Chapter 1163 - Crossing the River of Memory
Chapter 1163: Crossing the River of Memory
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Even the Mount Wolves were trembling like frightened rabbits in the face of the violent snowstorm.
They tried their best to get close to each other and huddled into mountains of flesh, using the group’s body temperature to resist the harsh nature.
However, in the middle of the wolves, there were some small human figures with sparse hair that were shivering.
They were naturally the Ancient Dream Saintess and the rat slaves who were in charge of taking care of the wolves.
Meng Chao had heard the veterans of the Great Horn Army talk about the Ancient Dream Saintess’ background.
He knew that before she received enlightenment from the Big-horned Rat God, she had been a slave in a Wolf Clan’s settlement, and she had been in charge of taking care of the Wolf Clan’s most important asset, the Mount Wolves.
It was not an easy task.
The Mount Wolves were savage and untamed. They were completely different from warhorses.
Anyone besides their master who dared to approach them would easily become a delicacy in their stomach.
Just like Monster Mountain Range, Picturesque Orchid Lake was affected by the underground spirit vein. It was also a place where extreme weather occurred frequently.
Once the Mount Wolves were stimulated by extreme weather in the wilderness, they would go berserk. It would be even harder for their keepers to escape. They would be torn into pieces and die without a burial place.
It was a shocking and life-threatening test.
That had been the Ancient Dream Saintess’ daily life before she turned sixteen years old.
Meng Chao originally thought that the life of Dragon City’s teenagers who lived during the Monster War was already precarious and extremely miserable.
Compared with the Ancient Dream Saintess, he realized that Dragon City’s teenagers were simply flowers in a greenhouse. He had no idea how happy and stable their lives were before this.
Following the Ancient Dream Saintess’ river of memories, he continued to move toward the source.
Meng Chao found more memories that had left the deepest impression on the Ancient Dream Saintess when she was still with her parents.
In one of the pictures, the Ancient Dream Saintess, who seemed to be less than ten years old, was carefully climbing a cliff with a rope tied around her waist. The rope did not seem to be reliable, and she was in the middle of a mandrake branch that had grown out diagonally.
There was a bottomless abyss under her feet.
The howling wind was like the roar of a hungry dragon.
Every branch around her, including her bones and nerves, trembled amidst the roar and made cracking sounds.
There was a big, round, and fragrant golden fruit covered in gorgeous patterns in front of her.
She stood on her tiptoes as her left hand clutched a branch and her right hand reached out with all its might. She had already touched the surface of the golden fruit, which had uneven natural patterns.
However, the golden fruit was too big. It was one round bigger than her head and three times the size of her tender palm. It was impossible for her to grasp it with one hand.
In order to successfully pick the golden fruit, she could only release her left hand and pull with both hands.
The degree of danger was obvious.
“Throw it over here!”
Behind her, someone fiercely shouted, “Throw the golden fruit over here!”
Even though it was buried down in her memory, the voice was still like a poisonous blade with saw teeth and barbs,. It made one feel nauseous and creepy.
The Ancient Dream Saintess took a deep breath and gently hooked the tip of her foot around the branch. She slowly released her left hand and extended it toward the golden fruit.
Then, she used all her strength and successfully plucked the golden fruit from the branch.
“Ah ha!”
The shouts behind her became more and more excited. “Well done. Run back here quickly and throw it with all your strength!”
The Ancient Dream Saintess nodded and raised the golden fruit high above her head.
Just as she was about to use her strength, an accident happened.
Perhaps she had moved too much, or perhaps the delicate branches at the top of the mandrake tree could not support her and the weight of the golden fruit for a long time.
With a crack, a few branches under her feet broke.
The Ancient Dream Saintess, who was holding the golden fruit with both hands, had nowhere to borrow her strength. She fell off the mandrake tree and descended into the abyss.
Fortunately, the thin rope around her waist saved her life.
She was suspended in the air, but she kept brushing against and hitting the uneven rock wall. She was covered in bruises.
However, the golden fruit left her hand and fell into the abyss, disappearing.
Meng Chao felt that the Ancient Dream Saintess did not feel any sense of relief about escaping death.
Her memory fragments were filled with fatigue that was even more intense than death.
On the cliff, her master had already begun to curse—she had squandered the trust that her master had placed in her by giving her the opportunity to pick such a precious golden fruit.
She had betrayed her master’s trust and wasted a precious resource that the ancestral spirit had given to the Turan people. It was very likely that she would anger the ancestral spirit and bring disaster to her master.
Once her master pulled her up, he would use the burning thorny whip to whip her fiercely to appease the ancestral spirit’s anger.
The Ancient Dream Saintess, who was not even ten years old, was indifferent to the approaching whip.
It was like she was struggling to survive among the hungry war wolves and their bloodstained claws, as well as teeth, in the near future.
That was just her daily life and the lives of all the rat people who had been bullied and harmed for several dozen million years.
At that moment when her life was hanging by a thread, the Ancient Dream Saintess did not care about the whip or death.
Even her bloody wounds that had been caused caused by the impact on the cliff did not take up too much space in her memory database.
She just narrowed her eyes and sniffed the finger that had just touched the golden fruit.
If only she had known that the golden fruit would fall into the abyss…
She should have taken a big bite and tasted the legendary golden fruit.
After that, there were few memories.
They were all scenes of the Ancient Dream Saintess wandering around Picturesque Orchid Lake, being bullied and enslaved.
She had picked golden fruits on the cliffs.
She had also been sold to a glorious city like Black-corner City and become a trash bug. She had been forced to hide in the dark and smelly underground sewage pipes, where she cleaned up the waste that the clan warriors constantly discharged.
She had also been caught by private hunters and taken to the deep mountains to act as bait to lure totem beasts out.
Before she was ten years old, the Ancient Dream Saintess had already engaged in more than a dozen dangerous and heavy jobs. She had tasted the world’s coldness and warmth and experienced pain that even the teenagers in Dragon City might not be able to endure for ten lifetimes.
The only thing that gave her the strength to continue struggling in this dark abyss that was worse than death and continue living on was probably those fragmented dreams.
Deep in the Ancient Dream Saintess’ memory database, Meng Chao found many fragmented memories that obviously did not belong to her.
In some of the memory fragments, she had turned into a majestic clan warrior, who was crazily cultivating or enjoying a sumptuous banquet.
In some of the memory fragments, although she was still a rat person, she had a warm family. She could lie in her parents’ arms and enjoy a short period of comfort.
There were also some bizarre memory fragments. They did not even seem like things that happened in this era. Instead, they seemed like fairy tales that happened in a fairyland a long, long time ago.
Meng Chao’s mind raced, and he quickly reacted.
That was indeed not the Ancient Dream Saintess’s own memory.
It was someone else’s dream.
The Ancient Dream Saintess should have been born with the ability to “sneak into other people’s dreams.”
However, before the age of ten, her ability had not completely evolved.
She still could not implant beliefs into the depths of other people’s minds through dreams.
She could only peek into other their lives through dreams.
It looked like she had used other people’s rich and colorful lives to illuminate her own poor and painful life to obtain illusory warmth.
If that was the case, then there was a very reasonable explanation for how the Ancient Dream Saintess was chosen by the mastermind.
It was very likely that back when she served as a wolf slave and took care of Mount Wolves, she had habitually used her ability to sneak into the mastermind dreams, and the mastermind discovered her uniqueness.
As though the mastermind had discovered a treasure, he turned her into the Big-horned Rat God’s spokesperson in Picturesque Orchid Lake.
The Ancient Dream Saintess’ river of memories was about to reach its end.
Most of the “balloon jellyfish” floating there were dim and hazy. They were missing a lot of details and were even distorted beyond recognition.
They should be the early memories of the Ancient Dream Saintess before she was five or six years old.
It was said that the memory storage area in the human brain would only gradually develop after the age of four, allowing the individual to remember some things.
However, most of her memories lacked sound and images. It was just a feeling of uncertainty.
Meng Chao frowned slightly.
Until now, he still had not found any important evidence related to the mastermind behind the Ancient Dream Saintess.
Plus, the Ancient Dream Saintess’ early memories lacked retrieval and analysis value.
He did not know how long he could remain hidden in the Ancient Dream Saintess’ memory database, but he had not been discovered by her and the mastermind.
He could not stop himself from burning with anxiety.
All of a sudden, Meng Chao noticed that deep in the Ancient Dream Saintess’ river of memories, there was something flashing amid the countless dim “balloon jellyfishes.”