The Embers of King's Teyvat Journey

Just as Ying was about to make a quick escape to pee, the small theater in the distance reached its climax.

"Hey! Hmph, I knew you monster would come here, take this!" Ember sprang to his feet and slapped Nasita from a distance.

"Ahhh, I'm dead!" Nasita drooped her dead fish eyes, then quickly left the field and ran back to Ying and Paimon's side.

"What are you guys up to?" Ying asked, full of doubt, when she saw Naxida coming over.

"Just keep watching." Nasida covered her face, not wanting to say anything more. Acting in such an awkward little drama was definitely a dark chapter in her life.

Seeing Narcida leave the stage, Ember quickly pulled out a Void Terminal and threw it on the ground. Then, he pretended to pick it up again.

"So this monster was actually a Void Terminal that had come to life?! No wonder it could eat people's dreams. Luckily, I'm clever and resourceful, and I've prevented this monster from ever having another chance to wreak havoc on humanity!"

"Ta-da! The plot of this play is fictional. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is purely coincidental!"

After reciting the last sentence, Ember couldn't wait to run to Ying and Paimon's side.

"How, how?"

"You acted very well, senior. Please don't do it again next time."

Ying rubbed her dead fish eyes, feeling that if she looked at this kind of thing for too long, something terrible would grow in her eyes.

"Who asked you that? I was asking if you had any insights or anything like that?"

"Look, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental!" Yu Jin repeated the last sentence, emphasizing each word.

Upon hearing this, Ying seemed to understand something. She began to recall the short drama she had just witnessed, connecting its elements with her own strange experience.

"Um……"

After pondering with her eyes closed for a while, Ying finally opened them.

"I understand, senior. You mean we're trapped in a recurring dream?"

“Very close. Think about what Nightmare said?” Ember said, patting Nasita on the shoulder.

"I've got it! I'll make this human keep dreaming, and I'll eat each dream as it's dreaming. I'll eat all his dreams and memories, and then I'll be full!"

Nasita rolled her eyes, then listlessly repeated her lines.

"Senior, are you saying...we're being forced to dream by the Void Terminal? And we keep having the same dream over and over again?!"

"I understand now. No wonder I had a sense of déjà vu. It's not reincarnation; it's just having the same dream over and over again."

With Ember's distinctive hints and subtle suggestions, Ying quickly realized their current predicament.

"Ah! Is it that scary? We haven't done anything since we arrived in Sumeru, how did we get caught up in such a huge incident?" Paimon exclaimed in surprise upon hearing this.

Actually, Paimon wouldn't have felt anything like déjà vu if Ying hadn't told her.

Now that Ying said that, Paimon felt like he was being swallowed by a giant whirlpool.

However, she was used to it. Every time she followed Ying and Yu Jin around, she would always get involved in something big.

Paimon glanced at Ember, who was staring intently at him, and the small panic in his heart immediately vanished.

With Yu Jin around anyway, what is she worried about?

"Paimon... do you sense anything unusual?" Narcida looked up and asked with concern, looking at Paimon, who looked relaxed beside Ying.

She originally intended to guide both Ying and Paimon to their own conclusions, but unexpectedly, after Paimon obtained the truth directly from Ying, it seemed that there were no problems at all.

“No? I feel great. If I had to say…” Paimon glanced at the crowd on the street and said softly:

Are those people over there ghosts?

"Phew... Don't worry about that, they are all Sumeru people who dream just like you."

Narcida shook her head. Ember was right after all; both Luminous and Paimon were very special.

"That's good." Paimon grinned foolishly. Since it wasn't a ghost, there was nothing to be afraid of.

Regardless of whether it's a dream or not, let's eat all the delicious food in Sumeru first!

Ying's heart wasn't as big as Paimon's. After realizing that this was a dream created by the Void Terminal, she first ripped off the device next to her ear, and then pinched her thigh hard a few times.

"Hiss... Wasn't this supposed to be a dream? Why am I still in pain? And why am I still not awake despite the pain?"

Ying rubbed her thigh, tears glistening in her eyes. Thinking it was a dream, she hadn't held back, but now she was almost crying, and there was still no sign of waking up.

"It's no use. The void terminal in the dream is fake. It's not there even if you take it off."

"Could we tear down their void terminals from the outside?" Ember suddenly thought of this and asked.

“This…” Nasita was taken aback upon hearing this, and then she began to consider the feasibility of this method.

"This should only work on Ying and Paimon. Doing this to others would probably have the same consequences as directly telling them that this is a dream."

Nasita shook her head. The key issue was that the Void Terminal guided everyone to sleep by modifying their subconscious.

If you abruptly interrupt or awaken someone, what your subconscious mind believes and what you see may be completely different, and no one knows what terrible consequences might occur.

"Is that so? This is really troublesome." Yu Jin scratched his head upon hearing this, but when he saw the blurry view outside Sumeru City, a new idea came to his mind.

"Perhaps...we could run out of the city and take a look?"

Hey, this is really strange, why can't I correct the wrong chapter number?

Chapter 699 The Limits of Imagination

2024-05-30

"Hey...hey! Are we really going to run away?"

On the outermost edge of Sumeru City, a group of people were peering out from the virtually nonexistent city wall.

“Of course, otherwise why would he jump down from that big tree?” Ember replied to Paimon, who was feeling guilty.

"How strange, there shouldn't be this many guards in Sumeru City normally." Nasita noticed the mercenaries coming and going near the distant exit and felt something was amiss.

Normally, most of the guards in Sumeru patrol the city, but judging from the current situation, most of the thirty-man group is probably stationed on the border of Sumeru City.

“I see.” Upon hearing Nasita say that the defenses of Sumeru shouldn’t have so many people, Yu Jin immediately nodded in agreement.

Then, with a powerful leap, he bounded over the approximately two-meter-high wall. He had never seen such low walls before; if they hadn't surrounded Sumeru City, Yu Jin would have thought some people had built too many walls around their courtyards.

"Hurry up and come over before we get caught!" Ember urged from another part of the city wall.

Upon hearing this, the group stopped worrying and quickly jumped over the walls of Sumeru City, which could hardly be considered city walls at all.

"boom!"

"It seems no different from the city?"

Ying looked around but couldn't find anything unusual.

"Nonsense, we can touch the city wall with just a lean. If we could tell the difference now, then the entire Doctrine Council would be full of idiots."

Ember looked around and then ran off first—it was a lull in the guards' patrols, and if he didn't leave, he'd have to waste a lot of breath arguing with them.

"Hey! Wait for us!" Upon seeing this, the others hurriedly followed.

Ember wasn't particularly fast; even Paimon, who never liked sports, could catch up with him, let alone Luminous and Narcida.

After running some distance out of Sumeru City, Ember, who was at the forefront, suddenly stopped and began to ponder with his head down.

"What's wrong?" The group of people walked over slowly, looking puzzled.

"You'll see when you come over. I can't possibly have presbyopia, can I?" Yu Jin didn't explain further; he simply waved to the people behind him.

Ying and Naxida exchanged a glance, and then continued their actions.

When the group suddenly crossed an unseen boundary, everything before them began to change drastically.

The lush jungle turned barren, and the verdant landscape transformed into an endless expanse of yellow sand. In a short span of time, the group had been transported from the rainforest to the desert.

"When did you use the teleportation anchor?!" Paimon shouted from the side, then started gagging.

She was used to it; after each teleportation, rather than waiting to be induced to vomit by dizziness, it was more convenient and faster to induce vomiting herself.

"Idiot! There are no teleportation anchors in dreams!!" Ying punched Paimon on the head, almost shoving her into the yellow sand.

"We are...we are..."

“This is a new dream,” Nasita said for Ying when she saw that Ying was stammering and couldn’t explain it clearly.

“That’s right, we’ve entered a new dream!” Now Ying could confidently lecture Paimon.

"Is it a dream outside of a dream? A nesting doll?" Yu Jin pondered, stroking his chin. From afar, it looked like the area outside Sumeru City was still a rainforest, but who knew it would be a completely different dream world?

From the moment Nasita entered the dream, she began to observe everything within it. She lowered her head and picked up a handful of sand.

"Is it this real?" The fine sand in his hand fell to the ground. The realism of this dream was comparable to that of Sumeru City.

“But the people here…” Nasita closed her eyes and began to sense the number of void terminals in this space.

"It's less than one percent of the size of Sumeru City." She opened her eyes and came to this conclusion.

"So, is there any conclusion?" Yu Jin asked, looking down at Nasida, who was deep in thought.

As for Ying and Paimon, they have already started preparing to climb the cactus and pick cactus fruit.

"A dream can yield few conclusions. As far as I know, this place uses less than one percent of the population to maintain a dream as intricate as the city of Sumeru, so the maintenance of the dream should be unrelated to the number of people in it."

Nasita quickly offered her speculation.

"so……"

"Let's keep going and see what new dreams lie beyond the boundaries of this dream."

Nasita nodded to Ember, who immediately picked up Luminous and Paimon, who were jumping up and down on the giant cactus.

One dream world after another, after the yellow sands turned into a rainforest, and after the rainforest came a swamp that Sumeru had never seen before.

The group continued forward, and what they saw kept changing. Not only were there ice fields and volcanoes—terrains unlike anything ever seen in Sumeru—but eventually, they even encountered mushrooms larger than mountains and castles in the sky—truly dreamlike things.

"Wow! Stop chasing me! I'll never eat you again!"

A new dream world, and this time the main characters are truly fantastical—they are food with legs and senses.

The swarms of rice grains flying, the flatbreads floating in the air, and the bouncy dough—everything has a fairytale quality to it.

However, they all have one thing in common: they seem to only have Paimon in their eyes.

All sorts of food seemed to have their eyes on her, chasing her from east to west, and then from west to east.