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 occupy 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 immerse himself in his dream.
The boy had been dreaming for a long time.
Hallucinations caused by pain first came to visit. 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, long-term and deep strategies, and long planning before making a move.
I don’t know how long I have been wandering, 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 grand dreams.
Those dreams lasted for many years, spanning several generations, witnessing everything covered with ice and then melting into spring water, experiencing the sea completely solidifying and then surging again, watching the sun as a brass disk speeding through the clouds in the sky.
It passed by, first shining brightly, bursting with light, then gradually dimming, turning into embers, and being 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 disintegrating, 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 a 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 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 in the depths of darkness, away from storms.
But was he really brought here for his own protection?
Or was he just stored away by some wild 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 recovered somewhat, but the air here smelled lifeless, like a dry boulder on the polar plateau, without even a trace of moisture to form ice.
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 for 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 again, the hollow voice still thunderous even as it whispered.
It was less like a human voice and sounded closer to the rumble of an ancient horn, with every syllable having the exact same dull echo.
"Stop squirming around."
"Where am I?"
"In a dream."
The voice replied, and at this moment it sounded like the howling 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 dreams, that's what dreams are, they don't need to be understood, that's all."
"But why am I here?"
When the voice came to respond, it already seemed quite far away.
"You're here to experience those dreams, it's that simple, so just dream peacefully... This will help you kill time, have a good dream, don't wiggle around! I'm very annoyed!"
The boy hesitated for a moment. He didn't like the threatening tone in the voice. The other party 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 couldn't help but let out a scream of terror.
The other party's loud voice was not only close at hand, but also had a hint of roaring in it.
"No one likes it here."
The other party repeated something 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, and we did not let you choose death."
There followed a long silence.
"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 while... just wait and don't move! 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...