The Red Dragon Just Wants To Do As It Pleases

Dreams themselves are magical, and Lucid Dreams even more so.

In his previous life, David often experienced poor sleep. He would always wake up once between 2 and 4 a.m. Then, he would drift back to sleep in a drowsy state, easily entering the dream phase of his penultimate or last sleep cycle. This enabled him to remember snippets of his dreams upon waking.

As the details of remembered dreams accumulated, along with an increased frequency of dreaming, a situation often arose:

Eh, it feels like I've had this dream before.

Hold on, so I'm dreaming right now?

Congratulations, you've entered a Lucid Dream.

A Lucid Dream is often a nightmare from which children cannot escape, yet it is the ultimate experience adults yearn for.

Because in a Lucid Dream, you are the master of the dreamscape—able to fly, to phase through the earth, to transform into an immortal swordsman, and do anything.

Yes, you could even conjure up a passionately fiery island girl at a street corner to share a romantic escapade. Or, if you wished, you could transform the dream into some sort of nefarious Time Stasis game.

Of course, novices who lack experience often wake up from the dream due to excessive excitement and then regret it deeply.

After experiencing this several times, David searched online. He discovered that, according to incomplete surveys, only about fifty percent of people have had a Lucid Dream in their lifetime, while about twenty percent have had one within the past month.

This means one in five people occasionally have this extraordinary experience, but whether they can realize they are dreaming while in the dream is entirely up to luck.

However, some 'clever people' had already found tricks for Lucid Dreaming, like the famous Nobel laureate in physics, Feynman, and the well-known director, Nolan, among others.

And when it comes to those most adept with Lucid Dreams, none could surpass the founder of the electrical age—the 'King of Lightning,' Nikola Tesla.

In Tesla's memoirs, he claimed to have achieved: instant dream entry, absolute lucidity, holographic verisimilitude, and a disregard for physical laws.

He also claimed that during his invention and research process, some projects no longer required blueprints or models. He could complete this entire series of work holographically within his Lucid Dreams and then verify it with physical laws back in reality.

In other words, if Tesla wished, he could absolutely play an alien civilization-building game light-years away.

In some ways, this already counted as a real-world superpower, completely outperforming Charlotte's Temple of the Mind from the TV series.

Now, David was attempting to rediscover that half-asleep, half-awake sensation from his previous life.

Unfortunately, a dragon's body is hardly comparable to that of a mere human. David, already weary from traveling for nearly half a year, plunged directly into a deep sleep, his snores thundering loud enough to shake the heavens.

It's unknown how long he slept. But once his desire for sleep was satisfied, just as his eyelids began to flicker rapidly and he was on the verge of waking, he vaguely heard that familiar voice again:

"Crimson Calamity..."

"Lord of the End of All Things..."

"Blood Demon..."

"Please bestow upon me your power once more..."

"Damn it! Not again!" David was on the verge of instinctively waking due to Wrath.

Suddenly, he felt that these words were somewhat familiar...

Eh, it feels like I've had this dream before.

Hold on, so I'm dreaming right now?

Don't get excited. Lower your conscious awareness. Just go with the flow for now, David silently instructed himself.

This was the 'dream stabilization' phase—an optional step after achieving dream entry and dream recognition, but before dream control.

Because many novices in Lucid Dreaming often wake up at this stage if they think too deeply.

Although David had considerable experience with this, the problem was that his current Red Dragon body was too robust; it completely lacked the physical and mental exhaustion he'd felt as a human.

Just like so many times before, the slightest emotional disturbance or a fractional increase in his thought speed would instantly wake him.

When that familiar voice sounded once more, David did nothing this time, merely maintaining his half-asleep, half-awake state.

Sure enough, the dream finally 'stabilized' this time and continued:

"Redscale, you're praying to that unintelligible being again? How's it going, still no response, right?"

As David, with some effort, 'tried to open his eyes,' he finally sensed the presence of light and saw the girl the other boy called Redscale.

David simply couldn't make out the girl's true face. Perhaps it was because his perspective was shaky, or maybe a pane of 'glass' obstructed his view. He could barely distinguish two 'goat horns' on her head, resembling those of a Demon or a Dragon.

A Tiefling? Demon Bloodline? No, wait... that nickname, Redscale. Could she be a Half-Dragon with Red Dragon blood?

So, it's a dream with a fantasy magic world setting?

David felt a pang of disappointment. He had hoped to use the Lucid Dream to return to Blue Star for a couple of bottles of 'happy water' to satisfy his craving.

As David mulled things over with an extremely slow thought process, the boy, seeing Redscale remain silent, immediately continued, his voice grating,

"I told you so! How could those beings possibly respond to the prayers of 'mongrels' like us? Instead of wasting energy on that, you'd be better off eating more and sleeping more. Once you're here, don't even think about leaving. You might as well just tough it out for a few more years. Maybe then you could even become 'livestock'—and then, heh heh heh..."