It was an infant’s body, but with an adult’s face.
No matter how handso the face was, Koni only found it terrifying. It sent a shiver down her spine, a textbook case of the uncanny valley.
She glanced from the infant to Sean beside her. The two identical faces made her body go rigid, and a sense of absurd horror shot through her mind.
It wasn’t just her. Even the normally daring Sean felt his scalp crawl when he saw the infant bearing his own face.
The baby was born safely, the family was crying tears of joy... It should have been a heartwarming scene. But because of that one face, the entire atmosphere beca utterly bizarre.
"Please don’t scare , Mr. Sean..." Koni’s aggrieved voice was tinged with tears. ’I’m so embarrassed,’ she thought. ’I know this is a dream, but I’m still scared. And I’m the one who built this dream! I’m completely disgracing my teacher.’
Sean swallowed hard. "It really wasn’t ."
He only knew he could control the dream, but he had no idea how. He’d never even tried, and he certainly had no reason to frighten Koni.
He was just as baffled by the situation. He didn’t understand dreams to begin with, and the only thing he could be certain of was that sothing was definitely wrong with this one.
He inexplicably recalled what Elvire had told him: ti could not change his appearance. ’Does that an I not only won’t get older, but I can’t get younger either?’
’Even if that were true, I couldn’t possibly have been born looking like this, could I?!’
Sean refused to believe it.
The infant’s smile was unsettling in a way he couldn’t quite describe. Forcing down his discomfort, he cald himself and said to the girl, "Try moving the tiline forward a bit."
"O-Okay." Koni quickly shut her eyes, struggling to dispel the gloom cast by the two hauntingly handso faces in her mind. She turned the dial of ti once more, and the dream jumped ten years into the future.
The scene before them scattered like clouds before the wind. The entire hospital, like a giant canvas, was instantly torn to shreds, revealing a verdant grassland under a sky cleared by rain.
The clear sky was a brilliant, washed-out blue. Leaving the confines of the hospital for the vast grassland made Sean’s breathing feel much lighter.
Koni, anwhile, looked left and right. Only after confirming that the infant Sean hadn’t followed did she finally let out a long sigh of relief. Then, rembering her earlier panic, she couldn’t help but blush. She cleared her throat and explained, "Mr. Sean, that was just an accident. I’m actually quite brave, usually."
Sean said with amusent, "Shall we try it again, then?"
Koni waved her hands frantically. "No, no! That’s a novel experience I only need to have once. It’s already left a very deep impression."
"But your mission isn’t finished yet," Sean said, motioning for her to look into the distance.
A group of shepherds was tending their flock there. Farther away, a few farms were scattered across the grassland. One of them was under reconstruction; a new building was half-finished, and a number of figures were gathered, apparently discussing the next steps of the construction.
"Does it look familiar?" Sean asked.
Koni’s eyes widened slightly. "This is... Alola Town?"
"Mr. Sean, were you here ten years ago?"
Sean shook his head. "No."
And that was the problem.
He had no mory of the hospital just now, nor of this grassland.
The hospital could perhaps be explained away as a mory lost to ti, but Alola Town?
This was the largest gathering place for Wizards in all of Siracle State. Would they allow an ordinary person to just wander in?
Besides, his life as a hobody ant he would never have traveled this far.
The distance between Holkaydo and Alola Town was greater than that to the Black Fruit Rainforest.
The dream now seed to be out of control, having little to do with him personally anymore.
Except for his face.
"But that’s impossible," Koni said, puzzled. "No matter how the tiline changes, this is still your dream. Only things from your mory should appear. How can you have no recollection of it?"
"I don’t know either." ’For soone who doesn’t understand dreams to encounter a problem within one, it really feels like being strong but having nowhere to apply that strength.’ That was how Sean felt right now. If even Koni couldn’t find the cause and a solution, it would an this attempt at Entering the Dream had failed. They would have to start all over again.
"Let’s not jump to conclusions. Let’s go take a look first." Unwilling to accept that her attempt at Entering the Dream had failed, Koni stubbornly grabbed Sean’s hand and hurried toward the construction site.
The two of them floated like Ghosts in front of the workers.
This ti, they weren’t faceless.
"Are you sure you’ve never seen them?" Koni asked.
"I’m sure." Sean was certain. His gaze swept over the dozen or so workers, but not a single face was familiar.
The "himself" who should have been the protagonist of this dream was also nowhere to be found.
Instead, a little girl in the corner, wearing an oversized safety helt and playing with so bricks, caught Sean’s attention.
Her golden hair was tied in a small ponytail, mostly hidden by the helt, with fine, downy wisps curling at her ears. The girl was squatting on the ground, treating the brick fragnts like building blocks and using her small, nimble hands to build one tiny house after another.
Koni followed Sean over to the girl. "Do you know her?" she asked.
Although she was asking Sean, Koni herself found the little girl very familiar, as if she’d seen her sowhere before.
Sean didn’t answer, rely watching the girl before him in silence.
He had already recognized her from the profile of her face as she turned her head to pick up another brick.
But from her angle, Koni couldn’t see it.
It wasn’t until another man appeared and called out from a distance, "Little Koni, ti to go ho."
Upon hearing his voice, the girl imdiately looked up in delight. "Teacher Sopea!"
Koni: "???"
Her eyes shot wide open as she stared at the little girl’s face, her own eyes filled with disbelief.
This little girl... was her?!
The next second, a sharp pain lanced through Koni’s mind.
The mories she had deliberately sealed away for the sake of Entering the Dream ca rushing out like a bursting dam.
And as her mories returned, the dream spiraled completely out of control.
The scene before Sean’s eyes underwent another earth-shattering transformation. The sky grew murky as ink, like an oil painting drenched in water. The surrounding scenery began to shift rapidly, rewinding through ti, changing again and again.
From the Alola Grassland to a city center—Sean saw a house. It was Koni’s ho, outside the town.
From the city to a street alley—Koni passed by, bringing food to a stray cat.
Then from the alley to a village—this Koni was even younger than the one from ten years prior, only three or four years old. She was eting Sopea for the first ti, placing her small hand in his, and being led away by her teacher from a place where she didn’t belong.
Koni’s entire life flashed before Sean’s eyes in rapid reverse, finally returning to the hospital of "his" birth.
This ti, there was no power outage at the hospital.
The family mbers had different faces, and the infant brought out by the nurse no longer had the eerie face of an adult.
But the infant’s gender had changed.
The nurse still wore a relieved smile. "Congratulations, it’s a healthy baby girl."
Koni rembered.
This wasn’t Sean’s dream at all. It was hers!
The one abandoned by their birth parents wasn’t Sean, but her...
Koni clutched her head in agony. The tragic experiences of her childhood brought tears streaming down her face. She knew she shouldn’t be crying in front of Sean, but she couldn’t stop herself. The emotions washed over her like a sudden tsunami, drowning her, suffocating her.
But even so, Koni fought to calm herself. Tears stread down her face as she forced herself to find the reason for the dream’s corruption.
She had followed every step of the dream-weaving process her teacher had taught her, so why had her own past appeared in Sean’s dream?
Everything was fine at the start. How did it all go so wrong after she shifted the tiline?
Had she entered Sean’s dream, or had Sean entered hers?
Suddenly, Koni rembered sothing her teacher, Sopea, had once warned her.
"When you gaze into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
The "abyss" here didn’t refer to a literal chasm, but to the terrifying Tier Ten beings from the Era of Polymath—entities who could kill with a single glance. Their souls were as vast as the ocean; no one could peer into them, only they could peer into others.
So...
’It wasn’t that Sean had no past, but that she wasn’t worthy of seeing it?’
’Was she attempting to pry into the past of a Tier Ten Grand Mage?!’
At this thought, Koni raised her head in terror.
Her gaze seed to pierce through the hospital ceiling, straight to the sky beyond.
But the sky was no longer the sky. It had beco, in its entirety, Sean’s face.
His pitch-black eyes were like black holes, threatening to suck her entire being into them.
Koni’s tiny body began to tremble uncontrollably.
’Help...’
’Sobody, please, help !!’
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