Tian POV

  Then, suddenly, something broke.

  The dried vine bracelet he had worn on his left wrist since leaving home crumbled.

  He had carried that vine for years, it was the only plant that had ever responded to his care, and now it turned to dust between one breath and the next.

  The spiritual energy that came out of him in that moment scattered the formation stones across the ground and brought Master Jian to his feet immediately.

  "Tian." His teacher's voice was sharp with an alarm he was visibly working to contain. "Tian, are you with me?"

  Tian opened his eyes and looked up at Master Jian.

  This was the man who had declared him hopeless on the first day they met and then spent five years guiding him despite his lack of talent.

  This was the man who had lost his best student because of Tian’s weakness.

  The least that he could do to pay the man back was be honest.

  "I am not Tian," he said.

  The certainty in his own voice was something he had not heard there before. It came from somewhere below the level of thought or decision, from the part of him that the dreams had reached and the rest of his life hadn't.

  "I never was. I am Ke Yin.”

  ***

  Moon padded silently through the darkened bamboo groves.

  She was a massive creature with black and white fur, and nearly nine feet tall when standing upright. The air around her seemed to ripple and distort due to the spiritual pressure emanating from her.

  Moon’s cubs were asleep in the den, lying curled together in the nest she had built for them. They were only three months old, and their eyes had just begun to open. As of yet, they had no cultivation, so they completely depended on her.

  “Home,” she rumbled to herself, the single word having multiple meanings, most of which would be understood only by other Oneiric Sovereigns.

  Territory. Home. Family.

  All of these concepts encompassed everything important to her.

  Moon was doing her daily patrol.

  She was checking her territory to see if any threats had developed since her last check.

  Lately, there had been demons roaming the area.

  Even though most spiritual beings knew better than to venture into her specific area of the Thornwood Deep, the mere thought of them encountering her cubs made her nervous.

  As she rounded a bend in the path, she caught a whiff of human blood. It was fresh and plentiful, mixed with something else she couldn’t immediately identify. Moon’s massive head swung towards the scent. Her nostrils flared as she analyzed the complex combination of scents being borne by the mountain breeze.

  Curiosity eventually overcame her caution.

  Moon had met humans before, most of the time they were merchants or traveling cultivators who passed through the lower valleys. Almost all of them gave her territory a wide berth once they sensed her spiritual pressure. Occasionally, some young and foolhardy warrior would decide to test her for the few rare herbs that grew in her domain. In those cases, the human fled in terror once she demonstrated a small portion of her real power.

  This scent was different.

  There was no aggression, no intentional invasion.

  Only blood and pain and something that brought her ancient, maternal instincts to the surface in ways she hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

  She followed the trail of scents through the dense underbrush, her massive body gliding effortlessly between the towering trees. The scent of blood grew stronger as she got close to a large pine tree that was growing horizontally from the side of a cliff.

  When she arrived, she was puzzled.

  There was a young human male hanging upside down from one of the pine tree's branches.

  The wooden branch had pierced completely through his chest. Blood was pooling under him and staining the moss-covered rocks a deep red. His breathing was barely perceptible, and his skin was starting to take on a grayish hue.

  However, there was something else, something that caused Moon to approach the human cautiously instead of turning her back and going home. The human’s scent contained elements that she had never smelled before: layers of spiritual energy that did not seem to fit any of the patterns she had seen before.

  Dream qi, yes, but something much deeper and more complicated.

  Moon gently touched the human’s dangling arm with one of her huge paws.

  His skin was warm, and she could sense a spark of life remaining in his damaged body.

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  “Play?” she rumbled.

  Moon had always been interested in small, fragile things.

  When she was younger and before she had achieved her current level of cultivation, she often found herself attracted to injured birds or abandoned wild creatures. She enjoyed helping them get better and seeing them become stronger and healthier.

  The human triggered the same feelings in her, especially now that she had recently given birth to her cubs. He was so small in comparison to her, so clearly unable to fend for himself, so entirely dependent on others for his very survival. The similarity to her cubs was superficial, but the emotional connection was real.

  She began by carefully removing the human from the branch.

  Although her paws were large, she had the ability to use them with extreme care as she worked the wood free from his chest. The wound bled excessively once the object was removed from his chest, however as an Oneiric Sovereign, she had experience treating such injuries.

  After freeing him from the branch, she sat back on her haunches and positioned the human against her chest as one would position a large cub. As he rested against her chest, his breathing grew stronger, although he was still in a deep unconsciousness. She could feel his life force flickering like a candle flame in the winds.

  "Home", she decided, the decision being laced with determination and a protective nature.

  To get home safely, Moon had to navigate the area carefully to not aggravate the human's injuries. Her domain was riddled with hidden passages and secret paths known only to her, routes that avoided the more dangerous areas where hungry predators or territorial spirits might pose threats.

  As a result of years of cultivating the area to expand her natural cave system, Moon's den was worthy of being called a home. The main cave was large and warm due to the underground spring. The walls of the cave were covered with the softest materials that she could find. A screen of bamboo was placed around each area of the cave to provide seclusion and block the cold air. Spirit stones were placed around the cave to provide a soft glow and to enhance the healing properties of the cave.

  In the largest alcove, her three cubs slept peacefully in a bed of silk and down. They were small as a house cat, their black and white fur looked like it had just been groomed, and their spiritual channels were developing rapidly.

  Moon could see the potential for great power in them.

  She placed the human who was recovering from his injury next to her cubs and positioned him in a way that would not disturb their sleep. The difference in size and weight between the human who was lying next to her cubs and her three cubs was quite a contrast.

  "Family", Moon said quietly, and as she said the word, the concept of family in her mind included this unexpected addition.

  ***

  Over the following weeks, Moon developed a routine that met the needs of her cubs, who needed to eat frequently and stay warm, and her new human friend, who required a high level of medical care.

  She washed his wounds with the clean water from the underground spring, applied medicine that she had grown in her garden, and gave him her own pure Oneiric Sovereign dream qi to stimulate his body to recover from the life-threatening injuries.

  The branch had missed his heart by just a few inches and had damaged his lung and had caused him to bleed internally. His ribs were broken, his left shoulder was dislocated, and he had lost a substantial amount of blood.

  However, there was something wrong with him, something that was not related to his physical injuries. His spiritual channels were intact, but they were surprisingly empty, as if they were designed to handle energies that he did not possess.

  "Broken?" she thought, softly stroking his hair while her cubs fed.

  Weeks passed, and she continued to care for him, and eventually, the human's body healed itself at a rate that was faster than she had anticipated once she had controlled the most serious of his injuries.

  Yet, no matter what she did, he didn’t wake up.

  As for the cubs, they didn’t seem to notice that the human was a stranger.

  They played with him like he was one of them.

  They jumped on his unconscious body and climbed over it like it was a jungle gym.

  And when it was time to sleep, they would curl into him.

  "Brothers," Moon had decided when she saw this.

  She didn’t care that they were pandas and the stranger was a human, they were family, nonetheless. And she treated him like that while she took care of him. During the quiet hours, she spoke to him as best as she could even though she knew he couldn’t respond. She spoke about simple things like the development of her cubs, the weather patterns, and the worries she has on her mind like the demonic entities that prowled around Thornwood Deep.

  When her cubs began to take their first real steps in the den, she whispered “growing” to the human.

  There were times where she thought she saw his eyelids move as if there was some part of him that was able to hear her from deep within his unconsciousness, but those moments passed too quickly for her to be sure.

  And it was like for another week until something changed.

  That morning, Moon had gone out early to gather fresh bamboo shoots, leaving her cubs and their human brother asleep in the nest. It was a productive hunt; she had even been able to find a few medical plants that would aid in her human cub’s final stages of recovery. But when she returned to the den, she experienced a strange feeling, something she hadn’t experienced before.

  It was then that she realised that he was awake.

  The anticipation that had built up over the past few weeks propelled her through the underbrush to reach the den as fast as possible whilst also trying to stay as silent as possible. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally terrify the tiny cub.

  But as soon as she arrived near the entrance of the den, she hesitated.

  What she sensed coming from the den were feelings that were more complex than simple confusion or disorientation. There was a deep feeling of wrongness that was unrelated to the fact that he had woken up in an unfamiliar place.

  And that is when she heard him speak.

  “This…this can’t be right,” the human whispered, his breathing was short and shallow.

  Realising the human was panicking, Moon froze.

  Even though she saw the young human as one of her cubs, her protective instincts for her actual cubs began to flare up. They were sleeping soundly inside. What if the human, in his panic, hurt them?

  The next few moments would decide whether she had found a new family member or simply delayed an inevitable tragedy. Either way, Moon prepared herself to protect her cubs while hoping that the young man, whom she'd grown so fond of, would prove worthy of the faith she'd placed in him.

  ***

  Inside the den, Hou Hongyun had no idea that a nine feet tall spiritually-enhanced panda was wondering if he was a threat she needed to eliminate or a child to spoil. Instead, he was staring at his reflection in the surface of the underground spring with pale blue eyes that were not his own.

  What he was seeing didn’t make sense.

  The copper brown hair and strange facial features looking back at him was familiar in ways he couldn’t explain but wrong.

  "This isn't my body," he whispered, pressing his hands to his temples as he tried to figure out what was going on. "My last memory was entering the portal, going into the Dream World for the finals. But this..." He gestured at himself, at the den, at the sleeping cubs. “What is this?”

  He then closed his eyes tightly.

  He needed to calm down.

  Panicking wouldn’t get him anywhere.

  And even if he didn’t know what was going on, he knew someone who would.

  "Azure," he called out internally, "Azure, what's going on? What happened to me?"

  70% of you got it right, Ke Yin is in fact Hou!

  As for why Tian is convinced that he is Ke Yin, that will be explained next chapter, which will show the Sect Master’s & Elders’ POV to explain the test of the Dream World and why it is rarely used. The benefit of the world is great, but so are its dangers (as Wu Kangming is now experiencing). And then we will return to first person POV of Ke Yin as he experiments with Dream Cultivation.

  As for Moon, an Oneiric Sovereign saving Ke Yin, not only is Ke Yin’s karma finally coming into play, but it is also literally impossible for Ke Yin & Wu Kangming to die in this realm except by the hands of the other (as mentioned by the elder before they entered the realm). This is something that Ke Yin will be taking full advantage of in the coming chapters!

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