All right. Time to enter this Sen Yu's dreamscape and see what was really going on here.

It seemed pretty plausible that there was an evil spirit causing these nightmares—the repetitiveness and the threatening voice were pretty typical of evil spirits.

The question was...what kind of spirit was it? And why was it tormenting Sen Yu?

There was only one way to find out.

As the poor old servant stood in shock behind me, I activated the Dreamwalking Technique and left my body, very gracefully and immortally falling to the ground and probably freaking out the old servant again.

Then I entered Sen Yu's nightmare...

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Huh. What a nasty dreamscape.

Most people's dreamscapes included luscious natural forests, palaces, and other places of beauty. This...was just freaking crusty.

It was like a desert gone wrong. There were sand dunes and the ruins of a city everywhere around me, stretching out for miles.

Splash.

Shit, I'd stepped in a puddle. Thankfully, it was only a dream-puddle.

Wait — WTF???

Was that a puddle of blood?

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Dayum, this was a messed-up dreamscape for real.

Suddenly, the ground shook. I called Destiny Blade out of the air and hopped onto it to avoid falling over.

Then, BAM!

Right out of the ground beneath me, there burst an enormous, hairy creature that was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen in my entire freaking life (cough two lives).

It was...a GIANT! UGLY! BLOODY! NASTY! RAT!!!

I flew higher on Destiny Blade, just out of the rat's reach—or, I guess, dreamscape Sen Yu's reach, since he was a rat in all his nightmares.

"Sorry, buddy," I called down. "Just pretend I'm not here, okay?"

I performed the Quilted Invisibility Technique and disappeared from view. Rat Sen Yu sniffed around and grumbled confusedly for a while, then wandered off to go and destroy another house and probably munch on some easier prey.

"All right. Now all that's left to do is follow him around until the end of the nightmare."

So that's what I did.

For what felt like hours, I sat on Destiny Blade, trying not to fall asleep as Rat Sen Yu pillaged and crushed villages, munched on poor dream people, bathed in their blood, and then went into dream village storages and ate all their food.

His stomach grew and grew. Dang. That rat sure had a flexible stomach. How could he even fit all that stuff in there?

At last, Rat Sen Yu had eaten too much. With a cry of pain, it fell over onto its side, and its stomach burst. It was really nasty, so I won't describe it. Just know the stench was enough to make any mortal faint! Like the stench of a bunch of rotting bodies, rotting food, and rat stomach fluid. Blech. All right, I basically described it for you.

Then came the voice:

"This will be your fate, Sen Yu, you rat of society."

Gotcha.

Invisible, I sped on Destiny Blade towards the source of that creepy, cheesily demonic voice until I found a little broken-down house that was the only building that hadn't been crushed by Rat Sen Yu in his hungry rampage.

I burst inside, undoing the Quilted Invisibility technique and whipping Destiny Blade through the air badassly.

"I've got you! Don't move a muscle, or your head—your spiritual dream head, whatever — ends up in the dirt!"

Standing in front of me, totally frozen, was a middle-aged male evil spirit with red eyes and bite marks all over his face.

He stared at me.

I stared at him.

He stared at me.

I stared at him some more.

Then he roared and lunged like a classic vengeful spirit, going for my beautiful immortal throat.