The sky burned crimson.
The river ran thick with blood.
The city lay buried beneath litters of rubble and corpses.
Fires raged on every street corner, painting everything in flickering orange and black.
Amidst this devastation, strolling casually was a strange, monster-like figure that looked physically disproportionate. Everything about it felt mismatched and confusing.
It had two pairs of wings, and each set looked completely different. The wings on the right side were bright white, glowing softly, giving the impression of something pristine and holy.
In contrast, the wings on the left were dark black, shadowy, and gloomy, giving off a feeling of corruption, darkness, curse, or something that had fallen, but not something evil.
On its head were two pairs of horns, like those of a devil, looking menacing and wicked.
Its body was full of odd details. It had rough, lizard-like scales covering its skin like armor. A long tail, shaped like a snake, moved slowly behind it. Even its shadow looked strange—it didn't match its body. The shadow looked furry, shaped like an animal walking on all fours, not like a person at all.
Yet, despite everything, its face was surprisingly human.
Its skin was extremely pale, almost like a corpse. Its face was just like the typical of a European man with a high-nose bridge, sharp jawline, and refined features.
But the most eye-catching parts were its ruby-colored eyes and snowy white hair, soft and pure like freshly fallen snow.
With his hands tucked into his pockets, he strolled through the field of bodies without a care in the world. His steps bounced slightly, following the rhythm of a tune as he hummed a recent trending song from TokTok.
"A hopeless romantic all my life~
Surrounded by couples all the time~
I guess I should take it as a sign~
I'm feeling lonely~"
...
Noah Crane felt as if he was both in Heaven and Hell.
Heaven, because, in this dream, he was free to do anything he wanted.
Hell, because everything around him looked like a scene straight from the hell itself.
"Honestly, if you can ignore the awful scenery, this dream's pretty amazing. It's kind of like that VR tech from Spear Art Online anime. Once you're inside, you can do whatever you want."
"Here, I can walk, wiggle my toes, swinging and kicking my legs, and do so many things I can't in the real world. I can even fly and shoot energy blasts through my mouth. Like a Godzilla!"
He paused, gazing out at the ruins around him.
"The only downside is… this is just a dream. I can't bring my friends or family here. And everything's destroyed, just rubble and dust. Not a single living soul in sight."
"I wonder… if I keep flying in one direction, will I eventually find something different? Maybe a city that survived? But then again, is it safe to go that far? I've heard stories about people dying in lucid dreams and some mysticism experts said the cause was because their souls were wandering far in the dream, ultimately leading them unable to find their way back to their bodies."
He sighed. "But if I don't take the risk, how am I ever going to figure out the truth behind this place?"
Noah spoke out loud, as he often did. It had become a habit—something that started naturally once he began exploring this world. With no people or animals around, and nothing but silence and destruction, talking made the loneliness easier to bear. Maybe, on some level, he hoped someone—or something—would respond.
Though, if something did respond, Noah was pretty sure he'd be the first to run.
Because, logically speaking, if you're in a world that only exists in your mind, and suddenly something responds to your mumbling—when usually, nothing does?
That's not comforting at all. That's nightmare fuel!
It'd be like finding out there was a stranger who has been living under your basement all along.
A full-blown horror story.
"But maybe I'm the one who'd scare them," Noah said with a smirk.
"With how I look now, I doubt any sane person would mess with me. Even if they're just NPCs, they'd still feel a little fear, right?"
Over time, he'd come to accept that his appearance in the dream was… monster-like.
He still remembered the first time he saw his reflection in a window. The shock nearly made him fall over. He'd looked like a twisted blend of human and beast. It had terrified him back then.
Now? He kind of liked it. It looked badass.
He still wasn't sure what caused the transformation. The best guess he had was that it was tied to his imagination—he was a hardcore gamer, after all. Maybe all those fantasy and RPG characters he admired had bled into his subconscious, shaping this strange dream body into something powerful, inhuman, and yet still vaguely himself.
"Anyway," he muttered, stretching, "time to head back. It's probably been about two hours."
Because of how strange and unique this dream world was, Noah had set a personal rule: never stay longer than two hours. While there was no solid evidence that staying longer was dangerous, it didn't cost him anything to be cautious.
Better safe than sorry.
If anything, he remembered a particular famous quote that he had been remembering ever since.
"If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,"
On the surface, the quote might seem unrelated to his situation. But the deeper he thought about it, the more unsettling it became. The strange dream was made of a world of ruin, mountains of corpses, rivers of blood, and air thick with rust and dust. It can be viewed and was an abyss in its own right.
And the longer he stayed in it, the more likely it was that something would go wrong.
After all:
"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
As such, the rule was made.
After a moment, Noah slowly lay down on the ground, facing the crimson sky, then closed his eyes without hurry.
Within seconds, the already quiet dream world grew even quieter in the absence of his usual rambling.