Infinite Nightmares

The green train slowly began to move, following the tracks through a listless forest and toward a pitch-black tunnel.

He could feel the train spiraling downward, accompanied by a constant clattering.

The pitch-black tunnel didn’t last long. When light returned outside the window, towering bookshelves that reached into the clouds appeared before Zhang Wenda.

These slender bookshelves stood amidst emerald-green seawater, forming a peculiar strait-like landscape.

Zhang Wenda had always thought this pink island only had a left and a right side; he never imagined there was such a vast environment within it.

As the train sped across the water’s surface, Zhang Wenda noticed that the books on the shelves were all translucent.

They came in all sorts of colors, but most were red.

Zhang Wenda recognized these books. They were clearly the handiwork of the Hippocampus. So this was where everything he had ever written was stored.

Zhang Wenda roused himself and began to search for the so-called subconscious entity that could solve his current troubles.

Just then, as the train entered the strait filled with bookshelves, its green skin rapidly peeled away, revealing yellowed old newspapers underneath. The train was actually made of old, yellowed newspapers.

As the lake water gradually soaked the paper train, the soggy vehicle began to sink. And in this bizarre, shimmering lake, Zhang Wenda saw an even stranger ecosystem.

Old award certificates, a flashlight he once owned, orange-flavored lollipops, even the rabbit-themed jacket he used to wear, Song Jianguo’s spear—bits and pieces of his past experiences—all drifted gently in the lake.

But before Zhang Wenda could make out what all these things were, with the sensation of surfacing for a deep breath, the train flipped over from the lakebed and arrived in a night-time region filled with stars.

The stars in the sky chimed with an ethereal sound as they collided. Below them, gauze curtains as massive as mountains swayed gently like an aurora, stirring a wind that made one feel drowsy.

As a breeze swept by, completely transparent things began to materialize around the old newspaper train.

It appeared to be a circus—an even weirder circus.

There were clowns with wheels for feet and elephants with comical makeup on their faces. A shifting, smiling face hung in every gondola of the giant Ferris wheel.

A huge balloon hung in the sky, with large words written across it: "Paleocortex, Third Level: Dream Carnival Circus."

Zhang Wenda paid no mind to any of this grotesquerie. Instead, his eyes were fixed on a flash of light amidst the noisy, bustling crowd.

There was no mistaking that color. He had seen this thing before in the Hippocampus’s mirror. It was a subconscious entity! The very thing he was looking for!!

Seeing that the train was still moving forward, Zhang Wenda couldn’t be bothered with anything else. He immediately opened the window and jumped into the bustling circus, stumbling across the soft ground as he chased after that spark of light.

All the while, the circus clowns, animal tamers, and performers kept rushing up to Zhang Wenda, trying to shake his hand. They looked incredibly excited.

Even a hippo washing its hair while doing a handstand nearby bared its huge teeth and came over to greet him.

Faced with all this, however, Zhang Wenda was getting extremely annoyed. The crowd grew larger and larger, seemingly endless.

He finally had enough. When he brandished his scythe, the number of people trying to greet him dwindled significantly.

After forcefully shoving everyone aside, he finally found the subconscious sparks in a corner at the edge of the circus.

The sparks were being flung from the circus’s merry-go-round. There were no wooden horses on it; instead, it was hung all over with stars folded from various translucent papers—stars folded from paper the Hippocampus had written on.

As the merry-go-round turned, the stars collided with one another, creating a pleasant, crisp chiming sound while also releasing subconscious sparks of various sizes.

They bounced around on the ground with a CLINKING and CLANKING sound, but after a few hops, they would quickly dim and disappear.

Zhang Wenda tentatively asked the subconscious sparks, "What should I do now?" However, the sparks, which only lived for a few seconds, gave no response to his question.

Just as Zhang Wenda tentatively reached out to touch one, a disjointed sentence popped into his mind. "You shouldn’t run away."

The voice was familiar, yet when he tried to place it, he realized he didn’t recognize it at all.

Stunned, Zhang Wenda immediately reached out his right hand to touch the spark again, pressing his question. "What do I do next to get through this crisis!"

As Zhang Wenda continued to touch the subconscious sparks, various new voices emerged.

"You can’t pretend nothing has happened."

"You must face everything honestly."

"Above all, you cannot deceive yourself."

After these words were spoken, when Zhang Wenda tried to touch other subconscious sparks, he found they just kept repeating the same phrases.

’Face everything honestly? Don’t deceive myself? What exactly have I been deceiving myself about?’ Zhang Wenda began to grow anxious.

And as Zhang Wenda’s emotions shifted, the sparks seemed repelled by him, hopping far away.

Sensing this, Zhang Wenda took a deep breath and closed his eyes, forcing himself to calm down.

When he slowly opened his eyes again, he looked at the sparks before him and said from the heart, "I, Zhang Wenda, will face everything with composure. I can’t pretend I haven’t noticed anything, and I will absolutely not deceive myself anymore."

The moment he finished speaking, the subconscious sparks finally stopped avoiding him.

Zhang Wenda walked over and opened his arms, catching as many of the subconscious sparks as he could.

"I, Zhang Wenda, will never deceive myself and will face everything with composure!"

After he spoke these words while holding dozens of subconscious sparks in his hands, his own voice began to repeat in his mind as if in resonance.

At that moment, Zhang Wenda finally understood whose voice it was. It was his own voice—different voices from his childhood, his youth, his middle age, and his old age.

Just as all these resonant voices echoed to a crescendo, the entire night sky beside him suddenly split open.

A great, vertical red chasm appeared out of thin air, slanting downward from top to bottom. It diagonally pierced through the uppermost island, then through the Prefrontal Strait and the Carnival Circus, continuing to split the earth deep underground.

Then, Zhang Wenda saw red spheres of all sizes spreading out from both sides of the red chasm. They seeped silently and subtly into the pink island, inside and out, along what looked like red blood vessels.