The Decaying Dream of America: I Assemble Corpses and Confront Madness

A modified all-terrain vehicle sped along an abandoned highway. Its tires crushed the dry, cracked gravel, producing a low, rumbling sound.

This road, once a vital artery to a bustling industrial area, is now buried deep in dust and oblivion, its surface cracked like a withered old skin. Only a few fallen utility poles sway precariously towards the leaden sky, like amputated arms, futilely trying to capture the past. On the distant horizon, a low-hanging leaden sky paints the vast wasteland a sickly ochre hue, a deep and sordid color, as if formed from countless ancient sins, inspiring awe and fear.

Lin Zheng gripped the communicator tightly, his fingertips feeling the coldness of the metal casing. The chill seemed to seep from his fingertips into his heart, eroding his remaining hope. He tried again and again to catch Ava's signal, every faint buzzing of electricity making his nerves tense, yearning for a familiar electronic echo.

However, only a static crackling came from the communicator; there was no response. The static sound was like countless tiny insects crawling around their ears, carrying a mechanical mockery, repeatedly proclaiming their complete disconnection from the outside world. Lin Zheng's pale face was etched with extreme exhaustion, but his eyes were unusually sharp, like a wild beast in the darkness, vigilantly scrutinizing everything around him even in dire straits.

His sanity was teetering on the brink of collapse under the constant flight and external pressure. He could feel his mind stretched taut by a thin thread, ready to snap at any moment. Every breath, every heartbeat, seemed to remind him that he was teetering on the edge of madness. His brain felt as if it were covered by a thin layer of ice, each thought accompanied by the stinging pain of cracking ice, threatening to shatter at any moment and unleash the deep-seated fear and despair.

Inside the carriage, the atmosphere was equally heavy and suffocating. Evelyn sat in the back seat, carefully wrapping the severely wounded and unconscious Arthur in a blood-stained white coat. Her movements were meticulous and focused, fine beads of sweat beading on her forehead, a stark contrast to the blood on the white coat. The blood had begun to congeal, dark stains clinging to the fibers like a malevolent curse, emitting a faint rusty smell.

Her expression was anxious, her fingers trembling slightly from tension, yet her movements remained steady, attempting to maintain the last vestiges of dignity in this extremely harsh environment. She carefully cleaned the wounds, skillfully stopping the bleeding and bandaging them; every gentle touch was imbued with her professionalism and emotion. However, Arthur's breathing was shallow, each rise and fall like a dying gasp. His life force was weak, yet he stubbornly fought on; this feeble pulse was the only signal of hope in the carriage, yet it was so fragile that it could be extinguished at any moment.

Lena and Jeremy took turns driving, their eyes intently scanning the road ahead and sides. Lena's hands gripped the steering wheel firmly, her gaze scanning the undulating hills in the distance through the bulletproof glass; every shadow, every protruding rock, could conceal an unknown threat. Jeremy, meanwhile, frequently turned his head to observe the rear through the rearview mirror and side window. They both knew that the unknown depths of the wilderness were more unsettling than the company's meticulous tracking—it was an elusive, ancient chaos.

The air became thick and heavy, like some kind of invisible glue, seeping into the car through the gaps in the tightly closed windows and doors. This stickiness was not just a physical dampness, but more like a mental pressure, making it difficult to breathe and causing thoughts to stagnate. It carried an indescribable fishy and earthy smell, like damp soil mixed with some kind of rotting meat, instinctively inducing disgust and unease.

Lin Zheng felt a faint whisper echoing in his ears. It wasn't human language, nor was it engine noise; it was the murmur of an unconscious dream, the slow breathing of an ancient being. This whisper resonated on his spiritual level, each syllable like a tiny hammer gently tapping the inside of his skull, bringing waves of indescribable dizziness. It seemed to be recounting secrets from billions of years ago, laws beyond human comprehension, suggesting that they had crossed the boundaries of "civilization" and entered a realm governed by another set of laws, a place filled with primal chaos and distortion.

Outside the window, the desolate landscape began to distort. Sparse, withered grass grew upwards, its branches intertwined, like countless skeletons protruding from the parched earth. Their shadows, elongated against the leaden sky, resembled writhing ghosts. When the wind blew, the withered grass rustled, not like the whispers of nature, but more like the low, grating whispers of countless dead. The occasional glimmers of light in the distance were no longer ordinary reflected light, but a dark, unnatural glow, like the faint blue light emitted by some deep-sea creature. They appeared and disappeared among the undulating hills, reminiscent of the eyes of a deep-sea monster, carrying the coldness and foreboding of a predator.

The pungent, sweet smell of decaying plants and the bitter stench of burnt metal wafted through the air from the vehicle, and even the airtight design of the modified all-terrain vehicle couldn't completely block out this strange odor. The smell was different from the bloody, stench of flesh common in urban slums; it was more primal, carrying a heavy, ancient death from the depths of the earth, even mixed with a hint of sulfur, as if seeping from the cracks of hell. This odor eroded their senses, slowly wearing down their nerves, making them realize they were venturing into a forbidden land forgotten by time and abandoned by modern society.

The communicator in Lin Zheng's hands finally fell into utter silence. The cursor on the screen froze, blinked a few times, and then went completely out. The connection with Ava was severed as the signal weakened. The extinguished screen was like a dark abyss, swallowing all glimmers of hope. Lin Zheng could feel an unprecedented despair engulfing him like a tidal wave. All the connections he had established with "American Dream" Company had vanished in this moment, leaving them alone and helpless, struggling to survive on this insane land.

The only sounds audible inside the car were Lin Zheng's increasingly heavy breathing and the clear, silent "murmur" of that ancient being echoing in his mind. That murmur wasn't a hallucination, but a real perception, a direct spiritual intrusion. It carried an incomprehensible grandeur and antiquity, like a boundless ocean, engulfing Lin Zheng's consciousness. He could even feel the boundaries of his thinking being slowly eroded, as if he would be completely assimilated by that whisper in the next second.

In the country where Lin Zheng lives, the central rust zone, due to industrial abandonment and population loss, has become a forgotten corner of mainstream society. This land was once the heart of industry, but now only dilapidated factories, steel and concrete eroded by wind and rain, and neglected machine wreckage remain. The air is not only filled with the physical smell of rust, but also with years of accumulated despair and the remnants of squeezed rationality, like an invisible fog shrouding every corner.

Compared to the financial districts of the East Coast and the tech parks of the West Coast, the spiritual energy here is more primitive and raw, like unrefined ore, yet containing a more unstable and wild power. In those highly "civilized" areas, corporate "narrative construction departments" meticulously weave various lies and illusions, systematically harvesting the hopes and despairs of the people, like shearing wool from tamed lambs. But in the Rust Zone, this sophisticated system collapses, replaced by an uncontrolled, primal spiritual torrent, which dissipates and collides uncontrollably, giving birth to even more chaotic forces.

The "American Dream" corporation has relatively weak control over these areas, preferring to use them as natural breeding grounds for "flesh and blood" and outlets for dangerous emotions. They use television propaganda and cheap drugs to numb and consume the residents, immersing them in a false sense of happiness, rather than subjecting them to the systematic "hope-despair" cycle of exploitation by the "Narrative Construction Department" like city dwellers. The corporation's top management tacitly approves of the chaos and decay here, treating this land as a vast outlet for spiritual venting to stabilize the "order" of other core areas.

This land, therefore, has nurtured supernatural phenomena utterly different from those in the city—wildering, uncontrollable. Follow the pen of the old alleyway postman on an adventure in "The Decaying Dream of America: I Assemble Corpses and Confront Madness." Even the most advanced "mental imprinting" technology struggles to effectively cover them. The "paranormal events" here are not corporate-embellished or exploited performances, but genuine, bone-deep terrors. They originate from deeper, more ancient dimensions, their forms varied and grotesque—sometimes invisible voices, sometimes distorted illusions, sometimes even partial manifestations of some primordial existence.

Lin Zheng knew they were heading towards a "blind spot" beyond the company's precise calculations, a frontier where laws became blurred and reality could be easily reshaped by primal forces. The madness there wasn't a sophisticated lie packaged by capital and politics, nor was it media-incited hysteria; it was a raw and naked primal terror, like the gaping maw of a wild beast, waiting to devour every intruder, chewing their soul and body together. It was a pure, indescribable fear, devoid of logic.

He could feel each bump in the car pulling him away from everything familiar, into a more incomprehensible world. Fear seeped into his body like ice water, yet it also made his mind unusually clear—a paradoxical clarity that allowed him to more deeply understand the desperate situation he faced. He forced himself to transform fear into vigilance, and despair into the will to survive, because he knew that in this wasteland, any weakness could lead to a fatal end.

Fragments of the law of "sacrifice and constancy" surfaced in his mind: the stability of the world requires continuous spiritual energy. The city's sophisticated harvesting might just be an "upgrade" of primitive sacrifice, extracting nourishment from the soul in a more civilized and covert way. And here, they might face this primitive price directly, becoming living sacrifices forced upon them in some ancient ritual. This thought sent a chill down his spine, yet it also gave him an almost fatalistic premonition of what might happen next.

Just before the modified all-terrain vehicle approached the abandoned border of the Ochre Maze State, the vehicle suddenly shuddered violently, as if it had crushed some unseen yet incredibly hard obstacle. In that brief, violent jolt, Lin Zheng's "Dream Anatomy" cheat ability suddenly became unusually active. This power was no longer the precise instrument he was familiar with, capable of deconstructing the remnants of corpses and dreams. It was more like a powerful, primal torrent of energy, violently impacting his mental sea, instantly tearing apart all his previous understanding, and completely overturning his comprehension of the world and even his own abilities.

Lin Zheng felt a sharp pain in his head, not a dull thud, but as if a thousand rusty steel needles were simultaneously piercing his cerebral cortex, each strike accompanied by the cracking sound of his mental structure, like fragile glass being mercilessly struck from within. This pain far surpassed anything he had ever suffered before; it acted directly on the depths of his consciousness, attempting to utterly shatter his thoughts. He felt his nervous system being forcibly torn from his body by a brute force, his soul emitting a silent wail in the violent tearing, the world before him like a shattered kaleidoscope, completely devoid of its original order.

His eyes, writhing in agony, uncontrollably scanned his surroundings. The landscape of the wasteland, his companions in the vehicle, even the horrifying wounds on Arthur's body—all appeared as vibrant yet chaotic structural lines. These lines intertwined and tangled in his vision, connecting with each other in a seemingly haphazard yet remarkably precise manner, forming ever-changing abstract paintings. Unlike the cold, systematic data streams of the city, which he could precisely cut and analyze—those data streams as orderly and predictable as program code—they were unlike the cold, systematic data streams of the city.

The structural lines before him, however, were filled with an ancient and restless will. Each line pulsated with a wild vitality unique to life, like a bizarre combination of blood vessels and tentacles, twisted and aggressive. They were not static, but rather slowly and continuously writhing, expanding, even merging and separating before his eyes, releasing an indescribable sense of oppression. This visual impact, mixed with a spiritual heaviness, made him feel as if he were in a living universe made of lines, and he himself had become an insignificant prisoner trapped within it.

This was a perception that surpassed all his previous experiences, far more direct, wilder, and more primal than the systematized corrupting forces of the "American Dream" corporation. The corruption manipulated by the corporation was ultimately based on human desires and weaknesses, possessing its own inherent logic and purpose. Yet everything before him resembled the chaotic and disordered energy of the beginning of the universe, pure and aimless, existing instinctively, revealing its profound and vast "dream" through these structural lines.

It was a dream deposited on the earth for billions of years, carrying the weight of geology, the antiquity of bloodlines, and the coldness of stars. It belonged to no civilization, no era; it simply existed, more ancient and profound than any concept known to humankind. He felt this "dream" like invisible mercury, trying to seep into every cell of his body, melting his consciousness, making him a complete part of this wasteland, a walking corpse assimilated by the ancient dream.

His body trembled instinctively, trying to resist this brutal intrusion. His brain was on the verge of shutting down in excruciating pain. Every thought of resistance felt like waving fragile paper in a raging fire. He could feel that if he relaxed even the slightest resistance, these ancient dream lines would completely invade his mind, assimilating him into this wasteland. He might even have his memories and self-awareness as "Lin Zheng" ruthlessly erased.

But he knew this was his only way to understand this new world, a special "perspective" granted to him by the energy surging into the depths of his spirit. He had to endure this pain, to decipher these mad structural lines, to peer into the truth hidden beneath the surface, even if that truth might be more terrifying than he imagined. He gritted his teeth, even tasting blood on his tongue, forcing himself to search for order, for meaning, for some kind of direction in that colorful chaos.

Amidst excruciating pain, Lin Zheng forced himself to focus. His gaze pierced through layers of illusions, fixed on the wildly pulsating structural lines. These lines seemed to pause briefly under his willpower, before reassembling in a more grand and terrifying way.

He saw those ancient structural lines sketching out a blurry yet enormous outline deep within the distant wasteland. The outline undulated and merged perfectly with the horizon, as if it were an extension of the earth itself. It slept, so vast that it defied human measurement, like a breathing mountain range or a resting sea monster. It was an indescribable existence, devoid of any concrete features, yet its very existence was enough to awe and overwhelm, making all intruders feel their own insignificance and helplessness. Lin Zheng's reason was once again stretched to its limit; he couldn't even distinguish whether it was a sleeping mountain, a lurking beast, or a forgotten statue, more ancient than any god.

The outline seemed to be asleep, its edges merging with the horizon, as if the land itself were a living, dreaming behemoth. Its "dream" seeped into the air, the earth, and the consciousness of every living being invisibly, distorting reality and fueling madness. Lin Zheng felt a chill run down his spine. He realized that the enormous outline appearing before his eyes might be the "master" of this wasteland—an entity slumbering on a timescale far exceeding human history, its unconscious ramblings having transformed this land into an extension of its own spirit, a veritable living hell.

What on earth is this? What kind of desperate situation have they stumbled into? Lin Zheng's heart pounded. He had thought that "American Dream" Corporation was the ultimate darkness he could face, but the scene before him told him that the company's corruption and exploitation were nothing more than child's play in the face of this ancient being. This escape was far more desperate than he had imagined; it seemed to have led them into an unprecedented predicament, confronting an existence older and more threatening than "American Dream," a terror that might be impossible to understand or defeat. His questions had no answers, only a deeper, more twisted darkness ahead, and the ancient murmurs that echoed in his mind, foreshadowing an unknown fate.