Plague Doctor

Chapter 184:

Angell’s Order (2in1)

There was a meteorologically strange weather pattern in Eastern State that December. A heavy storm hit the town later that month, almost drowning the entire city. The common flu was a result of this shift in weather; most hospitals were covered in long cues, and the local authorities had even set up a large quarantine center. All the communication channels and traffic were heavily monitored. It did not help to ease the concern of the people. The situation in Eastern State was heavily scrutinized by the rest of the nation; they were worried that the illness might not be able to be contained.

In an area unknown to the normal citizens, inside Eastern Phecda’s Medical Department, there hung an even heavier cloud. Inside the psychology building, a big conference room on the tenth floor was remade into a ‘Dreaming Room’. All forty-six people who participated in the mission were lying in the comfortable lounge, and they were connected to various machines. Their brain waves, heart rate, and other data were closely monitored. After they entered their lucid dream, their encephalograms started to change, but the operating members had no idea what it meant.

“Mr. Jiang, is this a positive development?” Yao Sinian asked a middle-aged man. Behind the man were six other members who were younger than him. Jiang Mingchang was a normal-looking fella who was slightly underweight. Dressed in a simple black suit, he could easily fade into the background if not for his pair of eyes that spoke of great depth of knowledge. He and his people were the surprise aid provided to Phecda. They were all members from ‘Angell’s Order’.

It was 1925 when George Gammell Angell, the Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown University, encountered a strange young man by the name of Wilcox. The young man had brought to Prof Angell a strange clay figurine and described his strange dream to him. The young man’s intention was to seek the prof’s aid to help him decipher the hieroglyphs on the clay figurine, but Prof Angell had found other leads from it. It was one related to a cult and a ‘collective nightmare-induced hysteria’ that mushroomed all over the world in the summer of 1925.

However, this incident was only privately investigated by Prof Angell. Due to the widespread hysteria and the cross borders of multiple countries, it was not picked up by the media. Furthermore, the communication technology back then was not as advanced as it was today. Therefore, other than the few news clippings that the professor himself found, there were no other clues.

By agreeing to study Wilcox’s dream, Prof Angell had encountered some surprising secrets about the cult. But not long after that, Prof Angell died. Granted, he was already at the advanced age of ninety-two, and he was positively identified by the police to have died from an acute heart attack. The Order, however, believed that Prof Angell’s death was due to foul play. He was murdered by the members of the cult.

Prof Angell’s death was not the end because his grandnephew and some of his students gathered to form this organization, Angell’s Order, to continue the study of his work, on dreams, and on the cult. There were two reasons they had kept a low profile. One was to stay away from the cult, and the second was because their research was not the kind that would be appreciated by the mainstream scientific society. Over the years, the Order had expanded and had picked up members all over the world. This Mr. Jiang was one of them.

However, Phecda knew nothing more about the Order. They still had many secrets about themselves. Regardless, it was Mr. Jiang who introduced Phecda to the research about the dream and the dream world as well as the knowledge that they had on the R’yleh Cult. They believed that it was the same cult that they had been studying. In fact, the Order had long since translated the statement “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”

“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

“We call them the Cult of Cthulhu,” Mr. Jiang informed Phecda. “The cultists believe in the presence of Cthulhu, which is the closest translation of its name that can be pronounced by the human tongue. They see this kind of existence as one of the Great Old Ones. Our research leads us to believe that the leader of the Cult is an old Chinese man who resides deep inside a mountain. He is known to the foreign cultist as ‘The Undying One’. The goal of this cult is to awaken Cthulhu from its slumber inside the underwater city of R’yleh and return it to this world.”

The information provided by Angell’s Order matched the exploration and prediction provided by Gu Jun and the rest. The Order believed that should the cult succeed, it would be the end of humanity. At the current stage, humanity should not even attempt to consider fighting the Great Old Ones but instead should focus on how to stop their arrival or rather how to avoid their detection. This matched Gu Jun’s action of blowing up the channel to the foreign world.

The aid from Mr. Jiang brought renewed hope to Yao Sinian and Elder Tong, but at the same time, they had their reservations. Why would the order offer such great help all of a sudden? What was their goal?

“We hope to bring the Order out into the light through this cooperation and show the rest of the globe our willingness to cooperate,” Mr. Jiang said in answer. “Times have changed, and so should the Order.”

Then he added that it was him who proposed to the Order that they should reach out to Phecda for this cooperation. “I know how dangerous this Nightmare Illness is, and we cannot sit idle anymore.”

According to Mr. Jiang, Angell’s Order was not a religious organization but an academic one. Their goal was completely different from the Cult of Cthulhu.

The Order was not all-knowing. After all, they were just a collection of academics. The only leg up they had was that they had started their research much earlier than Phecda. They had no solution to stop the Nightmare Illness, and they did not know much about spells, but they could provide tons of help in lucid dreaming.

‘Should we believe these people?’ After much consideration, Phecda decided the best course of action was to accept their offer of help while keeping them under close observation.

“There are two kinds of lucid dreams. One is to submerge oneself into the sea of one’s unconsciousness; the second one is to enter into the Dreamlands.” The Dreamlands was how Prof Angell referred to the dream world. “Only a small number of people have the talent to enter the Dreamland. Even our Order has had little success with it, and the few successes were all thanks for lucky coincidences. But the situation here is different. A large number of people have entered that nightmare, and within this short period of time, they still have a lingering spiritual connection with that place. That means that we can use Gu Jun as the anchor. Since he is still inside the nightmare and has shown the ability to respond to the calls of the dreamers, perhaps we can reach him and enter the Dreamlands through lucid dreaming. But to do that, we need people that he is familiar with, people that he will easily be able to tune into spiritually.”

After a long discussion, Phecda finally decided to give it a try, or rather, Elder Tong and Yao Sinian pushed them to this decision. For the two of them, they could not let the cult succeed and could not afford to lose Gu Jun. Furthermore, they had to prevent the situation at Eastern State from worsening.

“We might only have one chance. This will greatly exhaust one’s mental power. Those who enter the dreamlands will have their spirituality drained, and they might not enter it again.” It was this one time that the forty-six Dreamers entered the Dreamlands to help Gu Jun and Wu Siyu. A lot of people were selected, but it was a wild guess how many of them would be able to arrive at the Dreamlands. All of them were willing to take the double-risk. One risk was to place their faith in the Angell’s Order, and the other... well, entering the Dreamlands itself was a great risk.

Di, di, di!

Inside the control central, various machines beeped noisily. The workers stared quietly at the data on the different monitors. Suddenly, all the dreamers’ encephalograms started to shift, forming irregular patterns that did not match any common standard. But this data matched the data provided by the Order of the other dreamers quite perfectly.

“...” Tang Zhifeng, the leader of the psychology team, was stunned. Not all who were familiar with Gu Jun had volunteered to enter the lucid dream; most of the commanders had to stay behind.

“They have entered the Dreamlands,” Mr. Jiang said. A suppressed excitement radiated from him, but the other six members of his order did not have the same emotional control as he did. Yao Sinian observed this quietly. If the man was not lying, this was also the first time Angell’s Order had participated in a successful lucid dreaming on such a large scale. But soon, the data on the monitors became increasingly maddening and hard to read. Even Mr. Jiang was shocked; he had not encountered this before.

“The things that they are currently experiencing in the Dreamlands...” Mr. Jiang admitted his ignorance. “... are things that we have not been exposed to before.”

That announcement pulled at the guts of everyone present. The dreamers’ heart rates had gone over the safe rate. Some had reached extremely dangerous levels; their faces were distorted in pain, and their bodies were soaked in sweat. However, Mr. Jiang warned that the dreamers should never be woken up abruptly, or it would place them in even deeper danger.

All of a sudden, someone inside the dreaming world startled awake. He gasped heavily. “Ah Jun...”

It was Uncle Dan. Then more slipped back into the waking world. Lin Mo, Yu Xiaoyong, and Lou Xiaoning appeared like they had been through the wringer. Their faces were pale beyond belief.

“Ah Jun, Ah Jun, he...” Prof Shen said hoarsely, and his eyes were rimmed red. He stopped himself from finishing the sentence. He was still holding onto hope. Right at that moment, the dreamers who had awakened and the people inside the monitor room saw a blurry shadow appear inside the crowded dreaming room. The dimension appeared to have broken, and the space rippled into a crack. Through the many cameras, they only saw a black shadow that was twisting and contorting. Before the people could react, a figure leaped out from the dimensional crack. She stumbled over. In a cotton dress, carrying a book, a medic kit, and a bag of food, it was Wu Siyu.

She stood for a while before dropping the medic kit and the food expressionlessly. Then she lay on the ground while hugging the book. She gave a long sigh and then stared numbly at the ceiling.

At the same time, the rest of the dreamers who shared the deepest bond with Gu Jun—people like Elder Tong, Prof Gu, Cai Zixuan, and Wang Ruoxiang—woke up. They were like fish out of water. They gulped in deep breaths as they whipped their heads around. Their faces were lined in shock, fear, and sadness...

“Ah Jun, where’s Ah Jun?”

“Is Ah Jun here?”

“Gu Jun?”

They screamed the young man’s name as they scoured their surroundings. Gu Jun was wearing a cotton outfit, so he would stand out if he was there. But there was only one person in a cotton outfit inside the room, and that was Wu Siyu.

“Don’t waste your time,” Wu Siyu said as her voice cracked. “He did not come back.”

She could not sense his presence anymore. Gu Jun was in another world, perhaps in the Dreamland or perhaps in heaven. Someone like him... deserved a spot in heaven, right? She resisted the heavy tears, wondering if stupidity was a kind of sin.