’t need explanation: he held the core tech for drugs and consumables, the glass supplier was his old acquaintance Vechum, labor was mostly himself, and perhaps only the metal tools were forged by the blacksmith’s shop, and the building was bought outright.

This was likely 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 receptionist’s job.

If he hadn’t foreseen this and told Yin Feng to lock the inner gate, he’d have been crushed through the door along with the crowd.

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 illness in dreams,” only a handful of people close to the “miracle doctor” knew that the legend of Comfort Harbor was being haunted by nightmares.

It seemed the cost of granting the ability to induce sleep was that the giver himself had long lost the ability to sleep.

At first, Kup noticed Kraft had gained extraordinary energy—his blade and pen never stopped moving, ink and blood mingling, and Kraft had resumed his academy habit of working late into the night with manuscripts.

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

But soon unsettling tendencies emerged—signs had been there since the shipboard talks about past experiences and dreams, and his repeated orders never to disturb him while sleeping.

Though Kraft still meticulously followed his elaborate, ritualistic daytime routine, the increasing number of revisions on his manuscripts showed he wasn’t as fine as he claimed.

Not to mention the sudden noises from the master bedroom at night—definitely not leftover rats from when they moved in.

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 nothing strange—sensed something was off.

But no one questioned it. The two only knew Kraft rolled up his bedding and slept in a small corner room on the ground floor, and developed a habit of locking the door from the inside.

The late-night noises followed Kraft’s move—like a rat colony relocating—disappearing from the adjacent room and now haunting the shadows beneath the stairs. Kup had glanced toward the sound several times, but the silent pacing made him retract his outstretched foot.

The cold, salty sea breeze couldn’t wake his drowsy mind or eyes. Kup vaguely felt the hallway’s darkness had gained the layered depth of southern hills at night—like murky water obscuring vision, making the ground-floor scene, barely visible under thin moonlight, ripple and blur.

He wasn’t sure if it was the night blindness Kraft had mentioned, or some other non-visual cause. This sensation was interrupted again by a sudden crash of wooden furniture shifting—then the silent pacing 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, but still offered no further explanation. Kup knew what kept him awake wasn’t the muffled, negligible sounds through the walls, but some atmosphere—only felt by instinct—behind them.

Kup tried discussing it with Yin Feng, absorbed in her new lessons; the girl felt no resonance, only thought giving up the master bedroom brought no convenience—it was just a ritualistic excuse without merit.

Because Kraft’s academic way of explaining had become so ingrained, this kind of forced justification only made the behavior seem more suspicious.

He hesitated whether to ask—whether it was even necessary, and by what right or role he should ask. Was it worth raising doubts about something he didn’t need 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 intense.

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

Without hesitation, Kup leapt from bed and reached the stairs. The locked, dim ground floor was undergoing widespread, unnatural transformations: a translucent, double-layered surface, like melting grease, coated everything.

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

His mind had to accept it: reality itself was changing. Centered on the small room at the ground floor’s edge, the surrounding scene was undergoing varying degrees of edge-blurring and displacement.

It was as if two sheets of paper had been forcibly pressed together—the second layer’s strokes imprinted onto 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, so that similar yet different elements from two oil paintings melted into each other, becoming amorphous.

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

This force was uneven, erupting from a central point outward. Whether vessel, chair, or wall, each part transformed asynchronously—like raw eggs beaten into a bowl, violently stirred until they lost cohesion and began to break apart.

Kup watched as wall cracks were swallowed by rippling folds, glass containers’ necks twisted like living snakes, the wooden door near the center swelled and wrinkled like a curtain in a windless storm, and the metal doorknob dissolved into the wood grain, elongating into copper-colored filaments.

The scene emitted a presence he recognized—the same eerie aura from the white-glowing writhing forms, the floating surfaces on mountain paths, and the hunched, armored figures—a supernatural essence from another world.

His lower-back scar throbbed faintly, reminding him how the dagger had appeared behind him, accompanied by this same aura. Now, magnified a thousandfold and laid bare before him, he understood its principle without learning or explanation: rapid immersion into another layer, then return to the real world.

What his eyes now witnessed was similar in speed—but different.

All terrifying scenes unfolded in seconds, then vanished just as quickly. Kup braced himself, mustered courage, and slammed open 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 permeated, glowing under moonlight through the broken window with colors as rich, intricate, and deeply repulsive as oil sheen on sewage.

A potted plant transplanted two days prior to improve the environment—its roots still embedded in half an oval pot—its stem fibers woven into the wooden frame and spiral rocks, its translucent, glass-like leaves shimmering with broken fragments, hanging from chaotic ripples whose origin was unrecognizable.

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 still retained human form, its will seemingly exhausted, frozen mid-motion: alert posture, left hand gripping something inside its sleeve.

This eased Kup’s heart. Not the worst outcome—whatever happened, at least Kraft hadn’t been consumed.

He stepped cautiously around the twisted, floating debris, trying to move Kraft to safety, away from the vortex of jagged protrusions.

A whisper reached his ear. Kup strained to make out the few words flowing from Kraft’s lips:

“I understand…”

In the endless, illusory nightmare, Kraft had finally grasped the part his mind could comprehend.

Those dreams—the deep entities pressing in from confined spaces, the three-dimensional limitations, the dimness that hindered vision—all forced his subconscious to use methods unavailable in the real world.

Extraordinary memory, spiritual senses, layer-shifting—all hardened into his consciousness and neural reflexes through repeated use, transforming from “not-me” into “me.”

The scar from the Face-Stealer wasn’t the cause—it was the trigger, pushing him further each time he embraced the deep’s gifts, deepening the bond.

His spirit had already been altered; his conscious mind had silently approved the use of these new senses, so he no longer perceived the deep’s “kindred” scratches as “not-me” needing cleaning or disinfection—that was the essence of “forgetting.”

The speed of sinking and rising was accelerating, but still required stable conditions and time to initiate, and could never match the effortless mobility of true deep beings—not even approaching the level of the half-transformed hunched monsters.

The ability Kup described—vanishing from sight and reappearing behind—would take Kraft ten times longer to achieve step by step.

His spirit, increasingly entwined with the deep, clashed with his purely real-world body, forcing the process to accelerate. The more frequent the nightmares triggered use of deep-related abilities, the deeper the bond grew—and in turn, the spirit generated even more nightmares.

A vicious cycle—or for those changes within his spirit, a return to its origin, a virtuous one.

But if this continued, it was a dead end.

Imagine deep beings moving like fish leaping from water and returning—intimate, seamless. Now, it was a land creature’s failed dive: no control, the approach to the layer pushed to its limit, water splashing wildly, everything in chaos.

One mistaken layer migration—in his dream, meant to evade the Burrowers—his subconscious had summoned all its strength to replicate the deep beings’ transit.

But his human body dragged him down, exhausting every last reserve without achieving it. The uncontrolled “residual energy” became scattered “splashes,” creating layer dissonance, nearly pulling his body into the vortex.

Kraft tried moving his body, but his depleted spirit couldn’t support it—only weak muscle twitches made him lose balance.

Kup quickly grabbed his stiff left arm. Both cried out in pain.

“What is this?” The attendant, experienced in wounds, reflexively let go—but quickly realized and gripped again.

Piercing his palm were several unfamiliar dark stones, likely embedded in Kraft’s left arm during the chaos, blood dripping from his fingers, still frozen in the grip.

No answer came. He helped Kraft sit on the bed. After long silence, the latter suddenly spoke of something seemingly unrelated.

“I heard a story,” Kraft said, gripping a stone fragment, trying to pull it out—unsuccessfully. “A man woke alone in a strange place, where stood a tower—black, towering.”

“Do you need bandages or warm water?” Kup tried to urge him to rest, but Kraft didn’t look like someone who’d listen.

“In crushing solitude, he climbed the tower along a path narrow enough for only one foot, with no stairs,” Kraft continued in a grim tone, as if only satisfying his own need to speak—or like a priest reciting a parable beside a fire.

“He reached the summit, pushed aside the blocking stone slab, and saw the moon… and beneath it, an endless familiar plain.”

“He walked along ancient paths buried in wild grass, crossed rivers, and recognized the ruins of a stone bridge.”

“Finally, he entered a castle both familiar and strange, joining a feast lit by brilliant lamps—guests screamed in terror, fainted, or fled in panic.”

“The culprit stood before him, within an archway—its monstrous, alien form was not human.”

“Did he flee?” Kup felt cold even through his thick clothes.

“No. He walked to the archway and extended his finger. The monster extended its bony claw and touched his. In that moment, memories collapsed like an avalanche—the truth, devastating enough to destroy everything, shattered him.”

“It was…”

【A MIRROR】

…

Two days later, the legendary clinic of Comfort Harbor reopened as usual. Only a curtain now blocked half the main hall; the beloved doctor’s left hand seemed impaired, confirming his earlier claim of illness.

Everything was normal.