Fragments of light swirled in the liquid blackness and constructed a tunnel. Like a corridor through space, stars dotted the walls.
Voices grew louder.
He heard himself. Li Yao. Wu Di. Qiao Jinhai. A kind voice gently calling Huang Niuniu’s name. Her own screams.
Her own screams drowned out every other sound.
Yu Han let his mind relax. He didn’t want to visit the dream anymore. Still, he wanted to know what was there.
But he shouldn’t.
The corridor of stars was still there.
“Why won’t it disappear?”
Yu Han was dumbfounded. The corridor didn’t appear because Yu Han was thinking of her, but Fei Rui!
“Geez.”
The tunnel fell away, and the corridor crumbled. It was back to being an impenetrable mass of dark.
“The spiritual energy of the mind, according to Fang Zhao.”
“Let’s head back.”
They returned to Yu Han’s dreamscape.
“Can you make more pearls?”
Yu Han conjured the dagger he had given to Huang Niuniu. “Fei Rui, I’m doing some tests. Can you help me?”
Children loved it when adults took them seriously. Fei Rui was probably older than both Yu Han and Johan combined, but with his memory loss and upbeat personality, he had the mental age of a child.
The crab perked up. He raised both claws and spun around.
“We can transfer echoes of my memories into the pearls. Is there a way to transfer a pearl into the echo?”
Fei Rui poked a claw into the dagger. Nothing seemed to change for a while. Suddenly, the dagger became more real, the glitchy effects of the mirage fading away. Fei Rui dropped it, and it bounced on the ground with a metallic clank.
“How’d you do that?” Yu Han asked, shocked.
The dagger might have been just an echo, but in the dreamscape, objects he was so intimately familiar with appeared solid. Yu Han couldn’t treat them as holograms even if he wanted to.
But even so, slight hints would remain regardless of how real they felt to the touch. Glitches, shadows, blindsides.
Now, there were none.
Yu Han picked up the dagger.
“Heavy…” The weight was nigh identical to reality. He traced the edge with a finger. The dagger hadn’t been sharpened after he took it from Bushy Beard’s corpse. There were a few nicks here and there, and some scratches on the blade. Huang Niuniu used it frequently. Were these imperfections a reflection on the present reality, or the past?
He cut his finger. “Ouch!”
It bled. The pain was far less muted than usual, the blood dripping like the ghost of the real thing. It splattered on the white dreamscape floor.
“I’m fine.” Yu Han tried to echo the wound away, but a mental pressure built up. Slowly at first, then like an avalanche.
A transparent haze covered the wound. An image of a healthy, uncut finger overlapped with the version that was cut open. The healthy image slowly overwrote the wounded one until no cut remained.
But the blood on the floor and the dagger did.
“It’s real,” Yu Han gaped. He felt something draining away from his mind. The same sensation as when he overused Echoing Dreamscape.
Essence, right?
Until now, the changes he made to other objects were always a reflection of changes that had happened in reality. He couldn’t echo something and modify it on the go. When Jie Tong’s knife cut into him in the dreamscape, unless it was on the nose, it would not leave a wound.
What would happen if his dreamscape body died? Or got maimed? Was he brave enough to test that out?
A heaviness cloaked his brain. The feeling of spiritual energy depletion came back.
Yu Han echoed a wooden board hanging from a bamboo pole, then had Fei Rui turn it more real with a pearl. It was an object echo, not an event.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He took the pearl with Li Yao practising his swordsmanship and had Fei Rui project the event right in front of the wooden board.
Swish.
Crash!
Li Yao’s sword cleaved through the wooden board, chips and splinters scattering to the ground. In the waking realm, they had used the board as practise for Huang Niuniu’s whip art. Li Yao had never touched it.
But his echo could now destroy the board.
After a while, the echo of the events reached their end. Li Yao disappeared, and in his place, a lime-green pearl appeared on the ground.
As for the object echo—the bamboo pole, the ropes, and the shattered board—they began to fray. From the jagged breaks to the splinters on the floor, the wood was disintegrating as though each particle was undoing itself pixel-by-pixel. Yu Han picked up a chip and traced the edge; it dissolved against his skin with a painless pricking. Like static electricity, but the stings felt cold. Yu Han had Fei Rui stop the projection. The entire assembly vanished.
An unharmed pearl appeared between Fei Rui’s pincers.
“How did you do that?”
Fei Rui looked at the pearl with proud eyestalks.
Was the lime-green light on the pearl a bit dimmer now?
“Can you project it again?”
Fei Rui did. The wooden board and bamboo appeared. Unharmed. They then started and stopped the projections multiple times. Event projections would retreat into the pearls by themselves after the events had fully played out. Object projections needed to be stopped manually. If the object broke in a meaningful way while projected, it would slowly start disintegrating. After it fully disintegrated, the pearl would reappear. It would be unharmed, but the lime-green light would be dimmer.
Was it something like energy depletion? Could this energy regenerate? Was he trapping essence into the pearl while casting the echo in it?
Yu Han shrugged. “The pearls make the projections of echoes more real. Whether I cast an echo into a pearl or Fei Rui casts a pearl into an echo, it doesn’t matter.” He stabbed out with the dagger. It cut through the wind with its red tassel dancing.
“If I cast a pearl into my body, will what I train here become real? Will it transfer to reality?” Yu Han felt his heartbeat quicken. Until now, practising martial arts here hadn’t had much effect on his real-life mastery. But practising his cultivation art did.
“Is it about mental practises?” If so, Yu Han could grind Thousand Petals Awareness here. “Fei Rui, can you cast a pearl into me?”
Yu Han explained his reasoning.
“Good catch,” Yu Han shook his head. He had been using the word “real” subjectively. What the pearl did may as well be something different. “Thanks, and don’t apologise. This is how we test. Theorise boldly and experiment to find out what’s true.”
Yu Han asked him what he meant by their being similar to memory pearls, but didn’t get a coherent answer.
Yeah, no idea, bud. Yu Han held out the dagger. “Can we cast two pearls into one echo?”
They could.
Yu Han suddenly felt a sharp heat. “Ouch!” He let go of the handle. The dagger fell to the floor and shattered, fragments of two pearls flying out in all directions before disintegrating.
“E-ears. And nose.” Yu Han collapsed. He tried to echo away the headache but didn’t succeed. “So, we can cast multiple pearls into an echo. But it strains my… whatever it is that gets strained because of the projection. It wasn’t the same as the draining feeling. More like being stuffed? If I’m stuffed, it fails, and the pearls break.”
They didn’t break even when the projection of their respective echoes had broken, like the wooden board.
“Geez, thanks for the image. I won’t overdo it,” Yu Han agreed. It looks like this was the limit. For now.
Fei Rui made more pearls, then slumped into a corner.
Yu Han echoed a memory of him practising the Ox Tail 72 Sweeping Forms into the pearl. Again, the memory limit was about a hundred seconds. He gave the pearl to Fei Rui, who activated it. The halberd appeared, followed by Yu Han’s full body.
“It’s real.” Yu Han gasped. Why? How?
Before, only the parts of himself that Yu Han could actually see would appear. As for the rest, a glitching mess of a hazy cloud would substitute—Yu Han assumed—for the rest of his body felt by his other senses.
While practising, he couldn’t see his back.
But here it appeared, from the sweat stains on the shirt to the folding of the fabric as Yu Han moved.
It didn’t echo only Yu Han’s memory of the events. This particular practise session was before he met Fei Rui, so it wasn’t the crab’s memory either.
So whose memory was he echoing?
He echoed the dagger again into another pearl. His head felt heavy. Any moment now, he would blank out.
He held the pearl. Lime-green, its light at a constant intensity. It rolled on his palm like a marble toy. The mirage of the dagger within swirled. It was like an icon for the dagger in an MMO game. If he pressed it, it should appear from his inventory.
But in the dreamscape, it didn’t.
He couldn’t figure out how to project it like Fei Rui.
We get access to qi during qi gathering and essence during foundation building. In body tempering, their effects are passive, limited to within the body. Tempering it according to the arts practised, treasures consumed, traits possessed. The only probable way for most to actively use them is with bloodline arts, courtesy of traits.
He kept echoing different memories into the pearl. From the dagger to the halberd, to Feral Spot, to Elder Chang, to anything and everything. Finally ending with tonight’s experience of listening in on the trespassers from the Mad Bloodhounds.
His weariness grew. He figured out no way to activate it. He was just Level 1. It would take months, if not years, to get qi. As for essence?
Decades, if ever. Can I take my memories back from the pearl?
He tried, using the same intuition as when erasing echoes. But rather than erasing, he tried to take them back into himself.
“…Go to sleep…” Huang Niuniu’s voice sounded. Yu Han was taken back to when he was lying in the medical hall bed. He blinked, and he was back in his dreamscape again.
“What the hell just happened?” He stared at the pearl. The image of that day swirled within. “Did I just mentally read the pearl?”
He tried again. This time, he saw himself slowly opening his eyes. Then he was back in his dreamscape again.
He changed the echo to one where he was fighting the Filth-Eating Ghoul boss. Concentrating fully, he took back the memory.
“…retreat to the shrine!”
Each memory read would last barely a second before he was booted out.
He tried again and again, and the time-span seemed to lengthen. Barely though, but he was certain it did! It was as if a sense Yu Han never knew about slowly activated.
“I’m not taking the memories back. I’m reading them from the pearl without projecting them outside.” Yu Han jotted that down. “Is it similar to how Niu’er read the jade slip? I should compare!”
The accord really was a gift that kept on giving. Until now, he’d been continuously discovering the new synergies between Echoing Dreamscape and Fei Rui’s pearls.
“Memories can be echoed into the pearls to store them for longer. Fei Rui can project these memories from the pearls. This type of projecting makes them more ‘real’ somehow. Real is too subjective. I need another term for it. But for now, yes, realer than without first echoing them into pearls. I can read memories without projecting them. Maybe he can too? Fei Rui said he can bring pearls out into reality. If so… then I have my own DVD player now?”
Yu Han paused to catch his breath, then continued. “Can I play the projections in real life? Will they retain their ‘real’ effects in reality? If I use a pearl to project Li Yao slicing with his sword, can it harm objects in reality and not just in the dreamscape?” So many questions, so few answers. “I’m too weak to handle multiple pearls projected in the echoes—or the pearls are too weak.”
Yu Han held the final pearl and debated echoing a smartphone into it. How about the unit he’d had at his death in the Taiwanese mountain forest? A concept phone, with the latest tech stuffed into it, including satellite calling. A black brick with a tiny touchscreen at the top, for some strange reason modelled like a Casio scientific calculator.
Let’s start less complex.
He echoed his watch, a Seiko with a tourbillon. No electronic parts.
The memory seemed to paste from his mind like sludge leaving a drain. The image of the watch appeared in the pearl.
He tossed it to Fei Rui, who had been waiting with claws clicking. And the watch appeared.
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Huang Niuniu - Cow girl. Nice, sweet, and after the ship arc, unpredictable.
Fang Zhao - Red-eyed cripple. Noble Young Master (one of the good ones?).
Xiao Zhuzi - His name literally means Little Bamboo, former beggar.
Hu Feng - Farmer’s son. Maybe a bit perverted.
Li Weidong - Almost drowned trying to clear his Tribulation.
Dong Tianlan - Granddaughter of Elder Scribe. Has an eternal frown.
Dong Chou - Ninth Scribe Official of the Outer Sect. Probably has high blood pressure.
Yong Lefan - Sarcastic Senior Bro with a stone book.
Shi Miao - Mysterious white-haired girl who may or may not resort to violence.
Song Yinuo - Mysterious pig-tailed spoiled brat.
Duan Xiaolong - Is cool. Has monkey.
Sima Yan - Son of Riversong Commandary City's City Lord. Is a-hole.
Pang Jiming - Sima Yan's lackey #1.
Ma San - Sima Yan's lackey #2. Bushy beard's less bushier brother.
Tan Ruoxuan - Pony-tailed Law Enforcement Lady.