Fu Songcheng had a plan.
He bent slightly, leaning close to Bai Mu’s ear, deliberately lowering his voice and speaking slowly in a cold, drifting tone.
“Bai Mu… the amusement park doesn’t actually have just cotton candy…”
Bai Mu let out a confused nasal hum. “Hm?”
Fu Songcheng continued whispering in a bone-chilling voice: “There are also clowns. Their faces are painted on, and there’s no white in their eyes. When you’re asleep, they’ll stand by your bedside, watching you smile…”
The breathing of Bai Mu on the bed began to quicken.
“Do you hear the sound under the bed? Something is crawling, nails scraping the wooden boards. It’s crawled out, it’s climbing up along the bedsheet, its icy hand has already touched your ankle…”
“There’s a ghost! Help!”
A scream pierced the room’s tranquility.
Bai Mu shot bolt upright from the bed, as if waking from a nightmare.
She stared wide-eyed, looking around in utter terror, her eyes full of the helplessness and panic of a little girl facing unknown fear.
The familiar crack sounded again.
The cartoon posters on the wall, the plush toys at the head of the bed, the building blocks on the floor—along with Bai Mu’s shocked, doubtful face—all shattered. The scene before Fu Songcheng changed with it.
The lighting became somewhat harsh.
Fu Songcheng found himself standing beside an extremely narrow single-person desk. The desk was piled high like a small mountain with review materials, mock exam papers, and error notebooks. Five Years of Gaokao, Three Years of Simulations, Huanggang Secret Papers, Tianli 38 Sets…
Bai Mu was sprawled over a thick stack of test papers, head pillowed on her arms, sleeping soundly.
A red mark was pressed into her cheek. Her hand still loosely gripped a black gel pen, its tip smudging a large blot of black ink onto the draft paper beneath.
Fu Songcheng glanced at the calendar on the wall.
Thirty days until the Gaokao.
He immediately understood which layer of dream this was.
It was Bai Mu’s high school period—the most painful, most arduous time in most ordinary people’s lives.
Fu Songcheng casually pulled a half-finished math test paper out from under Bai Mu’s elbow.
It was covered in bright red crosses.
“At your age, how can you sleep?”
The voice wasn’t loud, yet it struck precisely on the most fragile nerve of a high school student.
Bai Mu’s brows instantly knitted together. Her body twisted uneasily in her sleep, turning her head away as if wanting to escape the voice.
Fu Songcheng didn’t stop. He opened the error notebook beside him and read coldly: “This physics problem—your force analysis even missed friction. Is this how you review?”
Bai Mu’s breathing grew heavy. Her fingers unconsciously tightened on the gel pen, her knuckles whitening slightly.
“Stop sleeping.”
Studying in this moment was no longer a path to knowledge, but a vicious curse. It trapped every examinee struggling within this system, nowhere to escape.
The anxiety of one point for a thousand people, ten thousand people, became an invisible giant hand, pushing dead at their backs—no stopping, no resting, no breathing.
Bai Mu’s brows knitted tighter and tighter.
She remembered her high school teacher’s words.
“Are you worthy of the tuition your parents paid, toiling from dawn to dusk? Are you worthy of your own three years of hardship? Fail to get into a good university and your whole life is ruined—you’ll end up screwing bolts in the lowest-tier factory, trampled underfoot.”
Those words were like a venomous snake’s tongue, licking at Bai Mu’s spirit—as if her life had no margin for error, a single exam would easily destroy her.
“Mm…”
Bai Mu let out a pained groan, her features twisting with anxiety.
She struggled desperately, wanting to climb out of that mountain of books and problems pressing down so hard she couldn’t breathe. Fine beads of sweat seeped onto her forehead; beneath her closed lids, her eyeballs rolled violently.
In the end, before Fu Songcheng could even speak, Bai Mu woke up on her own.
Doing problems, scores—what they were anxious about wasn’t knowledge, but the quantified evaluation standards under exam-oriented education. She wasn’t as smart as the geniuses, nor willing to be mediocre—and even a good, sound sleep was a luxury.
What was the biggest wish after the Gaokao? Probably to sleep well, to have a sweet dream.
But Bai Mu, before the exam, had no such right.
The space again let out a crisp crack. The test papers, the desk, the oppressive lighting, along with Bai Mu’s struggling figure doing problems—all shattered with it.
Fu Songcheng let out a soft breath. He was also surprised Bai Mu had woken up on her own.
He too had come through that period, but he’d been lucky—able to easily absorb knowledge other classmates needed ages to understand.
To make him blame a hard worker, to create anxiety for someone struggling bitterly—Fu Songcheng felt somewhat unable to bear it. But he couldn’t, for a moment of soft-heartedness, let Bai Mu keep sleeping and trap the two of them in her dream together.
So he could only say these words.
Though what Fu Songcheng actually wanted more to say was: life’s margin for error is actually very high. One exam, one interview, isn’t enough to destroy an entire life. Once you get through it, you’ll find those painful times have blurred; and the happy you will also thank the past, pained you.
But Bai Mu didn’t need his comfort or his awakening—she chose clarity herself, facing the problems and fighting on.
The surrounding scene rapidly reassembled.
They returned to an utterly ordinary room.
White sheets, white walls, a wall-mounted television.
Bai Mu was still lying on the bed, sprawled spread-eagle, the blanket kicked to one side, her sleeping posture utterly unrestrained and comfortable.
Fu Songcheng walked to the bedside.
He guessed this should represent her youth—or rather, her state after entering society.
To wake an adult, naturally one had to use an adult’s nightmare.
Fu Songcheng cleared his throat and stood by the head of the bed, speaking seriously: “Bai Mu, wake up. Your supervisor is looking for you. There’s an urgent project that needs you to handle immediately. Open your computer and work overtime right now.”
Bai Mu turned over, even smacking her lips.
No reaction whatsoever.
Fu Songcheng frowned slightly and raised the stakes: “Bai Mu, the client has overturned all your proposals. The client is furious right now and demands you redo a version within half an hour, or they’ll pursue the company’s breach of contract liability.”
Bai Mu’s breathing remained steady; not even her lashes trembled.
“You’ve been fired. The company went bankrupt, the boss absconded with the funds—your salary and performance bonus this month are all gone.”
Bai Mu slept even more soundly, even letting out an extremely faint snore.
At this moment, Bai Mu slept utterly peacefully, as if an invisible shield kept all worries at bay.
Fu Songcheng tried every crisis he could think of, his mouth dry, yet still couldn’t rouse her in the slightest.
He stopped, looking at the sleeping person on the bed, an uncontrollable anxiety welling up in his heart.
He didn’t know how many more layers Bai Mu’s dream had. If he stayed trapped here, he couldn’t leave either.
Fu Songcheng stepped back two paces and sat on the sofa beside them. He lowered his head and looked at the wristband on his wrist. He hadn’t seen his little stinky dog yet; he couldn’t be trapped in Bai Mu’s dream.
He unfastened the wristband and took it off.
Sensing Yu Huaiting’s state.
Yu Huaiting’s situation was very stable. Fu Songcheng guessed Yu Huaiting had most likely also fallen into some kind of dream and was sleeping.
Given Yu Huaiting’s personality of treating instances like an amusement park, even if he met a ghost in his dream, the ghost was probably being unilaterally beaten by him.
At that thought, Fu Songcheng relaxed.
He put the wristband back on his wrist and murmured softly to himself: “Must succeed in clearing.”
However, the instant the word “clearing” left his mouth.
Bai Mu—who had been sleeping peacefully, unresponsive to any external stimulus—suddenly changed expression.
Her brows knitted sharply, as if she’d heard some extremely disgusting word, her lips pressing slightly together.
Fu Songcheng keenly caught her expression change.
He rose from the sofa and walked to the bedside.
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