Chapter 665 – Dreamweaver World 3

The door lock had long since rusted shut, so Mo Lan simply pulled the door closed.

She retrieved several stone tablets inscribed with alchemical runes from the small pouch at her waist and set up a defensive magic formation at the doorway.

Magical energy coursed across the walls, ceiling, and floor before quickly concealing itself.

Once she confirmed it was secure, Mo Lan used a Cleaning spell to sweep away years of accumulated dust, revealing the mottled floor tiles beneath.

Only then did she take out her Spatial Tent and carefully set it up in the center of the room.

“Zhizhi! Keep watch for me—call me if anyone comes!” Mo Lan called out softly. The zipper on the inner pocket of her backpack was opened from inside, and a fuzzy little silver-furred monkey wriggled out.

Zhizhi hopped out of the backpack, nodded solemnly, and patted its small chest with its tiny paws in assurance: “From this moment on, I won’t drink a single drop of wine. I’ll focus entirely on keeping guard for you, Master—I guarantee I won’t miss a single unusual sound!”

To prove its commitment, it even pulled out a handful of magic cards.

Watching Zhizhi alertly perk up its little ears and patrol around the room, Mo Lan finally relaxed and lifted the tent’s door flap, stepping inside.

She found a comfortable position on the Living Room sofa and lay down, the soft cushions supporting the back of her neck just right.

Mo Lan regulated her breathing, allowing her body to fully relax, then began receiving the Dreamweaver World’s knowledge infusion.

Instantly, an enormous stream of information surged into her mind like a tidal wave.

Yet the expected shock never came.

A few minutes later, Mo Lan blinked, sorting through the newly acquired information while gazing quizzically up at the magic chandelier casting its gentle glow above her. “That’s it?”

She clearly remembered the materials warning that knowledge infusion could cause confusion, mental disorientation, dizziness, headaches, nausea, and other side effects, and that Explorers were strongly advised to undergo the process only in an absolutely safe environment.

She had gone to great lengths specifically because of this—finding this safe house, setting up protective magic, posting Zhizhi on guard.

And yet she had barely lain down for a few minutes before the entire process was over.

Not only had she experienced no discomfort whatsoever, she had remained fully conscious throughout.

An infusion of this intensity could have been handled perfectly well while standing in the middle of the street daydreaming.

Mo Lan was certain she could cast magic while simultaneously receiving a knowledge infusion, with absolutely no need to worry about being attacked during the process.

“It seems the warnings in the materials don’t apply to every novice Explorer.”

She murmured to herself, reflecting on the knowledge infusion process she had just undergone.

The newly added knowledge about Dream-Eating Tapirs reminded her of Earth’s civilization memory.

When Earth had infused her with civilization memory, it had first gently expanded her psychic power, then transmitted the civilization’s memories into her mental sea, embedding them so deeply in her mind that they could never be forgotten.

The Dreamweaver World employed an entirely different method. It had packaged all knowledge about Dream-Eating Tapirs into a complete “knowledge packet” using psychic energy and inserted it directly into her mind.

Under normal circumstances, this knowledge packet would mount itself like an external program within the Explorer’s mental sea.

It wouldn’t consume the Explorer’s own psychic power, but would initially create a certain sensation of pressure, causing discomfort. The contents of the knowledge packet could be accessed at any time, as clearly and readily as one’s own memories.

However, when an Explorer left the Dreamweaver World, this externally mounted knowledge packet would automatically uninstall, and the knowledge within would vanish along with it.

This mechanism was designed to protect Explorers—preventing the accumulated volume of knowledge infusions from other worlds from growing too large and interfering with their original memories.

But the mage Explorers of Valen had discovered that if one could actively digest and absorb the infused knowledge, it could be converted into permanent memory.

Better still, if one could fully master this knowledge, the psychic energy that had carried it could be assimilated as well, resulting in growth of one’s psychic power.

This was precisely why the exploration journals of Valen’s mage Explorers always included a period dedicated to digesting the knowledge infused by the world consciousness.

Sometimes it occurred right after arriving in a world, other times just before departing after completing a mission.

Mo Lan surmised that the reason she had completed the knowledge infusion so effortlessly was most likely thanks to the training from Earth’s civilization memory and her already vast reserves of psychic power.

The “Dream-Eating Tapir knowledge packet” that others would need days to slowly digest and absorb, Mo Lan had fully processed during the infusion itself, leveraging her enormous surplus of psychic power.

This knowledge was no longer simply mounted in her mental sea—it had been replicated one-to-one into indelible memory.

The psychic energy the Dreamweaver World had used to carry the knowledge was also completely absorbed as she thoroughly mastered it, converting into her own psychic power.

The end result was nothing short of perfect—her psychic power had grown considerably, and she had permanently acquired all knowledge about Dream-Eating Tapirs. Even after leaving the Dreamweaver World, she would not forget any of it.

Mo Lan keenly realized that for her, knowledge infusion was not merely a means of acquiring mission-world knowledge—it was also a precious psychic power “experience packet.”

When selecting missions in the future, she would need to factor in the additional benefits that knowledge infusions could provide.

The only regrettable thing was that this knowledge mentioned Dream-Eating Tapirs tended to appear in places dense with dream energy.

They would wait for humans to enter the dream realm, then stealthily insert their feeding tubes into human brains, using the connection between humans and the dream realm to siphon the dream realm’s energy.

Dream-Eating Tapirs were energy-state creatures that required special methods to detect and hunt. At most, their energy siphoning would leave humans feeling slightly weak upon waking.

What made them even more troublesome was that these cunning creatures thoroughly understood the principle of “sustainable development.”

They never parasitized a single host for long, instead rotating through populations like bees gathering nectar from different flowers.

This strategy ensured a stable energy source while preventing any individual host from being drained long enough to face life-threatening danger—stealth taken to the absolute extreme.

Thinking about this, Mo Lan couldn’t help but sigh. Given these circumstances, the old district was indeed far from an ideal hunting ground.

The resident population here was quite unusual. Not only were there large numbers of underage children who hadn’t yet reached the legal age to enter the dream realm, but there were also many “dream-shy” individuals—people who had suffered severe psychological trauma in the dream realm and developed such deep-seated fear that they dared not enter again. If they hadn’t lost the ability to extract resources from the dream realm, they would never have become so impoverished as to live in the old district’s welfare housing.

The dream realm energy here was clearly no match for the neighboring new district.

Even if Dream-Eating Tapirs came, they would only seek targets in the more densely populated new district, where there were far more dream explorers.

“I’ll have to move to the new district after all!”