Infinite Nightmares

The three of them stood frozen in place, as if immobilized. None of them dared to move a muscle.

Looking up, Zhang Wenda stared in shock at the thing looming right before his eyes.

It was a bizarre-looking giant. Its arms and legs were concrete pillars, and the better part of its body seemed to have merged with a nearby utility pole. The space where its head should have been was completely empty.

Zhang Wenda’s mind went blank. One second, two seconds, three seconds... After a few agonizingly long seconds passed, he noticed the giant hadn’t moved. He immediately understood: it hadn’t seen them.

"Move... slowly... Don’t make a sound," Zhang Wenda whispered, deliberately keeping his voice low.

His face ashen, Song Jianguo held his breath and frantically waved at the cats. The cats instantly rose onto their tiptoes, forming a single file line like a black magic carpet. They slid under Zhang Wenda, lifted him into the air, and carried him away in complete silence.

Once they reached a long, narrow alley, they all let out a collective sigh of relief.

Breaking out in a cold sweat, the terrified auntie said to Zhang Wenda, "Wenda, you could’ve given us a heads-up that we’d be facing something like that! You scared me half to death."

"How was I supposed to know this thing would be here? I have no idea what things from the adult world are projected as in this place. This is my first time here, too."

After catching his breath, Zhang Wenda looked at the other two and said, "We don’t need to get tied up fighting them. We just need to find a way out of the past. As long as we can escape this place, we can call the police or get help. Anything goes!"

Well, they’d come this far; there was no sense in turning back now. With the utmost caution, they followed Zhang Wenda and pressed onward.

Along the way, they saw more of the strange giants. Most were motionless, their bodies partially merged with the surrounding buildings. Where their heads should have been, there were no heads—only a single receiving antenna.

Whether it was because of their small size or the cats’ silent steps, the creatures showed no signs of moving.

Seeing the number and placement of these things, Zhang Wenda realized they must be inside a concrete structure. But it was hard to say exactly where.

The problem now was that he didn’t know if the way out of the past was a door or some kind of device, nor what its projection would be from their current perspective.

Right now, besides guessing that the giants were projections of those people, he couldn’t make sense of anything else.

’This won’t work. Once it’s clear, I have to go back to the other side,’ Zhang Wenda thought.

After finding a nearby street with no trace of the giants, he said to Song Jianguo and the auntie, "Wait for me here. I’m going to pop over to the adult world and see what’s going on."

He lightly pressed the Yellow Core, and his surroundings shifted rapidly. He found himself in a dim, trash-strewn, unfinished apartment. Clearly, he was in.

Zhang Wenda could hear a vibrating sound coming from outside. After shushing the cat, he cautiously crept toward the noise.

He followed an equally unfinished hallway to its end, where a miniature world unfolded before his eyes.

A basketball-sized sun hung glowing in mid-air inside the room. Next to it, a storm cloud rained and flashed with lightning.

A bolt of lightning shot from the cloud, instantly felling a foot-tall tree.

As Zhang Wenda stared, dumbfounded, he saw several people enter the room with transparent jars. They reached up as if to harvest the sun in the sky.

Using a small scraper, they shaved off some flares from the sun’s edge and carefully placed them into their jars.

They weren’t just collecting sunlight. They bottled the lightning from the clouds and the flames from the trees. They even captured the rainbow that appeared after the rain, winding it into a ball and stuffing it into a jar.

The scene left Zhang Wenda speechless. He had imagined all sorts of possibilities—drug manufacturing, maybe—but he never would have guessed that *this* was the ’evil deed’ they were up to.

What even was this? Right now, Zhang Wenda couldn’t even find the words to describe it. Nor could he fathom why they had to do it so secretly in a place like this.

"So? Impressive, right? Real impressive," a voice sounded from behind Zhang Wenda.

Without missing a beat, Zhang Wenda slowly nodded. "Yeah, impressive. You got a smoke? Lemme get one."

A cigarette was quickly offered. Zhang Wenda smoothly took it and lit it off the tip of the other man’s.

The man didn’t attack him, and Zhang Wenda showed no sign of panic.

’Zhang Wenda had guessed right! He’d suddenly appeared deep inside their operation without triggering any alarms, so they’d mistaken him for one of their own!’

The man had a pistol for a head. His exposed arms and chest were covered in tattoos, and his build was especially burly.

Without so much as looking up, Zhang Wenda played it cool, smoking his cigarette and casually watching the scene before him.

"This stuff must be expensive, huh?" he asked, continuing the conversation.

"You bet it is. This is the sun we’re talking about—you can’t just buy this stuff. The boss went through hell and back to get his hands on it."

Zhang Wenda’s gaze immediately shifted to the giant ball of fire. Everything else was just a byproduct, spawned from this sun.

Clearly, they had put it here to harvest its byproducts around the clock.

"The sun? Must be incredibly hot, then," Zhang Wenda continued, his tone even.

But the pistol-headed man said smugly, "Nah, it’s fine. Our boss stole it at night."

"At... at night? He stole the sun... at night?"

The claim was so absurd that he began to suspect the man had seen through his disguise and was just feeding him a line.

But he quickly realized the man hadn’t seen through his disguise at all. He was being completely serious, telling him that his boss had gone to the sun at night, pried a chunk off, and brought it back.

’Could it be... that the sun has mutated, just like time? The sun isn’t hot at night? Seriously, is anything in this place normal?’

Taking a deep drag from his cigarette to suppress the twitching at the corner of his mouth, Zhang Wenda adopted the tone of an insider and sighed, "Man, I wonder how much longer we have to stick this out."

"Just hang in there. We’re almost done. Three more months, max, and then we move. We’d never stay in one spot for too long."

At those words, Zhang Wenda’s heart began to pound. He was right—they really did have a way to travel freely through the past.

’If I can just find that thing, getting back will be a piece of cake!’

As they made small talk, Zhang Wenda’s mind raced, trying to figure out how to pry the secret of their return method from this guy.

Zhang Wenda forcefully flicked away his cigarette butt. "Damn," he said with a sigh, "it’s been ages since we got a break. I’d kill to sneak back for a bit."

The pistol-headed man sneered. "Forget about it. Without the boss’s password, the book won’t let you—"

He stopped mid-sentence, his eyes suddenly fixed on Zhang Wenda’s cuff, which had slid back slightly when he’d flicked the cigarette.

Suddenly, the man reached out and yanked up the sleeve, exposing Zhang Wenda’s Red Core and Yellow Core.

The man clearly recognized them. He stared in shock and yelled, "You... You’re from the Third Line?!"