A week had passed since Lillian's incident. A week of broken sleep, real food, and the simple luxury of not waking up in a cold sweat at the sight of a new bill under his door. The money he'd earned was a thick buffer between him and the anxieties of the outside world.
He'd bought a new couch, a stocked fridge, even a few books completely unrelated to psychology or sleep disorders, a desperate attempt to reclaim a bit of his old life.
But the calm was just a thin veneer.
In the silence of his apartment, Ethan felt it. That entity he'd captured, the nightmare he'd ripped from the child's mind, was still there.
It wasn't a physical being, but a weight in his consciousness, a cold knot of pure fear he could "touch" with his mind whenever he wanted.
He'd spent hours examining it, not like a scientist, but like a jailer studying his dangerous prisoner.
He felt its essence, the pure childish fear of darkness and loneliness. It was relatively weak, but it was pure.
And he wondered… were all Mind Eaters similar, or did each have its own special flavor of terror?
These thoughts bothered him, but what bothered him more was the silence.
He was used to the rhythm of work, to the adrenaline that came with each mission. Now, with his need for money less pressing, he felt a strange void. This dangerous work had become part of his identity, perhaps the only part that felt meaningful.
On the evening of the eighth day, the silence broke. Ding.
The soft notification from the encrypted Morpheus app made him jump. He went to his laptop, his heart thumping with a mix of anticipation and caution. There was a new request, but it was different from all the previous ones.
The client, who used the codename Mr. X,was chillingly brief and professional.
[Request: Information Extraction.]
**[Subject: Dr. Ares Thorne. Prominent scientist at "Omni-Gene" Gene Technology. Suddenly resigned and disappeared a week ago. We believe he suffers from severe paranoia and sleep disturbance.]
[Mission: Enter Dr. Thorne's dream world. We do not wish him harm. The sole objective is to identify the reason for his resignation, and the location of his hidden latest research data.]
[Attachments: His favorite fountain pen. To be delivered to the usual location.]
[Reward: 250,000 units.]
Ethan stared at the number. Two hundred fifty thousand. That was life-changing money. An amount that could build him a completely new life, free from any debt or material worry. But the mission... it was on the other side of the ethical line he'd drawn for himself.
All his previous missions were rescue operations.
He entered as a psychic surgeon to remove a mental tumor. But this mission was something else.
It was a heist. A breach into the most private space of a human life, their subconscious, not to save them, but to steal their secrets. This was psychological espionage.
He felt hesitant. This wasn't why he started. Morpheus was a rescuer, not a thief. But another voice, a colder, more practical one, began to whisper in his mind. The voice of the reality he'd lived for years.
You're not a rescuer, you're just a desperate person with a strange ability.
And this amount will ensure you never return to desperation. Besides, what's the harm? You won't hurt him. You'll go in, take a look, and leave. He won't even know you were there. A victimless crime.
The internal debate lasted for long minutes. Part of him clung to the remnants of his principles, and the other part, the one that had tasted financial security, pushed him to accept. Finally, he closed his eyes and sighed. Principles don't pay rent.
[Morpheus: Request accepted. I will commence tonight.]
The process was familiar now. He received the elegant silver fountain pen from the mailbox and felt the faint connection to its owner.
He returned to his apartment and performed his preparatory rituals. He lay down, placed the pen on his chest, and focused. This time, he wasn't focusing on saving someone, but on breaching their defenses.
The transition into the dream world was a bit violent, like passing through a wall of static electricity. And when he opened his eyes, he found himself in an astonishing place.
It wasn't a bedroom or a garden. He was inside a huge, spherical astronomical observatory.
There were no walls, but space itself, an endless night sky studded with breathtaking galaxies, stars, and nebulae. Constellations weren't just points of light; they were living mythological drawings moving slowly with celestial grace.
In the center of this space, a transparent glass platform floated, and on it stood a middle-aged man wearing a white lab coat. It was Dr. Ares Thorne.
This was the most magnificent and beautiful dream world Ethan had ever entered. A genius mind, organized, and vast as space itself.
But the beauty hid a deep-seated terror. The celestial constellations sometimes trembled and faded, as if there was a power outage in the universe.
And the enchanting calm was interrupted by overlapping, low whispers, distorted voices saying: "They found us... you must destroy the research... you can't trust anyone..."
These were the symptoms of paranoia. And the "Mind Eater" here was as sophisticated as the mind it was attacking.
Ethan saw Dr. Thorne running on the glass platform, shouting into the empty space: "Leave me alone! You'll never get it!"
Then the monsters appeared. They weren't childish monsters or primitive shadows.
They were exact replicas of Dr. Thorne himself, wearing the same lab coat, but their faces were empty mirrors reflecting a distorted version of Thorne's terrified face.
They advanced slowly towards him, with synchronized, terrifying steps, and as they approached, the stars around them died and turned into tiny black holes.
Ethan knew he had to intervene. This time, there was no protective rage, but cold, surgical focus. He didn't announce his presence.
Instead, he used his understanding of this world's laws. He focused on the glass platform beneath the doppelgangers' feet and willed it to crack. Fine cracks appeared instantly, then widened, and the terrified replicas fell into the empty space, dissolving into nothingness.
But more appeared instantly, this time directly behind the real Dr. Thorne.
"This isn't fear of the unknown," Ethan realized. "This is fear of oneself, of the knowledge he possesses."
He decided to change his tactics. Instead of fighting the symptoms (the doppelgangers), he decided to attack the source directly.
He felt the presence of the main "Mind Eater," it wasn't one of the replicas, but something hiding in the shadow cast by a nearby galaxy, an entity of concentrated paranoia.
Ethan moved through the dream, not by walking, but by leaping between constellations, using his will as a fulcrum.
He appeared directly in front of the entity, which was surprised by the direct attack. Its true form was even more unsettling, a mix of surveillance cameras and tangled wires forming an almost human shape.
Ethan began his assault, not by destroying the entity, but by dissecting it.
He wanted to understand the source of this precisely designed nightmare.
He grasped one of the entity's mental wires, and usually he would have torn it apart, but this time he tried to read the data passing through it.
A wave of information and images that didn't belong to Dr. Thorne flooded him. They weren't his memories, but they were... orders. Programmatic instructions.
Then he saw the image. A logo he had never seen before: a sleek, futuristic "S" inside a perfect circle. And beneath the logo, a project name written in cold digital script.
[Project: Morpheus - Phase Three: Surveillance & Stimulation.]
Ethan froze in place. Morpheus. His secret name. The name he'd shared with no one, used only in the darkest corners of the dark web. How could...?
The discovery was so shocking he almost lost control of the dream. This entity, this "Mind Eater," wasn't a natural parasite. It was artificial.
A psychic weapon designed and sent to attack Dr. Thorne. And the company that made it, somehow, knew his codename.
The dream world shook around him, but Ethan collected himself. Cold anger brought back his focus.
There was a conspiracy here, and he was somehow in the middle of it.
With renewed force, he grabbed the artificial entity and crushed it with his will, not to capture it this time, but to obliterate it and turn it into raw data. The entity exploded into a flurry of zeros and ones that dissipated into space.
With the source of the paranoia gone, Dr. Thorne's world calmed.
The whispers stopped, and the stars stabilized. Dr. Thorne turned, seeing Ethan for the first time, but his eyes were empty, exhausted.
Ethan wasted no time. He gently approached Dr. Thorne's weakened consciousness and searched for the information he'd been asked to retrieve. It wasn't stealing; it was reading an open page. He saw flashes of work in the "Omni-Gene" lab, saw Dr. Thorne's increasing fear as he realized his cell regeneration research could be used for military purposes.
And he saw the location of his hiding place: a small rented apartment under an alias in the old district.
And the location of his data: an encrypted offline server, hidden in a bank vault.
He had what he wanted.
He withdrew from the dream, returning to his body with force, gasping for breath.
The payment notification arrived instantly. 250,000 units, waiting for him in his account. He had succeeded.
But the money no longer mattered. He stood and looked out his window again, but he no longer saw a sleeping city. He saw a battlefield he hadn't known existed.
He used to think he was a hunter, preying on creatures of darkness. But tonight, he discovered he might just be prey in a much larger game.
A mysterious company that creates nightmares, and knows his name. It wasn't about paying bills anymore. It had become personal. "Morpheus" was no longer just a pseudonym for making a living. It had become the name of his enemy.
Now, he had no choice but to become what that name implied. Not just a dreamer, Not just a merchant, but a master and owner of nightmares. Because in this new war, defense wouldn't be enough.