So the dreams really were connected.
He had found Li Luo in this world.
They had arrived in the same dream.
Thinking of this, Mo Ling approached Li Luo and typed two words on the electronic screen.
"Wake up."
He knew that Li Luo had already realized this was a dream and could wake up at any time.
But the Young Lady shook her head.
"We can't wake up yet. The investigation isn't over."
She then began to explain to Mo Ling.
The Vibrating Beasts controlled by the Red Rope Worms weren't trying to fight over the black horn. They all wanted to use it to come to this world.
But for some reason, they couldn't get here.
Perhaps the dream wouldn't accept them, or maybe they had no way to pay the price.
In previous records, there were no cases of other creatures entering a dream artifact.
As for why he and Li Luo could enter the dream without paying a price, it was probably because they had triggered some mechanism that let them bypass the payment.
Mo Ling suddenly realized that not only had he not paid the price, but he had also stolen the pickles that were meant to be the price.
A strange thought occurred to him.
'I brought the pickles from that strange space into the dream version of Dawn City. Isn't this still all inside the dream?'
'Moving something from my left hand to my right hand, does that even count as stealing?'
Mo Ling couldn't figure out the answer, so he just cleared his mind and continued listening to Li Luo's explanation.
"Red Rope Worms can only parasitize living creatures, and there's only one kind of creature that can live in dreams."
Li Luo took out the electronic screen and typed a single term on it—Dream Qilin.
Then she handed the screen to Mo Ling.
...
It was a creature discovered on the first layer of the Abyss.
When people first started venturing into the Abyss, they had never seen this creature.
It had no physical body, or rather, no one had yet discovered its physical form.
This was back when Hunters had just begun to explore the Abyss.
Because Hunters faced all sorts of strange creatures daily, they didn't think it was odd even when they dreamed of this one.
They simply chalked it up to dreaming about what they thought about during the day.
And no one would bother mentioning it to others.
At most, two companions might be chatting idly and suddenly realize they had both dreamed of the same-looking creature, one that neither of them had ever seen in reality.
But even then, it didn't attract much attention.
Until one day, a Hunter came to the hospital at the First Monitoring Station and hesitantly told the doctor about his injury.
When the doctor asked how he got hurt, he finally told him about a strange creature he had encountered in a dream.
That night, the Hunter had drunk a lot of water.
So in the middle of the night, he dreamed he was driving. Halfway through, he suddenly needed to use the bathroom.
He pulled the car over and found a secluded, empty patch of bushes.
He had just pulled down his pants when he saw a colorful creature in the bushes by the road.
The creature was shaped like a horse but was much smaller, only about a meter tall, with a single horn on its head.
The creature was hiding in the roadside bushes, its whole body shimmering with a dazzling, multicolored light, like a rainbow.
It was incredibly bright in the darkness, like a blurry, colorful texture map that made the Hunter's head spin.
He didn't know what possessed him at that moment.
He aimed right at the rainbow creature and started peeing.
Then he was kicked on the spot and woke up from the pain.
Not only were his sheets wet, but the pain from the dream had also manifested on his real body.
Furthermore, the injured area was in the exact same place as in the dream, which was why the wound was in such an odd spot.
The doctor looked at the swollen injury, held back his laughter, and applied some medicine.
This Hunter's story was so amusing that it spread far and wide, even making its way from the monitoring station to Dawn City.
This was also the first time people discovered traces of the Dream Qilin.
Afterward, people grew curious about this creature.
The ability to live inside dreams was simply too fantastical.
Many Researchers flocked to study this creature.
But the Dream Qilin, appearing only in dreams, couldn't provide a physical specimen, and the research soon hit a bottleneck.
Fortunately, however, people gradually began to understand the Dream Qilin's habits, and it became one of the more well-known Abyssal Creatures.
Later on, other Hunters also began to encounter the Dream Qilin in their own dreams.
It was mostly harmless; as long as you didn't provoke it, the Dream Qilin would leave you alone.
But if you did provoke it, it would attack you directly.
Most people would be jolted awake by the pain.
They would then discover that the place where the Dream Qilin had attacked them was also injured in reality.
Someone was even gored to death by its horn in a dream.
When his companions found him, he was clutching his neck, where there was a gaping hole clean through it.
Mo Ling was a little confused.
'How could someone get stabbed in the neck by a creature that short?'
There were many records of the Dream Qilin because it was simply too conspicuous.
With skin the color of a rainbow, it was hard not to notice.
Although it could harm people in a bizarre way, it was ultimately classified by the authorities as a harmless creature.
After he finished reading the records,
Mo Ling wrote his question on the electronic screen.
"Can this creature be parasitized by Red Rope Worms too?"
Li Luo nodded and said, "Yes. As long as it's a living creature, it can be."
Mo Ling was still wondering how they were supposed to find a Dream Qilin in Dawn City, such a small creature.
But Li Luo was already on the phone. Before long, she received a reply.
After a brief exchange, she turned to Mo Ling and said, "Found one. Just wait a bit, they're bringing it over now."
Mo Ling was once again amazed by how money really could do anything.
'So efficient.'
A short while later, a group of men in black brought a caged Dream Qilin to Li Luo's house.
Mo Ling walked over to the cage to get a better look at the Dream Qilin.
It really did look like a small, rainbow-colored pony. The skin on its body was like overturned paint.
The "paint" even glowed, constantly churning on the surface of its skin.
Its entire body was covered by the swirling colors, making it blurry and indistinct. Only its outer silhouette was visible; details like its eyes couldn't be seen.
Its appearance was completely different in style from its surroundings, like a glitched texture in a video game.
This Dream Qilin wasn't resisting at all. Instead, it was sitting quietly in its cage, obediently eating its food.
He glanced into its bowl and saw the very familiar pickles.
That's right. The Dream Qilin's favorite food was pickles.
When the Dream Qilin was first discovered, a Hunter had caught one in a dream stealing pickles from his home.
After Researchers learned that the Dream Qilin's favorite food was pickles, they spontaneously made a connection between it and the "Dream" artifact.
Some even claimed that the "Dream" artifact didn't actually exist at all.
Instead, they argued, the pickles attracted the Dream Qilin, which then pulled people into the dream.
But this theory didn't hold up, as it couldn't explain the glass jar and the weight limit.
Not to mention that the Dream Qilin also appeared in people's regular dreams.
In the end, people could only chalk it up to coincidence.
Perhaps there really was some kind of strange connection between pickles and dreams.