It wasn’t until the following morning that Yang Siguang finally woke up completely, free from the effects of the medication.
“…Do you feel any better?”
Hearing the cautious question in his ear, Yang Siguang slowly turned his head and looked at Li Bo beside the bed.
He blinked and lightly nodded.
“Maybe.”
Even now, his voice was still hoarse.
It was a minor aftereffect from his sharp, piercing scream the day before. Of course, compared to the psychological trauma he had endured, it was nothing.
His eyes scanned the room, and Yang Siguang saw that his hospital room was clean and tidy.
The smell of disinfectant in the air wasn’t pleasant, but it somehow brought a sense of reassurance.
The entire room had a soft cream color, and compared to the noisy, chaotic environment of a public hospital, the conditions here were like those of a luxury hotel. An IV drip was still hanging from his wrist to enhance his nutrition, and the nurse’s skills were excellent—he didn’t even feel the cold needle piercing his body.
But even with such meticulous (and likely expensive) treatment, Yang Siguang still felt that something inside him had broken. What once represented vitality and health was now leaking out from an invisible wound, draining away.
He still felt weak and cold.
So much so that when he heard Li Bo hesitantly ask the next question, he took a long while to gather his thoughts before responding.
“Siguang, those wounds on your body… what happened?”
Li Bo asked.
“Wounds? What… what wounds?”
Yang Siguang replied in confusion.
He didn’t know that when he raised his head on the hospital bed, his once bright and clear eyes now looked like two deep wells. There was no vitality left in them.
When Li Bo met those dim eyes, a feeling of almost pity inexplicably rose in his chest.
He sighed.
Then, very gently, he pointed to Yang Siguang’s arm, through the hospital gown.
At Li Bo’s gesture, Yang Siguang slowly rolled up his sleeve. As he looked at the deep and shallow bruises and scratches on his arm, his pupils suddenly contracted.
The next moment, he raised his hand and tore open his collar. Terrifying marks once again came into view, clearly not limited to the small area on his arm.
The room fell into a brief silence. After a while, Li Bo slowly spoke.
“When we did the basic checkup earlier, we found many… signs of abuse… on your body.”
His voice was slow, as if he were carefully choosing the words he should use.
“Do you remember how this happened?”
He then asked.
Yang Siguang remained silent for a long time, his breathing growing noticeably more rapid.
“I… I… I don’t… I don’t know…”
The young man’s voice was unusually hollow.
“I don’t know.”
He repeated.
“I don’t remember.”
He said.
However…
[Do you really not remember?]
Deep within his heart, a voice sharply questioned Yang Siguang. He trembled violently, wishing he could bury himself under the blankets, like a six-year-old child trying to escape an imagined nightmare.
Did he really not remember?
Of course, that wasn’t true.
He remembered.
*
Before he woke up from the effects of the sedative, he had been trapped in that dream.
He dreamed that he was quietly lying in his simple but familiar bedroom. He was sleeping, but in the darkness, he felt the window of his room had been easily opened from the outside.
That shouldn’t have happened.
He clearly remembered locking the window every night.
Yet… with the faint creak of the window hinge, the damp night breeze from outside blew through the open window, brushing against his face.
Someone had entered.
The change in air triggered his body’s oldest instincts, and Yang Siguang instantly woke up. However, while his mind was awake, his body remained deeply trapped in a near-paralyzed sleep.
His eyelids felt as if something was controlling them, glued tightly together, and his body felt like it had been filled with cement. Even moving a finger became incredibly difficult.
Was it sleep paralysis? Was it?
Yang Siguang kept asking himself in his mind.
In the dark, his body uncontrollably trembled, as if it had already sensed the impending danger. He could clearly hear the soft sound of footsteps—so light and slow that even the most skilled thief would not be able to move so quietly.
But the night was so silent, and Yang Siguang was so tense. He uncontrollably caught every sound around him, and those footsteps were deafening to him.
Then, the footsteps disappeared.
They disappeared right beside his bed.
Then, his bed shifted slightly. A warm breath landed at his feet.
The breath was so strange, yet so familiar. The person started at his feet, licking his toes, then his ankles, and slowly climbed up his body.
The blanket was carefully lifted.
[Hoo…]
The breathing became thick and heavy.
In contrast, the person had ice-cold hands.
Their fingers were long and nimble, easily unbuttoning Yang Siguang’s pajamas.
Yang Siguang kept his eyes tightly shut, and a strange image from a documentary about poisonous spiders appeared in his mind—how they would raise their long front limbs, dismembering their prey bit by bit and slowly feeding it into their mandibles.
His pajamas were taken off.
Someone was breathing heavily, moving down his neck, and then pressing heavily on his body.
A sharp pain spread across his skin.
The person was licking him, then biting him.
In his dazed state, the distant and blurry sound of the person’s cruel laughter seemed to merge with the breathing.
No. It wasn’t sleep paralysis.
He was being… violated.
Deep inside his body, the last remnants of his rationality clearly told Yang Siguang this.
As the wet, itchy sensation and the sharp pain in his chest overwhelmed him, intense panic drowned him.
In this terror, the invisible force pressing on him seemed to finally relax just a tiny bit.
Finally, Yang Siguang painfully opened a small slit of his eyes. He looked into the darkness, and what met his gaze was a face twisted with ecstasy and satisfaction. He had seen that face before, in his hallucinations—ugly, distorted, and repulsive.
The eyes of the deceased were spinning wildly in their bloodied sockets… and behind that deformed and grotesque head was the body of a muscular, grotesque black dog, its skin torn and flesh exposed.
[Si Si…]
[Hehehe… I’ve become Si Si’s dog now…]
[I’ve always wanted to be your dog, hehehe…]
It seemed as though the person could sense Yang Siguang’s horrified gaze.
The human-faced dog suddenly lifted its head from Yang Siguang’s chest, opening its mouth to reveal Yang Siguang’s still-beating heart between its teeth.
It barked at Yang Siguang and, like a pure animal, quickly began to thrust its hips.
…
Yang Siguang had had similar dreams countless times, and they had repeated occasionally even before Li Chen’s incident.
He had consulted online therapists, and they always told him that these were nightmares caused by his extreme fear and repression of his own sexual orientation.
He didn’t pay much attention to it, as he had many other nightmares.
But only yesterday’s nightmare made Yang Siguang remember every detail of that dream—this particular dream had become unusually vivid, clear, and painful for him.
And the human-faced dog in that dream had left scars on him…
Now, those same scars had appeared on his physical body.
No, wait, is this really reality?
Is he still in a dream?
Or… has the monster from the dream broken through the barrier and placed its claws into his reality?
Yang Siguang pressed his hand to his mouth, his body uncontrollably trembling.
That should have been a dream. It couldn’t be real. No, if it were all just an illusion, why would the wounds caused by the illusion appear directly on his body in reality?
“This isn’t real.”
Yang Siguang said softly, only realizing how hoarse his voice had become.
Unconsciously, he looked at the window of the hospital room, and a thought suddenly entered his mind. Many people had said that if you jump from a high place during a nightmare, you could wake up.
But who told him that? He couldn’t remember anymore.
*
Li Bo was still looking at Yang Siguang.
The man’s gaze contained a strange tolerance and calmness.
But that only made Yang Siguang more anxious.
In front of Li Bo, he felt like a true madman, a mental patient, a delusional person, and…
“I’m sorry, Siguang.” At that moment, Li Bo suddenly interrupted Yang Siguang’s self-loathing. “But I want to show you something. It might be a bit disgusting, but I think you need to see it…”
As he spoke, Li Bo extended his bandaged hand toward Yang Siguang.
Li Bo unwrapped the bandages.
As the bandages loosened and fell away, an indescribable stench emanated from beneath them.
Then, Yang Siguang saw the wound that Li Bo had been hiding under the bandages.
The man’s palm had a large hole that was almost translucent.
Around the hole, there was a cluster of black-red, intertwined flesh, and a large amount of yellow-green pus.
Yang Siguang’s eyes widened in shock.
It was clear that someone had tried to treat Li Bo’s wound before, but amidst the pale bones, deep red muscles, and light yellow subcutaneous tissue, the rotting flesh was still clearly visible.
Of course, what shocked Yang Siguang the most was not the excruciating wound, but the rows of deep red, cinnabar-written scriptures around the wound.
No matter how you looked at it, these scriptures should not have been on the wounded limb.
“What… what is this—”
The scene before him seemed extremely bizarre.
“I’ve tried everything.” Li Bo lowered his eyelids, staring at the wound on his palm, and said in a deep voice, “But this wound on my hand is as bad as it gets… Against certain inexplicable forces, scientific methods are utterly useless.”
Clearly, Li Bo had long since grown accustomed to his wound, and even his voice sounded calm.
“In the end, no matter how I treated it, even after skin grafts, it would quickly rot, and I almost died of sepsis. Luckily, I finally sought help from metaphysics, or else the person you’re talking to right now might only be a ghost.”
Li Bo smiled bitterly, making a self-deprecating joke.
“Although in the end, I had to suppress it with scriptures drawn around the wound to save my hand. Li Chen, that kid, is really quite fierce. Without the scriptures, you might have already seen me with an amputated hand… Anyway, I want to tell you that none of this is your fault, and it’s not your delusion. I went through the exact same thing as you. Li Chen attacked me too, and now… he’s become a very terrifying evil spirit…”
“Li Chen isn’t like that—”
Yang Siguang instinctively interrupted, but halfway through his words, the events of the past few days came rushing back, and he immediately fell silent.
His knuckles, gripping his clothes, had turned white from the pressure.
“I want to help you. Can I?”
Then, he heard Li Bo speak slowly, one word at a time.
“Let me help you, Siguang.”
__
Author’s note:
Let me quickly clarify, Siguang’s condition was caused by the effects of the medication. His subconscious fears and disgust twisted the figure he saw in his foggy state.
When he first “had the nightmare,” that person was still alive! It wasn’t so grotesque!
