Yue Shi showed a fraction of his power, and the players watched with a mixture of shock and delight.
“Oh my god, the boss really is a hidden NPC!” 【Nightshade】’s jaw dropped.
“That mirror spell is so damn badass!” 【Iron Egg】 added with passionate agreement.
“Must learn, must learn, must learn.” 【Little Cucumber】 spammed the chat three times in a row.
The chat screen was flooded with exclamation marks and messages about wanting to cling to the boss’s legs.
Some players had already posted on the forum: 【The boss of Tulip Security Company is incredibly powerful. Highly recommend trying to win him over and learn spells from him. Videos for proof included.】
The post received dozens of replies as soon as it was uploaded.
Inside the mirror, Yan Chongshan and his team were all wounded. He had likely realized he was done for and was exchanging life-and-death farewells with his teammates.
“What are they doing, hugging like that? Do they want to have a five-way party before they die?” Yue Shi asked cuttingly.
Ghost was a bit speechless. “They just have a close bond. You probably wouldn’t understand the... well, the ‘bonds’ between them~”
Yue Shi indeed did not understand. Watching these people perform a tearjerker in front of him gave him a literal stomachache.
Stop wasting time and just die already!
Just as Yue Shi’s killing blow was about to fall, suddenly—
“Wait! Stay your hand!”
A woman’s voice rang out, possessing a piercing quality.
It was Long Jianguo.
“Do it as a favor to me.”
...
Blue Star.
To deal with the Nightmare Sickness, the authorities had specifically established the “Dream Disaster Research Group.”
At this moment, in the research center, the hallway lights stayed on all night. Researchers moved in and out of their respective laboratories.
On the circular screen in the center of the hall, dense rows of numbers flickered. These were the preliminary statistics of Nightmare Sickness patients reported from cities all over the world.
The numbers refreshed every few seconds, and with every update, the patient count grew larger than the last.
Furthermore, the increase in numbers wasn’t linear; it was constantly accelerating!
“The situation has spiraled out of control. As long as people sleep, they will have that dream.” The researcher in charge of data aggregation took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with the corner of his shirt, and put them back on.
The colleague next to him stared at the screen. His eyelids drooped for a second before he snapped them open. He didn’t dare close his eyes, fearing he would fall into that nightmare too.
“But why are some people still normal? Why haven’t they had the nightmare yet?”
No one could answer.
In the meeting room, several department heads sat around a long table. Thick stacks of reports were spread out, each one rushed out overnight by research institutes in different cities.
The conclusions of the reports were largely the same: no source of transmission or path could be found, and currently, there were no points where they could intervene.
“Some people who didn’t have the nightmare ended up having it later. Why is that?” An old professor with white hair slammed the report in his hand onto the table. The pages scattered, sliding to the other end of the desk.
His face was flushed red, and veins pulsed from his temples down to his neck. He knew losing his temper was useless, but he couldn’t help it.
He had spent over half his life studying mental illnesses and had seen all sorts of strange cases, but none of them were like this. It made him feel like his decades of knowledge had turned into a pile of scrap paper.
The enigmatic dream left everyone present feeling stifled.
They were used to using data and logic to explain the world; now, the world had suddenly stopped being reasonable.
As of now, the global count of people having the nightmare had exceeded several million.
The growth rate of this number was still increasing.
“We must first clarify the transmission route of the Nightmare Sickness before we can cut off its infection,” a certain leader spoke up.
These words were pure meaningless platitudes, devoid of any actual substance.
The director of the research center cleared his throat, his voice raspy. “We have screened all known methods of transmission. It is not a germ, nor is it airborne or transmitted through bodily fluids. We are still looking for commonalities among patients, but so far, we have found no quantifiable correlation.”
The leader fell silent for a few seconds before instructing, “Then continue the investigation. Every second counts.”
Several experts glared at him. You actually know that every second counts, yet you specifically wasted time to hold this big meeting?!
Are you here just to show off your authority!
Spreading to millions of people in a single day was something that had never happened in the history of human civilization on Blue Star.
Some compared the Nightmare Sickness to a plague, but a plague at least had pathogens and a latent period, and the immune system could fight back.
The Nightmare Sickness had none of that. All it required was sleep.
Blue Star currently had no way to eliminate the biological need for sleep. A person could go a few days without food or water, but they couldn’t go without sleep.
When people slept, their brains would dream, falling into that darkness, seeing the luminous celestial body, and dying repeatedly in suffocation.
Blue Star officials were forced to sound a Level 1 alert. This was the first time in Blue Star’s history that the entire world had entered a state of crisis simultaneously. Even during the regional wars and natural disasters of the past decades, such a scene had never occurred.
On the news broadcasts, everything was still depicted as flourishing, suggesting a mere nightmare was nothing to fear.
The official statement to the public was that Blue Star was experiencing a dream disaster that was difficult to explain with science.
“Blue Star people can endure hardship and are willing to do so. It is just a nightmare; it will not cause physical damage, only a mental shock. Every strong person on Blue Star can pass through this safely.”
To maintain social order, all news media kept a unified narrative.
They simply said that many people were having the same dream and that officials were working hard to figure out why. Meanwhile, they advised everyone to try to sleep less, and if they must sleep, to try segmented sleep to avoid staying in a single sleep cycle for too long.
Researchers at institutes everywhere were studying the cause of the dreams, reading the dream documents submitted by patients, and analyzing the content of the nightmares word by word.
Those documents filled the servers, every single one describing the same scene: darkness, the void, suffocation, and the luminous celestial body.
Some wrote in detail, others briefly, but the core elements were identical.
The researchers looked for any traces in the documents that might point to the source of transmission.
They were still far from the truth.
The Nightmare Sickness was not transmitted through physical contact in the traditional sense; rather, it relied on images.
Those videos on social media, the live stream footage of certain players in the game—as long as someone saw that face through a screen, they would fall into that darkness the next time they went to sleep.
No one realized this for the time being. By the time someone perceived the truth, it would already be too late.
In the research center, the numbers on the screen jumped again, the rate of increase now fast enough to make one’s head spin.
The number of Nightmare Sickness patients finally broke ten million.
Rate on N.U.
