Shadow Slave

Sunny stared at the Seed, feeling somewhat baffled.

It wasn’t located near LO49, but in its very center. So, it could not have been a remnant of the Chain of Nightmares — it had to have appeared in the ruins of the research facility sometime between now and the day Sunny reached the edges of the Dream Realm for the first time.

‘No, what am I even thinking about?’

Of course, the Seed was not a remnant of the Chain of Nightmares — because there were no Seeds of Nightmare in the waking world. There were only Nightmare Gates. But now that the nearby Gates had expanded, pulling this piece of the waking world into the Dream Realm, they were gone. And this Seed of Nightmare appeared instead.

So, it was pretty obvious what the content of the Nightmare contained within it was.

It was the harrowing time Sunny had spent here before the Terror of LO49 killed everyone.

‘Unbelievable.’

Sunny’s own Nightmares had all happened before the Doom War — except for his Third Nightmare, which did not really fit in the timeline of history. But not all Nightmares were the same.

Some challengers were sent to the aftermath of the Doom War, trying to survive in the mortal realms that were being consumed by Corruption. Some, like Tamar and her cohort, were even sent to Nightmares of the Divine Realms that had survived for quite some time after the gods fell.

But Sunny had never heard of a Nightmare Seed that contained the story of modern times… a story from the history of the waking world.

Until now.

‘How does that even work?’

What was the Rank of that Seed? Were Awakened meant to challenge it to become Masters, or were Masters meant to challenge it to become Saints? Either way, it did not seem fair… Sunny had been a Master during the Chain of Nightmares, but even he was surprised sometimes at the fact that he had survived.

And whose roles were the challengers going to take? Was someone going to inhabit the body of Verne, the chief security officer of LO49… and Sunny’s own body? Were they going to take the roles of his soldiers?

It all felt very wrong.

A Nightmare with MWPs, railguns, and the Rhino was simply… bizarre.

But then again, perhaps it was only reasonable.

The Seeds of Nightmare usually appeared in places where awful things had happened, and where great terror and heartbreak had been felt — where blood had been spilled. LO49 checked all the boxes. It passed the test with flying colors, even.

Still…

Sunny pitied the poor soul who would get the dubious privilege of experiencing any of the horrid things he had endured.

He shook his head.

‘Good luck surviving that.’

The existence of this Seed was reasonable, but posed a number of questions.

The most important of them was… what would happen when this Seed matured and was ready to bloom?

The Nightmare Seeds were born in the Dream Realm, matured, and eventually bloomed — therefore creating a Nightmare Gate and allowing the Dream Realm to invade another world. In the end, the Gate consumed a part of that world, transporting it back to the Dream Realm.

But after the waking world fell, there would be no more worlds for the Dream Realm to devour, and nowhere for Nightmare Gates to appear. So… what would happen to this Seed?

In fact, what happened to all the Nightmare Seeds after the worlds their blooming infected were consumed? Did they simply vanish, having served their purpose?

Since people from Earth had never witnessed a world being consumed by the Dream Realm before, this was all uncharted territory. Perhaps the descendants of Daeron and his Saints knew, but Sunny did not. Somehow, he doubted that the Seeds simply disappeared, though.

Rather… his intuition told him that the Seeds did what all the flowers did when blooming.

They spread pollen.

In the case of Nightmare Seeds, the pollen they would spread was probably Corruption. They simply remained, serving as eternal sources of Corruption and slowly tainting the world around them.

“Lovely.”

Sunny stared at the infantile Seed of Nightmare for a while, feeling cold despite his Supreme physique.

On the bright side, he knew all there was to know about what had happened at LO49. So, if he wanted to, he could gather a cohort of challengers, give them the detailed information of what to expect, arm them with the precise combination of Memories they needed to return alive, and throw them into the Nightmare.

Despite how harrowing it was, they would probably stand a better chance of conquering it than any cohort going into a normal Nightmare blind did.

So… if there were many such Seeds in the future — Seeds that were born from the horrors that had transpired in the waking world — researching a Nightmare before challenging it would become a distinct and incredibly beneficial possibility, increasing the number of challengers that survived their trials.

‘That is valuable intel.’

But that was not why Sunny had come to the edge of the world.

Staring at the ruins of LO49 and reminiscing about the past was not his purpose, either. So, after looking at the Seed with a deep frown for a while, Sunny sighed and turned away.

He continued moving north.

Further, and further, and further away… testing how much of the Antarctic Center had already been swallowed by the Dream Realm.

Sunny found the spot where he had met Sergeant Gere and his small convoy and refugees. From there, he scaled the mountains and reached the abandoned underground complex he and his soldiers had cleared once to allow the refugees to sleep in safety.

Moving further, Sunny eventually reached the old tunnel where he had first encountered the Heart of Darkness. Even knowing that it was long gone, he still decided not to go inside the tunnel. Instead, Sunny descended to the coastal highway and passed the spot where Goliath had almost killed him once.

By then, he was feeling a slight discomfort. As Sunny moved further north, the discomfort slowly grew more pressing, eventually starting to resemble a familiar feeling… the feeling of being rejected by the world.

That feeling finally reached its usual state when Sunny discovered the ruins of Erebus Field.

And so, at that moment, Sunny knew that he had crossed the realm boundary and returned to the waking world… only he did not cross anything. There was no boundary between the realms here, meaning that Earth was now seamlessly connected to the Dream Realm.

And that was not all.

On the shore of the ocean west of Erebus Field, Sunny found something that made him scowl.

There, sprawled on the edge of the rustling water, a dead Nightmare Creature was lying on the icy ground, towering above it like a black hill.

Its carapace was broken, and crude spears made from flint were sticking from the ghastly wounds.

The dead Nightmare Creature… was a member of the Black Millipede tribe.

The flint spears, meanwhile, undoubtedly belonged to the Barrow Wraiths.

But there was no sign of either around. Sunny stared at the dead Nightmare Creature for a long while, his expression grim.

‘So they reached that far north…’

He shifted slightly, looking at the undulating expanse of the ocean behind the Black Millipede.

Not only was the realm boundary broken, but Nightmare Creatures were also freely crossing from the Dream Realm to the waking world.

And that… that did not promise anything good.

‘Damn it.’

The apocalypse was not simply drawing close…

It was already here.