I slammed awake like a drowning man breaking through the surface of black water.My body jerked upward violently.My back arched off the floor, my hands immediately flying to my throat. I clawed at my own skin, choking, gagging, expecting silver strings that were no longer there, the laughing faces of the dead.My vision swam violently, blurring and clearing in uneven pulses.I could still see the white fog ; the endless white, the laughing faces, the echoes.My chest heaved harder.Then a pair of warm calloused palms grabbed my shoulders.“Wei!”I flinched so hard my core my meridians and dantian groaned “Easy…..easy, you’re back.”The voice sounded warped at first, distant and distorted, like someone speaking through layers of water.I blinked wildly. My breath hitching in broken, jagged pulls. The room was still spinning. My vision swam, blurring reality with the nightmare I had just escaped. The wooden ceiling beams above me fractured, looking exactly like the broken memory gate

We sprinted through flooded city streets where the water burned like acid. We climbed through the upside-down corridors of a ruined temple, force and pressure shifting violently with every step. We crossed a burning battlefield, then slammed waist-deep into the snow of a frozen mountain.Han Ruo knew these paths. He navigated the impossible maze with a desperate familiarity, proving he had escaped this creature many times before. But it didn't matter.Every time we turned a corner, every time we breached a new memory, the entity was already there. Standing on a burning siege tower. Waiting at the end of a flooded alley. Not chasing us. Just waiting. Smiling.And then, my own mind began to turn on me.The cognition sea recognized me as an intruder long ago, but for some reason, it waited this long to start fighting back. As we ran through an endless stone corridor, the walls shifted. Suddenly, I saw Brother Chen standing at the end of the hall. He looked at me with cold, dead eyes, t