This many... people? Perhaps not people. Whatever they were, the sheer volume of them appearing inside a dream left Ma En incredulous. He'd read extensively on psychology and dreaming, but dreams, as commonly understood, were fragile and narrow things. Almost no one dreamed a fully immersive forest rendered down to the grain of its bark, populated by a diverse ecology of life, and certainly not with a procession of over ten thousand individuals appearing all at once.

What people typically saw in dreams were fragments — scenes, one after another, often jumping between them the way a camera cuts between shots: one moment you're home, something happens, and the next moment you're at school, with no journey in between. That was the standard dream. But to dream starting from home, examining every piece of furniture in detail, seeing your family, then walking out the door, descending the stairs, crossing several streets — able to verify the specifics of every object along the way — and arriving at school with full continuity: that was profoundly abnormal.

And if, on top of that, the dream's contents were not the dreamer's familiar environment but something that looked and felt like an entirely different world — vast, coherent, governed by alien rules you could genuinely sense — then Ma En would admit to his own ignorance: he had never encountered a real case like this. He'd only read about such things in fiction.

Too much contradicted what he knew about dreams. Each new impossibility reinforced the conclusion: this was not his dream, and it probably wasn't any single person's dream, either. Of course, certain elements did match dream logic — enough to prevent him from treating the dreamscape as outright reality.

Even so — this serpentine column of beings winding through an ancient, primitive, alien forest (he wasn't sure "forest" was even the right word; these trees and plants matched the concept only in outward appearance, while everything beneath the surface was grotesquely wrong) — this procession still made him feel as though he were on the verge of solving the riddle. What was this dream?

The answer hovered close. It grazed his thoughts like a dragonfly touching water — and the instant he reached for it, it darted away.

Ma En lay prone behind the boulder and the dense vegetation, breathing shallowly to prevent being heard, eyes narrowed to slits to prevent any reflected glint, body curled tight to keep his outline from showing. Every precaution of a man who had done this before.

A fear gripped his heart that was viciously real, viciously immediate, and that the drug couldn't suppress. It told him, with absolute certainty, that if he was discovered by this column of strange beings, he would die — and not in a way as clean as being torn apart by a monster.

What kind of death it would be, he couldn't picture. The unknown quality of the threat, the sheer incomprehensibility of the death that awaited, nearly made him accept this dream as reality.

Ma En was not fragile. His psychological resilience, his capacity for self-regulation, his ability to perform under pressure — all exceeded the ordinary by a wide margin. But these advantages meant nothing in the face of thousands. For the first time, he understood what the legendary war stories described: the feeling of being the first man out of the trench, charging alone toward an entire regiment.

Some said you had to prepare yourself for death at any moment. Others said you couldn't think about dying, or you would. But what Ma En actually felt was neither of these. It was blankness — nothing could be thought, because when you saw this many, you already knew, with perfect clarity, that thinking was useless. Whether you thought about it or didn't, the fear was there. It was a mechanism that had existed since the embryo.

Aren't they past yet?

Hurry up and go.

These were the only thoughts his mind could produce, looping endlessly. He watched the river of torches stretching to the limit of his vision, and at the farthest, blurriest point, the line seemed to continue still further — as though this procession would never end.

He didn't know how much time passed. The head of the column had long since vanished; the tail was nowhere in sight. These grey-robed figures had become as much a part of the ancient forest as the stones and the trees — they were here, they had always been here, and as long as the forest remained, they would remain.

Ma En grew increasingly exhausted, his head aching faintly. He was grateful for the drug; while its effects lasted, he could keep his physiological responses forcibly steady even as his emotions surged. The sensation was like lifting his consciousness out of his body and operating it by puppet strings from above, rather than inhabiting it directly. Consciousness elevated, body reduced to a marionette — and emotion, isolated between them.

His mind stayed sharp and cold. His limbs stayed responsive.

The drug was dangerous, though — and not something the postal service had supplied. There was no manufactured version. Ma En had compounded it himself, from an ancient recipe he'd found in a second-hand bookshop.

What he'd actually gone there to buy was a book called Nanke Zi — a legendary-style autobiography attributed to a Song dynasty Daoist, author unknown, published sometime at the turn of the century. The print quality marked it as the product of an unlicensed workshop. The recipe had been tucked into the book as an insert — a loose page, as though meant to prove that this Nanke Zi was a real person and his story was true.

Ma En hadn't thought it strange at the time. Novels, domestic and foreign, often went to elaborate lengths to present fabricated evidence alongside their stories, manufacturing authenticity to immerse the reader. The author of Nanke Zi appeared to have had the same intention.

In the book, the Song dynasty Daoist Nanke Zi had a "yellow-millet dream" — a grand, illusory life experienced in the span of a nap — and upon waking, achieved enlightenment. He left secular life, became a wandering practitioner, traversed mountains and forests, accumulated a catalogue of uncanny encounters, and ultimately succeeded in his cultivation. He lived for eight hundred years.

What became of Nanke Zi after those eight hundred years? No one knew. The book ended on a deliberate mystery. But during his centuries of practice, Nanke Zi had regularly brewed and consumed a specific compound — described in the recipe insert — meant to "open the body's dao-treasury."

The book was secondhand. Multiple readers had clearly gone through it before Ma En, and the recipe page bore annotations in several different hands — a quality of earnest engagement that gave the whole thing a strange, infectious seriousness.

He didn't know what had gotten into him. Perhaps the annotations had something to do with it. But he'd taken the recipe seriously too — genuinely, unreasonably seriously — and had gone to pharmacies, to mountain forests, to remote villages to consult elderly herbalists, and had eventually sourced every ingredient and brewed the compound himself.

Even compressed into small pills with minimal dosage, the drug was ferocious. A single test dose had produced a sensation of his soul detaching from his body — the searing, hallucinatory pain of approaching death. After that, he'd sworn never to take it again unless there was no other choice.

Yes — he knew where he was. He knew how terrible and dangerous and real this dream felt. If it hadn't been this extreme, he would never have swallowed the thing.

The drug was dangerous. But set against the danger within arm's reach, it barely registered.

He didn't know how long he'd been hiding. The forest's light never changed — no sunrise, no moonset — and his attempts to count time by his own physiological rhythms had broken down partway through. When drowsiness finally crept in, the river of torches had reached its end. The last figure in the procession dragged its feet through the gaps between trees, its silhouette flickering in and out of visibility. Ma En watched it, and deliberately — accepting the risk of the small sounds it produced — shifted his body.

The figures didn't seem to hear. The last one in line showed not the slightest change in posture. Ma En flowed out from behind the boulder like something boneless, then shifted into the gait of a large cat that had locked onto its prey — closing the distance at a pace just slightly faster than the column's own, steady and smooth.

Twenty meters. Ten. Five.

He held the black umbrella. Through branches and brush, he trailed the end of the line. He could hear his own footsteps clearly — grass and pebbles crunching, plant stems brushing against his body, producing waves of tiny vibrations. He worried the sounds would alert them, but even at close range, these things that might or might not be human seemed entirely deaf to it.

Whatever the reason, he didn't regret his decision. He even felt that his arrival in this place — all of it — had been leading to this encounter. A group this large, what it represented, had to be closer to the truth than any single burning-tree monster.

He half-suspected the burning tree had herded him here precisely so he'd witness this. But could that really be? He didn't quite believe his own theory — it sounded like fantasy.

The last figure in line, up close, looked no different from the others. Ma En could see it clearly now. He was barely a meter away — almost close enough to be part of the column himself. If he put on the same robe and carried a torch, he'd pass unquestioned.

He could only do his best to disguise his footfalls. The disguise was poor, he knew, but the figure ahead showed no awareness of a stranger one pace behind.

One meter. Then half a meter. Then one body-length.

Ma En seized the figure's throat from behind, triggered the umbrella's mechanism to release the nerve toxin, and drove the blade upward through the spine at an angle that pierced the heart — three actions in one motion, the figure skewered clean through.

It was a gamble. He had no idea what was under that all-concealing robe. He treated it as human anyway. The thing couldn't cry out; blood surged up through the trachea and spilled over Ma En's hand — and the blood was ice-cold. Nothing like blood from a living body. Nothing like blood at all.

The sensation sent the hair on his arms straight up. He nearly concluded he'd failed — if this wasn't human, wasn't alive, wasn't something conventional methods could handle, then in the next instant they'd all know.

But the column ahead kept moving, receding into its own world, entirely unaware — or uncaring — that its last member had been quietly lowered to the ground.

Whatever the reason, Ma En allowed himself one quiet breath of relief.

He pried the stiffened fingers apart — had to cut several of them away — and took the torch. Then he pulled the robe free. Now he could see what was underneath.

Below the neck: human-shaped. Extremely emaciated — bones visible under the skin. The joints were rigid, and not from death; they'd been rigid in life. The knees in particular were wrapped in knotted tendons and tumor-like growths, fused nearly solid.

Above the neck, the head was unmistakably not human. The chin was covered in flexible tendrils — the appearance of squid arms, the texture of plant fiber when he touched them. Below where a nose should have been: smooth. No mouth. No lips. Just an unbroken surface of skin. The nose itself was not a nose — no bridge, no cartilage — only three dark, cavity-like openings. No eyes. No ears. In their places: dark holes, and inside each hole, similar tendrils lay curled — twitching faintly at the touch, retracting like the leaves of a mimosa plant disturbed by a finger.

Something like this...

It was stranger, Ma En thought, than the burning tree. And though it was down, its whole body was dense and heavy, slack and leaking quantities of fluid that resembled human blood in every way except temperature. He could not determine whether it was genuinely dead.

He didn't have time. He cut the head off with the umbrella blade and kicked it aside. Given more time, he would have wanted to open the body and examine the interior — even inside a dream. Instead he pulled the grey robe over his own clothes, lowered the hood, and quickened his pace to rejoin the tail of the column.

Disguised, walking among them, Ma En matched their rhythm, listened to their crude and ugly chanting, and chased the thought that had been brushing against his mind like a dragonfly over water: What is this dream?