Chapter 138: The Despair-Ridden Dream

Before Zhumu could even react, a pair of pale and eerie hands caressed his cheeks.
He only felt a chill on his face, followed by a tremendous force pulling him backward.
"Save me! Save me!"
Seeing his family members getting further and further away from him, Zhumu let out a desperate, tearful scream.
Yet upon hearing his cries, his family turned their heads in a mechanical fashion, wearing bizarre smiles on their faces as they waved at him.
He had seen this gesture before—wasn't this exactly how his family had bid him farewell before he left for the big city to attend university?
Gradually, he gave up struggling, allowing the white-robed woman to pull him away and drag him step by step into the screen.
Once inside the screen, he could truly and directly feel the sheer eeriness of that well.
Standing beside the well, the most immediate sensation was the seemingly endless darkness and terror dwelling within it.
It was like a bottomless abyss, poised to swallow everything in the world entirely.
Watching the well draw closer and closer to him, Zhumu was driven to the verge of madness.
While tugging at the woman's hand, he thrashed about frantically, shrieking, "Let me go! Let me go!"
Although he could not fathom what the well was, an instinctive terror was enough to make him desperate to get away from it at any cost.
Yet the harder he resisted, the more overwhelming that pulling force became.
Just as he thought the woman was about to hurl him down into the well, the force dragging him finally vanished.
Terrified, he raised his head to look around, only to find an all-encompassing, dead silence. Every corner was horrifyingly quiet and exceptionally bizarre.
Within this space, he felt an unprecedented, hollow emptiness.
He looked at himself, and then looked at the well.
For reasons unknown, he began to walk straight toward the direction of the well.
As soon as he reached the wellhead, he saw another version of himself peering up from within the depths.
This other self possessed a pair of red eyes and a smile of the utmost bizarreness, though the phantom appeared for merely a fraction of a second before vanishing.
Then, with no explanation, he found himself inside the well.
It was a gloomy, ancient well. The water inside was shallow, reaching only about knee-high, but it carried a rather peculiar odor.
"Zhumu~"
A gentle voice rang out, prompting Zhumu to turn his head involuntarily. "Who's calling me?"
"Zhumu~"
The voice came once again.
This voice felt like a beam of warm sunlight shining upon a freezing body; for reasons he could not understand, Zhumu felt a profound sense of comfort upon hearing it.
Without a moment's hesitation, he immediately began searching around.
It was only then that he realized there was actually a path beneath the well.
He sensed that the source of the voice lay on the far side of this path.
Wading through the water, enduring the unidentifiable stench, he stumbled forward along the path step by step.
At last, through relentless perseverance, a glimmer of light caught his eye.
Upon seeing the light, he grew as excited as a child, nearly jumping and dancing with joy as he immediately quickened his pace toward the radiance.
Yet the moment he made direct contact with the light, his smile froze completely on his face, refusing to stretch into a grin any longer.
For what had been soaking him all this while was no well water at all, but crimson blood!
The reason his journey had been full of stumbles was not because of stones in the well, but because the well was littered everywhere with human skeletons!
This place was nothing short of a living hell!
"Ah!!!"
Accompanied by a piercing scream, Zhumu bolted upright just like a drowning person regaining the right to breathe, gasping heavily for air.
It took him a full dozen minutes to realize that what he had just experienced must have been a dream.
Though it was merely a dream, the immersive terror still lingered fiercely upon waking.
After a long while, his nerves finally relaxed slightly, and he collapsed back in front of his computer desk, returning to his previous state of despondency.
That extreme eeriness and horror continued to linger around him, refusing to fade from his mind.
Once he had completely calmed down, he found himself utterly incapable of doing anything else, driven purely by an intense urge to create.
As for the content of his creation...
It was everything he had just dreamed of.
Thinking of this, he cast all else aside, opened his computer, and began to draw frantically.
During this time, his speed reached astronomical levels; working nonstop for over a dozen hours without a single moment of rest, he kept on creating.
Drawing after drawing, brimming with horror and uncanniness, was thus birthed from his hands.
For some inexplicable reason, he felt an unwarranted confidence this time, believing firmly that his manga would become a hit!
And a massive hit at that!
When he prepared to submit his work to a manga publisher, however, he stumbled over a title.
Finally, two words flashed across his mind: "'Tomie' is indeed a rather good name."
Even he had no idea why he chose this name, but it had simply surfaced in his mind, and so he naturally adopted it.
In less than a day, he received his first manuscript-acceptance email in his life.
An editor expressed immense interest in his work and hoped he would continue drawing.
This undoubtedly provided him with an enormous surge of motivation.
Fueled by this momentum, he entered a period of explosive productivity.
Oddly enough, someone who usually lacked creative talent now found himself exceptionally gifted.
Whenever he thought about the worldview and character backgrounds of the universe he was constructing, a brilliant idea would instantly present itself.
To describe it simply: ideas flowed as if guided by a divine hand.
Normally, creating and publishing a manga from scratch requires a considerable amount of time.
Yet under Zhumu's ultra-high-intensity workflow, it was ready for publication by the very next day.
Not until the manga was successfully published did Zhumu finally close his eyes for the first time since that nightmare, sleeping peacefully.
Little did he know, however, not even a second after he fell asleep, three uninvited guests materialized in his home.
Xiao Zi's crimson figure swept past Zhumu's body repeatedly, trailing wisps of icy, chilling wind that made the sleeping Zhumu shiver violently.
Twisting his neck, Xiao Zi muttered, "Clown, get back into his dream and throw a few more fierce ingredients into the mix!"
How could there be so many coincidences in this world? Everything was merely being manipulated by Xiao Zi behind the scenes.
He hadn't placed his hopes solely on this single manga artist; there were nearly a dozen artists suffering similar fates to Zhumu, though a few had already been frightened to death by Xiao Zi inside their dreams.
As long as just one of these dozen-odd artists managed to make their manga a hit, he could harvest terror value beyond his imagination and then travel directly to another world.
Perhaps this manga would even influence people in surrounding nations; either way, it was a foolproof investment that could never lose.
Every single one of the artists he had chosen was currently on the verge of a mental breakdown.
By day, their minds were controlled by Xiao Zi to engage in ultra-high-intensity labor; by night, every time they slept, they were subjected to hyper-terrifying nightmares engineered by Xiao Zi. Under such conditions, frankly, not losing one's mind was already a sign of superior psychological resilience.
Wanting even one of them to achieve massive success?
Difficult!
Yet this bizarre event had actually occurred, and through the very story of "Tomie" that he had initially been least optimistic about.