บท 56: CHAPTER 56: KILLING DREAMS

Head Guard Helio brought David to a small room inside the mining headquarters building that Mr. Harver's office was located inside.

"You can sleep in here tonight. Someone will bring by a few presents for you later," Head Guard Helio said with a grin,"Enjoy yourself....tomorrow, you go back to work in the mines."

After he shut the door, David heard the bolts locking from the outside. David walked over to the bed kicked off his shoes and laid down. It sure was nice to lay down on a bed again. For the last week, he had slept on the shitty floor of a prison cell and the cold hard floor of the tunnels. It was nice to finally have some decent sleep on something besides rock.

As David laid down in the bed, he began formulating a plan for the night. These people had made a mistake by letting him sleep on the surface near other people. In the caves, he could only hunt and kill insect beasts.....but sleeping up here, he could kill people.

David was thrilled at the chance to kill some of his captors. Now, he just needed to think of how to pull it off. He began remembering the ways that he had killed people in the past. After thinking over his past situations, the one that kept popping into his head was when he made Sonia Carmine's two stalkers get in a fight to the death. Maybe he could use the manipulation of dreams to cause chaos in this branch family town of the Diego Family.

With a smile, David sat and waited for nightfall. He was really going to enjoy tonight.....and Misery probably would too. She had gained considerable strength when absorbing the dream orbs of the beasts in the tunnels. The odd thing was that when she absorbed the soul energy....David also received a portion of the energy taken. David could feel that she needed much more to have enough to create a new physical body.

Having time to kill, David took the small pebble out of his bag. Looking at the stone, David smiled when he thought of the plan. While everyone thought that he was going to make a fake eye, he was actually going to make a fake....fake eye. It would really be a small hiding spot where he could store something important. He had a few ideas of what to use it for, but he had a feeling that he might find something important in the mines one day...and he needed to work out ways to smuggle the stuff out for himself. He did not want these people to get the good stuff.

David spent about an hour fiddling with the stone before he heard a key in the door of his room. The door opened and a guard appeared with a woman over his shoulder and a bag in the other. He sat the bag down on the table and placed the woman on the bed beside David.

"Have fun," the guard said before he closed and re-locked the door.

David just stood there perplexed. They had brought him a woman and a book as rewards? Was he some sort of fucking caveman?

Looking at the woman from the back, David stood up and pulled out a chair from the table.

"Why don't you get off the bed and sit down and relax," David said as he turned around to offer direction to the woman.

When he turned around, he gasped at the sight of the woman's face as she laid there staring at him from the bed. She had a long scar down one side of her face with burn marks on the other side. A chunk was missing from her nose like someone had bitten it.

David's heart wretched at the sight of the woman. She must have been very beautiful before these cruel sons of bitches got a hold of her. 'What kind of monsters could do this to someone?', David thought....then he remembered Misery.

With a thought, David's voice appeared in his soul world, "Hey Misery. Can you help me out?"

"Sure, what do you need?," Misery asked.

"I am carrying out my plan of getting on the good side of these people and they brought me a slave woman for the night as a reward. She is in pretty bad shape.....I don't really know how to handle this," David said pleadingly in his soul world.

"Oh...," Misery said very calmly before asking, "Is there anyway you can let me see her?"

David looked at the woman and willed Misery to be able to see the outside world.

After a moment, Misery finally spoke to David mentally, "Oh...I don't know how I can explain this to you. But you can not help her at this point. She is devoid of hope and drive. Her soul is probably locked away on the inside with only a small portion showing to us on the outside to keep her alive. If you brought out her soul, she may be able to recover.....or she may just kill herself on the spot. Maybe we can help her in her dreams?"

"Sure, Misery...we can try," David said with a bid of remorse, ".....and we can also get a little payback for her in the process."

Seeing that the woman was basically in a catatonic stage, David stepped over to the table to look in the bag that was dropped off. Inside were two pieces of rations and a book that read "Gem, Stones, and Ores" on the cover.

Without anything better to do, David place the food ration near the woman on the nightstand and sat down at the table to read the book.

After a few hours of reading, David felt enlightened as he completed the book. He now understood the basic of heavenly energy stones, soul stones, elemental gems and metallic ores. Heavenly energy stones were stones of concentrated heavenly energy that are created by natural formations in the world. Soul stones are either fossilized cores from the souls of dead beasts or the concentration of souls brought together by a natural phenomenon. Elemental gems are concentrated elemental energies from natural occurrences that could boost skill performance. Metallic ores are....just metallic ores.....but the rarity of some ores makes them ideal for weapons manufacturing.

The book also had a few descriptions of notable stones and ores. David had really wanted the knowledge from this part. If it were up to him, he wouldn't bring the Diego family any resources that would truly help them.....he didn't want the knowledge to try to better his position like he had told Mr. Harver....he wanted the knowledge to hurt the Diego family.

Since he was done reading, he didn't really have anything else to do, so David took one of the two pillows off of the bed and found a comfortable spot in the corner of the room. The woman could have the bed to herself tonight. David didn't need the comfort that bad.

David hung out in the corner of the room circulating his internal heavenly energy until the first hints of darkness began to peak in through the barred window of the room.

Seeing the darkness, David smiled and closed his eyes. He entered his soul space and was immediately assaulted by an excited Misery.

"Are we really going to get back at some of the people that did that to her? Really?," Misery said in an excited tone.

"Yes, but first let's check her dreams out," David said before making his way over to the woman's dreams.

As they reached the closest dream orb, David said to Misery, "Let's just take a peak in the dream first. If she is stuck in a good dream, then I will leave her be.....if she is in a bad one, I will fix it. That is the most that I can do for now."

David pushed his face against the dream orb and was instantly looking down on a small village in the mountains of Peru. The village appeared to be a small primitive place with only several dozen occupants. David could see the woman....her face restored to it full beauty.....playing with some children out in front of a small shack. She looked so happy. All of a sudden a gunshot sounded out in the village and a group of commandos stormed in with weapons drawn. Seeing the picture perfect dream turning into a nightmare....David decided to focus in on the faces of the men entering the village...maybe he could recognize one later. After memorizing a few of the faces, David put a stop to the attack and returned the dream back to the point where the woman was playing with the children. He deleted the bad part of the dream and decided to let the woman enjoy perpetual happiness playing with the children.

Pulling his face out of the orb, he looked at Misery, "She was having a mixture of nice dream and nightmare....I removed the nightmare portion.....she should feel much better now."

"Thank you.....Night," Misery said while looking at David appreciatively.

"No need for thanks. I know the faces of a few of the men who invaded her little village.....let's go hunting," David said with an evil grin.

David started to focus really hard. He wanted to see his soul's limits after his promotion to demigod. After a few moments of concentration, David was very pleased with the results. He could almost cover the entire 20 acre town with his soul's world perception. Looking around, David estimated around 600 dream orbs floating about in his view. For a second, he thought about crushing every orb that he could see...he wanted to know what would happen...but he shook off the thought to get back to his task.

"Misery, get to searching.....see if you can find us one," David said as he reached out with his hand and touched Misery's forehead. He had projected the images of the men into Misery's mind.

"WOW!," Misery said, "I didn't know you could do that."

"I didn't either," David said, "I saw someone do it once and it looked cool.....so I figured why not try.....ha ha..."

"Idiot," Misery said before flying off to look in orbs.

____________________________

While Misery was off on her adventure, David decided to look around and find some more information about the town. He wanted to find the demigods in charge of this oasis town. He assumed it had to be demigods in charge....gods were too rare. The Carmine family only had two gods....the Diego Family couldn't be that much stronger.

Looking through the dream orbs, he noticed that three of them were brighter than the others with a smaller orb floating around each of them.

'Damn. Those three must be the Demigods in charge of the oasis. I was hoping there was only one in this small town,' David thought.

Floating over to the nearest one, David started to investigate the differences with the Demigod dream orbs. The main dream orb was slightly larger than a standard person's, but the little orb floating around felt completely different. To test out the smaller orb, David began to focus in on it just like any other dream orb. Almost immediately, a burst of intense explosive warmth hit David.

Startled, David instantly pulled his soul's focus away from the tiny orb.

Since David lacked a good bit of knowledge about souls, he tried to piece together some understanding based on the information he had available. Foundation Stage cultivators promoted to Demigod when their understanding of a skill combined with a concept. When David had promoted to Demigod, his shadow skill and concept had coagulated into a small sphere orbiting around his soul. So this fiery sphere must be the skill concept of this Demigod.

David assumed that this Demigod must practice in the Truth of Fire and judging from the violent burst of heat....he had guessed that orb was the concept of the Explosion Skill.

Deciding that it would be best to avoid the concept orb, David wanted to see if he could enter the dream orb as normal. David willed his focus over the main dream orb. The main orb slightly resisted David's infiltration, but with a focus of his own soul's strength....David had popped into into the Demigod's dream orb with relative ease.

After taking a look into the demigod's dream, David couldn't keep from shaking his head. The old man seemed to be having a mixture of pleasurable fantasy and nightmare. In the dream, a beautiful woman was naked and riding on top of the man. All of a sudden, a group of guards burst into the room and yelled that the oasis is under attack. The old man threw the woman aside....put on some clothes...and stormed out to battle the incoming demon army. It seemed that this old man loved his vices but feared that demons would invade the oasis.

'A demon invasion,' David thought, 'that would be a good thing to brew an internal conflict.' With a few pushes of his will, David modified the old demigods dreams...he completely deleted the portion about the demon invasion and gave the man a full set of pleasurable dreams with no threats from demons. David felt that this manipulation effort expended a lot more of his soul energy. He could change normal people's dreams without any effort at all, but this Level 1 Demigod made him feel like he had used about half of his available energy.

But why did he make the old man forget about his demon worries? Was David being nice? Nope....after leaving the dream, he coasted around to each of the nearest dream orbs and planted the seeds of dread concerning a demon invasion. Now all the advisers and aids would be terrified of the possibility of a demon invasion while one of the leading demigods would be completely oblivious.

David spent some time modifying the dreams of the subordinates to promote an internal dispute about the possibility of a demon invasion. Eventually, David started to realize that his time asleep was almost up. Just as he was about to go look for Misery, he heard her call out to him mentally, "Night....Night...I found one."

_______________________________________

Moving over to Misery, David looked into the orb to find a man raping and pillaging a village. This freak actually fantasied about the devastation that he caused people. Taking his focus away from the orb, he looked at Misery and said with no emotion, "Torture him.....then crush his orb and consume it."

Misery immediately got to work and after about 30 minutes....she exited the dream orb with a smile on her face.....then she smacked both of her hands on either side of the orb causing it to explode. In one big breath, Misery breathed in all the particles and pieces of the destroyed soul orb and said, "Ahhhhh...so yummy."

"Alright, it is time for us to leave now. I need to wake up," David said before willing himself out of the soul space. Just as he was about to leave, he could have swore that he saw a flash of light moving on the outskirts of his perception. He refocused again, but nothing was there. Shaking his head, he left the soul world and woke up.