Mysteries: Arcana Wars

Klein was startled and immediately threw the hot dog away.

What a hell!

What are all these things!

When Klein clearly realized that he was hallucinating, Leonard's voice disappeared from his mind. He took out his cell phone and checked it. He had hung up the call for a while.

What is that? It's a mess... Is it my mind that created a Leonard in my hallucination?

Now that Klein recalled it, Leonard's words made him feel strange, just like two black grains of rice suddenly appeared in a plate of white rice, and a strange taste suddenly appeared in the familiar food.

Hallucinations invade reality and thoughts distort illusions.

...It's really... a big deal...

Reset your cognition and believe that you don't need to breathe, and the previous maddening feeling of suffocation and drowning will disappear.

But what followed was an even stronger feeling of nausea and dizziness, and that bottomless sense of disharmony that overwhelmed him like a tide.

Everything that the senses can perceive seems to have undergone slight changes. The familiar and stable daily life has undergone a slight abnormality today, becoming a familiar yet strange world.

Just like someone who used to ride a bike to work, but now he walks here; someone who used to drink soda, but now he orders a cup of tea; someone who used to eat French fries, but now he eats a bowl of salad for the first time...

All the familiar people were doing things that Klein was not familiar with, which aroused the fear deep in Klein's heart. But the more uneasy and inconsistent he felt, the more his restless thoughts would interfere with his world through hallucinations, making his feelings even more distorted and bizarre.

What you see and hear cannot be trusted, spiritual divination is not feasible, and logical thinking cannot be trusted.

Everything is unbelievable?

Is the hot dog on the ground a real hot dog? Is my phone a real phone? How can I prove to myself that I didn’t put the hot dog in my pocket as if it were a phone in a fantasy world?

...Damn it!

Klein, gather your thoughts! Don't get stuck in a dead end!

Your thoughts are seriously affecting your hallucinations!

...Yes! Pocket watch! Illusionary compass! I can still believe this!

In the fusion of reality and illusion, only the illusion compass made Klein feel a little safe. Klein found that no matter what logic he established for himself, "believing in the illusion compass" was actually the simplest and most practical [cognitive boundary nail].

It is believed that when the pocket watch is opened, the ancient hands will truly indicate the time in the illusion.

Unfortunately, the restless pointer kept twitching and jumping, and could not give an accurate time. In fact, the number on the pointer was getting bigger and bigger as it jumped back and forth.

Not good!

Klein felt a little terrified, but then the nausea and dizziness that he had suppressed came back immediately. This time, Klein finally felt the distortion of the world clearly and intuitively. The sounds, images, smells, touch... everything he felt could no longer maintain its "normal" state and began to distort, collapse, and decompose.

The sight and sound began to be squeezed and stretched, and quickly destroyed. A wide and empty hole was torn open in reality. Flickering snowflake noise flowed back and forth, and harsh noises rolled over Klein's ears.

...No, I can't stay here!

Reality is breaking! I need to get out of here!

Klein stood up and wanted to leave, but his thoughts and judgment had long been soaked into mud by the sticky juice, and his control was destroyed into pieces by the illusion. He stumbled to his feet, followed his instinct to leave, took a step, and staggered out like a human.

Woo——woo——

What is that? Did I hear that wrong?

That is - the sound of a steam train!

As if responding to Klein's eagerness to leave, an old steam train came from afar, passing through the broken reality and distorted illusion, and came to Klein's side.

This was a train with outdated technology, and it looked like an old steam train from the Fifth Epoch. The inefficient old-time Russell steam engine was like an old bastard with a tattered digestive tract. It clearly couldn't digest it, but it still stuffed piles of coal into its mouth, as if it would die tomorrow after eating it. In the end, as soon as these dead black slags touched the corrupt esophagus, they were hysterically rejected by the eroded digestive system and rushed out, becoming some kind of incompletely digested vomit, a large amount of gas mixed with incompletely digested coal slag, gushing on Klein's face, trying to fill his body with sorrow and pain along with the scratches of gravel and the pain of breathing.

"Cough cough..."

Klein's vision was blurred in the smoke, but he saw that the huge mechanical creature looked very familiar, as if he had seen it somewhere before.

But the steam train did not stop for him and was about to drive away in the fog.

...No...No!

Don't leave me!

Take me away!

Klein ran and jumped after the train, luckily grabbing the railing of the last car. He opened the door and got in.

There was no one in the carriage, and the empty seats were all of the Fifth Epoch style. The entire train seemed to have come out of Klein's memories.

The world outside the window was completely shattered, reality became fragments of some kind of screen, rising and falling in a strange beam of light. Looking out from the car, the outside was like a chaotic electronic garbage dump, with a waterfall of noise points ruthlessly washing all the discarded electronic screens. There were all kinds of broken and deformed garbage screens, black screens, distorted screens, all twitching and playing chaotic clips, and then squirming and twisting with the stream of noise points.

Klein couldn't see many of the screens clearly. A waterfall of snowflake noise poured down from the roof of the car, covering most of the window glass.

He tried to concentrate on a screen that he passed by, but all the screens around him became restless at this moment. The psychedelic images and twitching videos were vying to poke into his eyes, and the speakers on all sides were playing distorted audio at high speed, tearing his hearing.

A million images were about to bite his sight, a million sounds were about to invade his eardrums, and even a million experiences were about to climb onto his other fragile senses along this alien contact.

Klein immediately closed his eyes, sat in his seat, collected his thoughts, and calmed his emotions.

...too much...too much...

What is this…

That strange noise washed away Klein's sanity like the rising tide, and now it gradually faded away, leaving a few traces on the beach.

Klein came back to his senses and thought carefully about what he had just seen, but found that he seemed to remember nothing at all. The electronic screen was broken and rotten, and the steam train was running fast and shaking. He couldn't hear or see anything at all. He could only remember some fragmented images and fragments.

The past, the present, the future; the acquaintance, the familiarity, the unfamiliarity; the things heard before, the things experienced before, the things expected in the future...

The view outside the window was like some kind of distorted and broken historical crack, showing the past, the future and the future, but Klein discovered that there was much more outside the car window than that.