The swamp did not change.

Mud pressed against their legs with dull persistence–thick, cold, and unyielding–swallowing effort before it could become motion. Every attempt to move ended the same way: resistance without struggle, refusal without violence. The land itself decided how far intent was allowed to go.

Kiaria stood where he had stood before.

Ahead of him, Diala waited.

She was close enough that he could see the rise and fall of her breath, close enough that one step should have been enough. Her expression was calm, unafraid–exactly as it always was before danger revealed itself.

Behind her, the swamp rippled.

He knew what came next.

He had already seen it–

once,

twice,

thrice.

The mud parted slowly, not violently, as if repeating a memorized motion. Blood Worms surfaced in patient arcs, their pale bodies glistening as circular maws opened with mechanical certainty. They did not rush.

They never did.

Diala turned.

She reached for him.

Kiaria moved.

In this place, power did not answer him. In the nightmare, will alone carried weight–and the more fiercely he struggled, the more cruelly the outcome sharpened. Every attempt to act hastened the same ending.

She was taken.

Eaten.

Alive.

The mud closed.

Silence followed.

Then she stood there again.

Unharmed. Breathing. Looking at him the same way.

The beginning reset.

The ending unchanged.

–

Elsewhere, Diala stood frozen in the same mire.

She watched Kiaria die–again and again–each time the same, each death following a fixed path as though written into the land itself. His recklessness, his refusal to stop reaching for her, only ensured the repetition continued.

The swamp did not allow mercy.

–

Nearby, the Chief stood knee-deep in mud.

His armor remained intact. His body bore no wounds. Before him stood his family, close enough to touch, smiling as though nothing had ever gone wrong.

Then the swamp moved.

Blood Worms surged from below, slow and deliberate. Hands reached for him as they were taken, one by one, dragged beneath the surface while their smiles remained, unbroken, unchanged.

The scene reset.

Their faces returned.

The ground waited.

Again.

–

Hylisi did not shout.

She fought the mud with everything she had, dragging herself forward, reaching toward her son with shaking hands. Each time she came close enough to believe she might succeed, the swamp claimed him instead.

She recalculated. Adjusted. Braced.

Preparation had no value here.

Her experience did not change the outcome.

Her knowledge did not shorten the pain.

The nightmare did not punish her for ignorance.

It punished her for believing guidance should have been enough.

–

Mu Long stopped struggling.

Mu Li died in front of him without surprise in his eyes, as though this ending had already been accepted long ago. Mu Long screamed until his voice broke, then watched it happen again–unchanged in every detail.

The swamp did not acknowledge grief.

It only repeated it.

–

None of them were attacked.

None of them were targeted.

They were made to witness.

To endure.

To fail.

Not because they were weak–

but because the one at the center believed himself to be helpless, worthless, incapable of protecting anything at all.

That belief became law.

The swamp belonged to no one, yet all of them stood within it, bound by a single thought that was not their own. Strength existed. Power remained.

But expression was forbidden.

They were together.

They were isolated.

And somewhere beneath the repetition–beneath the unchanging deaths and the resetting scenes–the nightmare settled deeper. Not to kill them.

But to teach them what helplessness feels like when it is shared.

Not imposed.

Inherited.

Repetition broke something in them.

Watching the same deaths unfold again and again stripped fear of its sharpness. Horror dulled, then flattened, until what remained was understanding–not acceptance, but awareness. Each time the beloved was taken, the truth pressed heavier: life was not fragile because it was short, but because it could be erased in front of one's eyes without resistance.

They understood the value of life now.

And that understanding hurt more than ignorance ever had.

The swamp did not change its rhythm. The worms did not alter their path. Nothing adapted to their realization. Meaning arrived too late to matter, and that lateness crushed them with slow certainty.

What could they do?

They could not move forward.

They could not protect.

They could not even choose sacrifice.

The thought came quietly at first–gentle, almost merciful.

Ending it would be easier than watching this again.

Loneliness settled like a mountain dropped onto their shoulders. Not the absence of people, but the certainty that even standing together, no one could reach another. The nightmare did not isolate them by distance.

It isolated them by helplessness.

–

Princess Lainsa slept.

Her breathing was steady. Her expression untroubled. No swamp pulled at her limbs, no blood rose before her eyes. While others were forced to witness the death of what they loved, she drifted through a dream untouched by repetition or despair.

Her bloodline slept with her.

Even unawakened, it was dominant.

The Anatomy Chrysanthemum did not react to the Night Dream flowers. It did not resist them either. Plant species recognized hierarchy instinctively, and pollen born of fear bowed before a lineage shaped by life itself.

The flowers did not dare intrude.

Lainsa remained unscathed.

Her peace was so complete that she never realized something was wrong.

–

Kiaria stood unmoving.

At some point, he stopped struggling.

Not from exhaustion, not from surrender–but from clarity. Rage had only tightened the nightmare's grip. Willful resistance had accelerated loss. Every instinct he had relied upon until now had failed.

So he became still.

Calm settled over him–not empty, not cold, but precise. The floating crown above his head responded, its presence deepening, no longer passive. It had never been a symbol of authority alone.

It was a regulator.

The Will of Life activated.

Golden strands appeared before Kiaria's eyes–fine, luminous threads stretching through the swamp, weaving through fog and mud, cutting across the nightmare's false logic. They were not born of power.

They were born of persistence.

Life, unbroken, always left traces.

With the strands as anchor, Kiaria moved.

The swamp no longer resisted him completely. Weight loosened. The ground still pulled, but it no longer decided everything. He followed the golden paths, step by deliberate step, until the first presence came into view.

Diala.

She stood frozen in her own repetition, watching him die again.

Kiaria reached her.

Then another strand led him onward.

The Chief.

Hylisi.

Mu Long.

One by one, he found them, each trapped in a private cycle of loss, each bound by the same shared helplessness. The golden strands connected them–not as saviors, not as leaders–but as survivors pulled together by the refusal of life to end quietly.

Yet one strand was missing.

No matter how far he looked, Kiaria could not find Princess Lainsa.

No golden thread marked her will.

No echo of struggle called for him.

She was absent from the nightmare–not hidden, not lost, but simply outside its reach.

When they finally gathered, they stood together at last.

The swamp remained.

The fog did not lift.

The worms did not vanish.

They were still inside the nightmare.

But for the first time since it began, the nightmare was no longer shared unknowingly.

And that made all the difference.

The swamp shifted again.

Not in resistance.

In response.

As Kiaria followed the last remaining golden strand, the fog thinned just enough to reveal another presence standing where mud and darkness should not have yielded ground. The shape was familiar, impossible to mistake even within a dream warped by helplessness.

The Evil Spider was there.

It stood embedded in the mire as though the swamp itself had grown around it, vast legs planted with absolute certainty. Where others sank, it did not. Where motion was denied, it moved without negotiation.

Kiaria halted.

So did the others who had followed him.

What they saw next did not fit the nightmare's rhythm.

Blood Worms rose from the mud–slow, deliberate, following the same pattern that had erased their companions again and again. Their attention shifted, drawn not by fear or emotion, but by presence.

They did not reach the spider.

They were eaten.

Not violently.

Not ceremoniously.

The Evil Spider tore through them with mechanical precision, consuming their massive bodies as though they were nothing more than sustenance laid out in advance. No hesitation. No reaction. No triumph.

Breakfast.

The swamp did not resist this.

It recoiled.

Kiaria felt something loosen in his chest–not relief, not reassurance, but confusion sharp enough to cut through despair. As the spider continued feeding, a thought surfaced that had no place in fear-driven repetition.

It doesn't care.

No grief shaped its movement.

No rage fueled its action.

No attachment guided its will.

While every one of them had been broken by watching what they loved die, the spider stood untouched by such loss.

Kiaria's gaze sharpened.

He remembered the past.

The rage.

The relentless pursuit.

The moment when killing the spider's offspring had triggered something feral, something absolute.

Back then, it had hunted him with intent.

With fury.

But why?

If it had no beloved.

If attachment did not exist in its cognition.

If loss did not wound it–

Then what had driven that rage?

The answer settled slowly.

Territory.

Violation.

Order disrupted.

The spider had not acted out of grief.

It had acted because something had crossed a boundary that should not have been crossed.

Understanding dawned just as the nightmare changed.

The moment the weak host's gaze fell upon the spider–upon its indifference, its dominance, its effortless destruction–the swamp shuddered violently. Mud rose higher. Fog thickened. The ground warped beneath their feet.

Then the landscape broke.

The swamp did not flood.

It transformed.

Every pool darkened into mirrored chitin. Every mound of mud twisted, reshaping into grotesque echoes of eight-legged forms. The terrain itself bent into the silhouette of the Evil Spider–countless legs rising from the ground, shadows crawling where solid land had been.

The nightmare had shifted its core.

No longer loss.

No longer helplessness.

Fear.

Raw.

Instinctive.

Overwhelming.

The fear of being prey.

The fear of being insignificant.

The fear of something that could not be reasoned with, bargained with, or emotionally swayed.

Kiaria exhaled slowly. "So this was it." He started gathering what he had realized till now.

A nightmare–driven!

Someone within the group had become its center.

Someone whose mind, stripped in real world and overwhelmed by fear, had latched onto the spider as the ultimate terror–an existence beyond emotion, beyond mercy, beyond resistance.

Kiaria concluded. "Then, something happened in real world."

The Host's nightmare world shifted to something terrifying than hopelessness and worry.

The nightmare now followed by the fear instead.

Kiaria looked around at the others, at their rigid stances and widening eyes as the land itself mirrored the predator before them. He felt it clearly now–the subtle pull, the shared gravity of a dream no longer passive.

They were not just trapped together.

They were being dragged by the same mind.

His monochrome gaze couldn't find the weakling because of the sudden terror and terrain change.

The horrifying appearance of Evil Spider terrified everyone else same way and the law too mediated in sharing fear.

And for the first time since the nightmare began, Kiaria was certain of one thing.

The enemy was among them.

Not possessed.

Not corrupted.

Simply broken enough to believe that fear was truth.

And until that belief was shattered–

The nightmare would continue to evolve.

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