As I fell asleep, I found myself within my dreams.
A little fox girl greeted me.
"Yahoo! Drake, it's me." She said with an adorable smile.
"Ah, Eh?! You're in your humanoid form?" I asked.
"Yeah, in the dream world I can take any form I want so this is more comfortable! Don't I look cute too? Hm~? Feel like touching this little loli?" she asked with a grin.
"You're getting a bit ahead of yourself now that you became part of the family… And no, I am not feeling like touching you." I said rather coldly.
"Ugh… I-It was just a joke!" she sighed, as her cute fox ears twitched around.
I smiled hopelessly and petted her head, she was cute, I had to admit it.
After that, I used the dreams power and generated a comb, and began to groom her fluffy, pink-colored fox tails.
"D-Drake? Uwawawahhh… T-That feels good…" she said while blushing.
"I always wanted to do this but you're quite elusive in the outside world." I said, as I petted her.
I didn't wanted to do anything lewd with her, but doing this was relaxing, and she was pretty cute.
"Heheh… You shouldn't had done this… Why did you do it?" she asked.
"I don't know? I just wanted." I said.
"Y-You just wanted?" she asked while blushing.
"Anyways, why did you bring me here?" I wondered.
"Right! I brought you here to see this." said Belle.
She suddenly opened a portal within the dream world, which directed to the Dark Shadow Sect area.
She jumped towards it with me, and we suddenly found ourselves in the Dreamscape made up of the dreams of the many people that lived here.
This entire place was eerily dark, everything was abyssal.
The land was pitch black, the grass growing from the land was red and black, and even trees were black, with red leaves and fruits.
The sky was red-colored, with black clouds and a crimson-red moon.
There were various distorted spaces everywhere, leading to the dreams of various other people.
"This place… is the Dreamscape made up of the many dreams concentrated in this area… It is such an eerie place." I said.
"Indeed, I wanted to bring you here because of that, this entire place is very unnatural. Usually people wouldn't have so many distorted thoughts and minds constantly to the point they only have such dark nightmares… This place might possibly be fabricated…" she said.
"What?" I asked.
"Fabricated in the meaning that these people's minds and hearts were manipulated so they would only harbor hatred… even if this entire sect was made out of criminals, it wouldn't end like this, even the most murderous criminal shouldn't have so many nightmares every night, and even so, not all the three hundred people here… all together and at the same time…" said Belle.
"You're right… this is indeed quite fishy, could this had been provoked by someone else then? Artificially distorting the minds and- Ah, now that I remember, when I interrogated the souls of the Dark Shadow Sect Members, they were filled with an endless darkness, and big chunks of their memories were completely lost, which included important info I couldn't grasp back then…" I said.
"It must be that… This Sect… something malicious is dwelling in here to the point they had completely distorted the minds of the people… But why? Why would they cause so much pain to them without any gain? Because they're sadistic?" wondered Belle.
"Well, maybe… but there should be something else to gain from this, right?" I wondered.
"Exactly… And then, I noticed this… Look." Said Belle, pointing me at the sky.
And then I saw it, something I didn't noticed before because I was too concentrated into the conversation.
The black clouds atop the sky… they were not illusions.
What seemed like black clouds were in fact immense quantities of negative emotions concentrated together.
They all looked like wailing and monstrous humanoid faces groaning endlessly, but they were so far away from us I could barely heard anything.
Negative Emotions can become energy, which is often called Negative Energy… in this world, there is Emotion Magic, a branch of Illusion Magic.
This powerful magic helps their users extract the emotions of other people and use them to fight or… as fuel, energy.
"These are the negative emotions of all these people, they're being harvested every night! I can't… I couldn't believe it when I saw it, not even my creator ever dared to do such a thing… This is just outright barbaric…" said Belle.
"I see… But whoever is doing this… they're just accumulating these negative emotions without any point to it?" I wondered.
"Nope, that's not it… I don't know why but there's certainly something more to it, Drake… And I discovered this as well." Said Belle.
She held my hand and guided me upwards, until we suddenly noticed a small fracture in the dreamscape that led to somewhere else…
"Does this leads to the outside world?" I asked.
"No, I attempted to enter through it but I felt a powerful suction force, so I stopped, it is some sort of item that is draining the negative energy automatically…" said Belle.
"An item…" I said.
"Yes, an item… And it could quite possibly be part of the insane strength that the Dark Shadow Sect suddenly acquired out of nowhere… Aside from what you've learned about there being an Inheritance that the Sect Master of the Dark Shadow Sect found back then which aided in all they had done… there might be something else…" said Belle.
"Do you feel it?" I asked.
"Feel it? Ah…!" muttered Belle.
Indeed, she felt the same thing as I did.
A powerful entity that encompassed chaotic darkness seemed to be glaring at us right about now.
TRUUUMMM…!
Suddenly, two enormous crimson-red eyes looked down on us.
The entire dreamscape seemed to be its domain!
"You… Who are you?" I asked.
The eyes looked down on me, as the pupils seemed to dilate in surprise.
"Huhuh… Hahahahahaha!"
And it began to laugh.
