Wizard: Starting from the Skill Tree-Chapter 578: Nightmare Plane

He pushed the door open, a breath of air mixed with earth, plant humus, and a slight mustiness rushed towards him.

The interior of the hut was cramped and dim, with only a small window letting in some light.

A grey-haired, ragged old man was curled up on a pile of straw in the corner, his hands holding his head, his body slightly trembling.

He was the old gardener, Hans.

Old Gardener Hans had a vacant look in his eyes, his wrinkled face filled with fear and confusion, muttering repeatedly, "...It’s here again... dust... so much dust... they’re laughing in the dust... the castle has fallen asleep... outside... there’s nothing outside..." 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

Duke gestured to Ossen to wait outside the door, and he himself walked slowly into the hut.

He did not attempt to wake Hans with words, for someone who was mentally completely chaotic, direct communication was inefficient and might even cause a more violent stress reaction.

He crouched down, looking eye to eye with Hans, a subtle flash of silver glimmering in his deep gaze.

Powerful spiritual power, like the finest thread, carefully and non-invasively probed into the chaotic surface of Hans’s consciousness.

He wasn’t using a brute force method like soul-searching but trying to read it like a journal with torn pages and blurred handwriting to capture relatively complete fragments of information.

Spiritual power itself is an efficient means of information transmission, it’s just that most ordinary people’s spiritual power is too low to actively use it for communication.

But for a wizard of Duke’s level, he didn’t need a common person like Hans to actively use spiritual power to communicate, simply reading the fluctuations in Hans’s spiritual power was enough to learn a lot of information.

With Duke’s ability to control spiritual power, he could very precisely manage his own spiritual power, so he could read Hans’s chaotic spiritual power fluctuations without harming Hans’s own spiritual power.

Even though Hans’s spiritual power was already damaged, there was no need to make things worse.

At first, what poured into Duke’s perception was a chaotic swirl of colors and sharp fear emotions. But soon, he guided his spiritual power, like walking through fog, gradually capturing a relatively stable but extremely unsettling image.

Through Hans’s spiritual perspective, Duke saw a series of fragmented, chaotic images.

These intermittent images combined in Duke’s mind to form a relatively complete picture.

When Duke placed himself in Hans’s perspective, he found himself still standing inside Red Rock Castle, but everything was different.

The castle was still that castle, the walls of red rock, the familiar corridors, but everything was covered with a thick, grey-white dust, as if it had been abandoned for hundreds of years.

The wall lamps were extinguished, the stained glass had become filthy, losing all color.

The air was stagnant, carrying a scent of ancient dust and decay.

Hans’s awareness wandered aimlessly through the castle, his feet treading upon the soft, sound-absorbing dust, unable to hear his own footsteps.

Everything was dead silent all around, not a single sound of living things, not even the wind.

He pushed open a familiar door, it was the connecting corridor to the east wing garden.

Looking out through the corridor window, Hans’s awareness trembled violently with fear, outside the castle was not the Red Rock City he was familiar with, built upon red stones.

Instead, there was an endless, monotonous barren land, the ground cracked and grey-white, with no vegetation, only some bizarre, bone-like black rocks scattered about.

The sky was a depressing, uniform grey-white, no sun, no clouds, no night or day, only an eternally unchanging suffocating dead grey-white.

The outline of distant mountains twisted, like the spine of a dying giant beast.

In this world, besides the dust-covered castle, nothing seemed to exist.

A fear rooted in the instinct of life, a great dread of absolute nothingness and annihilation, seized Hans’s heart.

Duke suddenly opened his eyes, a grave look flashing in their depths.

He withdrew his spiritual power, looking at the still-babbling old gardener in front of him.

That was no mere hallucination or mental disorder.

The dust-laden castle and the silent exterior landscape reflected in Hans’s spiritual world had an uncanny authenticity, especially that sense of void and annihilation, which was absolutely not something an ordinary old painter could imagine from thin air.

Because those scenes carried a sense of reality and oppression, this oppression acted directly upon a person’s spiritual power.

An ordinary person couldn’t even survive in such an environment because their spiritual power couldn’t withstand such pressure.

This only indicated that the level of this environment was too high, not suitable for ordinary life forms to exist.

Like atmospheric pressure or water pressure, just like an ordinary sea fish cannot survive in the deep sea, as it lacks such strong bones.

It was precisely because of this environment that Old Gardener Hans’s mind collapsed, now leaving him a complete lunatic.

In Hans’s current state, he probably wouldn’t live much longer either.

Because the trauma to his spiritual power is permanent, unless extremely precious resources are used to repair it, but who would spend such resources to save an old gardener already on his last legs.

And that environment, Duke was extremely familiar with it, instantly recalling his past experiences in the Nightmare Plane.

That taste and feel were almost identical to the Nightmare Plane, even though seen through Hans’s spiritual power fluctuations, there was little difference from being there personally.

Duke’s expression grew a bit somber, involving the Nightmare Plane made things far from simple.

The Nightmare Plane was a top-tier plane, even among the entire Endless Plane it was considered a powerful top-tier plane.

It had no fixed location, woven from the dreams of countless living beings, as long as there were creatures dreaming, it remained eternal and unextinguished.

From this perspective, the other several deceased individuals likely also entered the Nightmare Plane, unable to withstand the Plane’s immense oppressive force, their very souls perishing there.

Hence, the bodies here appeared unharmed, and there were no signs of toxins.

The current issue is why such incidents have occurred consecutively at the castle.

The Duke of today was different from when he was a wizard apprentice, his understanding of the planes was far more profound.

From what Old Gardener Hans saw, it seemed the entire castle was projected into the Nightmare Plane, just as it was on Academy Island back then.

It was merely a projection of the surrounding environment reflected onto the Nightmare Plane, but back then, it was due to the effect of the Coordinates Earring.

The current situation in the castle, the cause is unknown and requires further investigation to uncover.