Simple man with his overpowered army-Chapter 76: Exploring parts of the dreamworld

As Lud walked alongside Samael along the dreamscape, he saw many things. On one side, he saw a mountain of pure see-through glass. On the other, he saw dunes of finely powdered sand crystals.

Then when he looked in another direction, Lud saw a sea of marbles with each of them having something intricate inside them.

Lud asked Samael "What are those marbles?"

And Samael answered "They are the former dreams of the reverse god known as Maumar. They also represent how singular beings view the vast timelines, though here, in much more, if that is even permitted, tangible way for us who can traverse the dreamworld."

Lud muttered to himself "So those are... I heard of that before. Who did I hear it from again? Was it Maumar? Most likely. But somehow, it is hard to remember anymore. So much... has passed. The time in that silent, lonely hell has done something for me. On top of that, all those other versions of me converge because I chose so... It becomes hard to keep track."

Samael responded to Lud’s mumbling "You are an unique existence, but the... normal people... do have ways to experience how you feel, if only just a little."

Lud asks "Does it have something to do with dreams?"

Samael answers "You are not wrong, but you aren’t entirely correct either. Dreams let people enter this... vast and mysterious place. Though their experience is often restricted to their own little pocket world, it does ring bells that do also ring to you a little more often than others."

Lud responds with a confused "I don’t follow your metaphor."

Samael tries to make himself clear by explaining "It is completely understandable. Dreams aren’t something so tangible that you can put your head around it in an instant. But for some, it is like... peeling an orange. Another metaphor, I know, but that is just how it is. Intangible. Yet we dreamwalkers try to make sense of all of it, and understand beings like you as we are forced to live in this everchanging world."

Lud says "Did I understand you wrong or is the dreamworld something that changes constantly?"

Samael explains "Depends where you are. As I mentioned, gods’ dreams do change this place quite often, but it isn’t only the gods who can do that. Dreamshaping is something that even some dreamwalkers can pull off. Or even regular old people in the rest of Lutah. It just... takes a... well this feels off to say, but... it takes a miracle to do so. Happenstance? No, that doesn’t quite fit well either.

But rarely is the dreamshaping that is done by non-gods permanent. Us dreamwalkers can ask Un’I for permission and she can grant us an authority to dreamshape on our own with little to no effort for a limited time."

Lud says "So... they are like construction workers then? The ones who ask permission to mold the dreams as they like from Un’I, I mean."

Samael stares at Lud for a moment, before bursting out laughing for a while.

When he calms down, Samael says to Lud "While you aren’t wrong, it is a funny way to look at borrowing god’s power to reshape the world. Construction workers. Hah. What a funny way to look at it."

Lud asks Samael "I mean... it does sound kind of crude, I must admit, but that is how I pictured it."

Samael gives a few more laughs before saying "Like anywhere else, we do build houses to live in, you know. While borrowing Un’I’s power can make things easier, it isn’t something that you go do when you want to build a building or two. You gather materials like a normal person and then construct the thing. Granted, finding building materials sometimes can be tricky, but there are roughly infinite wells of materials for one thing or another around the place here. I mean, the dreamworld does expand constantly, so infinitely spawning materials is near a must."

Lud says "The dreamworld is constantly expanding? Where does it all fit in the grand scheme of things?"

Samael grabs a hold of Lud’s shoulder and says "That, my friend, is the question... isn’t it."

The two stand in silence for a moment before Samael breaks the silence by saying "Why don’t we go look some other places. There are plenty of things to see here."

Lud nods and says "Lead the way."

And off the went.

Their next stop was the forests of frozen lightning. The forest has three types of "trees".

Type A is lightning frozen in time as they hit the ground, forming reverse trees of sorts. It extends to the sky and spreads through the ground as it once hit it, kind of like the roots of plants. Some locals call these types of frozen lightning trees "Towers of Lezzpritzi". Lezzpritzi being the god of lightning and electricity.

Type A is harmless at its current form, but should it ever begin to move forwards in time, the area around it would shatter into thousands of tiny fragments of solidified earth.

Type B is often referred to as offshoot lighting trees. These too are frozen in time, similarly to the first type. They seemingly rise from the clusters of the type A lightning trees. They rise from the ground and spread into the sky like a tree would spread its branches upwards.

Unlike its type A counterpart, type B varies in length, though they are clearly not as tall as the type A lightning trees. There are type B lighting trees that seemingly reach the stars in the sky, but those are fairly rare in the vast sea of these trees. And like it’s type A counterpart, it is harmless if one should touch it, but should it begin to move, gods can’t save the person who walks that part of the dreamscape, for the aether in those trees will shatter the person, should they ever make contact while they no longer are frozen in time.

Type C is a whole different story. It is a cluster of lighting that continues to zap away. It has roots and branches that converge into one straight cluster like the body of a regular tree.

The type C trees are not connected to the other two types of lighting trees, as they are technically not frozen in time. Instead, they are a very active form of lighting that is forced to keep a tree-like shape continuously.

Unlike types A and B, type C can kill you if you touch it in its current form. Though they are rare compared to the other types, dreamwalkers avoid going to the forest because they fear that they accidentally make contact with the type C lighting tree.

As one might guess, the frozen lightning forest is most often associated with the dreamscaping of Lezzpritzi, but that is not entirely true.

Electricity has a certain type of relationship with dreams that makes this forest continue to grow, though rarely do anyone near hear the sound of lighting in the area. They just appear as if they were always there, though no one has been able to observe one spawning while they were looking. It is as if they are born only when not observed.

Because type C is the only moving of the three, people have tried to study it to solve the mystery of the frozen lighting forest. The current theory is that types A and B are born when Lezzpritzi has calm dreams and type C is born when Lezzpritzi has a nightmare, but this is only accepted as a theory, as Lezzpritzi has not commented on the matter.

Un’I has confirmed that she knows the truth of those trees, but she has yet to tell a soul of the true nature of those lightning trees frozen in time.

Lud felt off as they walked past the forest, as if something was calling him inside it. Like how the forest called for him when Eris was doing tricks on him. This time though, it felt... different. Like voices that are made but never heard, spawning within that forest. Lud feels more and more like there is something calling for him there, but chooses not to linger any longer and follows Samael to see the next destination.

The next destination is the convergence of the six river paths. A spiralling reverse waterfall that starts from the ground and flows upwards to a floating island up in the skies.

The rivers themselves are also a wonder, for none is a river of water.

One is a river of liquid gold.

One is a river of blood.

One is a river of liquid nitrogen type of material.

One is a river of liquid lighting.

One is a river of liquid flames.

One is a river of abyssal liquid.

These six rivers converge and spiral to the sky island where the six rivers finally merge into something that mortal truly knows. All that is known is that the seemingly endless six rivers, when merged in the sky island, infinitely turn into something that continues to be supplied, but never truly increases or lessens.

The spiralling rivers hold the sky island like six fingers holding a cup. Lud did ask if he could see what was up there, but Samael told him "Only Un’I can give a permission to do so. Should you not have her permission, the dreamsentinels will hunt you down and you may never enter the dreamworld again."

Lud asks "Dreamsentinels, huh... Are they powerful?"

Samael responds by saying "They are, though I don’t know how they would fare in battle with you or any of Elysium’s soldiers. But then again, I’m not eager to find out which comes on top."

Lud asks "Are you certain it would be a hard won battle? My people are seemingly strong compared to the natives of Lutah."

Samael responds by saying "Still, I don’t wish to see you two in conflict."

Lud thinks for a moment and then asks "Do machines from Elysium, or machines in general, dream and be able to enter the dreamworld?"

Samael answers "Generally speaking, no. But few of... Xu’s fingers... have been able to have ’dreams’ of sorts. Especially the one that has been recognised as a god."

Lud thinks out loud "So you mean Song Bai. She really outdid herself, didn’t she?"

Samael responds to Lud’s muttering "I didn’t get to see it personally, but the day when she ascended, the dreamscape did change in a few places."

Lud asks "How so? Are you going to show me?"

Samael thinks for a moment and then says "It isn’t next on our list, but I will show the place most affected by the ascension."

The next spot that Samael decided to show Lud was the time dilated ocean. A sea of water that never lets land people swim in it and sea people exit it. Once a person who is used to walking on land tries to swim in it, the surface of the water becomes impenetrable and causes that person to effectively stay on the surface as if the liquid being solid in that one, certain spot.

The time dilated sea is mysterious in many ways, as there is spots where the sea is effectively frozen in time in one spot and moving forwards or backwards in time in others. The chaos in that sea is something that no sea farer who was able to enter it could conquer by the laws of the rest of the oceans in Lutah.

In that time dilated sea, there are spots where the water floats on the sky or is flowing to the sky by a mysterious force. In the same type of places, there are caves where dreamwalkers can enter to search for treasures left by ancient dreamwalkers. Treasures that could change the tides of the whole dreamworld, maybe even the whole Lutah.

And if you travel far enough, you might find sword strikes that continue to split this particular sea in two eternally, flowing still, but never being able to return to that spot, as if they are forced to be waterfalls of some sort by the time eternal.

Samael only told Lud of this vast sea and showed the shores of it. Even by the shore, Lud could feel that if the normal seas were untamed, then this particular sea was even more so.

Lud did ask Samael "How do fish of the sea fare in the time dilated sea and how do boats sail, if they do at all?"

Samael answered Lud "While there are fish species that you find in Lutah that appear here as well, there are many races that have learned and adapted to this peculiar environment. As for boats, well... while there are boats and fishing industry here as well on some level, it is fairly different from what the sailing and fishing that you are used to."

The next stop was the whispering woods, where Lud had a strange inkling to go in like the lighting forest, but this time, the feeling was much, much more stronger. Samael only showed this place to Lud and didn’t want to spend much time exploring the place due to its nature, he even had to forcefully remove Lud from the place, since he, for some reason, resisted quite a bit.

Once Lud calmed down as Samael was carrying him to the next place, Samael explained the nature of most, seemingly regular forests, in the dreamscape.

The forests, no matter how unassuming they seemed in the dreamscape, were a dangerous place meant to drag dreamwalkers and wandering dreamers to it.

Should one become lost in one, they might never be able to return to the real world again. It highly depends on the nature of the one who finally catches the person, but most tend to only steal the rest of that person’s dreams as long as they live.

However, there are beings in those forests that are different from those who only steal the rest of the dreams of the mortals who enter it. There are those who only steal a few dreams that they might have, or not at all. There are tricksters among those who wander the dreamscape dreams as well as the real forests in Lutah, like the servants of Oretettia, fairies to be exact. But those are only the kinder ones.

Should one be caught in the enchanted forests of the dreamscape, one might be caught by the malevolent forces that live inside it. They rarely enter the real world, but they can manifest in it. As for their names, they come in many, but the common one is called the forest banshee that drains your life once it catches you.

As Samael and Lud journey on, they finally get to a place that changed drastically after Song Bai ascended. The place was filled with towers that were seemingly made of bronze like material, as well as marble stone. However, in dreamscape, or dreamworld rather, the appearance of material doesn’t tell the slightest of trust in every case. One might look like a cloud, only to it be a field tough as steel.

Nevertheless, Lud continued his journey as he marveled in the bask of one of his people’s, albeit accidental works.

Lud walked and saw creatures seemingly biological, but were purely mechanical. But even though they were mechanical, they were alive. Well... at least in terms of the rules of the dreamworld.

There were trees that looked like the natural ones, as well as plants, but there were ones that didn’t hide their machine origins. It was rarer for the creatures, but mechanical looking creatures did exist in that dreamscape.

You could see massive vires the size of mountains just crossing over from one tower to the next, both on the ground and up in the sky. The rules of nature didn’t work the same way here, as Lud already had experience during his visit in the dreamworld.

There was a slight static electricity all around the area influenced by Song Bai’s ascension that could be felt. Due to the nature of electricity in Lutah, it seemingly had a strange effect on the dreamwalkers of the region.

Some mortals who experienced that static electricity were barely affected by it, but some had severe mental breakdowns the closer they walked to the centers of the places affected.

Speaking of centers, Song Bai’s ascension seemingly spawned massive metallic spheres on the landscape that layered the surrounding to be what it was. Those spheres infiltrated the different types of biomes of the dreamworld and affected it differently, but the empty plains were the place that was most affected by them.

Samael admitted to Lud "This place makes me feel a bit uneasy, though I can’t help but admire the feat of one of your people."

On each mechanical field created by Song Bai’s ascension, there were several mechanical dragons of different kinds. Some were more serpent kind that flowed with the sky. Some were lizard-like that had four limbs and wings, no wings at all or two legs and two wings where the "arms" should be.

Those "dragons" were not creations of Trix in any measure. They were creations purely made from Song Bai’s dreams that she had pictured guardian deities to be like. Those being dragons of different kinds of cultures.

There were of course other mythical creatures made from mechanical parts. Examples of this were phoenixes, cockatrices, minotaurs, lamias, gorgons, wendigos, and so on and so forth.

Lud was quite astonished as he got to see the creatures that inhabited that place. He almost forgot that he was in a dreamworld and that the rules of this place were drastically different from the rest of Lutah.

However, while it was unknown to Lud at the time of what the feeling was, he felt the distinct feeling of something that hung far atop on each sphere that spawned these habitats. Something that wasn’t created by Song Bai’s dream, but was something intricately connected to the concept of "Machine god". Lud could not see any clear shapes, but the feeling was definitely there.

However, Lud figured that it was the static electricity that was making him feel strange things and brushed it off, but there truly was definitely there unseen to him and Samael that would one day affect both of them. But that day was far, far away.

Lud’s time in the dreamworld was starting to end as he was waking up, so Samael decided to show the closest city that existed in that dreamworld.

The city that Samael got to show Lud was the city of Melanch. A place where most inhabitants did surreal things that didn’t often harm anyone for real, but those inhabitants often find themselves a bit obtuse after they leave.

Even Lud could feel something surreal affect his body as he entered the city, but since he was about to wake up, Samael said his goodbyes for now, and so Lud woke up to face another day in the real world in Lutah.