Nightmare's Call

As the door came ajar, Lin Sheng raised his wooden shield and took a step back. Staring unblinkingly into the gap of the door, he waited anxiously. After a long while, there was still no movement. He thought that perhaps the door had not been closed correctly and that a gust of goddamn wind had blown the door open. He did not believe in random chance, however. Why did the door not open before or after, but at that very moment he arrived? Something was definitely amiss. He slowly extended his sword forward, inserted it between the door gap, and gave it a gentle twist. The door slowly swung open, revealing the antiquated, decaying interior.

The floorplan of the house was similar to that of Lin Sheng’s house, but the place was covered in a thick layer of ashen dust. A picture frame with a missing corner hung loosely in one section of the house, while the sofa, TV, fridge, and everything else were outdated in style. Lin Sheng slowly walked in, carefully skimming his surroundings with the faint light on the edge of his shield. With a tri-partition design, the house consisted of only a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom.

Lin Sheng suddenly heard a sound coming from the kitchen the moment he stepped into the living room. It was as if someone was cooking on a stove. He warily edged closer to the kitchen, and once he was right in front of the kitchen, he saw something boiling in a small pot above the glowing flames of the stove. Who the hell’s cooking in this goddamn abandoned house? Lin Sheng thought. He instantly became even more suspicious and raised his guard even further. The burning red flame on the stove was particularly bright in the dark. He carefully walked over, and just as he was about to take the lid off to see what the heck was inside the pot, a quick-moving shadow emerged behind him out of nowhere.

“Who is it?” With the aid of his ultra-sensitive perception, Lin Sheng swung his sword in a quick backward motion, and the blade of his sword glowed with soft white light. He was not sure if the move would kill the mysterious shadow, but since he knew how potent the sacred light was, he focused all of his strength on his sword and left the question for later.

The shadow was fast, but Lin Sheng was not slow either. The effective damage range of his great sword was wide, and it caught the shadow, slicing into its tail. However, the cut felt like it had hit a block of solid wood. The shadow shrilled like a jungle fowl as the blade’s sacred white light exploded into a furious fire like a spark igniting gasoline. The shadow rolled on the floor in agony before it quickly became motionless, appearing dead. For a moment, the shadow continued to shrink in the flame on the kitchen floor, and Lin Sheng went up to it take a good look. At only half his height, the dead figure had two pairs of arms and a pair of legs, but its face was featureless. The only thing that stood out was a tentacle akin to an elephant trunk growing out of its chest. The shadow continued to squinch and burn, and before long, it was reduced to a pile of blackened ash on the floor.

Lin Sheng stirred the burnt ashes with his sword for a while but found nothing unusual. Suddenly, a plume of black smog rose from the ashes. It quickly condensed into a black streak before it disappeared into Lin Sheng’s chest in a swoop.

“Are these monster’s memories?!” Lin Sheng squinted, carefully distilling the chaotic data that was entering his mind. However, it seemed that the memories contained no language and images except for a bunch of strange sounds. The length of the sounds varied from a couple of minutes to days, and different sounds appeared to carry different meanings. But, Lin Sheng could not make head or tail of what they meant. It was not until he had sorted them out a little that he also began to see patterns and found that the monster feasted on the fears of living creatures. The compiled sounds seemed like the scared whimpers of different living creatures, and the monster appeared to be in a good mood in the presence of long cries while depressed when it was only short whines.

“It’s just a bunch of garbage.” Lin Sheng shook his head. Despite that, he did feel like he had gained some mental strength, which was almost equal to the gains from killing a Blackfeather swordsman. So, he continued to look around the abandoned house. But, there was nothing else except for the mysterious creature he had just killed.

Nonetheless, all was not lost, as he found something of interest in the corner of the bedroom. “What is this?” He dragged a chair away from the corner, where there was a light-purple florescent fissure in the wall. In the fissure, which measured only about the width of a palm, was a beetle. It looked almost identical to regular beetles, but this beetle was no ordinary beetle. Translucent and like sapphire, the little bug’s six legs were reminiscent of red-hot spikes. Smoke would rise whenever it crawled across the floor.

“This bug...” Lin Sheng instantly found something wrong with the picture. The beetle was out of place there, and it was not native to the area. Then, his keen eyes noticed that the fissure behind the beetle was closing very slowly.

“Such a small fissure... Could it be a portal?” After he pondered for a moment, he poked and churned around the fissure with his sword. Lin Sheng was wildly excited when the crack slowly grew in size as black debris rose in the air.

The Summoner’s Grimoire mentioned that portals could exist everywhere in the world at any time. A portal led people from one dimension to another and formed a temporary bridge that two different dimensions. On normal days, the minimal perceptive ability of humans meant that they had no way to find and step into different dimensions. However, the existence of portals opened up this opportunity, giving humans a chance to filter themselves and enabling them to contact other dimensions. The contents of the Summoner’s Grimoire worked on this principle to cohere and draw out the different dimensions for itself.

Lin Sheng had no clue how the portal came about since his strength had only been improving incrementally. If he could step into other dimensions just like he had done twice previously, it would significantly speed up his power gain for sure. Upon thinking of that, he grew even more excited and jerked the fissure with greater force.

After a moment, the fissure in the wall finally expanded to over a meter wide, large enough to allow a person to squeeze through. The frightened beetle was long gone, fleeing back to the other side of the hole. But Lin Sheng could not have cared less. He finally stopped as he was already sweating profusely.

He writhed into the purple light within the fissure and felt like he had plunged into a sticky pool of mud. He could not breathe or move in the omnipresent purple light. Nevertheless, he scrambled ahead and finally saw the beetle floating not far ahead. When it realized that Lin Sheng was in there, the beetle almost jumped out of its skin. It quickly turned around and swam away.

Lin Sheng decided to follow the little bug, and it did not take long before he felt like he was running out of breath. Right then, he suddenly found himself swimming past the purple light.

On the other side of the purple light, a figure suddenly emerged into a dark and putrid dungeon, tottering out of the purple fissure in its wall. It was Lin Sheng. Holding his wooden shield and great sword, his face was covered in purple residue, which rapidly evaporated from his skin. He coughed convulsively, then dusted the purple fluorescent liquid off his scale armor to speed up the evaporation.