On this beautiful night, Helena a goth girl with tired red eyes starved for sleep, skin pale as a ghost, and thick black hair—spent her time devouring fantasy novels in her old apartment with its peeling walls.
She read the novel aloud, pacing back and forth as if reciting from some holy scripture, trying to hype herself up and immerse herself in the story's repetitive tropes. Dragons, fairies, handsome princes, the Middle Ages... all the standard archetypes that define high fantasy.
She stood before a drawing on her wall depicting a dragon breathing fire onto a village, reading the final page of the third novel she had finished that day in a loud, swaying voice.
She slammed the book shut at the very end, straightened her posture, and smiled. She grabbed a device resembling a gauntlet counter and slid her arm into its straps. After ensuring she was wearing the necklace of one of her favorite characters, she lay down on the bed, hugged the device tightly, and recited her improvised incantation:
"Oh, faithful Wardens of the Imagination,
Pull me now to your elevation.
To where time and space are unbound,
To a kingdom lost and never found.
Oh, Imagination that knows no frontier,
Bridge the gap and draw me near.
Take my essence... for humanity, I disdain,
And bear my soul to Fantasia's domain."
She drifted off, repeating a single phrase:
"Oh, Kingdom of Fantasia, pull me in..."
Despite her exhaustion, Helena focused intensely on detaching her consciousness from reality, just as a hair is pulled from dough.
The sounds outside faded, her eyes grew heavy, and the struggle to open them in reality shifted into the world of dreams.
Helena wandered through her lucid dream, which had manifested as her own room. She looked at the counter she had brought with her into the dream; it was registering strange symbols—numbers, in this world. The reading was:
75+6i Ontometers
It was a number within the set of Complex Numbers, which define the reality of personal dreams, unlike stable reality which hovers around 100 Ontometers.
She took her book, ripped it apart, and taped the pages vertically onto the wall. Then she chanted,
"Kingdom of Fantasy..."
repeatedly, pressed her palms together in a prayer position, and crossed her eyes. The pages on the wall transformed into a portal. She inserted the device's sensor into it, and it registered:
75.1+10i+36.9j+36.5k Ontometers
"I succeeded."
Keeping her eyes crossed, she stepped through...
She entered a vast, sprawling fantasy city. The buildings towered with alien geometry, floating in a strange spatial arrangement. The area was populated by various Dreamers in disguise from different nations of TERRAVASTA, accompanied by the Egregores and Tulpas they had created through the power of their belief.
Helena didn't change her appearance when entering these Collective Dream Worlds like most people did. Although this world was a dream within a dream, it was incredibly stable compared to the hazy, glitchy nature of ordinary dreams. Sometimes, it felt even more real than reality itself.
She focused and manifested a Tulpa in the form of a communication device.
"Delaney, where are you guys?"
"You fell asleep late, so we thought you weren't coming... We're waiting for you near the Imaginators' Guild, south of King FableKeeper's palace. Just hurry..."
The communication device evaporated before Delaney could finish. Helena's Egrinoric Energy—the energy of faith used to create Tulpas and Egregores from dream matter—was only at Level
D-9
It was weak and unstable.
Helena rushed toward her party. It consisted of Delaney, who had taken the form of a white angel with wings around her head and two on her back, and Rory. Rory was a young man, but he had chosen the avatar of a goth girl with short black hair covering his eyes, black lips, and a frail body. However, he hadn't bothered to change his voice; despite the appearance, he sounded like a grown man. Rory was a Dream Walker, meaning he spent days asleep, grinding his levels.
He was currently Level B-3
Helena had never met these two in reality and didn't know what they actually looked like. They were from different countries entirely, but their shared sense of adventure had brought them together here.
Rory spoke up.
"Haven't you gotten bored of this avatar yet, Helena?"
"I told you, this isn't an avatar. This is my real look."
"I don't believe it. You're not a Fertility Goddess, I'm sure of that. Fertility Goddesses are evil, and you're softer than a cookies ."
"No, that's just a racist rumor...
So, where are we going?"
"We're continuing the world expansion from where we left off. It's a safe zone. Helena, do you have a weapon?"
"Check this out."
From her inventory bag, she pulled out a sword as tall as herself. She unsheathed it to reveal a two-meter-long Katana.
"Hhh, that sword is made purely for aesthetics. It's not practical. Luckily, the enemies aren't that hard."
Rory snapped his fingers. The area turned black, and they teleported to an insanely vast landscape filled with purple grass and massive white boulders. On the horizon, a colossal tornado stretched thousands of kilometers high, yet there was no wind. They began hacking their way toward it.
Along the way, they fought various creatures: geese, little girls wielding swords, transparent black dogs with visible bones under glass-like skin, and crows that assembled into a giant monster. The crow beast was the hardest; they had to kill every single bird individually.
Their weapons absorbed the Egrinoric Energy from these creatures, compressing it into stable coins. These coins were used to craft weapons and items, substituting the user's own weak Egrinoric Energy.
The coins ranged in rank:
Rank E: Weak coins, discarded by most.
Rank S: Highly concentrated, very stable coins extracted from an Egregore that many Dreamers agreed to create and buff to provide a challenge. Whoever obtains these can create their own pocket worlds and legendary weapons.
Rank SSS: Legendary, absolute coins. It is said that whoever possesses them can manipulate the entire explored Fantasy Kingdom.
Coins from Rank SS and up require the agreement of at least one billion people to create an Egregore yielding an average of 100 SS coins.
This had happened only once in history it was 9 miraculous days of enjoyable, marathon combat, and the coins were distributed based on the damage each player dealt.
The monsters they were fighting now were only Rank C. However, their difficulty level was enough to promote Helena to Level C-0. Leveling up is easy at the start, but it becomes hellish later on. The highest-ranked person in the world currently,
"The Absoluter,"
was at Level A-9.
The group found an abandoned hut, indicating someone had reached this spot before them. A wave of disappointment hit them. Rory entered cautiously. Inside, there was a bookmark checkpoint for returning. Rory destroyed it, laughing, effectively cutting off that person's ability to respawn at this point after waking up.
Delaney found fresh tire tracks heading toward the cloud tornado.
Annoyed, Rory used his Egrinor to create a jet-plane Egregore. They fed it coins to boost its speed and specs, then flew toward the heart of the storm.
"We have to do some Looting before he does,"
Rory said.
Suddenly, Delaney cried out in panic,
"Turn back, Rory! There's a Hecatyon nearby!"
Rory banked hard and turned back
. "I hope it didn't see us,"
Delaney whispered.
Hecatyons are the indigenous inhabitants of dreams—dreams without dreamers, born from the fluctuations of dream matter itself. Unlike humans here, whose Ontometrics have a real value connecting them to reality and an imaginary value connecting them to the dream world, Hecatyons have purely imaginary Ontometric values. They are the gods of this place. Physical contact with them means severing the 'cord of wakefulness'—immediate death in the real world. Hecatyons move freely between kingdoms and can ascend in their imaginary dimensions to numbers in Hypercomplex sets, beyond the Quaternions that limit humans in the Dream Core.
At a safe distance, Rory dismantled the plane, and they dropped to the ground to hide. From a hill, they peeked at the creature and witnessed a horrifying scene.
The entity looked like a girl in a school uniform, but parts of her skin had been flayed, revealing raw red meat underneath. A metal frame was bolted around her head, with coins driven into her skull. A visible black aura surrounded her body. But most terrifying of all was that she was eating a person. Her breathing sounded like a gasoline engine, and she occasionally emitted a loud noise resembling a chainsaw.
"No, no, no...Delaney stammered. We have to go back and tell the Guild. That's a Hecatyon from the Meat Core kingdom."
"Let's wait a little," Helena said. "Just have your safety triggers ready to wake up."
The Hecatyon didn't notice them. It continued walking until it suddenly vanished with a sound like an explosion.
Rory stood up.
"It's safe now. It teleported."
"Oh my god, that was terrifying. We have to report a player death to the Guild."
"I think that was the owner of the hut,"
Helena said, pointing.
"Look, his cart is wrecked over there."
"Damn, there's always someone to spoil the fun,
[ Rory laughed nervously. ]
I guess he was so scared he forgot to pull his safety trigger to wake up."
The group continued toward the fake tornado, which now looked like a solid wall of clouds. After an hour of walking, they arrived. Rory hid a bookmark in the area, and they breached the tornado, pushing through two hundred meters of dense fog. Helena created a light source with her new, more stable level.
The fog cleared to reveal a massive metal door. It wouldn't open with brute force, and an attempt to break it with an imagination-powered attack failed.
"We aren't strong enough to open it,"
Helena said.
"I think we should go back."
"We'll just peek at what's inside,"
Rory replied.
They decided to squeeze themselves under the gap at the bottom of the door. Helena was, of course, the most dangerous person in the group to have behind you—literally the person you shouldn't stick your butt toward. First, the pro, Rory, slid under, followed by Helena, and finally Delaney.
Suddenly, Helena's device emitted a sound:
"Beep Beep"
"The Ontometrics of the location have changed."
"Let me see."
Rory pulled out a massive guidebook filled with bookmarks. He read it and said:
"We're still in the Kingdom of Fantasia, but we've entered a sub-pocket dimension. Its Ontometrics are between those of the Northern Plains King's dimension and the scarlet King's dimension...
What do you think?
Should we keep going?
We might find treasure."
Everyone agreed.