Dragon Raja 5; Chapter 405: For Your Majesty (220)

Dragon Raja 5

The night was quiet and long. A small suite in the Khrushchev Building was filled with the smell of smoke. Lu Lincheng sat alone at the table, his shirt collar and cuffs loose, eating a plate of burnt peanuts.

The cups on the table were stuffed with cigarette butts, and a bottle of vodka was more than half empty. When Lu Mingfei lived here, he hadn’t actually been home many times. Whether this place could even be considered his home was questionable. But now, with his wife and children lying in different hospital beds, he had returned to this simple house, smoking, drinking, and eating peanuts, much like the down-on-his-luck researcher he had once pretended to be.

With a “ding,” Lu Lincheng got up and went to the oven, taking out a roasted guinea fowl.

He got the fattest guinea fowl from the farm, slaughtered and cleaned it, stuffed its belly with ginger slices, cooking wine and scallion segments, and roasted it over a low fire for two whole hours until the chicken skin was shiny and fragrant.

He carried the guinea fowl back to the table, cut it open with a knife, and devoured it with gusto, eating most of it in no time. Suddenly, he stopped, put down the knife, leaned back in his chair with a cigarette in his mouth, and silently looked at the photo frame on the wall.

The photo depicts a summer scene: a family of three sitting on a picnic mat, posing for a picture. Lu Mingfei, wearing a straw hat, grinned foolishly, while Giovanni shielded her eyes from the sun, the wind rippling the hem of her floral dress. Lu Lincheng himself proudly carried his homemade fishing rod. The photo was deliberately chosen to create a family atmosphere in the small apartment, and it might even be fake, a composite. Yet, Lu Lincheng stared at it intently for a long time, then suddenly chuckled, shaking his head as tears silently streamed down his face.

“The guinea fowl I made seems pretty bad too,” he said softly to the person in the photo. “Maybe it’s because I am eating it alone?”

He poured himself another glass of vodka, and just as he was about to drink it, the phone rang.

The man’s expression suddenly changed. One moment he was a drunkard who was almost passed out, and the next he was a sharp knife drawn from its sheath, his gaze seemingly capable of cutting people.

He got up and opened the drawer of the wardrobe. It wasn’t the wall-mounted telephone that was ringing, but the telephone in the drawer—a black plastic phone, an old-fashioned device that looked quite vintage—that was ringing merrily.

Lu Lincheng picked up the receiver and put it to his ear, remaining silent.

“We haven’t been in touch for many years, how are you?” the person on the other end of the phone said in a low voice.

“All I can say is that they are still alive,” Lu Lincheng said.

The call didn’t last long. Lu Lincheng hung up the receiver, and before he could return to his desk, the wall-mounted phone rang again. Lu Lincheng frowned slightly and turned to answer the phone used for internal communication within the safe haven.

“Secretary-General Lu, your son said he wants to see you. We’ve looked everywhere else but couldn’t find you, so we’re trying this call.” The person on the other end of the line spoke respectfully. Lu Lincheng glanced at his watch. Only seven hours had passed since his conversation with Lu Mingfei, just enough time for a nap. It seemed he wouldn’t be able to figure it out so easily.

But he immediately put on his coat and went out, and the two armed guards waiting at the door followed him.

A new day was about to begin in the haven. Young people, dressed in their festive best, strolled under the streetlights, books in their arms. The incident of Giovanni and Lu Mingfei’s escape was simply glossed over, and the haven had already entered a Christmas celebration atmosphere. Along the way, people greeted Lu Lincheng, and he returned the greetings as usual. However, his sudden change in appearance caught most people off guard. After the greetings, many were confused for a long time, wondering if they had mistaken him for someone else.

***

“Tell me in detail how to cut it, the more detailed the better.” When Lu Lincheng arrived, Lu Mingfei was lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, speaking quietly. The intense emotions from a few hours ago had completely disappeared. He seemed to have truly figured things out and let go, and his whole being was almost overflowing with the radiance of having received the gospel.

Dr. Duden also rushed to the ward. He was not yet ready to explain the treatment plan to the patient. Lu Mingfei’s sudden attack caught him off guard.

But he quickly cleared his mind, sat down by the hospital bed, and began to speak in a calm tone, “We will use a high dose of hypnotic drugs, and you will have a very long dream. This dream is the one you are most familiar with, and it will be so real that you will doubt what is real, but you must remain conscious. It is a dream, and it is also your battlefield. The devil is hiding in that dream, and we still cannot determine what form he will take.”

“Neither he nor I had any abilities in the dream, right?”

“It’s hard to say, but you and he would completely equal in that dream. Maybe you will have the ability and he will have the same ability, or maybe neither of you will have any ability. In Buddhist terms, that is your ‘sea of​​ ​​consciousness.’ You shared that sea of​​ ​​consciousness and fought in it. What determined the outcome is willpower.”

“It’s like a game, right? Once you enter the game, your real-life muscles become useless. Everyone has to follow the rules of the game. No one can start with three bases.”

“A very good analogy, and no one can use cheat codes; it’s an absolutely fair battle. It’s also a very dangerous battle because the dream is too real. If you fail, you’ll feel like you’re really dead, and in reality, your body will suddenly fail. But soon your heart will start beating again because that demon will take over your body. One will dies, and another will take the opportunity to awaken,” Dr. Duden said. “In that situation, we would fail. Your body would have to be destroyed immediately, but we’re not sure if that would destroy the demon.”

“Doctor, is your plan really reliable? It sounds like something out of the dark.”

“I’m not entirely sure either. Although similar psychological experiments are recorded in ancient books and can be explained from the perspective of modern psychology, you’re right, this is metaphysics.”

“Can killing him in a dream truly destroy him?”

“This is also unknown, but at least it can suppress his consciousness. Some ancient myths say that after a hero kills a demon, he uses his body as a vessel to seal the demon’s soul, and uses his own consciousness as the battlefield to continue fighting the demon to the death, while his body has turned into a dried corpse on the altar. You are playing that hero role.”

“You’re not talking about ancient mythology, you’re talking about Diablo. I’ve played that game,” Lu Mingfei said with a smile.

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