When those unknown drugs were pumped into his body in large amounts, the boy felt as if he was in an ice storm and began to shake violently uncontrollably.
During this process, the restraint belt on the operating table firmly fixed him to the cold metal plate, preventing him from falling to the ground.
As trembling and frenzy continued to crowd his mind and body, his consciousness gradually became chaotic.
After an unknown amount of time, he finally escaped from the storm, as if he had been carried into a deep, warm and dull cave.
He lay there, continuing to dream.
The boy had been dreaming for a long time.
Hallucinations caused by pain came first. The pain in the nerves throughout his body made this hallucination extremely sharp, and the large amount of analgesics injected into his blood vessels distorted everything.
Those sharp and incomplete dream fragments are like scattered puzzle pieces or shattered mirrors, intertwined with periods of dark and silent coma.
The interweaving and collision of the two feelings is like a game between two masters of regicide chess - careful attack and defense that have been carefully considered, long-term and deep strategies, and long planning before making a move.
I don’t know how long I have been floating, the sharp edges of the fragments of my mind are gradually blunted, and those dreams are becoming more persistent and complex.
He began to have some extremely long and recurring dreams.
Those dreams have lasted for many years, spanning several generations, witnessing the ice covering everything and then melting into spring water, experiencing the sea completely solidifying and then surging again, watching the brass disk-like sun speeding through the clouds in the sky. Then, it first shone brightly, bursting with light, then gradually dimmed, turned into embers, and was wiped away by the breeze.
Day and night alternate endlessly...
Sometimes, his dreams are like an adventure. He is sitting in a speeding express train, with a panoramic view of everything in the world. However, he often rises or falls suddenly, and needs to hold on to the handrails tightly to avoid accidentally falling. .
Sometimes, in his dreams, he would withdraw his gaze and escape into his own flesh and blood, observing this body as complex as the Milky Way at a microscopic level, examining the countless atoms that make up the whole one by one, and splitting the essence of his life into the smallest details. Genetic information is like using a prism to skillfully filter out its colorful components from light.
He felt that the organs and tissues all over his body were dissociating, as if he had turned into an old wall clock, and every delicate component covered with Geneva patterns was laid out in front of the craftsmen, waiting for maintenance and repair.
He is also like a biological specimen, an experimental animal fixed on the workbench, first disemboweled with a sharp knife, and then the internal organs are removed one by one like the gear parts of a pocket watch.
Or like an insect nailed on a wax plate, tissue cells from various parts of the body are placed on glass slides for people to study various internal mechanisms.
After the long dream that took him back to the cave, he often felt as if he had been reassembled into a completely different person.
If it is still an old clock, then the arrangement of its gear parts has been changed, and some of them have been cleaned, repaired or replaced, such as the mainspring and escapement, the transmission and balance wheel, and all the details. The levers and hands were reorganized in a creative new order, and finally the dial was firmly tightened.
These make the internal structure of his transformation completely unknown to outsiders.
He began to think again about the cave itself.
It's warm and safe here, hidden deep in the darkness, away from the storm.
But was he really brought here for his own protection?
Or was he just being stored away by some beast?
The strangest and rarest dream occurred after he had a violent convulsion, after which a voice began to talk to him.
His sense of smell had returned somewhat, but the air here smelled lifeless, like a dry boulder on a polar plateau without even a trace of moisture to form frost.
This place is far away from the warmth and fire in the cave. When he stays here, the boy's limbs always feel as heavy as lead, as if he has swallowed a belly full of ice, as if some kind of cold liquid metal is flowing in his veins. It became a burden on him.
Even his thinking was slow and sticky.
He struggled against the bone-chilling chill, fearing that he would be dragged into the dreamless sleep of death.
However, his best efforts seemed to only make his limbs twitch slightly, and he could not even raise his eyelids.
"do not move!"
These were the first words the voice said to him.
There was no warning, and the sudden words made him freeze immediately.
"do not move!"
The voice repeated itself, the hollow voice still thundering as it whispered.
It sounded less like a human voice and closer to the rumble of an ancient horn, with exactly the same dull reverberation in every syllable.
"Stop squirming around."
"Where am I?"
"In a dream."
replied the voice, which now sounded like the cry of a ram's horn on a distant solitary mountain.
"I don't understand."
There was silence for a while, and then the voice suddenly sounded next to the boy's right ear, as if the other person had just come around behind him.
"You don't have to understand the dream, that's what the dream is, it doesn't need to be understood, that's all."
"But why am I here?"
When the voice responded, it already seemed quite far away.
"You're here to experience those dreams, it's that simple, so just relax and dream... This will help you pass the time, have a good dream, don't move around! I'm annoyed!"
The boy hesitated. He didn't like the threatening tone in the voice. The other person was obviously very impatient.
"I don't like it here."
"Yeah, none of you like it here!"
The next second, the voice boomed in the boy's left ear. He let out an involuntary scream of terror.
The other party's loud voice was not only close at hand, but also had a hint of roaring in it.
"Nobody likes it here."
The other person repeated it more calmly, and the voice lingered in the darkness around him.
"But just because your bodies resisted the dream, many of you died! This is not what we expected. We did not let you choose death."
A long silence followed.
"Who are you?"
the boy asked hoarsely.
"My name is only for myself, not for you to use."
The voice was still so impatient.
"Then why are you still here."
The other party paused for a moment, then muttered:
"because of you."
"How long have I been here?"
"It's been a few days... just stay still! Shut that lousy mouth of yours and stop bothering me."
After saying that, a sharp pain came, and the boy's mind was once again shrouded in fog...
