The dark aura was getting closer.
I could feel it pressing against my spiritual senses making my body want to flee on instinct alone.
"How fast can you run?" I asked Lu Chenyang.
It turned out that I didn't even need to ask.
The old man was already moving since his three hundred years of dream walking experience apparently included plenty of practice at running away from dangerous situations.
I followed him while channeling Du Yanze's World-Writ Sovereign cultivation, so I could enhance my speed. The golden light of Xuan Yi energy wrapped around my legs while I wrote a simple declaration: "My steps cover great distance."
The technique kicked in imdiately.
Every stride carried dozens of feet forward while the realm's natural laws bent themselves to accommodate my conviction.
Lu Chenyang managed to keep up beside using dream qi to do sothing similar through different thods. Where I imposed my will on reality through belief, he negotiated with the realm's structure to achieve the sa result.
"Tell more about these Nightmare Enforcers," I asked him while we were running. The twisted forest all around us blurred past with the shadows lengthening in unnatural directions. "What are they supposed to be?"
"Like I told you before, they are the defense chanism of the realm," Lu Chenyang answered with a strained voice. "The dream realm makes them when it spots threats to its fundantal structure, they are pure rejection given physical form ant to expel foreign consciousness."
That made a lot of sense. Dream cultivators ca into these realms as spiritual projections which made them vulnerable and exposed. A defense system targeting that specific weakness would be devastating.
"Have you ever fought one of them?"
"Fought one?" Lu Chenyang laughed and the sound was bitter. "No one fights Nightmare Enforcers. You run from them, or you wake up back in your physical body with your cultivation base shattered, sotis permanently."
The pressure intensified.
I risked taking a glance backward and imdiately wished I hadn't done that.
The thing pursuing us wasn't physical in any conventional sense since it looked like a hole in reality. It was a patch of absolute darkness consuming everything it touched, the trees it passed through ceased to exist.
"It's gaining on us," I warned him.
"Of course it's gaining," Lu Chenyang replied bitterly. "They are built to catch dream walkers. Our cultivation is suppressed when we are in foreign realms, but these monsters operate at full power."
I pumped more Xuan Yi into my running technique, but it barely did anything to help.
The entity was simply faster than us, it would catch up in seconds.
I needed to try another approach.
"Tell how they fight," I told him. "What kind of techniques do they use?"
"Spiritual disruption attacks," Lu Chenyang yelled back. "They tear apart dream constructs with a single touch and their presence makes any dream qi in the area destabilize. Most dream walkers can't maintain their manifestation forms near an Enforcer for more than a few minutes."
That was useful information.
If the monster specialized in countering dream qi, then maybe using other energy types would work better against it, and since I was possessing Du Yanze, I had full access to his Xuan Yi cultivation and those calligraphy techniques that were inspired by blue sun cultivation.
The only question was if they would work better against this monster.
The Enforcer was getting close now, it was maybe hundred ters behind us and closing the gap fast. It made zero sound while it flew toward us except for that oppressive spiritual pressure making the air feel thick and wrong.
"Keep running," I told Lu Chenyang. "I'm going to try sothing."
"What? No don't be foolish! If you stop moving, it will catch you!"
I ignored his yelling and slowed down my pace, letting the gap between us grow wider.
The Nightmare Enforcer locked its attention onto imdiately and the heavy pressure of its gaze felt like freezing water pouring down my spine. Seeing it up close, I realized it possessed more than simple darkness, there were shapes moving around inside it, showing twisted forms that might have been old dream cultivators who failed to escape in the past.
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I gathered up my Xuan Yi energy and wrote out a phrase in the open air.
"I belong to this realm."
The golden letters floated in space for a second before they shattered.
What was worse was that the Nightmare Enforcer didn't even slow down.
Right. The realm could tell I was lying. The conviction-based thod wouldn't work if I didn't actually believe the words I was writing down.
The monster was less than fifty feet away from now. It was close enough that I felt its effects hitting directly. My spiritual form started destabilizing and the edges of my body grew fuzzy and blurry. Du Yanze's consciousness woke up in the back of my mind, his instincts screaming about the danger.
I fired up the Xuan Yi calligraphy and tried again.
"Absolute conviction creates absolute reality."
This ti I backed the sentence up with genuine belief pulling from Du Yanze's cultivation. The phrase lit up with blazing golden light shining much brighter than my previous attempts. The Nightmare Enforcer slowed down slightly, its darkness rippled like it hit a wall of resistance.
There it was. That reaction told everything I needed to figure this out. The Enforcer handled dream qi easily because it was designed for that specific purpose. Xuan Yi operated on different principles that the defense chanism wasn't optimized to deal with.
I wrote out another phrase being more aggressive this ti.
"My presence here is undeniable truth."
The golden letters slamd directly into the darkness. Nothing happened for a split second, then the Nightmare Enforcer recoiled and its void-like body contracted away from the Xuan Yi energy. It wasn't taking any real damage, but it felt uncomfortable. That was better than nothing.
"Lu Chenyang!" I yelled. "It's vulnerable to other energy types! Use your strongest Xuan Yi skills!"
"I don't have Xuan Yi skills!" the old man scread back at . "I'm a dream cultivator. Why would I practice this realm's thods?!"
Right. Of course he didn't know them. He ntioned he could replicate basic principles but integrating a completely foreign cultivation system took ti and resources he never invested.
The Nightmare Enforcer shook off its montary confusion and charged forward again. I wrote frantically, throwing up phrase after phrase using golden calligraphy. Every single one slowed the creature down a little bit, forcing it to process the conviction-based attacks before it could keep chasing .
"The space between realities is infinite."
The words hovered in the air forming a solid wall of light.
The Nightmare Enforcer crashed into the barrier. The two forces contested against each other for several seconds. My absolute conviction that dinsional space was vast and impassable fighting against the creature's nature as a manifestation of the realm's rejection. The golden light flickered and grew dim while the darkness pushed hard against it.
Then I felt a shift happen. There was a weakness in the surrounding space acting like a thin point where the fabric of this realm had worn out. It lacked any natural origins. Constant friction and repeated stress created it similar to a piece of cloth getting holes.
"There is a spatial rift nearby," I told him. "If we can reach it…"
"Rifts are less predictable than Enforcers!" Lu Chenyang cut in. "If we're unlucky, it could tear apart our spiritual projection and scatter our consciousness across multiple dinsions!"
As much as I disliked relying on luck, I didn't see any other options since this monster would catch up and destroy us in a few monts anyway.
"Do you have a better plan?"
The old man didn't give an answer, so I took that as his agreent.
I reinforced my defensive calligraphy with another thick layer and started moving toward the spatial weakness. The rift wasn't visible to normal eyes but my sensitivity to dinsional boundaries let feel its location. It was like sensing a cold spot inside a warm room.
The Nightmare Enforcer kept pursuing us relentlessly. My Xuan Yi barriers slowed it down, but they couldn't stop it completely. The creature was learning and adapting its approach to handle the conviction-based attacks. Every new phrase I wrote down had slightly less effect than the last one.
We reached the rift a few seconds later. Looking at it up close made it obvious even without special perception skills. Reality looked wrong in that spot with colors bleeding into each other incorrectly and space folding in on itself using geotrically impossible shapes.
Anything entering it would be subjected to extre dinsional stress.
"This is insane," Lu Chenyang muttered while staring at the spatial distortion. "We will be ripped apart."
"Maybe," I murmured. The Nightmare Enforcer was fifteen feet away from us now. My spiritual form wouldn't last much longer in its presence. "But it's designed to hunt dream cultivators inside stable dreamspace. It won't expect us to jump into an unstable region."
Before Lu Chenyang could argue, I grabbed his arm and dragged the screaming elder into the rift with .
The feeling was indescribable.
My spiritual body stretched out in multiple directions as every part of my consciousness experienced different realities at once. I could see the Realm of the Chosen from a hundred different angles overlapping and contradicting each other. The Nightmare Enforcer's darkness filled up half my vision, reaching out toward us with hungry intent.
Then the rift rejected the monster.
The spatial instability that was threatening to tear us apart acted like a solid shield against the Enforcer's ordered darkness. The creature couldn't follow us into true chaos because its nature as a manifestation of the realm's structure prevented it from entering genuinely unstable space.
We tumbled through distorted reality for what felt like hours but was probably only a few seconds. Then the rift spat us out into a different section of the realm. I landed hard on golden cobblestones and Du Yanze's body took damage that I felt radiating as sharp pain throughout my entire spiritual projection.
Lu Chenyang popped up beside a mont later with his form flickering erratically while he struggled to maintain cohesion after surviving the dinsional trauma. "That was... that was..."
"Effective," I finished the sentence for him. "The Enforcer can't follow us through spatial rifts. We bought ourselves so ti."
The old man slowly pulled himself upright and checked his spiritual form for damage. His normally controlled deanor was shattered and his hands trembled while he examined the tears in his projection's integrity. "Ti for what? That thing will hunt us throughout this entire realm. We can't hide from it forever."
"We're not going to hide," I said, standing up and writing a simple healing script in the air to repair the worst of the damage from our dinsional transit. "We're going to find the source of this realm's corruption and fix it."
Lu Chenyang stared at with his mouth hanging wide open.
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