Chapter 1761 — A Strange Dream (Part Two)

"Yaoyao, tell us first. What did you feel last night?" Wei Zhao did not answer Gu Mengyao's question. Instead, he asked her one of his own.

"Last night..." Gu Mengyao frowned, apparently trying to recall what had happened. After thinking for a while, she said, "The three of us agreed that each of us would keep watch over the pot for a while. When it was my turn, I grew a little bored and sleepy, and somehow I fell asleep... I do not know what happened after that. When I woke up, I was lying in bed, and I even instinctively told them to go check the pot..."

"So you knew nothing at all about what happened after you fell asleep?" Wei Zhao nodded as he asked.

"Wait... I vaguely remember having a dream..." Gu Mengyao suddenly recalled the dream she had had the night before. When people woke in the morning, unless they deliberately tried to remember, their dreams simply faded away and were never mentioned again. But Wei Zhao and the others kept prompting Gu Mengyao to think back, and so she finally remembered that strange dream of hers.

"What kind of dream?" Wei Zhao asked hurriedly.

"I dreamed... I dreamed that I seemed not to be myself..." Gu Mengyao was at a loss for how to describe it.

"What do you mean, you were not yourself?" Wei Zhao was slightly taken aback by her words.

"It was me controlling the person in the dream, but that person did not seem to be me..." Gu Mengyao offered an equally vague explanation. "It was as if, in one of your dreams, there were someone called Xiao Shu, and you could control Xiao Shu's body..."

"Wow, Sister Yaoyao, that is amazing!" Shen Yushu exclaimed. "Brother Arrow can control Xiao Shu now..."

"Ahem..." Wei Zhao coughed twice, caught somewhere between laughter and tears. "Xiao Shu, stop fooling around. Yaoyao was only giving an example. I understand what she means. The person at the center of the dream was not her, yet she could control that person's actions..."

"Yes, exactly!" Gu Mengyao nodded and continued. "I dreamed that I was the leader of a very powerful sect. Everyone called me Palace Mistress..."

"Palace Mistress?" Wei Zhao was faintly startled. Could this be what people meant by dreaming of what occupied their thoughts by day? They had only just discussed the Dark Night Palace, and now Gu Mengyao had dreamed something like this?

"Yes, everyone called me Palace Mistress... The strange thing was that the Palace Mistress did not look like me, though she did resemble me somewhat. I had no idea who she really was..." Gu Mengyao went on. "It seemed that a ritual was being held. Someone brought me a completely black creature called a Dark Phoenix and asked me to consume it... And I actually swallowed the Dark Phoenix whole... Can you imagine it? I swallowed an animal the size of a pheasant in one piece. Now that I think about it, how terrifying was that? Yet the me in the dream seemed to regard it as the most natural thing in the world..."

When Gu Mengyao finished, strange expressions spread across Tang Yun's and Xiao Shu's faces. Wei Zhao, meanwhile, was caught between laughter and tears. When Gu Mengyao asked whether they could imagine it, they all had the same thought: not only could they imagine it, they had witnessed it with their own eyes.

They had all seen Gu Mengyao swallow that Black Phoenix whole the day before. Could that Black Phoenix have been the Dark Phoenix she was talking about?

"What happened next?" Wei Zhao did not comment. He merely continued questioning her.

"Then... then I seemed to enter some incredibly mysterious state. I could see what was happening in the dream, and I knew that the me in the dream had no consciousness of her own. At that moment, a flash of golden light suddenly passed through the dream self's eyes. Then her entire body was surrounded by a cloud of gold. It circled around her before finally gathering at her back and forming a pair of golden wings... At that point, everyone present knelt before me and congratulated me, saying that I had acquired some sort of Dark Phoenix bloodline..." Gu Mengyao frowned as she spoke, apparently still shaken by the scene in her dream.

"And after that?" Wei Zhao nodded and asked.

"After that... I do not think I dreamed anything else. I woke up once, and it was already morning..." Gu Mengyao thought for a moment, then said with lingering unease, "Is that not frightening?"

"It certainly is frightening... But, Sister Yaoyao, do you know what you did yesterday?" Shen Yushu asked.

"What did I do?" Gu Mengyao asked.

"You swallowed... the Black Phoenix we bought yesterday..." Wei Zhao said with a wry smile. "It was exactly like what you described in your dream. You simply stuffed the Black Phoenix from the pot into your mouth, then gulped it down into your stomach... Afterward, a flash of gold passed through your eyes, and your body was enveloped in golden light as well. In the end, you grew a pair of golden wings..."

"What?" Gu Mengyao's eyes widened. "Then... it was not a dream?"

"I do not know whether it was a dream... But the scene you described was astonishingly similar to what actually happened!" Wei Zhao said. "That is also why Xiao Shu said you had eaten everything yourself."

"That cannot be right. Did I really... eat the entire Black Phoenix we cooked yesterday?" Gu Mengyao instinctively touched her stomach, but she felt nothing unusual at all.

"You did, Sister Yaoyao. Was the Black Phoenix tasty? I wanted to try some, but you drank all the broth..." Shen Yushu licked her lips and said regretfully, "I love strange delicacies most of all."

"It was really me?" Gu Mengyao blushed. She pointed at herself awkwardly and asked in disbelief.

"It was you!" Tang Yun nodded as well. "You scared us half to death."

"Then... after I ate it, did everything happen just as I described?" Gu Mengyao was also beginning to feel uncertain.

"Yes, exactly!" Wei Zhao said. "It was almost identical... Fortunately, you do not seem to have suffered any problems."

"That is terrifying." Gu Mengyao could scarcely imagine how she had managed to swallow an entire Black Phoenix, yet there was no way Wei Zhao and the others would lie to her. The only possible explanation was that she had truly swallowed the whole Black Phoenix the night before.

And yet nothing at all seemed wrong with her. That was what made the whole thing so utterly baffling.

"Calling it frightening is perhaps an overstatement," Wei Zhao said. "It was merely rather strange... Could your dream have been hinting at something?"

"Hinting at something? Do you mean that after swallowing the Black Phoenix, I acquired some kind of Dark Phoenix bloodline as well?" Gu Mengyao asked, her expression odd.

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