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

The bloodshot in Lin Zheng's eyes hadn't yet subsided when his consciousness was once again completely enveloped by a damp, sticky sensation. This feeling wasn't merely tactile; it was a pervasive immersion on a spiritual level. It was the distinctive odor of the Ochre Maze State's wasteland, a nauseating mixture: opioid-containing fumes, the earthy stench of excessive drought, and the remnants of aromatic hydrocarbons illegally emitted by some multinational chemical giant. On this brown land forgotten by the federal government, every breath of air felt heavy, as if it contained tiny lead particles.

The raindrops pounded on the bluestone slabs, producing not a crisp crackling sound, but a dull, heavy thud. This rainwater was extremely acidic, a product of chemical waste from the West Coast drifting eastward with the high-altitude jet stream. It absorbed enough sulfides in mid-air that it could even cause ordinary leather to emit faint white smoke upon landing. In the depths of Percy's shattered memories, this sound of rain was the background noise of all his nightmares. Lin Zheng seemed to have become a passenger in that small body, sharing every bit of cold and tremor.

As a child, Percy was pitifully thin; his ribs, like rows of dry firewood, protruded beneath his almost transparent skin, rising and falling dramatically with each violent, heart-wrenching cough. At that time, Ochre Labyrinth hadn't yet been completely abandoned by the "American Dream" Corporation, but it had already lost its dignity as an industrial powerhouse. Due to the abundance of an otherworldly high-frequency conductor known as "Dream Core" deep underground, the red soil here maintained a faint, tinnitus-inducing resonance year-round.

"Can you hear that...? They're talking down there." This voice echoed in Percy's young mind. In reality, the faint sound in Percy's throat wasn't due to a throat ailment, but rather a remnant of a slumbering being deep within the earth's crust. This low-frequency signal has a natural allure for children with low intelligence, the mentally ill, or those who are highly sensitive; it's like an invisible hook, catching the exceptionally empty boundaries of Percy's malnourished mind.

He trudged through the torrential rain, his thin, pilling shirt plastered to his back by sticky mud. Broken corn stalks and rusty scraps tumbled in the mud beneath his feet. Agriculture here had been corrupt for fifty years; the "agricultural sector," in its efforts to combat mutated pests ravaging the wasteland, had overused a potent psychoactive compound pesticide. This chemical hadn't saved the crops; instead, it had given the corn a hallucinogenic bitterness, plunging those who ate it into prolonged depression and nightmares of burning harvesters.

Those were waypoints marking the sacrificial site. Deep within the mud, an almost eerie glimmer occasionally flashed. Lin Zheng tried to zoom in and discovered they were small objects called 'road marker stones.' The molecular structure of these stones was completely different from any mineral on Earth; they were more like highly compressed, inactive organic matter, densely packed with invisible biological nerve tentacles distributed in geometric multiples. Percy, like a puppet driven by instinct, mechanically stepped over the wrecked truck blocking the road, heading towards that cursed forbidden zone.

Percy walked into the heart of the long-abandoned Indian reservation. This place once belonged to a tribe that worshipped the "God of the Great Rift," but now only massive, wind-eroded red stone pillars remained. These pillars leaned at an angle that defied engineering principles, forming a grand and grotesque natural temple. As Percy approached, the crescent-shaped runes on the pillars began to revive one by one, their light a chilling deep purple, the color of a wound before it scabbed over, stripped of all natural light.

These runes weren't naturally generated; they were byproducts of the early "Contract of Nation" during territorial surveying. To suppress the land's inherent madness, the colonists buried numerous "anchors" here, attempting to guide the unstable reality distortions in the wasteland into usable energy or defensive structures. However, due to calculation errors, this place became a logical loophole that constantly devoured reason. The child's trembling fingers slowly reached towards the center of the altar, where the largest "pebble" writhed slightly with some rhythm.

"Want...to become stronger?" In the darkness, the pebble offered a silent temptation. When Percy's fingertips touched the cold, living creation, a sharp pain instantly shot through his body. It felt like thousands of barbs, thinner than needle tips, piercing his nerve endings simultaneously. Darkness rapidly spread upwards from his fingertips; it wasn't just a shadow, but the primordial seed of the "living nightmare creation." It greedily absorbed the negative emotions within its host, nourishing him with humanity's extreme thirst for power, survival, and revenge, quickly establishing a complex parasitic network in Percy's fragile and sensitive lymphatic system.

Using his cheat-like access, Lin Zheng glimpsed the microscopic anatomy of these creations within the images of the remnant dream. They completely defied Darwin's theory of evolution, resembling a set of logically flawed and highly aggressive biological codes. They were forcibly rearranging the atomic arrangement of the body, transforming each mitochondria into a miniature frequency emitter. When the reality of the remnant dream overlapped with his own, like a red-hot branding iron burning a grotesque line onto Lin Zheng's retina, he realized that this was not merely the reading of memories, but a 'sensory synchronization' across time and space.

"Lin Zheng! Wake up!" Evelyn's scream shattered in his ears, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass in the examination room. Percy's scream in the real world instantly pulled him out of his childhood hallucination, but the scene before him was even more horrifying than the dream. The air in the examination room had distorted into some kind of semi-solid gel, and light was violently refracted in the air. On the once pristine white walls, the invisible runes that Lin Zheng could only see with a microscope before were now beating wildly like a real heart, each contraction oozing out a pale blue, conductive liquid with a strong ozone smell.

Due to the physical infiltration of dream logic, the physical constants inside the examination room are being breached. The gravity sensor emits a piercing alarm, and all the surgical instruments scattered on the floor—scalpels, bone saws, hemostats—are now eerily suspended in mid-air, slowly spinning around Percy like a silver meteor shower. Evelyn is gripping a fixed medical bed handle tightly; due to weightlessness, her body is drifting towards the ceiling at a forty-five-degree angle, her voice becoming hoarse and distorted in the thick spatial medium, like sand being ground beneath the deep sea.

"Suppress him! His narrative integrity is crumbling!" Evelyn roared. At the same time, Frederick's thick hands gripped the doorknob of the examination room, trying to stop some external force from intruding. His rusted rifle, which had been with him for years and bore numerous signs of manual modification, was now exhibiting a grotesque, barbed layer of keratinized skin proliferating from its barrel due to this high-level reality distortion, as if the weapon itself was being infected by this nightmarish aura and transforming into a semi-biological monster.

On the operating table, Percy was experiencing the most terrifying mutation of his life. The flesh of his chest cavity seemed to have been ripped open from the inside by the force of some monstrous beast. Instead of gushing blood, there were tangled, morbidly blackish-purple living roots. These roots were covered with thousands upon thousands of tiny eyeballs, frantically darting around in their sockets, finally locking onto Lin Zheng. These eyes held no human emotion, only the cold ruthlessness of a predator and a disdain for logic.

Just as the situation was about to spiral out of control, the shaman Uma, who had been monitoring the situation from dozens of miles away, seemed to sense the crisis. As one of the agents of the laws of this land, she unleashed an extremely savage intervention through the spiritual medium within Percy's body. A dark red remote rune mark appeared out of thin air, its shape resembling a gaping maw capable of devouring everything. This ancient shamanic technique was essentially a primitive crack of the "American Dream" company system, delaying the complete collapse of space by creating localized probability fluctuations.

Lin Zheng felt his sanity plummeting at a rate of several units per second, and various geometric shapes began to appear misaligned at the edge of his vision.

The dissociation was almost enough to make him give up. It was the brain's forced shutdown mechanism to avoid self-destruction when it detected unbearable horrific information—severing the connection between emotion and cognition, turning a person into a walking corpse. But he knew he couldn't disconnect here, or they would all become fertilizer for this lump of dark purple flesh.

"True Deconstruction, Activate!" he roared in his mind. The red structural lines in Lin Zheng's eyes lit up again in the chaotic space, and he saw the true core of the enormous nightmare creation. It was a constantly flickering, black crystal-like energy cluster, completely entangled with Percy's beating heart, exchanging nutrients through tens of thousands of nerve bundles. In this thing's eyes, all medical common sense—whether it was modern surgical suturing or basic biochemical inhibition—was nothing but a joke, because you were trying to trim a multidimensional error with three-dimensional scissors.

"Boss, catch this!" Frederick roared, enduring the high-frequency vibrations in the air that almost tore his skin apart, as he forcefully threw out a bag of mineral fragments he had collected during his previous exploration. These minerals came from the ancient sacrificial grounds of the Ochre Maze State. Although called minerals, they actually contained an extremely high concentration of 'stabilizing elements'. This element could produce a violent electromagnetic coupling effect with the Samantha Jones pebble in Lin Zheng's hand. As the bag exploded in mid-air, the grayish-brown dust formed a barrier in the weightless environment.

Lin Zheng grabbed Samantha Jones's pebble, which was now scalding hot from the frequent energy exchanges, so hot that the air smelled of burning flesh. But he didn't let go; it was his only anchor point in this mad dimension. The pebble sensed the arrival of the dust and began to emit a chilling low hum. Evelyn seized the opportunity, using the momentary logical delay created by the mineral dust, to plunge a dark green solvent, contained within a special shock absorber, deep into the exposed internal organs of Percy's chest.

That was a top-secret contraband product from the Narrative Construction Department of "American Dreams," originally intended as a stabilizer to deal with "background characters" who had developed self-awareness. It could forcibly interrupt the organism's reception frequency of dream logic; in a sense, it was a forced artificial stimulant. The moment the solvent was injected, the crisp sound of bones cracking filled the entire room, sounding like a construction crew frantically dismantling Percy's spine. This reconstruction was extremely violent, regardless of the cost.

Percy's body was pulled by an invisible, immense force to an angle completely defying the laws of human anatomy. His neck was stretched back a full ten centimeters, and his spine emitted a series of cracking sounds. His ribs broke one by one, then, under the forceful intervention of the black roots, reassembled into a defensive skeleton with sharp barbs, as if he were growing a natural suit of armor from within. The entire examination room was on the verge of complete collapse, and the black feathers growing on the bulletproof glass observation window began to flutter gently with the airflow.

Without further hesitation, Lin Zheng pressed Samantha Jones's pebble firmly against the pulsating, black core in Percy's chest. The contact was like two polar magnets repelling each other, unleashing a physical repulsive shockwave that instantly cleared away any floating debris in the surrounding area. A piercing scream, loud enough to make Evelyn and Frederick's eardrums bleed, emanated from the depths of the shadows. It was the final, most vicious curse of that transdimensional creation against the laws of reality. Each syllable of it attempted to drag those around into deeper madness.

Amidst the shrill screams, Lin Zheng's consciousness was ripped to the brink of despair, but he saw the thing's true form. That creation wasn't a simple parasite; it was a hub for some kind of 'spatial transformation.' It was attempting to use Percy's human body to transfer the entire clinic, even the entire underground fortress, to that muddy, desolate childhood sacrificial site. This was the most primitive and effective attack launched by the ancient natural laws of the Red Earth Throat against the order of civilization. If it succeeded in this transfer, they would become mummies sacrificed on the altar millions of years ago.

"Shrink back...!" Lin Zheng gritted his teeth, channeling all his sanity into the pebble anchor. The tiny cracks on the pebble's surface rapidly healed in the light, the burst of white light not to illuminate the darkness, but to wash away the overloaded cognitive garbage forcibly crammed into everyone's minds by nightmares. Wherever the light swept, the abnormally long keratin and disgusting compound eyes withered away. Percy's movements froze instantly as if a pause button had been pressed; the black stone ore that served as his prosthetic eye, unable to withstand the pressure, shattered into countless fine powders inside his eye socket.

The distortion of the clinic walls ceased, and the space, like a crumpled sheet of paper being straightened, gradually returned to its proper smoothness. But the nauseating, viscous stench, spanning generations, lingered. It reminded Lin Zheng that something hadn't been completely eradicated, but had simply hidden deeper. Percy slowly opened his remaining blood-red eye, and in Lin Zheng's ear, with a hoarse voice as if scalded by lava, he spoke haltingly: "It...didn't leave. It's just waiting...for someone to push open that door."

Outside the door, the crisis of the real world followed closely. The roar of dozens of warlord scout vehicles' engines lingered within a hundred meters. Thick, dark brown smoke from their special exhaust systems drifted in through the gaps in the poorly sealed ventilation ducts of the examination room. It was the stench of industrial oil mixed with human blood. The vibrations of the engines echoed against the fortress's thick concrete walls, sounding like countless sandworms lurking in the darkness simultaneously grinding their massive jaws, preparing to devour the remnants of this nightmare.

Evelyn collapsed beside the control panel at the operating table, breathing heavily, her hand still clutching the deformed syringe of special solvent. Although her rationality as a forensic pathologist was struggling to rebuild in her eyes, Lin Zheng noticed a trace of indelible grayness etched into the depths of her pupils, the emerald green that represented hope. She had seen something beyond the scope of her knowledge, and this visual pollution was usually irreversible. This was the price of encountering the truth; it would slowly creep up the very foundations of a person's reason, like moss.

Lin Zheng looked down at the Samantha Jones pebble in his hand. It had stopped glowing, and its temperature had rapidly cooled. Now, it felt cold, heavy, and rough in his hand, like a dead person's eyeball or a crystallized eye struck by lightning and instantly carbonized. The creature within Percy's body moved with an abnormally slow frequency, pulsating steadily only every few seconds, displaying an astonishing resilience. It was far from being healed, and Lin Zheng could vaguely sense that this dormancy was for a grander scheme—it was attempting to steal the supreme narrative power of *The Contract of Founding* in the northwestern wasteland.

The entire examination room had been reduced to a monstrous laboratory reshaped by logic, with traces of dried conductive liquid remaining on the ceiling. Grayish-white dust and stone chips, still clinging to the air, were held together by residual static electricity, forming tiny, counter-rotating spirals. Frederick stared at Persina's chest, which had closed again, leaving a grotesque gap. His fingers tightened slightly around his gun, his knuckles cracking. As a warrior who had witnessed too many strange phenomena in the wasteland, he knew that even if the lord survived, he would no longer be a pure human being, but a dangerous vessel.

Lin Zheng didn't speak to stop Frederick's wariness. He was waiting, waiting for the next development of this sandstorm and bloodbath. Before Percy completely lost consciousness from the excruciating pain, his intact left eye swept over the chaotic clinic one last time. He looked at the glass; the wasteland outside was in its most violent period of the year, endless sand being swept high into the air by the gale, slowly coalescing into a huge, funnel-shaped, pitch-black shadow, covering the entire sky. That shape, and its eerie rotating arc, appeared to Lin Zheng in a chilling, perfect geometric overlap with the veins on the parasitic pebble he had seen in Percy's childhood memories. The nightmare had never left this red earth; it had simply taken on the shape of this wasteland.