It was 2 AM, and the only light in Ethan's small apartment came from his laptop screen, a pale white glow casting long, tired shadows across his face. The numbers on the screen were his arch-enemy, red figures shouting rudely from his bank statement. Late rent, an electricity bill about to be cut off, and the student loan payment haunting him like a ghost. The air in the room was heavy, thick with the smell of long-cold instant coffee, and the un-washable scent of worry.
Ethan wasn't lazy. He worked two part-time jobs, at a café and a warehouse, but they barely covered the basics in this expensive city. He was running on a giant hamster wheel, expending all his energy just to stay in the same spot.
Ding.
A soft sound came from a secure, anonymous chat window on his laptop, the only window that gave him a glimmer of hope. This was his access to his third job, the one he could never talk about, the one that paid more than all his other work combined.
A new message popped up from an unknown client, codenamed "Sphinx."
[Request: Very Urgent.]
[Subject: My daughter, Lillian, 8 years old.]
[Status: Dream coma for 48 hours. Doctors are helpless. She shows signs of extreme terror in her sleep. I fear we are losing her.]
[Attachments: Photo of the child, a lock of her hair to be left at the agreed location.]
[Reward: 50,000 units.]
Ethan's fingers froze above the keyboard. Fifty thousand. That amount would change everything. It would pay his rent for months, cover the bills, and give him a rare bit of breathing room. But the risk was as big as the reward. A 48-hour dream coma meant the Mind Eater attacking her was strong and deeply rooted in her mind. This wasn't a routine cleaning job. This was a rescue operation in a psychic disaster zone.
Clients didn't really know what they were dealing with. All they knew was there was someone on the dark web, someone known as Morpheus, who claimed to solve "stubborn sleep disturbances." They were desperate, willing to pay anything for a miracle. And Ethan was willing to sell them that miracle.
He typed a concise reply.
[Morpheus: Request accepted. I'll start work within an hour. Leave attachments at location. Payment upon subject's awakening.]
He closed the laptop, feeling a wave of cold adrenaline wash over his exhausted body. He got up and went to his closet, pulling out a small wooden box. It didn't hold weapons or weird tools, just noise-cancelling headphones, an eye mask, and a small bio-sensor that stuck to his finger, connected to a wristwatch showing his heart rate. These were his tools, not for fighting monsters, but for stabilizing his consciousness amidst the chaos.
He put on his coat and stepped out into the city's silent night, heading for an abandoned mailbox in a back alley, the "agreed location." There, he found a small envelope containing a photograph of a beautiful child with curly blonde hair, and beside it, a soft lock of that hair tied with a pink ribbon. He felt a pang of responsibility. This wasn't just a job; it was a child's life.
He returned to his apartment, locked the door and shutters, and unplugged his phone. Any disturbance in the real world while he was in the dream world could be catastrophic. He lay down on his worn couch, placed the photo and hair lock on his chest, put on his headphones and eye mask, and secured the sensor to his index finger.
He took a deep breath, then another. He began emptying his mind of everything: debts, exhaustion, fear. He focused only on the photo, on Lillian's face, and on the feel of her hair between his fingers. This was the method, this was the key that let him in. It wasn't a power he summoned, but a door he opened. A door between reality and dream.
The physical world began to fade. The faint hum of the refrigerator turned into a distant drone. The feeling of the couch beneath him became vague. He felt the familiar sensation of falling, as if dropping through layers of static electricity. Distorted colors and shapes flashed behind his eye mask, then suddenly stabilized.
He opened his eyes.
He was no longer in his dark apartment. He stood in a spacious, bright children's bedroom.
The walls were painted light pink, and toys and dolls were neatly arranged on shelves.
A small castle-shaped bed was in a corner of the room, and warm sunlight streamed from a large window overlooking a garden full of flowers. This was Lillian's dream world. Or at least, what it should have been.
But something was terribly wrong.
The air was heavy and cold, despite the fake sunlight. Colors were muted, as if a layer of grey dust covered everything.
There was no sound, no birds chirping from the garden, not even a whisper of wind. It was a dead silence, the silence of fear.
Ethan, or Morpheus as he called himself here, began to move. His footsteps made no sound on the wooden floor. He'd learned long ago that the laws of physics here were flexible, but the laws of the mind were absolute.
He examined the room with an expert eye. He saw the marks immediately. On the wall, a happy family photo was distorted, the parents' faces smeared with terrifyingly frozen, exaggerated smiles.
On the floor, one of the dolls cried thick, black, tar-like tears. These were the fingerprints of the Mind Eater, a psychic parasite that fed on positive emotions and left terror and despair in its wake.
"You're here, you little bastard," Ethan whispered to himself. "You've eaten your fill, haven't you?"
He headed towards the castle-like bed. There, he saw the dream version of Lillian. She was crouched in a corner, hugging her knees and trembling violently.
Her eyes were wide open, staring into space, and she whispered the same word over and over: "He's coming... he's coming..." She was trapped in a loop of terror, like a corrupted video tape replaying the same horrific moment forever.
Ethan knew the monster was near. It was enjoying tormenting its prey before devouring the last remnants of her consciousness.
He looked around, searching for the source of the fear. Where was it hiding? Under the bed? In the closet? These were the classic places for children's fears.
Then he noticed something. The shadow cast by the castle-bed was longer and darker than it should be. It wasn't just an absence of light; it was a presence, a darkness with its own weight, and it was... breathing.
"Found you," Ethan said quietly.
He took a step towards the shadow, and in that moment, the shadow surged. It was no longer just a dark spot on the floor, but it rose and stretched, forming a huge, indistinct shape, a swirling mass of darkness with no features but many eyes, empty white eyes that opened everywhere on its dark body, all staring at Ethan.
Ethan didn't feel fear. Fear was the currency of this world, and if he felt it, it would only grow stronger. Instead, he felt a kind of cold disdain.
The monster attacked. It wasn't a physical attack, but a psychic one. The wooden floor suddenly stretched towards him, the planks turning into long, slender arms trying to grab his feet. At the same time, the toys on the shelves began to laugh loudly and sharply, laughs filled with malice.
But this was a dream world, and Ethan was a "Lucid Dreamer." He was the visitor, but he had the will.
Ethan focused, imagining the floor beneath his feet turning into solid, smooth stone. The floor responded to his will, and the wooden arms retracted. He looked at the laughing toys and imagined their mouths being sewn shut. The laughs immediately silenced.
"This is my world now," Ethan told the monster, his voice echoing with unnatural power.
The monster hissed in rage, and its darkness gathered into a sharp spear that shot towards Ethan. Ethan didn't try to dodge it. Instead, he raised his hand and imagined a wall of pure white light materializing before him. The spear hit the wall and shattered into thousands of dark fragments that vanished into the air.
This was the essence of his work. Imposing logic and order on the chaos of nightmare. He fought with will, with creativity, with control.
The battle continued for several minutes that felt like an eternity. The monster constantly changed shape, transforming into every possible fear of an eight-year-old girl: giant spiders, clowns with knife-like teeth, faceless strangers. And Ethan faced all of it calmly, turning spiders into butterflies, clowns into cotton dolls, and strangers into stone statues.
Little by little, the monster began to weaken. Its darkness became more transparent, its movements slower. It had exhausted the fear energy it had stolen from the child.
"Time for cleaning," Ethan said.
He reached out his hand towards the exhausted monster, intending, as usual, to dispel its existence, to dismantle it and return it to the mental void from which it came. But this time, he felt something different. A new sensation he had never experienced before. It wasn't just the ability to destroy, but the ability to... contain.
He hesitated for a moment. What was this feeling? It was like he saw a handle on the monster, something he could grasp.
Driven by curiosity, instead of ordering the monster to vanish, he imagined a cage. Not a cage of light, but a cage of mental glass, transparent and strong. The cage appeared around the monster, and its size began to shrink rapidly, compressing the dark entity. The monster let out a silent scream, its darkness intensified, and its size shrank under the immense pressure, until it became the size of a small glass orb, a ball of swirling darkness trapped within a prison of pure will.
Ethan held the mental orb. It was cold to the touch, and he felt the raw, pure fear trapped inside, trembling and writhing like an insect in a jar.
He had done it. He had captured one.
He looked at the child, Lillian. She had stopped trembling. Colors slowly began to return to the room, and the sun outside became warmer and brighter. She whispered sleepily, "Mama?"
Ethan knew his work was done. He focused on the feeling of his body in the real world, on the coolness of the couch beneath his back. And he felt the sensation of falling again, but this time, upwards.
He opened his eyes, tearing off the eye mask and headphones. His whole body was stiff and dripping with cold sweat. He looked at the watch on his wrist; only 45 minutes had passed, but it felt like a lifetime.
He got up and sat down, feeling a slight dizziness. He reached for his laptop and opened it. There was a new message from Sphinx.
[She woke up. She's crying for ice cream. I don't know how to thank you. Amount transferred.]
He opened his bank statement. The big number was there, fifty thousand, gleaming beautifully in green. He felt a huge wave of relief wash away all the exhaustion. He could rest now. He could sleep.
He lay back down and closed his eyes. But as he was about to drift off to sleep, he looked at his empty palm. And for a moment, just for one moment, he felt the ghostly presence of the glass orb he had made in the dream. He felt the presence of that captive nightmare, that concentrated essence of fear, still connected to his consciousness somehow.
A strange, dangerous thought slipped into his tired mind, a thought he had never considered before.
"I-I cleaned up the nightmare..." he whispered to himself in the silence of his apartment.
"...But what if, instead, I could rent it out to someone else?"