Ke Meng opened his eyes. He was silent, watching the dark, almost pitch-black ocean water.
Shutting down the game would not affect the City of R'lyeh's order. The Level 999 marine creatures were still fighting blindly.
However, that was not the important thing.
The important thing was that he sensed many unknown dreams. There were people dreaming of the same dream somewhere he could not see.
At first, it was a barren world of one player on their own. However, it was no longer a person's dream since it was connected, but a dream that everyone was in.
"There are too many!" Ke Meng exclaimed.
The Dream Dissemination skill was insane. He could no longer count how many people were dreaming.
It was troublesome that too many people were dreaming at the same time.
Ke Meng wanted to stop the dissemination of the nightmare. However, he did not find such a skill in his list.
He could not stop the dream as it had begun to spread. Not only that, but it would also continue to spread unless people stopped the spreading through spoken language and maintained the secrecy of the dream, such as blocking the news or other measures, including group quarantine of the people who had the dream before.
It would be a great security measure to erase specific memories.
Ke Meng thought about it, and perhaps erasing specific memory was one of the solutions to eradicate the nightmare.
Since there was no way of stopping the nightmare at the moment, he could only build the nightmare to be more normal so that the people would be happier.
He sensed the dream that had closer relation to him. It belonged to the girl player, White Milk.
A person's dream connected countless dreams. Thus, Ke Meng could see the broader dream world through the entrance.
In the dream, he saw countless people living in the city the big whale had built. There were people all over the jungle, fields, and residential buildings.
In the beginning, Ke Meng had designed it following a small city's model. Therefore, the city in the whale's body could contain over 100,000 people.
Upon looking at the current trend of him being away for a day, the population might break through millions in a few days.
It was terrifying.
Ke Meng had no idea when Orange Planet would find out the way the nightmare spread. He would build the dream anyway.
There were countless people added now, sacrificing a massive amount of psychic force to allow Him to modify the dream world.
By the way, the dream world was a joint dream built by the dreamers. Ke Meng was using the psychic force they provided.
Ke Meng was not planning on using the evil god's psychic force as the foundation building material. Therefore, the current dream was considered to be normal.
Ke Meng connected the dream world as he thought to himself.
The players were stuck in the big whale's body, so they did not see the cloud of mist appearing above the ocean. Naturally, they did not have fear growing in them.
They merely felt the world in the whale suddenly turn rather suppressive. They felt pressure that could not be described in their chest.
"What's happening? I feel something off."
"I've no idea."
The players talked to each other softly in the whale's world. They discussed the change that came out of nowhere.
Meanwhile, compared to the fear she felt in the beginning, White Milk was rather relieved now.
She was not the only one here. There were a bunch of players who were also from Orange Planet around her.
Humans were social animals. As their same kind increased, their sense of security would skyrocket. Compared to the fear before, they were no longer as terrified now.
However, the water source issue came. The well next to the farmland was the only place that could bring in the ocean water in the entire city.
The players had yet to stay in the dream for a long time. It would be merely a few hours every time they dreamed and woke up. They would not be dehydrated yet.
The battle players gathered at the well. They were staring at it aggressively, but they did nothing as a great conflict of interest was involved.
At the moment, the Orange Planet officials had sent someone into the dream to take over the control of the well. Whoever created a stir would be suspended.
…
Ke Meng saw the new players who had just entered the dream and fallen into the ocean above the big whale. As they could not swim, they drowned.
The whale was slow, as it needed time to swallow the players. Some would avoid being drowned, but some could not.
The middle of the ocean was the starting point. Such a setting was a trap, whereby people who could not swim would definitely drown.
It was horrible for people who could swim too. It was the ocean, after all. They were easily pulled into the ocean when a big wave came sweeping.
Ke Meng thought to himself and created a land in the middle of the ocean with the psychic force the players sacrificed.
In the next second, a drowned player was revived on the land.
He looked horrified while lying on the ground. He was panting hard and squeezing his throat in an attempt to spit out the ocean water. However, there was no water in his mouth at all.
Player Wright was dumbstruck. He thought something was off and then realized that he had been revived.
He was tall and skinny, dressed in a black warlock robe. He, who was handsome, looked exhausted and beaten at the moment.
The experience of being drowned in ocean water was petrifying.
A terrifying feeling came above his head as if there was a scary monster passing by in the sky. His instinct told him that the scary thing did not see him. However, its existence was frightening, causing his adrenaline to surge.
He dared not lift his head to look at the sky. He could only observe around him carefully.
'What's this? A barren desert?'
He rubbed his eyes and noticed a bud appear beneath his foot out of nowhere.
"What's happening?"
Wright blinked again, and the bud grew more suddenly. There were hundreds of buds around his feet now!
As he blinked again, the entire desert was filled with lush, green plants' buds.
'Is this a horror game? Why does the setting change every time I blink?'
Wright was regretful now. He should not have read the story about the nightmare. Perhaps this would not have happened to him if he had not read about others' stories.
However, he knew that it was just his guess.
Even if he did not read the nightmare stories on the internet forum, this would have happened to him too.
The reason being the officials had said the way the nightmare spread was unknown. At the moment, nobody knew how it spread across the cities and the gaming pod's restriction.
The nightmare condition was an unprecedented super-infectious disease. The outbreak was unclear, and no physical isolation seemed to matter to the outbreak.
All of the people on Orange Planet that had yet to dream of the blue dream were afraid to sleep now.
Due to Wright's curiosity, he had learned about the case of the nightmare condition's patient zero, as well as the news reports of the condition being spread quickly in various places.
The more he learned about it, the more curious he was.
He was ballsy and had set the alarm for three hours of deep sleep as usual.
He regretted it now.
'I'm so foolish. I really shouldn't have slept. I shouldn't have set the three-hour alarm…'
This thought filled his head at the moment.
The gaming pod had an automatic waking setting that could reduce the sleeping time. The officials strongly encouraged everyone to wake up by force after half an hour of deep sleep. They were encouraged to do that for the time being.
He had set the alarm to wake him three hours later. Nobody knew what would happen to him next in the nightmare.
Nobody on the internet had seen what he was looking at before!
The buds beneath his feet had branches spreading out. As if time caressed the land, time accelerated here. The buds grew at lightning speed. Some grew into trees, some into flowers. There was no turning back to the desert, as it turned into a field within a blink of an eye.
At the moment, Wright only wanted to say one thing.
'Oh, sh*t!'
Wright saw new things appearing as he secretly cursed.
The soil in the field was bulging. There seemed to be something unknown coming out of the soil.
The terrifying suppression above his head was getting more and more intense. Wright was shaking. Everything seemed strange to him.
In the next second, bugs that looked strange were coming out of the soil. They were hopping and chirping everywhere they went.
And those rocks too, Wright could guarantee he saw them coming out of the soil. They were produced exactly how the bugs were born.
Subsequently, a rumbling came from the sky.
He had no idea what that was, where there was only a white gleam far away. A few seconds later, the white gleam flew over, splitting the field.
Wright only saw it was a destructive stream of water when it arrived closer. It broke all obstacles, while the white gleam on it was the sunlight's reflection.
A couple of minutes later, the change in the land stopped.
A massive mountain covered in snow stood before him. It was so high that its tip was in the clouds. The river flowed from the mountain.
The massive trees were six to seven meters tall. The dense treetops blocked the eternal scorching sun above his head. There would be sunlight passing through the gaps between the trees. It shone down and lit up the roads.
There were some strange-looking plants having ghostly flowers blooming. They spat fluorescent substances that hovered around the entire jungle.
The pressure on his shoulders faded quietly. The terrifying existence in the sky seemed to be merely passing by. It did not stay.
Wright felt weak in his knees. He knelt onto the ground, not knowing what to do as he stared at the unfamiliar environment.