35 Sleep Well, Player

Back when Dr Zha Huang created the system, he tried his best to eliminate the factor of dying in the game. He tried his level best to create a factor that would make his Players immune to the human process of death.

The Dream System, the channel to Dimension Zero, was not born out of thin air. In fact, it isn't the pure creation of Zha Huang. Instead, it was an invention… to which generations of great cultivators contributed as its knowledge got passed down from generation to generation.

Until the war that took place somewhere around 1800 (1822 to be exact). It wasn't a war that included countries of armies or slaves or the cavalry.

No, it was the lonesome fight of a small girl, who simply wanted to be the best. What's so wrong with that? No one alive currently knows her real name, but she is known as the Little Raven, the one who tried to steal the invention of travelling between dimensions but in the end only managed to create a huge tear in the veil connecting the dimensions.

This tear was the second reason that Qi couldn't be manipulated properly by humans anymore. It caused the rapid decline of cultivators that uphold a balance on Earth, eventually leading to temperatures of the world rising, animals that need special care going extinct and overpopulation. Another unexplainable thing that happened was that the cultivators that existed till then… started disappearing out of the blue.

It was a harsh time and eventually, families with this power brought up their children without educating them of the power of Qi. Sometimes, not knowing was the shield that protected them.

Dr Zha Huang was the first person in the descendants of the cultivating families to have accidentally discovered this secret deep inside his old house (researching was his passion after all). What he had found was a vial with fiery red liquid still bubbling inside the glass container. This intrigued him, and with further investigation into the family and letting the secret out among the entire cast of the Zha family, his cousin Zha Junhei stepped up and used her influence as CEO of a trading company to start a private subsidiary, and thus, Project Dream System was born.

It initially had one primary aim: to successfully travel to and learn more about the unknown dimension. And later after Dr Zha Huang discovered the possibilities through years of research and funds, two other aims popped up. One of which being to allow a normal human to achieve immortality.

So far, only his primary aim was accomplished.

The important factor of his second aim now faced the one thing that the Doctor couldn't avoid: death itself.

Percy had wondered what death would feel like countless times before. Everytime he went to the hospital, he saw at least one patient who had a near-death experience and for a brief moment, he could see what the patient had gone through but he never felt it.

For some patients, they had seen total blankness. For some others, their brain was still active while their body was numb. For other special cases, they saw faces of their loved ones flash by.

While everything in the game felt real, even this was real. As he closed his eyes and felt himself slip away, he felt comfort washing through him. A feeling of euphoria starting from his heart burst inside him and like a wave, captured him as a whole. He felt it in his toes, his fingers and even in the strands of his hair. He didn't see any faces, he didn't feel numb. He felt… happy.

'I want to die…' he found himself thinking, probably with a smile on his face. Everything that he wanted to do, take the Qi Test, defeat the Obsidian Lord, prove the Emperor wrong, all of them seemed like forgotten memories and bedtime stories to him now. All he wanted now was to embrace this feeling and sleep forever.

The sound of a laugh pierced his ear and his eyes flew open.

He was standing upright in a kitchen filled with sunlight. There was a woman at the sink washing dishes. Her jet black hair, just like his, was tied loosely at her shoulders.

"What do you want for dinner, Percy?" her raspy voice entered his ear like a melody. He loved her voice when she was calm like this.

"Sausage," Percy muttered. His voice had gotten squeakier. Percy's eyes widened in surprise and he looked at the mirror on the side to see that he was a 4 year old now. 'What is this? Is the system taking me back to my own memories? Is this how death feels like? Why am I seeing mom out of all people?'

"Sausage? We have run out of sausage, sweetie," his mom said, wiping her hands with a towel. Her auburn eyes turned around to meet his and smiled. "Anything else? What about beans?"

Percy jumped down from the stool and went to the fridge and opened the compartment. He stood on his tiptoes and pointed at the packet inside. "There is a sausage packet here, mum!"

His mother's face convoluted. She strode forward and slammed the door close before bending down to look at him, "When I said no sausages, that means no sausages."

Her voice… it had gotten dark. But Percy knew that there was a worse version of her voice. But he couldn't understand why she wouldn't cook sausages for him.

Afraid of hearing more scoldings from her, he drifted back to his table and ate beans for dinner before going to sleep.

Some time passed. And Percy opened his eyes again and peeked out of his blanket to see light coming in from the kitchen. His feet touched the floor slowly and he tiptoed out into the kitchen. His legs froze as he saw his mom sitting at the table, hunched over and eating something from her plate.

The strong smell of sausages hit his nose and for some reason, tears started forming in his eyes. It was the first time he had felt something called betrayal.

"M-m...um.." he sobbed, looking at her eat the entire packet of sausage. Her eyes flitted to meet his and she screamed at him. "Why are you here?! Why are you in places you're not supposed to be?!"

She got up and her chair fell backwards from the force. Before Percy knew it, she was in front of him and pressing him against the wall. Percy's heart threatened to self-destruct from fear.

"I'm sorry, mum… let me go back to sleep…" he whimpered, not daring to look straight into her glinting eyes.

"You want sausages!? Then I'll give you sausages!" she screamed at him before reaching forward and stuffing a sausage into his mouth. Percy cried, shaking his head and trying to push her hands away from his mouth.

"EAT!!"

"Mum, no…"

She slapped him across the face and Percy yelled as his cheek hit the floor. She pulled him back up again and forced his mouth open. "Eat, Percy," she said seriously. "You're the one who wanted it."

Percy was running out of breath and he tried pushing his mom away but she was far too strong. His knees buckled as he painfully swallowed the sausages and coughed on to the floor, holding his chest to control the suffocation. His mom grabbed his hair and lifted his head to make him look at her.

"This… is what your father did to me, Percy. Don't be like him."

Percy bit his lip. What was she saying? His entire body was throbbing, his cheeks, they were burning. But still he wanted to ask. "What did he do to you?"

A single stream of tears escaped her left eye as she smiled. A moment of silence passed between them before Percy started coughing. The rancid taste of burnt sausage suddenly filled his mouth. 'But the sausage was not burnt…' He bent over and coughed up blood. He groaned and looked up at his mother from whose mouth blood was also dripping.

She shrugged, "I'm used to this by now." She wiped the side of her mouth, but still more blood came out.

"What's happening to us, mum?" Percy's voice trembled. He looked at the floor and all that… blood.

"Your father… he tried to make me one of them- those blood sucking monsters…" she sat on the floor and placed her head on Percy's chest. "I hate him… I hate him so much…"

"Why?" Percy whispered.

"He wanted to make us all immortal, Percy… he tortured me so much…"

Percy watched his mother as she kept mumbling random stuff about a sect his father had been dragged into and how he barely even came back home after he joined it. About a leader in that sect who never showed their face and how they were all forced to drink blood to live longer.

It all felt like a bedtime story to him. So it eventually went to the deepest depths of his memories… buried.

But now, it had resurfaced. The system had made it resurface.

Percy's eyes flew open once more and he was in a white room. He felt himself and saw that he was back in his adult body. He looked around at the familiar place. "What… I'm back at the Introduction part of the game. Shit, I actually died?" He groaned and got up to see the same screen glaring at him once more. This time, the option for Royalty was closed off.

But he was banned from choosing any other option for a while too.

[You will be able to re-start the game after a buffer period of 5 minutes. Until then, please wait.]

"System,' Percy asked the screen, "Why is there a buffer period?"

The system's voice returned to his head, like it was supposed to. He felt relief at hearing its calm voice. "Everytime a cultivator dies or goes through something as close as death, the thin veil over the dimensions waver and threaten to tear even more. This is because your souls are more deeply connected to what makes up the world- the Qi. So any fluctuation in your Qi can affect the veil. For the better or worse. So please wait 5 minutes in this buffer room as the world's self repair mechanism copes up with the threat and makes it safe for you to travel between dimensions again."

Percy sat down on the floor and buried his head in his hands. "What about you, Tiara? If you aren't here, that means you're alive." He sighed, "Good, if two cultivating souls died at the same time, maybe the world will have to suffer much more." He clicked his tongue in disappointment.

"I couldn't defeat those monsters… argh... and…" he opened his mouth to ask the system again. "System, was it you who showed me those memories?"

"What memories?" it replied instantly.

"The ones… of my mom the day before she abandoned me." Percy's heart clenched at the thought. Even after all these years of living with his uncle and having a better life, his heart still clenched. She had left after that outbreak. The next morning Percy opened his eyes on the floor of the kitchen, there was a note next to him instead of his mother with his uncle's phone number written on it.

"That was all you, player. You will remember what you have to remember."

Percy let out a small laugh. "I know it's you, system. No need to hide it. I would never have remembered that on my own. It was too traumatising."

"You underestimate yourself."

Percy closed his eyes and let out a sigh. 'Do I?'

"No," he decided. "If there is someone who underestimates herself, it's Tiara Keeser. That little…" He clenched his fists. "Is she alive?"

The system gave no reply this time.

"System!"

"That's for you to find out, player."

"I hate you."

"-10 exp the moment you enter Dimension Zero for hating me."

Percy laughed and looked up at the white ceiling. "You sound like someone my mom would have been if she didn't have her problems."

"Do you want me to sound like that from now on?"

Surprise clearly flashed across his face. "System, who are you really?"

There was no reply this time again. Percy lied down on his side and touched the floor. A weird calming sensation overcame him and he felt himself going to sleep. For the first time in years, he felt like he was at home. "It's okay, System, just tell me when you can…" he mumbled as his eyes closed slowly.

"I'm so tired…"

The system increased the temperature in the buffer room a bit and let Percy get comfortable.

"Sleep well, player, I'm looking forward to your future."