Chapter 315: Chapter 273: The Shipwreck Graveyard, Blue Dragon King_2
She twisted the eight tentacles that had replaced her legs a few times and glided to the watery side of the temple, slowly swimming towards the temple door.
She had only swum a few strokes before quickly adapting to her new body, as if she had been born this way.
Gazing out through a wide crack in the temple gate, large enough for her to pass through at will, she surveyed the scene outside.
In the midst of the dense fog stood an immensely vast city.
However, the architecture was highly abnormal, completely contradicting the geometry she had learned at the Vinaia Art Academy.
It somewhat resembled the work of that small handful of avant-garde abstract artists.
She wondered if they too had gained their inspiration during dreams.
Its unprecedented spatial structures and dimensions induced an intense feeling of discomfort deep within her.
All the buildings were constructed from massive, slick green stones. The city was filled with dizzyingly tall stone carvings, majestic statues, and ornate bas-reliefs.
Moreover, both the statues and reliefs were covered in engravings of slimy tentacles, giving the impression of having stumbled into a den of tentacles.
Previously, an experience like this would likely have given Violet goosebumps.
However, now that she had accepted her new form, her perception seemed to have shifted as well.
Looking at her reflection in the water, she nodded and said to herself, "Hmm, even a girl with eight legs can be cute! You never cease to amaze, Violet. Even if I were to randomly receive such a form during the bloodline sublimation ritual in the future, it doesn’t seem that hard to accept."
She squeezed through the crack and stood on the grand temple steps.
Her eyes scanned every street, every window, only to discover, futilely, that the entire massive city seemed truly deserted except for herself.
The city was deathly silent and frigid, sending shivers down her spine.
Only when an occasional sea breeze scattered part of the fog, allowing her to peer far into the distance, could she see what seemed to be an immensely vast landmass behind the city.
She was unaware that the Contract Devil who had escaped had witnessed an identical scene before her.
"It looks like the New Continent out there," she murmured, her earlier gloom from being unexpectedly pulled into the dream suddenly replaced by excitement. "Could Father have come here before?!"
To be separated from the real world by an entire Celestial Sphere Circulation, yet reach this place instantly within a dream, was a truly delightful surprise.
Recalling the intelligence she had previously gathered—"Fortress Bridgehead," "Bayfolk Pioneers," "Whale Oil Revolution," "Whale Hunter Footsteps," and more—she wiggled her tentacles, suddenly eager to explore this place.
"Huh, what’s this?" Violet suddenly noticed something strange beneath the calm water surface that covered half the city.
The entire city, in time with the shifting mist, flickered between illusory and real, as if half of it existed in reality and the other half in the Dream Realm.
The magnificent temple where she stood seemed to be the boundary, with one half submerged in the water and the other on land.
And with each shift between the real and the illusory, the light and shadows changed accordingly.
The placid surface of the water acted like an immense mirror, inverting the city and revealing another, identical underwater city.
Her Transcendent knowledge told her that such a distinct anomaly signified an entrance to the deeper layers of the Dream Realm!
Biting her tender lip, the girl couldn’t help but feel torn. Deeper layers of the Dream Realm? Should I take a look? If I use the deeper Dream Realm as a springboard, maybe I can directly witness the lives of the New Continent’s natives and obtain firsthand information. I might even be able to steal knowledge about Whale Oil from their collective consciousness and perhaps obtain the original Whale Oil technology.
She knew that if she delved deeper into the dream, danger and opportunity would coexist.
In the Dream Realm, space and time held little meaning; it could be described as the most lawless place in the world.
However, it could generally be divided into three major layers: the shallow, the deep, and the lost layer. These corresponded to the levels within the ocean of human collective consciousness: consciousness, the individual unconscious, and the collective unconscious.
If one were to view the inner world of all humanity as a vast archipelago at sea, then the land rising above the water represented the awakened part of an individual’s consciousness, accessible even to ordinary people—the realm of daily life and lucid dreams. The submerged land, revealed only by the tides, represented the individual’s personal unconscious, where all of one’s lifetime experiences accumulated, never discarded. And the seabed, the foundation for all these islands, was the collective unconscious—shared by a people, a group, a country, and ultimately, all of humanity.
Reaching the collective unconscious meant encountering the psychological sediment of countless similar experiences passed down through generations, embedded in all members of humanity.
Violet was immensely intrigued by these sediments. We, the Sequence Transcendents of the Tower Sequence who uphold the maxim ’Dispel ignorance with knowledge,’ can unearth various lost knowledge from the collective subconscious: the seemingly insignificant sparks of inspiration from ordinary people, the wild conceptions of a few geniuses... It’s like excavating all sorts of treasures from a mine. This also applies to the natives. It’s rare to find such a precious place, a nexus between reality and the Dream Realm that can serve as a window. Once we leave here, even if we successfully land on the New Continent in the future, we would face isolated collective subconsciousnesses; even the most powerful Transcendents would be helpless against them. But...
There was always a ’but’ behind all the benefits.
Only when protected by the [Silver Code], which could impose some Order on the chaotic Dream Realm, did they dare to venture into shallow exploration.
If a Transcendent dared to explore the deep or lost layers directly through their own dreams, it meant they were courting death or madness.
The endless surge of memory dregs could shatter a Mid-Sequences Transcendent’s mind with a single wave. It could even cause an individual’s sense of self to vanish completely, their entire personality dissolving into the collective consciousness.
Moreover, Violet strongly suspected that the source of the contamination that had afflicted the Fourth Order Adventurer Balboa, a hero, might be hidden below.
After only a moment’s hesitation, her Tower Sequence’s insatiable thirst for unknown knowledge, for the truth of past events, and for her father’s whereabouts, compelled her to take a small risk.
Wrapping her eight tentacles around the doorknob and the stone railing by the entrance, she seized an opportunity during another shift in light and shadow and plunged just her face into the water.
Her vision cleared to reveal she was still in front of the same temple. Though she had been looking down from above outside, upon arriving in this other city submerged in seawater, her perspective abruptly shifted to looking up from below.
Her delicate face emerged from a puddle before the doorway, gazing up at the ’sky’ above.
The moment she made out the appearance of this underwater city, her heart skipped a beat. "Are these all... shipwrecks?" she gasped.
As far as she could see, densely packed, dilapidated shipwrecks filled the entire underwater city. This was clearly a shipwreck graveyard stretching as far as the eye could see.
Ethereal sailors drifted in and out of the sunken vessels, while others manned their Ghost Ships, engaged in phantom battles...
And among this vast collection of shipwrecks—all seemingly transformed into Ghost Ships by the Dream Realm’s contamination—stood a colossal First-class Sailing Battleship, undeniably the overlord of this fleet.
Violet happened to recognize it.
Upon recognizing it, she was so astounded that her beautiful eyes widened and her mouth fell agape as she stammered, "The blue Figurehead of a Giant Dragon... it’s unmistakable! Is this the legendary Blue Dragon King, sunk by the White Rose York Family?!!"