Wen Jiubai looked at me, sighed and said, "Because what you saw was just a dream."
"What?" I retorted without any hesitation, "No, it's impossible. I know what I've been through. It can't be a dream. If I was dreaming, it would be too real."
"I said you were dreaming, but I didn't say they were false." Wen Jiubai said this out of nowhere.
I raised my head in surprise, and cast a puzzled look at Wen Jiubai. Wen Jiubai stood up, sighed, and started pacing around the room.
"Before the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, people believed that dreams were a passage to another world. People in the Shang Dynasty once made special incense, trying to peek into the future through dreams. However, because their gossip calculations were wrong, they did not succeed at that time. Later With the flames of war, people have gradually forgotten this saying, and dreams have become just dreams."
I frowned and looked at Wen Jiubai, feeling puzzled. But my subconscious told me that Wen Jiubai might have something important to say, so I resisted not to interrupt him.
"But there is no problem with this theory." Wen Jiubai said quietly, "Dreams are a completely independent spiritual world, which is separated from all material worlds. Have you ever experienced such an experience? When you dream, you Feel like a long, long time has passed in a dream, but when you wake up, you realize you only slept for an hour?"
I nodded knowingly.
"Or when I was dreaming, my memory was very clear, but after waking up, I could only remember fragments of words?" Wen Jiubai walked over, pulled out the three burnt incense sticks from the incense burner, rubbed them with his slender fingers, "Or sometimes, your dreams can predict the future, some little things that haven't happened yet. After it happens, you suddenly suddenly realize-I seem to have dreamed about this thing last night."
"So what?" I finally couldn't help but interrupt him, saying, "Everyone has been through something like this, and it's not a big deal."
Wen Jiubai showed a helpless smile, and sighed: "You humans. Everyone has had similar experiences, but no one has thought about why."
I couldn't help but follow Wen Jiubai's train of thought and asked: "Why?"
"Because dreams are not only an activity of the human brain when it is boring, it is also a crack." Wen Jiubai said seriously.
"Cracks? Cracks of what?"
"Reality and illusion, yin and yang, death and life, past and future, dreams can all connect them." Wen Jiubai looked into my eyes and said, "If dreams are used properly, it can also be a communication between the two." bridge."
Wen Jiubai's complicated words messed up my head even more. I made a "pause" gesture, trying to extract effective parts from Wen Jiubai's words.
"So you mean, I can go directly to my past or future by dreaming?"
"And ignore the barriers of time and space, that's right." Wen Jiubai said affirmatively, "The premise is to use the correct method accurately, otherwise you may sleep forever in a dream."
etc…
What did Wen Jiubai mean by this? I turned his words around in my head and quickly came to a dire conclusion.
"Do you mean..." I looked at him in horror, and said cautiously, "The scenes I saw were all in the future, and they happened in real life? Are they all real futures?"
Wen Jiubai nodded, confirming my guess.
The amount of information contained in this nodding action is too great for people to digest in an instant. I took a few deep breaths, my eyes still wide open.
"Okay, let's talk about it one by one." I asked, "When did it start?"
"When you got off the bus." Wen Jiubai replied calmly, "I lied to your two friends, saying that you were not feeling well, and brought you back to the old house."
I was a little surprised by Wen Jiubai's frankness, but what followed was the anger of being deceived.
"So I've been dreaming since then?" I asked.
Wen Jiubai nodded, "The dream of blood rain and mist you told me about is just your body's natural resistance to wake up from sleep, it's just a dream within a dream."
In this way, Shi Yitong and Su Xiaoyun did not see that terrible scene, which made me somewhat relieved.
"Okay, then the second question. You must answer me honestly." I stared at Wen Jiubai and said, "You went to great lengths to stop me halfway and hypnotize me with that strange incense. What is it? For what? If you don't give me a proper answer, I will never forgive you!"
"Gu Yu, I'm really sorry." Wen Jiubai showed apology on his face, "If I had other methods, I would never choose this method."
"what is going on?"
"On the second day after you went to Diecui Mountain, an old friend of mine sent me a letter." Wen Jiubai said, and took out a yellowed letter from his pocket.
I took the letter in doubt and looked it up and down. This letter looks very old, not only the paper is yellowed, but also quite brittle to the touch. I'm afraid it will be broken accidentally.
"It's okay, let's take it apart and have a look." Wen Jiubai raised his chin.
I carefully opened the envelope and pulled out a piece of letter paper that was also yellowed. After unfolding it, I found that the characters inside were even in traditional Chinese characters.
——Mr. Wen:
I have a nightmare recently, knowing that the king is in danger, and I can't sleep all night, so I write this book for warning in the future. The sealed man is not dead, you must not take it lightly. In yesterday's dream, the Taoist priest came in time of year, full of murderous intent. Jun fell in a pool of blood, and Yu was helpless. Only by writing this letter in hand and mailing it in the next day can it be used as a warning.
I wish you all the best.
There was no signature at the end of the letter, but judging from Wen Jiubai's reaction, he should know who the sender was.
"I've finished reading." I returned the letter to Wen Jiubai, "So... who wrote this letter? It looks very old."
"I just received this letter a few days ago. But it is very interesting that the old friend who sent me the letter has passed away for many years, so this letter is so yellow and old." Wen Jiubai said the letter He put it in his arms again.
"How?" I was a little surprised.
"My friend, he is a fortune teller, he is proficient in Zhouyi gossip, and sometimes he can predict future events through dreams." Wen Jiubai said, "He should have predicted that Taoist priests would attack me in the near future, so I wrote this letter specially, and asked someone to deliver it at the right time to warn me of the danger that will happen soon."
"So that's how it is." I murmured, recalling the content of the letter, "But... there is a sentence in the letter that I can't understand."
"Um?"
"He said 'Taoist priests come every year', what does that mean? Is it a metaphor?" I asked.
"No, it's not a metaphor. It's a literal meaning." Wen Jiubai said calmly.
"Literally?" I was even more confused, "I don't understand..."
"When he said Nian, he meant the monster named Nian." Wen Jiubai sighed and said, "I believe you all heard that story when you were young, about why people celebrate the New Year."
I hesitated and nodded, "Because... in the past, there was a monster called Nian Beast, who always went to the village to eat people. Later, the whole village found that Nian Beast was afraid of red and the sound of firecrackers, so they used red lanterns and firecrackers to kill Nian Beast. Drive away. Hey, don't you want to tell me that the Nian beast is actually a real thing!"
Wen Jiubai nodded, "Why not?"
"Because these are just legends to coax children. There is nothing credible." I said with an incredulous expression.
Wen Jiubai looked at me teasingly, "You have experienced so many incredible things, but you don't want to believe that Nian Beast really exists?"
"But this is different." I insisted, "Other ghosts are based on evidence. Ghosts are the spiritual bodies produced after death, and spirits are creatures that gain intelligence and strength after cultivation. But the story of Nian Beast It's really ridiculous, because the Chinese New Year is only based on the Chinese calendar, and the calendar is calculated based on the moon's waxing and waning, and it has nothing to do with any monsters."
Wen Jiubai thought for a while and said: "Well, you are not wrong. But in fact, Nian Beast is a kind of monster that is much more troublesome than the legend. Actually, even I am not sure whether it is a monster or not. Maybe we'd better use a better word - call it 'biology'."
It was the first time I saw Wen Jiubai use such ambiguous words to describe something, so I couldn't help but become more curious.
"You said that people celebrate the New Year because of the calendar, which is not wrong. But the existence of the Nian beast does not contradict the calendar, because it itself is a creature that lives on the timeline." Wen Jiubai looked at me with burning eyes.
"Living on the... timeline?" I couldn't figure it out more and more.
"Nian has no entity, nor does it exist in the world we stand in. If the world we live in is a three-dimensional space, then Nian is a living four-dimensional creature." Wen Jiubai said slowly, "Thinking is its body , time is its food. It can exist in the past and the future at the same time, and it does not belong to any one time and space. Imagine how terrible it would be if such a creature attacked your village."
I opened my mouth wide in surprise.
"The Nian beast does eat people. It's just not in the way you imagine." Wen Jiubai continued, "What the Nian beast eats is time, or in other words, all the time a person lives in the world. The Nian beast can control time , People who are eaten by it, not only die or disappear, but are completely erased from time. And the people around him will not even remember that there was this person at all. "