The strange story of Huai'an Inn

A drop of mucus landed on his face.

Chong Liu's consciousness floating in the abyss was pulled back to the surface with that little cool touch.His eyelashes trembled a few times, and finally lifted up unwillingly.

"Six, six?"

A hand was patting his cheek with a hint of urging.Chong Liu's gaze finally focused on the face floating in front of his eyes.

"Boss..." His mouth was very dry, as if he hadn't opened it for a long time, and there was a strange smell of rust in his mouth.

Zhu Helan's face was lacking in color, and her hair crown had long been disheveled.His long hair hung down Chong Liu's face, itching.

Chong Liu sat up suddenly and almost bumped Zhu Helan's head.

"Slow down! Surprised!" The shopkeeper scolded, but asked in a soft voice, "How do you feel? Is there any discomfort?"

Chong Liu stared at the shopkeeper for a while, and almost didn't start to check, "Boss... are you okay!"

The shopkeeper's painful cry still echoed in his ears.He felt he would never hear that voice that made his whole heart tangled up again.

The shopkeeper Zhu shook his head, "I'm fine...but you, didn't I let you go?"

"I wanted to leave at first..." Chongliu said it out of embarrassment and saw the shopkeeper's head being pierced by those pipes. He quickly pulled the shopkeeper out.

At the beginning, he wasted so much energy and even exposed his identity just to prevent the shopkeeper from suffering at the hands of Xu Hanke, so how can he be so cruel now?

Chong Liu didn't finish his sentence, and fell silent.The shopkeeper stared at him quietly, and the silent air became denser between the two.

After a while, Chong Liu whispered pitifully, "Master, I was wrong..."

The shopkeeper laughed, without any hint of anger.He gently supported Chong Liu's cheek with his palm, making him look into his eyes.His scrutinizing eyes were focused and careful, as if he could see through Chong Liu's pupils that his mind had been swept away by intentions that did not belong to him that had suddenly poured into him before.

Chong Liu's heart beat faster when he looked at him as if there was nothing in the world except himself.

"Is there really nothing uncomfortable?" The shopkeeper asked again.

Chong Liu just felt a little groggy, as if he had been beaten with a sap.He tried his best to feel his body, and said hesitantly, "It seems... nothing special. It's just a headache. Ah! By the way, Master, I saw that Luzhou layman. They were not one, but four of them were writing. , but there is one person who is different from the other three..."

Chong Liu was in a hurry, speaking faster and faster, but before he finished speaking, the shopkeeper suddenly pressed his lips lightly with his finger, "Shh... don't worry, I know."

"You know?"

"I saw it too. The scene that the locust tree showed us should be the same."

Chong Liu snorted, and eagerly grabbed the shopkeeper's arm, "Then let's go find that person!"

The shopkeeper smiled wryly, "I think so. Look where we are now."

Having said that, Chongliu finally took his eyes off the shopkeeper and spread his eyes to his surroundings.

No locust tree was seen.

What spread around them was no longer a dark void, but a forest.

A nightmarish forest.

All "trees" are a combination of flesh and wood, and both the trunk and the branches are twisted and deformed.Massive lumps of tumor-like flesh fell from the tree trunk, dripping with disgusting pus, but clusters of tightly clustered swollen vesicles formed at the root of the tree, as if they were giant frog eggs with a pus-green luster The black particles suspended in it made them look like countless eyeballs glued together.

On the ground, the criss-crossing trees were no longer tree roots, but many still wriggling regularly, whether they were bugs or some kind of moving plants he didn't know.The sticky, fatty texture of the epidermis makes the scalp tingle.

And the sky... is completely invisible.That black-gray, heavy solidified thing that is still convulsing occasionally...is it meat?

The "cloud" composed of huge chunks of meat as large as mountains covered all the sky as far as the eye could see.Those greasy, iridescent textures interspersed with muscle and fat are interspersed with a dense network of blood vessels, exuding a secret and evil red halo.They are undulating, piled up, buckled upside down on the top of the head, hanging densely packed long strips of mycelium, swinging slowly in the high air.

Just staring at the sky, there are thousands of chaotic emotions and consciousness rushing into my mind, and they are messed up in a mess.Countless fragmented pictures, pictures that are simply incomprehensible, interspersed in his brain that was crumpled into a paste.

Chong Liu immediately lowered his head and closed his eyes, not daring to look any further.

Not only the visual impact, but also the ubiquitous smell of rotting meat filled the nostrils, every breath seemed to not have enough air to be sucked into the lungs.There is also that damp and cloudy heat, as if an invisible film is tightly pasted on every inch of skin.

Chong Liu's heart that had just calmed down immediately began to beat wildly because of nervousness.

"Boss...are we going to hell?"

The shopkeeper was amused by his frightened appearance, "What bad thing have you done, are you going to hell?"

Chong Liu blinked his eyes a few times, shrugged his shoulders, "I killed three cockroaches with my shoes the day before yesterday, isn't that creating killing karma?" Farming and raising chickens together in hell is no different from being alive."

Chong Liu anxiously said, "Boss, don't bury me! When is this..."

Still maintaining a funny smile, Zhu Helan explained, "The locust tree is still too young to control its own power. When it transferred its consciousness to us, it accidentally pulled us into its dream."

"...Is this its dream?" Chong Liu looked around and said in a daze, "This locust tree child is too pitiful, what dreams do he have every day..."

The shopkeeper chuckled twice, and continued, "Its dreams are different from those of ordinary humans. It can repeatedly return to the same dream, settle its own spirit in the dream, and constantly improve the dream. Even become another piece of land."

"...You say it can create the world?"

"That's almost what it means. This is the dreamland formed by the distortion of its memory when it was just born." The shopkeeper Wang Zongliu showed an unbelievable expression, and said plainly, "But this world has boundaries and is very narrow. Probably It is because only its immature consciousness is creating here, and there will be chaotic and unknown dead ends in many places it cannot imagine, and the order here is also very unstable, changing all the time, and will collapse at any time. So with our world There's still a big difference."

Chong Liu couldn't understand how he and the shopkeeper came to the dream of a locust tree.

His life was really getting...crazy.

"Then... master, can you find a way to wake up the pagoda tree and let us go out?"

"Yes, yes, but we have to find its incarnation in the dream. Kill the incarnation, and it will wake up. There is only one small problem." The shopkeeper said, gesturing around with his hand, "Look here There are thousands of trees, any one is possible."

Chong Liu was speechless, and he was in a daze.

This is to find the year of the monkey and the month of the horse? ! "Fortunately, the passage of time is different in dreams. We stay here for ten and a half days, but in reality it may be less than a stick of incense. Don't worry about not being able to catch up with the catastrophe ten days later. Even if we are unlucky and find If we don’t get its incarnation, Song Mingzi will come to wake up the locust tree the next night and get us out.”

After Zhu Helan finished speaking, she stood up and held out her hand to Chong Liu, "Let's go, it might not be safe here."

Chong Liu grabbed the shopkeeper's hand and stood up, not wanting to think about what the shopkeeper might mean by "unsafe".

The two trekked through the land full of reptiles and the forest full of tumors, and it took two hours to walk.Chong Liu's legs seemed to be filled with lead, and his clothes were soaked in sweat, sticking to his body.

The shopkeeper is still carefully observing each tree.

"Boss... all these trees look similar?" Chong Liu wiped his sweat pantingly, "You usually need to cultivate its imagination, and read operas and poems to it when it's free..."

The shopkeeper turned his head and gave him a blank look, and replied lazily, "Okay, I will leave this job to you later."

Just as Chong Liu was about to ask for forgiveness, he suddenly heard a strange... buzzing sound.

He looked in the direction of the sound, but saw a very thin and tall shadow quietly protruding from behind a "tree" in the gap between the slowly twisting branches and trembling tumors, as if it was a shy person. girlish pose.

But...it is as tall as the north tower of the Huaian Inn.

Not only is it tall, although it has a certain degree of humanoid appearance, its proportions are completely out of order.It was as if a living person had been cruelly elongated four to five times, and the skin in the middle was broken in pieces, like dehydrated and cracked land, exposing bright red muscles.Its head was also severely crushed and deformed, the flesh melted into a ball, obliterating all the five sense organs, only a few sharp teeth stuck in the flesh very casually, and half an eyeball protruding from the seam of flesh.

"Uh... my boss?" Chong Liuxiang stepped back to the shopkeeper, poked his elbow on his back, "what is that..."

When Zhu Helan turned around, the same huge, slender, twisted and deformed black shadows appeared from the mouths of other trees around them, one after another, all in the same shy posture protruding from behind the trees In the end, it was even a little funny.

But also very weird.

They "kept" staring at Guan Chongliu and Zhu Helan, motionless, almost like the shadows of trees.

When the shopkeeper saw it, his face changed slightly, and he cursed secretly, "How could such a thing be attracted here!"

When Chong Liu heard it, his heart immediately cooled down.

The shopkeeper whispered, "This is Nightmare, which feeds on dreams. If you are caught and eaten by them in your dreams, you will really die..."

So there will be people who die in their dreams and never wake up again.Zhu Helan omitted the second half of the explanation.

The moment Chong Liu heard the "good news", he wanted to grab the ground with his head.

"...Then... shall we run for a while?"

The shopkeeper was quiet for a moment, looked around, and squatted down to touch the ground at the same time.Zhu Helan made a calculation in his heart, and then said, "I'll count one, two, three, and we'll run. Follow me closely, don't look back."

"Okay..." When Chong Liu saw the Yan who appeared first, the cracked flesh on his body suddenly began to vibrate like ripples.At the same time, the sharp humming that seemed to resonate in the depths of the mind that I heard before also sounded from it.

"one……"

Similar ripples and vibrations began to appear on the other Nightmare's body, and the humming sound became louder and louder, and even began to cause pain deep in the ear.

"two……"

At the same time, they took a few steps crookedly from behind the tree, approaching the two of them.Something dark, moldy, and dripping like meat fell off them.All the worms on the ground that were touched by this black sticky mass immediately began to emit hissing smoke, a large amount of green mucus gushed out of their bodies, and their swollen bodies quickly shriveled up.

"three!"

Before the words fell to the ground, the shopkeeper grabbed Chong Liu's hand and ran towards a direction with the least number of nightmares in the black forest.