Chapter Forty-One: Dream Erosion

The imperial border has been anything but safe lately.

It was so unsafe that Ethan had been hauled out of bed for a meeting after less than four hours of sleep. A blackboard, procured from goodness knows where, had appeared in Ivy’s living room, plastered with documents sent from Gear City. She had even prepared name tags, labeled with codenames like "Alpha Wolf" and "Chicken Herder."

But before the meeting could begin, Ms. Rose needed to clarify one thing.

Her beautiful eyes were filled with profound bewilderment. "Why are you gnawing on a hardtack again?"

Without anyone noticing, Ethan had become almost synonymous with hardtack, as if he were a man naturally meant to be clutching one at all times.

"Because I didn’t have breakfast before I came... wait, is eating breakfast not allowed during meetings?"

"Breakfast? It’s nearly afternoon!"

Realizing she had been sidetracked by Ethan, Ivy continued, "I didn't say meetings don't allow eating. I’m just asking why you only eat hardtack. Just how much do you love the stuff?"

An outsider might think the Riverwood Containment Bureau intelligence station was so poorly funded that she, as the station chief, was mistreating her subordinates. If those who knew her back in the Imperial Capital found out about this, the Margaret family name would be dragged through the mud.

"Reporting to Ms. Rose, it’s because the shop was having a 'buy ten, get three free' promotion last time I went, and I ended up buying too many!"

Fortunately, Miss Chloe was never a picky eater. She was happy with whatever he fed her; Ethan had even observed her eating tree bark once when no other food was available.

Ivy pressed a hand to her forehead. The "buy ten, get three free" deal was obviously a clearance tactic for stale bread that wouldn't sell, yet this guy acted as if he’d struck gold. It seemed she would have to invite him over to her place more often to improve his diet.

"Early this morning, the Gear City Containment Bureau sent a letter ordering us to temporarily halt all investigative work. They also warned the residents of Riverwood not to leave the town easily."

"What happened now?"

Ethan’s heart tightened. Riverwood had seen more major events in the last few days than in the previous two years. Was it possible that Miss Becky and her seven old stewards had won their resurrection tournament and were coming here to film "Becky’s Revenge: Season Two"?

"A few days ago, bureau investigators spotted two members of the 'Dream Eaters' at the imperial border. They seem to be attempting to enter the empire through one of the border towns."

The crunching sound stopped. A pale-faced Ethan handed the remaining two-thirds of his hardtack to Miss Chloe, who accepted it without hesitation, swallowing the entire chunk in one go and puffing out her cheeks.

"Are you talking about *the* Dream Eaters?"

Ethan felt that adding the emphasis was the only way to convey the gravity of the situation.

"What else?"

Ethan knew that, according to the usual tropes, he was about to fall into a flashback.

The first time he saw the Dream Eaters in the *Griffin Daily*, it left an indelible impression on him. It was a murder case in Gear City where the victim was the Deputy Director of the Containment Bureau. He had been killed at his mistress's home; both his and his mistress's bodies had been sliced into 316 pieces by some kind of sharp implement and scattered throughout the crime scene.

Even worse, the images in the *Griffin Daily* were often animated, like an old black-and-white film, allowing Ethan to witness the upscale apartment filled with blood and human remains from a first-person perspective. It was a case that occurred shortly after he had transmigrated, leaving a permanent scar on his young, fragile psyche.

Since then, the "Dream Eaters" would occasionally appear in the *Griffin Daily*. Each appearance was invariably accompanied by a sensational case. None of the names linked to the organization had ever survived, even when they hired the finest local guards or fortified their estates to an impossible degree—it only resulted in a few more, or dozens more, corpses at the scene.

Typically, the victims who died at the hands of the Dream Eaters died in very creative ways. The crime scenes were usually sights rarely seen even in B-grade horror films. To put it bluntly, the gap between Miss Becky and the Dream Eaters was like the difference between a sole proprietor and a Fortune 500 company.

Over time, concerned citizens who read the papers as often as Ethan did couldn't help but ask: Why was a group of serial killers targeting high-ranking nobles, government officials, and the upper echelons of the Church, yet no one had been able to take them down?

At least in the two years he had spent in Riverwood, not a single Dream Eater member had been captured or killed. Consequently, a theory had become rampant among the public: Every member of the Dream Eaters was a saint who worshipped an evil god, which was why disaster spread wherever they went, as if the evil god himself had descended upon the world.

And now, two such evil saints had appeared at the imperial border at the same time?

Ethan felt a sinister premonition and asked, trembling, "With the branch office sending so many files, you don't intend for us to deal with that bunch of perverted serial killers, do you?"

"Of course not. After receiving the report, the Empire began mobilizing an elite order of knights, who should be departing for the border shortly. Our duty is to meet them in town and help them understand the local situation. Come to think of it, the reason the witch hasn't made a move on Riverwood yet is likely because she, too, has heard the news about the Dream Eaters."

"That’s most likely it!" Ethan immediately agreed. "By the way, as for big shots like the Dream Eaters, they shouldn't bother us average folks, right?"

"Hard to say."

"...What do you mean 'hard to say'? I recall the *Griffin Daily* never reporting them slaughtering civilians."

"But they are hunting down people from the Containment Bureau."

Ethan’s expression turned serious immediately. "Ms. Rose, I have a plan, though I don’t know if I should share it."

"Speak."

"Is there any way we could resign from the Containment Bureau, return to being ordinary residents, and then re-register the Riverwood intelligence station after those perverted killers have left?"

"Resigning wouldn't help. The Gear City branch received word this morning that a researcher who was fired from headquarters years ago was found dead in Hearth Bay. In fact, quite a few retired or career-changed former investigators have been assassinated."

Watching Ethan’s face grow increasingly grave, she added a key piece of information. "However, most of them were Grade A investigators or higher. I suspect these cases have a hidden agenda, so I had the branch office send over all the relevant files. Since we have nothing better to do before the kingdom's army arrives, we might as well use these files to pass the time."

Ivy’s dark circles were a dead giveaway. Ethan could imagine that she must have been too excited to sleep after receiving the files, getting up at the crack of dawn to investigate. Theoretically, as a Grade B investigator at the Riverwood intelligence station, she had no clearance to access these files, but that was the power of the Margaret name.

"What clues have you found?"

"Three years ago, the Containment Bureau experienced a major containment breach. To suppress the rioting anomalies, the former director led a team into the isolation zone and died inside."

"I know about that." The former director was the author of the *Encyclopedia of Cursed Objects*; he died at the age of 33.

"The former investigators targeted by the Dream Eaters are all, to some extent, linked to that containment breach."

Ivy stared at the case summaries on the blackboard, lost in thought. Rather than a terrorist attack, this looked more like a calculated purge—a purge of the Grade A investigators who had survived that breach.