The old sailor agreed very readily.
Having said that, he leaned back against his pillow, his eyelids slowly closing.
Elias's eyelid twitched, and he quickly reached out to tap the bedframe.
“Wait, old-timer.”
The old man was startled awake by the sound and opened his eyes again.
“What's wrong?”
“I told you to rest, not to sleep.”
Elias pointed to the surrounding wounded, who were holding cups of cold water and forcing themselves to stay awake.
“Don't take my polite words so literally, alright?”
“Oh.”
The old man nodded blankly and sat up a bit straighter.
Elias looked back at the brooch in the old man's palm.
“Old-timer.”
“Where is your wife now?”
“Dead.”
The old man answered very quickly this time.
He didn't even have to think.
“She didn't make it back the night the sea beasts came ashore.”
His voice was very calm.
It was as if he were stating a fact he had repeated and been forced to accept many times before.
Elias didn't respond immediately.
Well.
He forgot her name.
Yet he remembered her death clearly.
Elias stood up and turned to Dr. Hall.
“What about the others with abnormal memories? What did they forget?”
Dr. Hall cradled the stack of medical records in her arms again.
She flipped through a few pages and quickly found the annotated records.
“A mother who can't remember what her deceased son looked like.”
“She knows she has a son, and she remembers he died at the docks.”
“But when asked to describe him, she only says she can't see him clearly.”
Dr. Hall flipped another page.
“And a dockworker.”
“His younger brother went missing the night of the sea beast invasion and hasn't been found since.”
“This afternoon, he suddenly forgot his brother's voice.”
“What about other things?”
“There are no obvious gaps for now.”
“They still remember their own names, addresses, and jobs.”
“They can also recognize their living family members.”
Elias clicked his tongue in annoyance.
“Of all the memories a living person has, it just had to take the ones of the dead.”
The old man forgot his wife's name.
The mother forgot her son's face.
The older brother forgot his younger brother's voice.
The missing pieces seemed different, but they all pointed to the same thing.
The deceased.
To be precise, the memories that the living retained of the dead.
Elias stroked his chin as he walked back to the long table where the dream drawings were laid out.
If he were the one behind this.
Going to all this trouble to procure two crates of genuine 【Dream-soothing Paper】, forging complete paperwork, and then dragging one hundred and thirty-six people into the same dream.
It couldn't just be to give them collective, early-onset dementia.
According to the current pattern, those experiencing memory loss had all lost friends or family in the sea beast invasion, or had witnessed someone's death with their own eyes.
Those people had originally dreamed of sea beasts repeatedly.
After the 【Dream-soothing Paper】 was activated, however, the nightmares were not sealed within the paper.
That was why the paper remained perfectly white.
So, where did the stripped-away things go?
Elias's gaze swept over the drawings on the table.
The coast.
The reefs.
The non-existent waterway.
And that unlit lighthouse drawing closer and closer.
Initially, he had mistaken the twisted lines around the lighthouse for reefs.
After all, the people drawing them had no artistic training.
The lines were chaotic, and the proportions were completely off.
The black outlines crowded along the shore indeed looked like a stretch of bizarre rocks eroded by the waves.
But looking at them now...
Some “strange rocks” were narrow at the top and wide at the bottom.
Some had slender protrusions sticking out.
A few outlines even faintly held the posture of bowing their heads, waving, or cradling objects.
Those weren't rocks.
They were human figures.
Elias rotated several drawings in turn.
Once the perspectives from different angles were pieced together, the blurry outlines finally formed shapes that corroborated one another.
One.
Three.
Over a dozen.
The closer they got to the lighthouse, the denser the human figures on the shore became.
They stood quietly between the dark sea and the lighthouse, as if waiting for something to come ashore.
Elias stared for a long time.
“This time, it really might not be the Mist Veil Society.”
“At least, it doesn't look like their handiwork.”
After a long moment, he made his judgment.
Dr. Hall looked up at him.
“You thought it was those cultists at first?”
“It was highly possible...”
“But I take it back now.”
Elias raised a hand to interrupt her.
“We really can't pin this one on them.”
“Why?”
“The style is wrong.”
Elias tapped the drawings.
“The Mist Veil Society likes to make people grow things they shouldn't.”
“Tentacles, eyes, scales, or just turning them into a pile of rotten meat that even their own mothers wouldn't recognize.”
“Their rituals are all about being chaotic and spectacular.”
“You go in alive, and when you come out, they have to change your species on your files.”
Dr. Hall fell silent for a moment.
It was a crude description.
But strangely accurate.
“This thing is different.”
Elias's voice slowly grew quieter.
“It isn't turning living people into monsters.”
“It is gradually extracting every dead person from the memories of the living.”
Dr. Hall followed his gaze, looking at the last few dream drawings.
Those dark shadows that had previously looked like strange rocks suddenly became jarringly obvious.
“So what exactly does the other party want to do?”
“Harvest some kind of precious memory?”
Elias spoke.
“Or specifically harvest memories related to the deceased?”
“I'm not sure.”
Elias walked back to the old sailor's bedside.
The old man was still looking down, rubbing the brooch.
The movement was familiar.
But his eyes no longer knew who it belonged to.
“Have you seen your wife in your dreams?”
“No...”
The old man answered subconsciously.
Midway through, his expression grew hesitant.
“Wait.”
“Under the lighthouse, there seems to be a woman standing.”
Elias leaned down.
“What kind of woman?”
“I can't see her face clearly.”
The old man furrowed his brows.
“I don't know what she looks like.”
“But I know she's waiting for me.”
Dr. Hall asked:
“What did she say?”
The old man clutched the brooch, his vacant gaze briefly settling.
“The fish soup is ready.”
He muttered.
Elias was silent for a moment.
Just moments ago, the old man had remembered that the fish soup his wife made tasted awful.
And the woman in the dream with the obscured face happened to call out to him using this very detail.
This wasn't a lure fabricated out of thin air by some foreign entity.
At least, the raw material wasn't.
It came from the memories of the life the old man had shared with his wife.
A man who couldn't remember his deceased wife's name, yet his deceased wife in the dream still retained these details.
Memory hadn't vanished.
It had simply been moved from the old man's brain to somewhere else.
“Let me see the dream records of the others.”
Elias held out his hand.
Dr. Hall had already grown accustomed to his pace and immediately handed over the medical records and their corresponding drawings.
He quickly found the reports of the other two individuals with abnormal memories.
The mother who forgot her son's appearance had seen a child holding a wooden toy boat under the lighthouse.
She said the child kept his head down, and his face had no features.
Yet he kept raising the wooden boat for her to see.
The notes in the medical record mentioned that the child's favorite toy during his lifetime was indeed a small wooden boat carved by his mother's own hands.
The dockworker who forgot his younger brother's voice didn't see any figures clearly.
He only heard someone singing across the sea.
The tune was fragmented.
And the lyrics were muffled and indistinct.
But it was an old nursery rhyme the two brothers often sang when they were young.
Few people knew it outside of their family.
Elias placed the two records on the table.
Looking at the drawings of varying quality again, the strange rocks rising beneath the lighthouse had completely changed.
They were the people the dreamers missed.
Wife.
Son.
Brother.
And many more who had died in the sea beast invasion, surviving only in the memories of the living.
“The 【Dream-soothing Paper】 didn't turn black because the stripped nightmares didn't stay in the paper at all.”
Elias said.
“Those memories related to the dead were also sent into the dream along with them.”
Holly looked at the old man.
“Is the woman in the dream really his wife?”
“No.”
Elias answered quickly.
“Not really.”
“Why?”
“Because the real Molly has already passed away.”
“The figures in the dream only repeat what the living remember.”
Elias picked up the old man's record.
“The fish soup.”
“The small wooden boat.”
“The childhood song.”
“So far, not a single person has heard the deceased say anything in their dreams that they themselves didn't already know.”
“There are no new memories belonging to the deceased, nor any genuine new conversations.”
“They are merely using the materials provided by the living.”
He put the record down.
“It's more like a counterfeit stitched together from memories.”
Dr. Hall's expression grew even grimmer.
If what stood in the dream were merely empty shells pieced together from memories, the more those figures resembled the departed, the more unsettling it became.
Because every word they spoke meant that a piece of memory in the brain of the living had been carried away.
By the time all the details were stripped bare...
The living might not even remember who they had lost.
Elias looked back at the waterway that did not exist in reality.
The originally incorrect geography...
Now seemed to have another explanation.
“Perhaps the map isn't the goal either.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone is using the memories of one hundred and thirty-six people to pave a path for these things.”
His finger traced along the narrow waterway, slowly moving toward the open sea outside the lighthouse.
There was no path in reality.
But one had appeared in the dream.
And the figures stitched together from memories beneath the lighthouse were waiting at the end of that path.
Right at that moment.
A commotion came from outside the shelter.
The watchman's questioning was cut short by a cold voice.
Immediately after, the doors were pushed open from the outside.
The cold night wind poured into the hall.
The flames of several kerosene lamps tilted inward simultaneously.
A young man wearing a black-and-silver robe walked in.
He was slender and pale, with his black hair combed impeccably.
The edges of his robe were embroidered with dark silver moon phase patterns.
As he walked, the moon phases sequentially transitioned from waning to full, and then back to waning.
Even more eye-catching was the crescent moon holy emblem hanging from his chest.
The Ascetic Society.
The young man looked around the shelter.
His gaze swept across the wounded struggling to stay awake, the dream records scattered on the table, and Elias standing in front of the drawings.
“Dream investigator of the Ascetic Society.”
He stopped in the center of the hall.
“Theolan Vesper.”
His voice was cold and clear, echoing through the shelter.
“Who is in charge here?”
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