In Li Pan's vision, the endless mountains rolled up like serpent shapes, roaming the galaxy, heading towards the void, the endless, deep space whirlpool.
In this wildly magnificent scene, Li Pan couldn't help but shed tears of blood; he felt as if he could hear the sounds of blood vessels bursting in his head, and the warmth of fluid spilling from his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose.
But he didn't blink, because he had truly seen it.
It was a snake.
A snake too vast to describe.
Those two glittering suns were the snake's eyes.
It coiled its body, emerging from the darkness, looking at Li Pan.
Li Pan also recognized its face.
It was his own face.
...
Li Pan abruptly opened his eyes, feeling his heart pounding violently in his chest.
As he looked up, he saw his own face again, like the monster with the body of a snake in his dreams, staring at him from not far away, nearly screaming out in fright. He stared wide-eyed, almost forgetting to breathe for a good ten seconds before he was able to catch his breath.
It was just his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
At this moment, he was sitting in his small one-bedroom, one-living room, and one-bathroom apartment. The timer on the mirror was blinking, showing it was two o'clock in the morning.
Although in the dream, he seemed to have climbed that mountain, no, the back of that snake for days, in reality, he had only slept for an hour after returning to his apartment on the first day from work.
"...Damn this weird dream..."
Li Pan's voice was hoarse as he wiped off sweat, suddenly sensing that something was amiss.
Then he saw that he was holding the Bamboo Slips in his hand.
"What the hell..."
Li Pan trembled as he crawled to the window, cautiously peering out, and only when he saw the dirty and crowded slums of the Tube Buildings without the sight of that huge snake did he breathe a sigh of relief.
For a moment, he didn't know which truth was more terrifying,
whether he had truly gone to the Otherworld just now and stolen the Bamboo Slips from the body of a giant serpent with a human head.
Or if someone had snuck into his apartment in the dead of night and stuffed a roll of Bamboo Slips into his hand...
Li Pan hurriedly got up to take a bath. He had no injuries on his body, nor had he suffered a burst blood vessel like in the dream; his newly purchased Prosthetic Body was also intact. It seemed the only connection to that strange dream was this Bamboo Slips.
"Xingtian, pull up the apartment video from an hour ago, and my sleep state, physiological signs."
Li Pan didn't dare to be negligent and promptly conducted a full-body check. Thankfully, the surveillance showed he was mostly normal. After coming back, he had simply sat on the sofa and started sleeping, with no Hacker or Ninja breaking into his apartment; even the bite marks on his hand from that female vampire at work were still there.
But there was a minor problem.
In the video, as well as in the mirror, there were no Bamboo Slips.
Even though Li Pan could see and touch them with his own eyes, there was nothing in the mirror, in the video, in the system—they couldn't observe anything!
The person in the mirror kept raising his head to check against the air in his hand, making him seem like a madman acting out a scene.
It wasn't Optical Invisibility, it wasn't camouflage.
It truly was, an artifact existing only in dreams.
"Damn, monster..."
Li Pan couldn't make heads or tails of it, struggled to understand, and for the time being had to attribute this weird dream and monster to the 'trial of formal attire.'
Frowning at the Bamboo Slips in his hand, he had an instinctual feeling that this 'trial of formal attire' wasn't over yet.
But now that he had 'returned' to the reality of 0791, Li Pan proceeded to copy the ancient characters on the Bamboo Slips one by one, searching them out on the network.
Then, looking at the translated results, Li Pan was speechless. For a moment, he suspected someone was playing a trick on him, then he fell into deep self-doubt, even considering volunteering for a mental assessment to see if he was truly insane.
This damned thing was actually the "Nine Yin Manual," can you believe it...