Nightmare's Call

A hell load of chaotic memories started to rush into Lin Sheng’s mind. Contrary to the experience of the last two dreams, the memories he was taking in this time completely knocked his socks off.

Messy footages and blurry voices formed no meaningful images. It was as if someone had tipped over a barrel of fuel, it was chaotic and incomprehensible. The slightly more complete memories were nonetheless just a hazy thought, which seemed to be the only obsession that this person was holding on. It was like the last dry land that had not yet sunk into the sea of wanton chaos; it represented the last orderly existence.

Lin Sheng carefully filtered the thought, noting what was truly valuable and ignoring the rest. This very piece of thought could still offer some information.

Find the Circle of Reaping that Dark Igor left behind in the Level 3 dungeon. With the power to extract primordial blood from any living creatures, the Circle of Reaping is the only way of reaping the Chaos Blood inside me. It is also the only way to saving me.

That was all about the thought, and the rest was merely a bunch of illogical mosaics of thought.

“Dark Igor?” Lin Sheng spoke of the name from memory as if it was merely a pronunciation. The memories of this person had only a thought, which was the only thing that Lin Sheng could understand. Other than that, there was no language. The footages and voices were completely illegible, and the world in this dream did not use Ancient Rehn but a language that Lin Sheng had never heard before.

The body of the long-robe man leaned limply in the corner of the wall, motionless and long dead. So, Lin Sheng went up and searched his body. He found a silver key, a small glass bottle containing some silver powder, and a blurry scroll.

“This guy seemed to know something. He knew that the Circle of Reaping could directly reap primordial blood from any living beings and turned it into pure blood crystal. Cool.” Lin Sheng stowed everything back into the black fabric pouch on the man’s body, and then took it and tied it on his own body. Killing the man was utterly exhaustive for Lin Sheng. So, he decided to take a little break before continuing his exploration.

After a while, he was off again. Not long after trudging deeper along the corridor, another three-man team of armored soldiers appeared. Lin Sheng made his move first to greet the three soldiers before they could react, and of course, he finished them off in a swoop. He got the fragmented soul of a soldier this time. Aside from a tiny piece of explicit memory, the mind of this particular soldier was mostly chaotic. But it was from this memory that Lin Sheng learned of the name of this place: The Fay Vault.

Once upon a time, a formidable royal court magician, named Dark Igor, suddenly came to this place. He had brought a powerful magic circle called the Circle of Reaping, which he used to reap the different ancient types of blood from the convicts for his own benefit. The soldiers had been here to extend their cooperation to Dark Igor under orders.

Because of the language barrier, Lin Sheng found it extremely tricky to decipher the information. Not only that, in the memories of this soldier, those magicians called the power that they controlled as the Mastery of Death and Decay instead of magic.

“This place... the Mastery of Death and Decay?”

Lin Sheng took a short rest. He swapped his broadsword for another one before continuing his journey. There were stretches of downward slopes at different sections of the passage. So, Lin Sheng was moving deeper underground as he went.

Not long after, he again bumped into a wayward armored soldier. He finished off this one without much difficulty. After that, he encountered no more living being.

As he hustled down the corridor further, the gray fog grew thicker. At first, Lin Sheng still had about ten meters of visibility, but that quickly diminished. With the monotonous surroundings, Lin Sheng began to feel a faint sense of fatigue in his mind’s eye; he was unsure how far he had gone, but just when he thought his time was up and he was waking up, he heard heavy footsteps coming from the front. He halted his steps, firmly clutching the hilt in his hands as he peered ahead intensely.

A man began to emerge from the thick gray fog. Massively fat and standing at over two-meter tall, the bare-chested dude had a hideous, black spiked tiger tattoo on his dark tone skin. He was bald, arms strapped with black armor, and wearing a pair of spiked metal gloves. When he saw Lin Sheng, he sped up his pace while making a low, furious roar.

Coming within four meters of Lin Sheng, the fat dude forcefully drew air into his lungs before spurting it back out violently in the form of fiery flames. In just a second, the flames had spread throughout the entire tunnel, sanitizing everything on its path. The fervor blaze blasted onto Lin Sheng’s shield before being deflected away in a ring of fire, which still burned for a full three-second before completely dying down.

As soon as the fire stopped, Lin Sheng launched his counterattack. He leaped four meters in a beat and slammed hard on the fat dude. But some repulsive energy hit back at Lin Sheng, who almost lost his grip on the wooden shield and fell back sitting on the ground. How did it happen? The fat dude’s belly seemed to be an energy deflector, bouncing off every attack that Lin Sheng struck at him.

But Lin Sheng had no time to analyze. He planted his feet on the ground and stayed behind and inside the wooden shield as much as he could. A beat later, a mighty force hit as the fat dude cupped his hands and smashed violently from above onto the wooden shield. The sheer force of the impact had left behind a deep crack in the wooden shield.

Lin Sheng still hid behind the shield, but his eyes, nose, and mouth were bleeding badly. Feeling lightheaded, he barely managed to stand on his feet. Quickly, he summoned the sacred power in his body and started the healing cycle. Although Lin Sheng had stabilized his health, he had missed an opportunity.

Despite the massive body size, the fat dude was agile, and his strength was extraordinary. Even his skin was tough and impenetrable. Lin Sheng and the fat dude had exchanged several rounds of assault. Thrusting his sword at the fat dude’s belly was of no use at all. Lin Sheng had tried Flash Riposte, leveraging on the fat dude’s own force to strike his own head. But the problem was, the broadsword was not strong enough to withstand the kind of abuse, and it snapped in an instant.

When the first step went awry, nothing seemed to work in his favor anymore. Failing to dodge an incoming fist, Lin Sheng was directly struck on his chest and sent flying backward. Crash-landing on the ground, Lin Sheng began to vomit blood in his mouth. The scale armor on his chest was severely dented from the punch, and he could no longer stand up.

“Fearsome!” Lin Sheng had not suffered such a severe injury for a long time. The fat dude’s combat strength was at least Level 3. His flame-spitting skill was particularly destructive; inflicting a wide range of damage would work flawlessly in either one-to-one combat or melee. The fat dude was too strong for him to beat. He did not only lose in terms of combat skills, but also from a raw physical strength perspective. Particularly difficult to deal with was the fat dude’s skin; it as unbelievably tough, seemingly impenetrable.

Lin Sheng could barely make himself to sit up. He saw a flash of light, and before he could move his body to dodge, a burning flame had already wholly engulfed him. His body began to char and blacken quickly. A large hand suddenly reached out from the fire, grabbing his head, and with a violent jerk, it snapped Lin Sheng’s head off his neck like a lid coming off a bottle.