Chapter 86

With a "bang," Hao Ren's door was pushed open, and the three abnormal tenants who were huddled in the living room watching TV immediately turned their heads to look. They saw Hao Ren holding a small piece of iron, jumping and running out of the room, shouting, "Big discovery, big discovery!"

Lily, always the most agile, had already transformed into a white blur and darted to his side by the time Hao Ren had shouted a couple of sentences. She jumped and reached for the small iron piece, but after a few jumps, she seemed to suddenly realize this was a dog's behavior, so she quickly wagged her tail and went back to the sofa to pretend to watch TV.

Hao Ren looked at Lily in surprise: "Why are you in werewolf form again? Did you lose control?"

Lily's ears twitched, quite sensitive to the word "lose control": "No, no, just letting the tail breathe a bit."

"What's going on?" Vivi asked, standing up calmly after Lily had finished her antics. "Did everything go well in the Dream Plane yesterday?"

"Oh, pretty well, fought with about seventy or eighty wild wolves, and woke up when I was thrown into the sky by a tornado," Hao Ren waved his hand dismissively. "The key is that I brought something back from 'there' again, and this time you recognize it!"

Vivi was about to say, "You didn't have a very smooth night either," but her attention was drawn to the iron piece Hao Ren was waving. She was slightly surprised: "Isn't this the thing we saw in the basement a few days ago?"

"That's right, it's that thing," Hao Ren grabbed Vivi's arm and headed towards the small staircase leading to the basement. "Do you remember where we put it? Let's go find it together, they look so similar!"

After Hao Ren and Vivi left in a hurry, Izzak and Lily looked at each other in confusion. The demon asked in a deep voice: "What's going on with these two? I arrived late and don't know much..."

"Oh, they must be having an affair," Lily said, as always, following her whims. "I saw it on TV."

Izzak responded with an "oh" and actually thought about it for a while before looking up: "When are they getting married?"

For the next ten minutes, these two abnormal beings started to study the marriage procedures on Earth, but that's a trivial matter and can be skipped for now.

Hao Ren and Vivi quickly found the wooden box they had placed in the basement storage room a few days ago. The box, which had been filled with childhood junk, now looked even more worn out. The small diamond-shaped iron piece among the old antiques looked like a discarded part from something. Hao Ren moved the entire box to Vivi's room and placed it on a small table. The two then began to examine the two iron pieces—there wasn't much to study, as they were clearly identical.

"Did you really bring this back from the Dream Plane?" Vivi stroked the patterns on the iron piece, which Hao Ren had brought back the night before. It looked newer, with less rust than the first one. "The patterns are exactly the same, and the material is the same."

"Absolutely," Hao Ren nodded vigorously and then recounted his entire experience in the Dream Plane, including the rigid shield he had gained. The focus, however, was on the small iron piece. "I found this in a herdsman's hut on the grassland, with nothing else around. It was buried in the soil. Oh, and the huts looked like they had been abandoned for about half a year."

"What kind of place is the Dream Plane?" Vivi's face showed great curiosity. "Is there a landscape and people there? And are the people there the same as those outside?"

"I haven't seen any living beings there yet, but it's indeed a normal world with everything, and even things that don't exist in the real world—like talking wolves in packs," Hao Ren described the Dream Plane to Vivi, mentioning the strange wolf packs, the vast grasslands, the brilliant night sky, the herdsman's hut, and finally the most magical part: the two moons. "There are two moons there! One big and one small, the small one is about the size of a fingernail, and the big one is several times larger than the moon on Earth. It looks amazing at night... If I could bring you in, do you think Lily would go crazy seeing two moons? One moon is enough to make her excited."

"Two moons..." Vivi, who was also sensitive to moonlight, had her eyes involuntarily glow with a hint of red. "I really want to see it. If I get the chance, you must take me! Hey, I once had a dream where I saw two moons in the sky. I remember it clearly; under the protection of the two moons, I finally escaped my bad luck and became super rich—unfortunately, I was woken up by the landlady before I could dream about spending the money."

Hao Ren: "..." Every time he heard Vivi's stories about her past, he felt like he was listening to a bitter history. How heart-wrenching.

Vivi recalled the wonderful experience of becoming super rich in her dream, then came back to her senses and wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth. She held the two iron pieces in front of Hao Ren and said, "Now it seems both of these are from the Dream Plane. It's impossible for someone in the real world to coincidentally create something exactly like this, especially a useless piece of scrap iron. You mentioned that the first iron piece was something you got as a child... do you remember the circumstances?"

"I don't remember," Hao Ren shook his head. "I've said it before, I don't know when it appeared in my hand."

"There are two possibilities. First, someone else has been to the Dream Plane, and this iron piece was brought back by someone else and somehow ended up in your hands. Raven 12345 mentioned that many people in history have contacted the Dream Plane and brought things back, so you're not the first. Second... you went to the Dream Plane as a child, and this iron piece is something you brought back. Which one do you think is more likely?"

Hao Ren took the two iron pieces from Vivi, fiddled with them silently, and then shook his head after a long time: "Neither seems very likely. The first possibility requires too many coincidences. According to the madman with the five-digit number, only one person every few hundred years can contact the Dream Plane and bring something back alive, and then it would take hundreds of years for it to end up in my hands. How coincidental is that? The second possibility... I was just a few years old back then. How could I have gone to the Dream Plane and come back alive? That place is full of man-eating beasts and sudden storms. I faced life-threatening situations twice in my two visits, and if it weren't for my enhanced body, I would have died there. How could a child of a few years old survive there and wake up naturally? Besides, I don't remember anything like that from my childhood."

"Overall, the second possibility is still more likely," Vivi patted Hao Ren's shoulder. "You just need to be lucky. And children's memories are often unclear, especially when it comes to nightmares, which they tend to avoid. So maybe you just forgot. Look at me, I often forget things too."

Hao Ren silently looked at Vivi, not daring to say it was because she was too old...

"What do you think this is for?" Hao Ren quickly changed the subject, afraid of accidentally saying what he was thinking.

"Probably just a decoration," Vivi said uncertainly. "This small piece of metal has no sharp edges, and the material isn't strong enough to be a weapon or a tool. I guess it's something like a badge, embedded somewhere."

"Would a herdsman need a badge?"

"Who knows about the Dream Plane?"

Hao Ren thought about it, and that was true. That place even had wolves speaking in Beijing dialect (thanks to the translation system), so what was impossible?

The origin of the first iron piece was probably a question that couldn't be resolved, as even Hao Ren himself couldn't remember the details from back then. But now he could confirm that this thing was also brought back from the Dream Plane. Raven had always said that the Dream Plane and the real world were intricately connected, and now, looking at the evidence before them, Hao Ren and Vivi had a clearer and more direct understanding.

The two iron pieces, along with the wolf hair Hao Ren had brought back from the Dream Plane, were carefully stored in a sturdy small iron box. Hao Ren felt that he might find more interesting things in the Dream Plane in the future, so he decided to start collecting these items from today.

In the following days, nothing significant happened, and time quickly passed to the night of the full moon—Lily's time for super evolution.

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