Chapter 241: Butterfly from the Dream

After Xu Qin left, Han Fei started to inspect the room. This room used to belong to the 8th persona, it might contain some useful clues. ‘All the rooms at this place have about the same layout, in fact, they resemble the room layout at the plant’s living compound in real life, even the location of the altar inside each room is the same.’ Stopping at the corner, Han Fei already noticed the altar when he entered the room but he was still too injured at the time to do anything about it. ‘Be it in real life or in the cryptic world, the building where the author lived is filled with a lot of altars even though he had stated explicitly that he was not a religious person in the House of the Butcher.’

Slowly removing the black cloth over the altar, Han Fei was about to open the small wooden doors when Weep suddenly stopped him. “What’s wrong? Is there a danger?” Weep bristled like a cat being threatened. Looking at the blood that leaked out from the gaps on the altar, Han Fei decided to let it be. ‘The blood on the altar is already dried, the door probably hasn’t been moved for a long time already. I better not take unknown risks. I should wait for Xu Qin to return and ask for her opinion first.’

The room was well-kept, the place was regularly cleaned and everything was placed neatly. In fact the owner perhaps suffered from OCD because even the distance between each decoration was similar. The living room, kitchen and bathroom were all incredibly tidy but it was a whole 180 when Han Fei entered the bedroom. Bloodied bandages and clothes littered the ground. The mattress was cut with knives and there was dried blood everywhere. The light on the ceiling was shattered. The cupboard toppled over, the study table was sawn apart. Basically any place that was big enough to hide a person had been destroyed. The window was sealed up with cement. The peeled walls were filled with red scratch marks made from nails and knives. The blood red character was imbued with the house owner’s pain, just a glance at them could cause great discomfort.

Standing at the door, an image appeared before Han Fei’s eyes. At midnight, a woman who was shocked out of her dream sunk into madness. She morphed into a different person and destroyed everything within reach. She destroyed indiscriminately, it was to vent the horror within her heart and to find security for herself. ‘The 8th persona, the chef’s mind is only slightly less complicated than the writer. Why would a woman who has an obsession with tidiness and cleanliness turn into an unstoppable murderer?’

To get to the bottom of this mystery, Han Fei entered the bedroom and started to inspect the bloody messages. There was this saying within the field of psychology, you can try to enter a mad person’s heart but do not ever attempt to see things from their perspective, do not try to understand them. What Han Fei did was extremely dangerous. He had not received official training before, he merely wanted to reconstruct the fear the 8th persona had been through by submerging himself into her past to ascertain the factors behind the drastic shift to her personality. Studying the words on the wall, his fingers tracing the knife and scratch marks, the chef appeared to not feel pain when she was caught in this delusion. The words had traces of blood and flesh in them. Being enveloped by the bloody words, Han Fei slowly immersed himself into the 8th persona’s experience.

“I have forgotten when was the first time that thing appeared in my dream. At first, it hid among the crowd, walking past me as if by accident but for some reason, it has decided to follow me home. The thing then kept appearing in my dreams. No matter what kind of dream it was, there it would be. Most of the time, it would assume the identity of a stranger. It would not interact with me, just observing me from afar.

“But from a moment onwards, everything changed and it started to approach me. I could feel that it was coming closer and closer. Sometimes, it wouldn’t be visible but I could feel its gaze on me, I knew it was nearby. I do not understand why I would have such strange dreams. What have I done to deserve such punishment? Real life is already tiring enough, sleep is my only respite but now it is not safe even in my dreams anymore.

“The 7th day after the thing appeared in my dreams, something horrible happened.

“At the time, I dreamed that my own pet cat had jumped onto the window ledge, it appeared to be wary of staying inside my room. I went to go hug it but when it saw me approach, it jumped out the window directly. I hurried over to the window but as I poked my head out to look, I felt a giant force pushing me from behind. Someone was inside my room and it pushed me out of my window!

“As I fell, I saw it was standing at my window. I did not recognize it, but it wanted to kill me, I couldn’t figure out why. The death that night was only the beginning, in the following dreams, I would be killed by the thing again and again. It would be creative with the methods. As I was killed, I would be shocked awake from my sleep!

“I didn’t dare to fall back into sleep, my mind was fraying. I don’t know what to do next, whenever I close my eyes, the thing will be there, waiting to kill me!

“I cannot remember how many times I’ve been killed already. I can’t tell whether I’m awake or still sleeping. Sometimes I know I’m dreaming but the pain is so real. Sometimes I believe I’m in real life but after being murdered, I realized I was inside a dream. The edge between reality and dream blurs. It was right about then that I brought the thing from my dreams into reality. It feeds on my consciousness and crosses the boundary between dream and reality to reside inside my brain. Yes, I can feel its presence clearly now. Be it in my dream or in real life, I know it is there. The imprint in the shape of the butterfly is the best proof of that.”

After reading all the messages on the wall, Han Fei’s back was drenched. His gaze fixated on the word, Butterfly.

‘The it mentioned by the 8th persona is actually the Butterfly? The Butterfly wasn’t something from real life but came out from nightmares?’ Until now, Han Fei had no idea what Butterfly was. So far, only Spider had encountered the real Butterfly before. ‘All of his 8 personas have died, Spider has paid such a huge price so what has he gained over the Butterfly?’

The clues hidden at the House of the Butcher were far more numerous than Han Fei anticipated, the mysterious veil around the Butterfly would start to peel off here.