Chapter 57: Two-Way

Li Sidun looked at the stairs shrouded in shadow; the flimsy wooden frame could block nothing, and there was undoubtedly nothing there.

Silence fell over the room; even the owner turned his head, following Kraft's gaze toward that old staircase, searching the shadows swaying with the firelight for what he pointed at.

In the silence, Lu Xiusi glanced at the stairs, then looked back at Kraft, certain he indeed meant that direction, observing something invisible, while others were also bewitched, taking his question as some kind of irrefutable statement.

Recalling Kraft's sudden sword strike without warning, a cold gleam slashing at a wooden board and an enemy of unknown nature, Lu Xiusi could not judge whether it was a delusion or if truly something invisible had been lurking nearby for a long time.

"There is nothing there."

Li Sidun broke the emperor's-new-clothes-like hesitation by speaking up, "Do you feel any fixed patches in your vision? I know some people with external injuries experience this."

Kraft's attitude did not seem feigned, yet Li Sidun indeed found nothing on the stairs, making one suspect organic damage caused by external impact; such cases were not uncommon in the clinic.

Those who suddenly fell or were struck by heavy objects might, upon waking, suddenly and permanently lose some ability—sight, hearing, or the ability to speak a complete sentence again, behaving strangely.

Some explained this as an evil entity's invasion of the soul, but Li Sidun scoffed at this; evil spirits would not always rely on external injuries to harm health. This must be caused by damage to the human body's structure, though his abilities were insufficient to draw an empirical conclusion.

Unintelligible paintings, pointing out something invisible; it was likely that Kraft had injured himself somewhere after falling from the second floor. According to the humoral theory, as long as the stagnant blood within the body was drained or allowed to dissipate on its own, his sanity could return to clarity.

Only the closed window and the clothes soaked by seawater remained unexplained; Li Sidun could not and did not wish to investigate these trivial details himself.

"So do you still remember how you went from sleeping on the bed in the room to the back alley?"

"The back alley?" A look of confusion, quickly fading, appeared on Kraft's face. "Oh, yes, the back alley. I jumped out the window..."

He closed his eyes, pursuing the chaotic memories in his mind; although only the most deeply imprinted ones remained, the act of jumping out the window could still be recalled.

"Why do that? That height was not low." Li Sidun pressed on. Unlike Lu Xiusi's evasiveness, Kraft appeared more honest, perhaps because he had not yet recovered from the confusion of just waking up.

"Water."

Lu Xiusi handed Kraft a glass of water. He took a small sip and added an explanation: "I am not talking about this. I mean there was water below."

"Water below the window, in the back alley?"

Without thinking, Kraft wanted to give an affirmative answer; in his consciousness, there was undoubtedly a record of this.

Just before speaking, Kraft felt this reasoning was very tight; if there was no water below, then he must have jumped straight down with water in his brain, and he was quite certain it was not the latter.

However, he got stuck; logic froze at a certain link, and he realized he had blurred the boundary between dream and reality.

"No."

"Was it not that there was water below the window?" Li Sidun was confused by the roundabout words.

"Everything is wrong!"

Kraft shouted loudly, his expression fierce and confused, as if fighting with himself; the focal point of the contradiction made him realize he had not fully woken up, or that what he experienced was not a dream at all.

He was in a transitional phase, shifting from an experience mostly forgotten to the normal world; acceptance and habituation to everything in the experience remained, while the memories within it were already fragmented.

Breaking free from numbness and calmness, he re-examined the "abnormal" parts around him: mental senses, half-dry clothes full of salt grains. The part between lying in bed and being found in the back alley was connected by lingering dreams.

Based on these current judgments, he had just experienced an anomalous phenomenon that produced a material-level impact on the real world.

【Turn it off】

The lingering dream continued to remind and urge him to push away the mental senses, but it was too late.

A severe and familiar headache struck, disrupting his thoughts; senses became chaotic in an instant, the mental perspective was pushed away, and he returned to normal vision.

The feeling of narrow confinement, the discomfort of withdrawal surged; Kraft understood why he had such a deep impression regarding the control of the usage time of mental senses.

To others, Kraft suddenly clutched his face with both hands, emitting painful gasps as if his trachea had been cut; his long fingers bent with force, as if trying to tear his face apart from the middle to release the suffocating soul from a cramped space.

Lu Xiusi and Li Sidun reacted quickly, lifting him to lie flat on the table, unbuttoning the two buttons at his collar to let him breathe more freely.

But Li Sidun soon discovered that Kraft did not show the purple lips and deep chest heaving typical of other patients with breathing difficulties; instead, he exhibited rapid gasping, more like an extreme reaction during excessive tension or mental agitation.

He tried to pry Kraft's hands away to see the state of his face, but the explosive power of Kraft far exceeded that of him and Lu Xiusi; even though he had already consumed a large amount of physical strength, the two of them together could not hold down Kraft, who struggled and writhed like a dehydrated fish.

"Calm down, Kraft! You are fine!"

The considerable force reassured Li Sidun somewhat; after all, this was not the strength a critical patient could muster; it looked more like a delusion or something similar. But he was not someone who dealt with potions like Luo Moluo, so he could only watch Kraft continue to roll on the table.

The only thing to do was to support him from the side, preventing Kraft from unconsciously rolling off the table and causing secondary injury; that would be even more troublesome.

Fortunately, the situation was not so urgent that Li Sidun or Lu Xiusi needed to exert their amateurish internal medicine skills; Kraft alleviated himself after more than ten minutes and slowly calmed down.

"Uh, truly sorry, a small problem occurred." Kraft turned his head, pressing his left cheek against the cold table surface to dissipate the residual pain.

The pain just now awakened some even older memories; it seemed that not long ago he was also lying on a table, surrounded by discomfort and headache, there darker and damper, where the sound of water could be heard at close range.

Some vague shadows swayed before his eyes; those cold contours came from another place similar to the present world, almost overlapping with the images before him, only damper, darker, and nearly indistinguishable.

【Tides, writhing, soft-bodied】

Thoughts emerged as fragmented content like a broken teleprompter, accompanied by scattered, inverted, and damaged scenes.

"You do not look as relaxed as you say."

"I know, but I have indeed understood some things."

Kraft could boldly infer that from the Salt Tide Zone to the anomalous phenomenon just experienced, to say there was no connection between the two was something even ghosts would not believe.

Considering the loss of most memories, he must have contacted another layer, and the large circle covered in cracks drawn immediately upon waking was the last and clearest part of the memory.

【Celestial body, reverse fall】

Since there is a reverse, then there must be a forward, right?

Recalling the falling sensation before being approached by a malicious entity in the Salt Tide Zone, there was reason to suspect the falling sensation was a somatic illusion generated when entering the deep layer.

Conversely, by analogy, the reverse fall could be leaving the deep layer.

Things were quickly clarified: he entered the deep layer, then returned to the present world through something resembling a celestial body; this circle was his depiction of its image, the content he most wanted to preserve over there before losing consciousness.

So the question arises: how did I get in?

Just like that time in the Salt Tide Zone, a falling sensation generated in a semi-dream, semi-awake state.

【Fall, Bai Guang, writhing song】

It was not an accident; after leaving the Salt Tide Zone, that soft, malicious entity emitting white light followed closely; this time it dragged him into a more stable deep layer, that cold and damp place in his memory.

The boundary between dream and reality, spirit and matter, was blurred; experiences on "that side" were fed back into the present world. The salty spray of the sea tide smashed the barrier between the two, passing through the originally clear Clear boundary, and wetted his clothes.

If what Li Sidun said was true, he also followed actions made in another layer, moving from the room to the back alley.

Kraft realized the severity of the problem; this was a very bad signal, shattering his long-held belief that the Deep's influence on the mundane world was limited to the spiritual.

Or rather, his understanding of "reality" was off by a mere billionth; neither side was more real than the other; both were material.

And if he could be pulled into the Deep, immersed in the water there, would all of this be reversed?

Could things from that side enter, or at least approach this layer, when the barrier between the two grew thin? After all, if they couldn't "approach," how could they pull him over?

"Trouble is huge, Lu Xiusi. How long have I been asleep?" Kraft, suppressing his discomfort and ignoring Li Sidun's阻拦, jumped down from the table and nearly twisted his ankle.

"Counting from last night, a full day."

"Did you go today to tell them not to drink the well water?" Kraft pressed his knuckles against his temple, asking a question whose answer he already knew; if Lu Xiusi had gone in alone, he certainly wouldn't have come out.

Lu Xiusi shook his head. "I never waited for you to arrive at the academy, so I came to find you first."

"You should be thankful he dragged me along; otherwise, you'd still be sleeping in the alley," Li Sidun interjected. He hadn't forgotten his purpose. "Given your current health condition, I suggest you sit down and tell me exactly what happened; perhaps I can still help."

"I need to change locations." Kraft glanced at the stairs. After shutting off his spiritual senses, he found nothing there anymore; the faint, elusive wriggling sensation just now seemed like an illusion.

"There's one more thing. Is this table for sale? I want to take my first painting with me."