Chapter 176. The End of a Dream
Staring into Charles' blank gaze, a soft smile appeared on Anna's visage. She reached out and grabbed Charles' forearm.
"Let's go. Follow me out. We can build a new home together outside."
The world around him started crumbling once again. Anna's words seemed to have triggered a raw nerve in his heart.
"A new home?" Charles muttered to himself.
"Hurry up and come out. I even prepared a gift for you to celebrate your return."
Looking at his childhood sweetheart, Charles muttered, "Anna, let me have a look at your original appearance."
Anna was stunned in place. She couldn't understand why Charles would make such a request.
"I just want to have a look," Charles continued. His voice was suddenly unusually calm, as though he had never exhibited a crazed behavior.
Anna's alluring figure soon melted away to reveal a grotesque tentacled creature. A monster with writhing gray tendrils, bright yellow eyes, and a massive maw with barbs stood before him.
Charles reached out and patted one of its tentacles.
"Can I trust you, Anna?"
Anna's towering form bent slightly in acknowledgment.
Charles let out an abrupt chuckle. At this moment, it felt as though a weight had been lifted from his heart.
"Let's go, Anna. Let's get out of here."
The moment his words fell, his surroundings shifted dramatically. Colors swirled and flashed past him. When he finally regained his senses, he found himself suspended in a glob of greenish slime. An excruciating pain pierced his head.
Instinctively, he reached up toward his head, and it didn't take him long to touch what felt like a tentacle. A tentacle that was continuously drilling into his head.
"Don't pull it out," a sudden feminine voice called out, and Charles' hand halted in its tracks. He recognized it to be Anna's voice.
Pop!
The slime bubble that engulfed Charles burst. Like a cracked egg, the slime and Charles spilled out onto a complex, eerie, green pattern composed of wedges on the ground.
It was a vast magic array. Giants standing at three meters tall donned white triangular hats and large cloaks as they silently stood around Charles in some sort of structured formation.
However, Charles couldn't see any of that. Currently, everything in his sight presented itself as decaying organs. Pieces of fragmented flesh rapidly swirled around him, and his vision was upside down.
"Drink this quickly. Your mind is still unstable," Anna said as she offered Charles a bowl of squirming liquid.
Without uttering a word, Charles tipped his head back and drank every single drop.
As the boiling fluid slid down his throat, passing through his gullet and into his stomach, the grotesque, fragmented body tissues around him swiftly reverted to their original form.
While everything returned to normalcy, Anna remained next to him in her monstrous tentacle form. After all, the very tentacle embedded into Charles' mind had sprouted from her.
Charles slowly turned his head and looked around. Just as his gaze shifted away from the tentacled creature, it speedily morphed back into the stunningly beautiful Anna.
With a flick of her left wrist, the gray tentacle was severed. Like a serpent, it wriggled its way into Charles' brain.
After getting accustomed to his surroundings, Charles walked past the towering giants and picked up a mirror from a nearby table.
From his reflection, he saw that his scalp had been peeled back, and there was a gaping hole in his skull. Through the hole, Charles could see his brain silently pulsating and the writhing tentacle lying atop it.
"What is that?" Charles asked as he placed the mirror down.
"My tentacle. What else could it be?" Anna replied as she approached Charles with the circular bone piece cut out from his skull.
"What is it for?" Charles sat on the ground to make it easier for Anna to place the missing piece of his skull back into place.
"To suppress the Divinity's Curse that has been driving you mad. Without this tentacle, there's no way you would have come around. However, the tentacle's effect has a limited duration. We still need to find a long-term solution," Anna said as she placed the round bone piece back into its original position.
She clapped, and a group of figures in white lab coats and masks entered the room with a hospital bed in tow. They carefully hoisted Charles onto the bed before they expertly stitched the wound on his head.
The steel needle pierced through his flesh, with a thin thread following its path. In no time, his separate flesh was sewed back together. Stinging pain like this had become nothing to Charles a long time ago.
After the figures in white lab coats were done with their task, they offered a deferential bow to Anna before leaving the room. The giants followed right afterward.
In the blink of an eye, Charles and Anna were left alone in the vast hall.
Charles sat up on the bed, but before he could speak a word, Anna shot him a piercing glance.
"Who is Elizabeth?" Anna asked in an icy tone.
"Are you jealous?" Charles chuckled softly.
"I asked you a question." Anna folded her arms across her chest as though she had caught him in bed with someone else.
Charles spread his arms open and pulled her into his embrace.
"A girlfriend," he answered.
As if triggered by his answer, she struggled out of Charles's arms. Her high heels clicked angrily against the ground as she headed toward a distant exit.
Charles hurriedly chased after her and then walked next to her.
Charles soon realized that the place they had been in was merely a basement. The floor above was much more spacious. It seemed to be the grand hall of a building, and its interior was lavish and exquisite.
"You must be hungry. Let's go get something to eat," Anna suggested as she pulled Charles by the arm and led him out of the main entrance.
The moment he stepped outside, he was taken aback by the sight before him. If it weren’t for the occasional sensation of the twitching tentacle in his brain, he would have thought that he was still in his dream.
A modernized street was outside. The shops that lined the street bore signboards identical to those he remembered from his neighborhood.
"How did you manage to do all this?"
"As long as you have money, nothing is a problem," Anna said with a playful smirk. She led Charles into a nearby restaurant with a signboard that said—Lanzhou Noodles.
Even everything in the restaurant was strikingly similar to his memory of the one back at home.
Anna took a napkin and carefully wiped the seat before sitting down. She raised a hand to make her order, "Two bowls of beef noodles, please. One large and one small."
The shop owner made swift work pulling the noodles and cooking them. Shortly after, two steaming bowls of beef noodles were set down before Charles and Anna.
Picking up a slice of beef with his chopsticks, Charles scrutinized the meat that was so thinly sliced it was almost translucent. He turned his gaze to Anna seated next to him and nodded in approval. "Impressive. The mirroring is spot-on."
"Eat up, or it will turn soggy," Anna remarked. She picked up the beef slices from her bowl and placed them into his bowl.
Charles hungrily slurped down the noodles. To his surprise, the taste was identical to that in his memory.
"Is this the little gift you mentioned?" Charles asked as he placed the empty bowl down.
Anna rested her chin on her hands, and with her head tilting slightly in an adorable manner, she asked, "What do you think of this place? How about living here with me?"
Charles cast a glance at the noodle shop owner, who was visibly tensed up. He then shook his head. "Everything in my head is an illusion. And this world you've created... is the same."
"So, you wish to return to Hope Island and resume your role as its Governor? That works, too; I can move there."
"No. I want to return to the surface."
Charles' gaze no longer contained his usual determination that bordered the boundary of madness.
His voice was extremely calm, but Anna could discern that Charles was prepared to forsake everything to achieve that goal.
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