The only chilling detail was that where the Beijing Lucas's head should have been, someone had burned it away with cigarette butts, and the body had been slashed several times with a small knife. The sight was disturbing.
"If I'm not mistaken... Lucas developed dissociative identity disorder from the childhood abuse he suffered. One personality is the kind, wounded child, and the other is a violent, emotionally unstable 'mother' personality. After the fire that made him an orphan, he grew up alone in an orphanage. To prevent the 'mother' personality from causing harm, he became withdrawn and silent. At school, he frequently got into fights when he couldn't control the violent personality, but in the dorm he got along surprisingly well with his roommates. They had no reason to be on guard around him. Deep down, though, he was consumed with jealousy toward his college roommate—who happened to share the same name—because that Lucas had better grades, a better family, and a better job. So..."
"So the 'mother' personality murdered the roommate on graduation night. Because Lucas refused to disclose his condition, he was convicted and spent years in prison... until he escaped."
"Exactly. In prison, he split off yet another personality—a Beijing Lucas personality. That's the delivery driver you met. He convinced himself he'd been framed and wrongfully imprisoned. On top of that, he constructed an elaborate backstory: a poor village straight-A student who fought his way into a Fortune 500 company, only to have gambling destroy his life."
"The only remaining mystery lies in the fourth dream layer..."
"Right. The origin of that scar. That traffic accident at the intersection..."
---
Holding Chloe's cool hand, we stepped into the fourth dream layer and arrived directly at the intersection I knew best—Dawanglu.
According to the dream data, the delivery driver Lucas had been in this accident six months ago. A drunk driver had struck him, and the driver had fled before he was even admitted to the hospital. Because of his debts, he hadn't dared stay long—just had the wound stitched up and slipped away quietly.
Chloe and I hid in the shadows near the intersection, waiting for the delivery driver Lucas to appear.
One hour passed. Two hours. Traffic flowed steadily, but there was no sign of Lucas.
"Chloe, once we get the fourth key, we'll break through this nightmare realm. What happens on the outside after that?"
"Once Lucas's Abandoned Object is destroyed, his ability will naturally dissipate. The people of Hangzhou will all recover. And he himself, with those dark personalities erased, will be purified into an ordinary person." Chloe leaned lightly against a lamppost. Her figure, silhouetted by the light, was striking enough to make me blush.
I couldn't help myself. "You know, you clearly know a lot of inside details, including how the battle in Beijing went. You must be in contact with whoever's pulling the strings. I can feel it. If you can't talk about it, fine. But after this fight, maybe we can get them to sit down with us and have a real conversation. Can't we call a truce and work together? There's no need for us to be killing each other—we're on the same side."
Chloe suddenly looked up with a playful smile. "What's the matter? Afraid you can't beat me?"
"No, that's not what I mean. I'm just saying, it's ugly when family fights. You... what I mean is... fine, let's finish this first. But afterward, can we at least find somewhere to rest together?"
Chloe rolled her eyes. "Look at you. Like a werewolf—as soon as the full moon comes out, your mouth has no filter..."
Full moon?
I snapped my head up and saw that familiar blank space reappear in the sky above.
That ugly moon puppet... That was it! That was the key!
In an instant, all the fragments of the puzzle clicked together in my mind, and everything made sense.
"Chloe, check right now—six months ago, within a three-kilometer radius of Dawanglu, anywhere an e-bike could reach, was there any kind of murder or homicide?"
Chloe had no idea what had suddenly gotten into me, but she quickly pulled out her phone and searched. "Six months ago, there was a home invasion robbery at a residential complex nearby. A married couple was killed, and everything valuable was taken. The strange thing is, the surveillance cameras didn't capture any suspicious individual. The robber is still at large."
My eyes lit up. That was it!!!
Right on cue, faint cries for help drifted from deep inside one of the apartment buildings in the complex.
The entire apartment was shrouded in purple mist. Lucas, still wearing his delivery uniform, held two innocent people aloft—one in each hand—under the moonlight on the balcony.
"It won't hurt. It'll be over soon. The moon told me to do this! I'm offering you... offering you to the moon..."
Just then, a streak of Ama-no-Murakumo slashed across the night sky, pinning Lucas to the floor.
"Drop the act. We've figured you out." I stepped out of the shadows. Just in time.
"You... what do you mean?" Lucas struggled against the blade, but Ama-no-Murakumo had driven straight through the floor. He couldn't move.
"There was never a mother trying to strangle you in that fire, was there?"
"You set that fire yourself, on purpose."
"Something felt off in the second dream layer, and now I know what. That ugly moon puppet—the clumsy carving—it was made by a child's hands. Why would it be the second key, placed on your mother's body? Because you wanted to misdirect the dream's narrative. You wanted to paint yourself as a pitiful victim of domestic abuse. That way, if we followed your script and waited at the intersection for a traffic accident that never existed, you could quietly carry out the real murder in this timeline. With the dream and reality overlapping, the exit would be sealed in a loop, and we'd be trapped in your nightmare forever, unable to escape."
"The most incongruous thing about the Liu Family Village dream was this: it's your dream, so if we never came to rescue you, how did you escape in the real timeline?"
Lucas's eyes narrowed. I'd hit a nerve.
"The truth is, you were never inside that house. You'd had enough of life in that backwater village. So while your parents slept, you hauled straw over, locked the door from the outside, and set fire to your own home. You'd read enough to know that a social orphan like yourself would be sent to an orphanage in the county seat. And from there, you plotted your way, step by step, to where you are now. Isn't that right?"
"Every full moon, you couldn't resist the urge to kill. The first time was that fire at age nine. The second was graduation night at eighteen. The third was the night you escaped from prison. The fourth is tonight. You couldn't bear the full moon without doing something, so you used the delivery driver identity as your cover in the city. But you couldn't stomach what you'd become, so you fabricated this story—reconstructing your own memories through nightmares. You wanted to believe you were a good person. But whenever the moon rises, you become this. You can't change it. You're in pain. But I can help you. I can end that pain."
Lucas stared at me calmly, like a dead man listening to a eulogy.
"Goodbye." As Ama-no-Murakumo expanded, the final Nightmare Lord was slain. A passage to the real world opened from the balcony.
Everything was finally over...
---
But stepping back into reality, I expected to find sunshine. Instead, when I looked up, the purple haze of nightmares still hung over the city of Hangzhou.
"Chloe, what's going on?" I turned to her. She was frowning in thought.
"In terms of raw power in this Holy Grail War, Lancer should have been the strongest. I originally assumed you and Lancer would be the ones coming to Hangzhou—after all, his Abandoned Object was water, so I set up a boundary field at Thunder Peak Pagoda as a countermeasure. If he fought at West Lake, we needed an ace up our sleeves. But you managed to take Lancer out early with your scheme in Beijing. That meant Assassin stayed hidden in the shadows the entire time. His combat abilities consume very little energy, and with the negative emotions of everyone in the city feeding his Abandoned Object, the nightmare power that remains is far stronger than we anticipated. That evil child personality is still inside him. If this continues, every person in this city will be trapped to death in the dream."
"Is there anything we can do?"
"There is, but..."
"But what?"
"It requires this..."
With those words, Chloe suddenly raised both hands high and began to chant.
As she chanted, golden light—like the moon piercing through storm clouds—began to disperse the darkness shrouding all of Hangzhou.
Chloe leapt lightly into the air, floating upward like a feather, then suspended herself above Thunder Peak Pagoda. Beneath her feet roiled the nightmare mist, and there she hovered at an unreachable height, like the golden oil lamp burning before the Buddha of Light.