Chapter 240 - Chapter 240: 240 (1/2)

Chapter 240: 240

Translator: 549690339

Chapter 240: An Abnormal World

When Liu Shiling’s “runaway plan” fails only a few hundred meters away from home, Li Jun, better known as “Xiao Pingguo” who had been asleep for over an hour, suddenly sat up.

Her eyes wide open, “staring” straight ahead, those blind eyes seemed shiny like black gemstones.

In her sleep, she had heard what seemed to be the faint rumble of thunder, followed by the feeling of being amidst a thunderstorm.

She had never seen lightning, nor experienced a thunderstorm before.

In the past, her understanding of these natural weather phenomena had been constructed solely through listening to the sounds of thunder, as well as various related verbal or textual descriptions.

But the thunderstorm she perceived in her dream felt vastly different from what she had known before.

She could even vaguely feel the tremors in the surrounding air after a rumble of thunder, the slight movement of her hand hair under the influence of static electricity, and a tingling sensation on her skin.

However, her dream was not limited to just this thunderstorm. The thunderstorm seemed to merely serve as a sort of “opening ceremony”, opening a door for her in her dreamland.

Next, she didn’t know how it happened, but she inexplicably seemed to have passed through a “portal”, arriving in a different space, initiating another “dreamland”.

In that “dreamland”, she was sitting in front of a computer, watching a variety of humorous animations and dramas, one after another, guffawing aloud from time to time.

Sometime later, she went through another “portal”, entering another dream. She crouched on the ground, fiddling with components inside a computer case, figuring out, according to the knowledge taught by Xiang Kun, that she was now messing about with jumpers to overclock the device. After the powering-on failure and hearing the machine’s beeping sound, she started planning to modify the CPU cooling.

She then left this dream and entered a “portal” once more, wandering a long time inside before finally discovering another dreamland.

In this “dreamland”, she had turned into a monster, not only gigantic in stature but also possessing many arms, pursued by many people, and instinctively forced to keep fleeing. Fortunately, she was able to run very fast.

Awakening from the sense of fear that this dream had instilled, Xiao Pingguo sat up from her bed.

Despite these several peculiar dream scenarios, including an inexplicable thunderstorm and the last one filling her with intense fear, the emotions she mostly felt after waking up were not just stress and fear but more of excitement, exhilaration, and curiosity.

In those three “dreamlands”, she experienced numerous perceptions she never used to have.

Like when she was sitting in front of the computer watching movies and animations, she could not only listen to the sound but also perceived some peculiar images.

Those images were vastly different from what she usually inferred from sound alone. They may seem bizarre and surreal, but this sensation was utterly novel, and for the first time in her head, a real sense of imagery was formed.

Although she didn’t know to what extent these images from her “dream” were different from real-world scenes.

Besides the images on the computer screen, she also sensed the scenes from the other two “dreamlands”, “seeing” the monster-like CPU case with the wide-open mouth and those “people” chasing after her monstrous self. In her perception, those who chased her, akin to monsters themselves, looked exceedingly bizarre.

Remaining seated on the bed, Xiao Pingguo constantly replayed what she “saw” in her few dreams. She didn’t lie back down to sleep, not because of fear of dreaming again, but because of the fear that if she were to fall asleep straight away, she might forget these “dreams”.

Luckily, she awoke with vivid impressions of her “dreams”, which allowed her to recall them readily.

While lost in her thoughts, Xiao Pingguo sensed something and bent down to pluck the minion wood carving she had kept by her bedside.

After learning the “object sensing” method from Xiang Kun, this minion wood carving had practically become inseparable from her, being taken wherever she went – although she seldom ventured out of her home, mostly staying indoors, sometimes sitting in a nearby park for a short while.

Caressing the minion in her hand, Xiao Pingguo suddenly felt a deeper connection between herself and this wood carving.

In fact, even a day ago, she had sensed a unique bond, stronger than before, between her and the minion wood carving. Not only could she focus better and enhance the sensitivity of her senses like listening to surrounding sounds and sensing the environment with the help of the wood carving, but she seemed also to predict the movements of people or objects around her more accurately with it, giving her a sixth sense-like “subconscious reaction”.

Moreover, she noticed that during conversations with others, the wood carving seemingly helped her better sense others’ emotions and intentions.

Having only recently developed this feeling, Xiao Pingguo wasn’t too sure whether it was all in her head but got no reply from Xiang Kun when she sought his advice on WeChat.

However, at this moment, clutching the minion wood carving, she was absolutely certain that her sensing capability had improved significantly.

She could even use the minion wood carving to sense the CPU, motherboard, and memory wood carvings kept in a drawer.

She clearly sensed the general environment within the table, then extended her thoughts through the three wood carvings and vaguely sensed an entity resembling a multi-armed monster gazing at her from an indeterminate distance.

She could sense that this monster was in an enclosed space, as if it had been locked up.

Given the few dreams she had had earlier, which were immersive and filled with inexplicable emotions, did they have something to do with the wood carving?

Xiao Pingguo’s immediate thought was that the monster she could sense might just be a figment of her imagination, an illusion arising from her over-concerted attention to the minutiae of her dreams.

After all, whether it’s the monster’s appearance or the action of it watching her from a distance, both were constructions of her own cognition, devoid of any sensory information that led to this cognition. Neither sound, smell, nor touch – strictly speaking, such inadequate and baseless cognition could only be defined as a “hallucination”.

At seventeen years of age, she was no longer naive enough to believe in the existence of monsters and spells. In fact, perhaps because of having a father who was a university associate professor, she never indulged in such fantasies when growing up. She was much more willing to approach various phenomena with a scientific mindset rather than assume the existence of magic.