Chapter 3: The Black Dream

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The man was tall, thin, and hunched, his entire body wrapped in a gray trench coat. A wide-brimmed fedora shaded his head, while a mask and sunglasses concealed his face completely.

He removed his left glove and rolled up his sleeve, revealing a segment of wrist with a metallic sheen, upon which a laser-engraved ram’s head tattoo stood out starkly.

“Is the merchandise ready?”

“Of course.” Li Nanke produced a data disk he had prepared in advance, containing the dream he had just finished modifying the night before—“A Cat’s Catastrophe.”

The man with the ram’s head tattoo took the disk without even checking it, and briskly pulled five bundles of cash from his coat, handing them over.

The ram’s head was an old client of Li Nanke’s. Of course, the real buyer was certainly not the ram’s head himself; perhaps it was whoever stood behind him, or perhaps even they were just middlemen. Li Nanke understood this well, but he never probed deeper.

Both parties dealt in physical goods—no traces left on the cloud, no record of electronic transfer—this was the best protection for both.

The transaction complete, the ram’s head did not leave as usual, but said, “There’s a new job, double the price—100,000 credits. It demands top-tier skill. Will you take it?”

“Double... What’s the job?”

“You’ll know if you accept.” He pulled out a semi-transparent gray box containing a data disk.

This new job, with its high reward, required physical media: the disk was not to be a modified version of an officially released dream, but something else entirely. That spoke volumes.

The disk the ram’s head handed him most likely contained an illegal, unreleased dream.

Because of its illegality, it could not be distributed or downloaded via the cloud—only through physical disks, passed hand to hand in the shadows. This is why such dreams were called “Black Dreams.”

“Modifying an already illegal Black Dream...”

A Dreamweaver’s job seemed simple enough—altering normal dreams into Black Dreams at the client’s request, much like adding a new plotline to a film or installing mods on a game. But in truth, the difficulty and risk were immense.

For Dreamweavers, third-party plugins served only as aids, merely transcribing—recording—the dream. The true work depended entirely on the Dreamweaver’s own extraordinary gifts.

Sometimes Li Nanke joked to himself that perhaps he was burning through all the neural energy he’d ever have in this life, which was why his brain was so abnormally active, and why he paid the price by developing ALS—a degenerative nerve disease.

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People like Li Nanke, with exceptionally developed neurons, could break through the built-in limitations of the dream synchronizer, forcibly pushing their own sync rate to 100%, even beyond that, exceeding the safe threshold.

This brought unimaginable freedom within dreams, and sensations far more intense and exhilarating than reality itself.

Imagine if the pleasure of intercourse in reality was rated a 10, then in a modified dream, that pleasure might become an 11, 12, or even 15 or 20.

In dreams, every sadness and every joy, all pleasure and all pain, every sensation and emotion is artificially magnified, granting one unprecedented experiences. And what would that lead to?

Reality, bland and insipid, would become the “dream,” while dreams would become the true “reality.”

This was no alarmist exaggeration. The example of intercourse was tame. If you replaced that with the euphoria of drug use—pleasures far beyond what biology can safely endure—then amplified again in a modified dream...

Extraordinary talent was the first essential condition for becoming a Dreamweaver. The second was a willingness to shoulder immense risk.

The dangers of excessive sync rates hardly needed repeating; the major corporations had long conducted countless experiments.

When a dream feels more real than reality, it becomes easy to blur the line, to lose oneself, to let real memories fade. Worse, if one suffers trauma within a dream, the consequences could be catastrophic—far beyond what any user could bear.

Yet, a high sync rate was not without its benefits.

When sensory perception broke past the 100% mark, it could gradually awaken dormant extrasensory perception within the human body—the so-called sixth sense (ESP)—enabling instinctive danger detection and crisis avoidance within dreams.

Ordinarily, the fine skills, muscle memory, and neural reflexes acquired in dreams were dulled by imperfect sync, making them impossible to carry back into reality.

But Li Nanke was different. The battlefields, shooting ranges, dissecting tables, and fighting arenas in the dream archive had all provided him with skills and experience far beyond the norm.

His exceptionally high sync rate allowed him to learn new techniques at an extraordinary speed—much faster than painstaking real-world practice.

It was precisely because of this that he could so adeptly modify every kind of dream, earning his place as a seasoned Dreamweaver.

Faced with such a lucrative offer to modify a Black Dream, Li Nanke hesitated only briefly, then took a deep breath and said, “I’ll take it. But the fee isn’t enough... you’ll have to raise it!”

The ram’s head gave him a long look. “One hundred fifty thousand. That’s my final offer.”

“Deal!”

The ram’s head handed over the box containing the disk, and turned to leave at once.

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As he left, he tossed a final remark over his shoulder: “Get some sleep first. There’s no rush. As always, I’ll be back in a week for the goods.”

Li Nanke gazed at his reflection in the mirror. His face was bloodless, lips drained of color, his eyes bloodshot and vacant, his whole expression stiff and numb—a picture of utter exhaustion.

He looked as if he’d just pulled three all-nighters and then been ruthlessly drained by a rich woman for good measure.

The high sync rate from last night’s session still hadn’t worn off. Attempting another dream modification in this state—he’d be lucky not to drop dead on the spot.

He grabbed a sheet of paper and scrawled, “The boss is out speed-dating. Dream sales postponed—come back another day,” then stuck it on the shop’s shutter, locked up, and closed for business.

With a solemn air, Li Nanke opened the box, taking out the data disk and a single sheet of paper covered in writing.

[Dream—“The Sea of Abes”]

[Dream Synopsis: Abes was a small settlement established in the Middle Ages, on the western continent’s port. Its main industry was shipbuilding, with some fishing as well. But after years of religious wars, Abes fell into decline and slowly vanished from the map.]

[At the end of the 19th century, an explorer stumbled upon this long-lost town, swallowed by the tides of time. For reasons unknown, the explorer eventually fled in madness. No—he was already mad! Perhaps he had unwittingly glimpsed the town’s terrible secret...]

[For full details, specific modification requirements, and all relevant nodes, refer to the information embedded in the dream. You may view it upon syncing.]

“Not even a minimum sync rate specified? This Black Dream really is black as hell.”

At his last medical consult, the doctor told Li Nanke he had only two and a half years left. If luck was on his side, maybe three years at most. That was the very latest he could take the special medication—take it then, and his life might be saved, but the aftereffects would be nearly irreversible.

If he delayed, even if cured, he’d end up a drooling, bedridden wreck with a twisted mouth and skewed eyes, tubes sprouting from every limb.

Transplanting a cybernetic spine might solve some of the paralysis, but when all muscles in the body fail, a single artificial spine is useless—unless one replaced everything but the brain itself with prosthetics...

Leaving aside the astronomical cost, if he swapped out every part for synthetics, Li Nanke figured he’d lose his mind before he ever left the operating table.

He had no choice. If he wanted to live, even knowing the risks hidden in this Black Dream, he had to grit his teeth and accept.