Chapter 575 : Cleanup

Within the Dreamscape, deep in the forested expanse, countless towering trees stretched endlessly into the distance. Their thick canopies blanketed the sky, casting the entire woodland into a dim, shadowed gloom. Hanging from the branches of these ancient trees were innumerable white dream cocoons, and drifting through the trees were radiant memory bubbles glowing with iridescent hues. On the forest floor, glowing dreamflowers and luminous grass swayed gently in the quiet.

In the middle of a wide clearing, a colossal dreamlike moth now lay sprawled and weakened. Several pieces of its massive, withered wings drooped feebly to the ground. Its body and bloated abdomen were riddled with horrific gashes. A third of its many tendrils had been torn off. Wisps of ethereal blood streamed from its wounds.

“Huff... huff…”

Inside the pseudo-moth’s wounded body, situated where its head would be, was Withered Wing in dreamform—gasping for breath, his expression still haunted by fear. After struggling desperately, he had finally escaped Moncarlo—escaped the full-force pursuit of Edward, a veteran Crimson-rank powerhouse. No matter what state he was in now, surviving such an ordeal was an accomplishment he could be proud of as a Beyonder.

“Huff... why? Why did that mad old Edward suddenly come after me? Saying I stole something from him? What a joke… If he truly wanted the Black Moon Talisman, he wouldn’t have put it up for auction…”

As he panted, Withered Wing thought angrily to himself. Alongside his lingering relief, his heart was filled with confusion. He couldn’t understand why Edward had come after him so aggressively. Wasn’t Moncarlo supposed to be an open city? He hadn’t done anything to touch that old pirate’s reverse scale.

𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

“No… something’s wrong about all this… That old lunatic really looked furious—even irrational. He must’ve lost something important. And during the search, he found me and decided I was the thief…”

“Which means—there’s definitely a third party involved. Someone used some method to provoke conflict between me and Edward to serve their own purpose. We were both manipulated…”

Having finally escaped the fight, Withered Wing had the time to analyze the strange events of the night. And the more he thought, the more suspicious the final series of explosions seemed—the ones that had saved him.

“Those final blasts that destroyed the water serpents—they weren’t mine, and they couldn’t have come from Edward, who was trying everything to stop me. They must’ve been orchestrated by that third party. First they pit me and Edward against each other, then they helped me escape… which means their real target is—”

His pupils widened suddenly. As realization dawned, fear bloomed in his chest. Now understanding the true objective of the mysterious manipulator, he immediately decided to leave this place and return to somewhere truly safe.

With no time to waste, he focused all his energy on commanding the pseudo-moth to absorb the living dream cocoons stored in its abdomen, intending to squeeze out every last bit of nutrition to rapidly regenerate its body before fleeing further. The pseudo-moth had been stockpiling these cocoons precisely for emergencies like this.

But just moments into the absorption process—something went wrong.

The pseudo-moth’s bloated abdomen began to squirm irregularly. After some strange convulsions, it suddenly swelled drastically on one side. Withered Wing felt a violent disruption in his spiritual flow.

“What!? This is—”

Before he could make sense of it, the bloated lump on the moth’s side exploded. A torrent of illusory blood and dream cocoons burst out—and from within emerged a gigantic dragon head, plated in armored scales, crowned with fierce horns, lined with razor-sharp teeth and jagged ridges.

“ROAR!!”

The dragon’s bellow shook the entire woodland. The towering trees trembled, suspended dream cocoons swayed, and floating memory bubbles shattered en masse. Bathed in shimmering spectral blood, the dragon erupted from the pseudo-moth’s abdomen. Behind its head unfurled vast wings. Its winged claws and bladed fangs tore savagely into the moth’s already fragile body—far more efficient than Edward’s water serpents.

In the blink of an eye, over half the pseudo-moth’s abdomen was shredded. The dragon’s massive form emerged completely, and the pseudo-moth let out a silent scream of agony. The unbearable pain coursed back into Withered Wing’s dreamform, causing him to howl uncontrollably.

“AAAAHHH!! A DRAGON!? WHY!?”

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With eyes and mouth wide open in anguish and disbelief, Withered Wing screamed. But he didn’t give up. Clinging to hope, he forced the pseudo-moth—missing half its belly—to beat its wings and attempt escape.

But the dragon, far more terrifying than Edward’s constructs, would not allow its prey to flee. The moment the pseudo-moth took flight, its wing was seized by the dragon’s claw. Withered Wing directed its tendrils to lash downward in retaliation, but they struck the dragon’s stony scales to no effect.

The dragon acted again. With a single motion, it wrenched the moth back to the ground—then ripped off its wings. The pseudo-moth writhed in mute agony, its tendrils trying to fight back, but the dragon bit and tore them away without mercy.

It showed no sympathy. Using claws and teeth, the dragon dismembered the pseudo-moth with brutal efficiency. In that unbearable agony—physical and mental—Withered Wing’s spirit began to collapse. His soul and consciousness, bound to the moth, were shredded alongside it.

Once the gruesome slaughter ended, the fragmented remains of the pseudo-moth’s body began to fade from the forest floor—along with the dreamform body of Withered Wing. As both dissolved into nothingness, only the standing dragon remained.

The clearing was now littered with motes of violet and silver light, and scattered among them—several blue memory bubbles shimmered faintly.

Aside from the glowing motes and memory bubbles, there were also two illusory objects floating in midair—one was an intricately carved, hollow sphere; the other, a fragment of black jade. Apart from those, a scattered pile of dream cocoons was slowly fading away. Seeing the scene before her, the will residing within the dragon’s form—Dorothy—let out a slight sigh of relief.

“Phew... It’s finally over. As expected, once I use this dragon mimicry form, everything becomes so much simpler. Blackdream really is the easiest cult faction for me to deal with.”

“As long as I can reach the pseudo-moth’s Dreamscape coordinates, even a Crimson-rank member of Blackdream can be taken down head-on. Beating the enemy in their own field—this must be what that means.”

Dorothy thought to herself as she looked over the scene. Back when she learned from the little fox that their opponent this time would be a Crimson-rank from Blackdream, she had already drafted a strategy: locate him, force his pseudo-moth symbiote out, let the moth capture her dream cocoon, follow it into the Dreamscape coordinates, and then use the dragon mimicry to destroy it—just like she had done back in Navaha.

The hard part of this plan was finding and forcing out Withered Wing’s pseudo-moth in Moncarlo. Thankfully, thanks to both Edward and the Abyssal Church, that difficulty was taken care of. Edward had gone all-out to track him down and force him into action. All Dorothy had to do next was make sure she got herself captured.

To that end, Dorothy used the Marionette Marks that Vania Chafferon had left on the Moncarlo city guards. At the harbor, they attacked the escaping pseudo-moth with spiritual bullets Dorothy had acquired from the Moncarlo black market. This gave Withered Wings the false impression that Edward’s men hadn’t all succumbed to hypnosis and were still attacking him—prompting him to retaliate by harvesting dream cocoons from the guards.

Then, Dorothy disguised herself as a city guard and rushed in, allowing Withered Wing to seize her cocoon as well—thus bringing her dream cocoon into the Dreamscape alongside the pseudo-moth.

For added safety, she had left her unconscious body in the care of Nephthys, who could now perform body possession, so nothing would go wrong on the physical side.

Now, Withered Wing and the pseudo-moth were gone. Dorothy had achieved her goal. It was time to clean up the battlefield.

Her attention first went to the two floating dream-state items. With focused intent, she drew them toward herself. They floated into her dragon-form’s clawed hands, where she examined them closely.

“So this... is the main objective: the Dreamscale Censer… And this thing… if I remember correctly, it’s the Black Moon Talisman from the second half of the auction. Looks like this was Withered Wing’s real objective in coming to Moncarlo. Since it ended up on him, he must’ve snatched it with his tendrils while fleeing.”

“Besides these two, he didn’t have anything else on him—no storage items, no sigils, and certainly no other mystical items. Not quite the stash you’d expect from a Crimson-rank. Probably due to the dreamform state. The little fox did mention that while the Dreamscale Censer can dreamify physical objects, for anything not of the Shadow path, it drains extra spirituality, makes them extremely fragile, unusable, and easily destroyed even by incidental shock. Since the dream realm isn’t their native inner world, transmitting people or objects through it always has these problems.”

“So after dreamifying himself and being entangled with Edward and his water serpents for so long, and then getting beat up by me… all his lower-rank dreamified Shadow and spiritual items must’ve been destroyed. Only these two survived. A bit of a shame, but at least I got what I came for—plus a bonus.”

Thinking this, Dorothy turned her gaze to the Black Moon Talisman. Withered Wing had come all the way to Moncarlo for this and lost his life over it. She wondered what he had planned for it. What significance did this item hold for Blackdream?

“Either way, it’s worth a fortune—went for ten thousand pounds at auction. No loss taking it for myself.”

With that thought, she willed the Dreamscale Censer and Black Moon Talisman into her mimicry form. Since they were still in dreamform, they were of no use to her in their current state. She’d have to hand them over to the little fox later, who could have the Butterfly Faction restore them to physical form. Then they’d be usable.

After storing the two mystical items, Dorothy turned her attention to the field of glowing violet and silver motes. Her eyes lit up, and a wave of joy overtook her.

“Ah… Dream-realm spirituality. This time, I won’t be missing out…”

She grinned, recalling how she had seen these motes before but hadn’t known what they were. Back then, she’d ignored them entirely. It wasn’t until the Navaha incident, when she accessed memories through a Blackdream member’s memory bubble, that she realized these were actually spirituality points. Missing a pseudo-moth’s drop? She had felt like she’d lost a fortune.

Thankfully, thanks to Navaha, she’d since mastered the Dreamhunter Method, which allowed her to absorb dream-realm spirituality. This time, she wasn’t going to miss a thing.

Focusing her mind, she began casting the Dreamhunter spell through her dragon mimicry. As her will expanded, the scattered silver light motes lifted into the air and swirled toward her—merging into her body. The violet motes, however, gradually dimmed and vanished.

The silver drops from the pseudo-moth were plentiful—so much that they blanketed the forest floor. Dorothy had to move around to collect them all, floating from place to place like a vacuum cleaner. After a while, she finally absorbed every last mote, then gave her solid dragon belly a pat and let out a symbolic burp.

“

Burp~

Thanks for the meal...”

All the Shadow spirituality released from the Crimson-rank pseudo-moth had now been consumed by Dorothy. Her internal reserve of Shadow had surged to an all-time high. Her capacity, capped at 50, had been completely filled—now matching her reserve of 50 Revelation. Were it not for that hard cap, she could have absorbed even more.

Getting so much spirituality in one go—this was a first for Dorothy since becoming a Beyonder. She was thrilled.

“Damn… That’s a full tank of Shadow. Now that’s what you call the real value of a Crimson-rank mystical creature! With this much Shadow, I don’t have to worry about anyone trying divination on me—not even a high-ranking Lantern bishop could spot me for a while…”

Energized by the massive infusion, she then turned her eyes to the vanishing violet motes.

“Those violet motes… must be Revelation spirituality. The Dreamscape is inherently composed of Shadow and Revelation. But why can’t the Dreamhunter Method absorb Revelation? Has the method for that been lost? Or is it something else...?”

Dorothy pondered for a moment but didn’t dwell on it. After all, Revelation had never been something she lacked.

She then recovered two blue memory bubbles, and glanced around at the scattered dream cocoons freed from the pseudo-moth. These cocoons, released from imprisonment, were slowly fading—returning to their rightful places in the Dreamscape. Some would heal and awaken, others—drained dry—would never recover, just like those Dorothy had seen at the psychiatric ward in Navaha.

Among the dream cocoons, she spotted her own. It had nearly vanished—already almost invisible. Because it had only recently been captured and hadn’t been drained, it remained healthy and returned quickly. Those that had been extracted dry returned slowly, if at all.

“They’re returning… I should go too.”

With that, Dorothy waited for her own dream cocoon to fully disappear—then began the ritual to return her mimicry form to the cocoon.