More Questions than Answers

Diao Zhen replied to his letter much sooner than he expected. He slit open the envelope with a utility knife and took out a thin sheet of paper.

"Dear Lin Yuchen,

I received your letter. Interpreting dreams is indeed a common ability among members of the Five Noble Priestly Clans, and--this is real dream interpretation, not that stuff you get from some roadside fortune teller...It's not something we like to speak about openly, though. I am quite busy these days, but I can meet you tomorrow around lunchtime at the East Gate Cafe. Tell me the details then.

Sincerely, Diao Zhen"

A huge, fancy red seal was stamped at the bottom, and though it was just a personal letter, it looked no less official than a correspondence between palace ministers. The handwriting was quite refined, too. If it weren't so lifelike, he would have thought the words were printed by a machine.

The next day--a Monday--Lin Yuchen rushed out of his classroom as soon as his hour-long lunch break started. He crowded onto a messy subway car bound for the East Gate district. Before long, he was wading through a sea of plainly-dressed salarymen with fish-like faces. When he came to the street level, which was only slightly less crowded, he had to stretch his neck to see the street signs over the heads of people taller than him.

The East Gate Cafe was a wide, rectangular structure with two layers of shiny blue gables from which colorful lanterns and streamers were dangling. As soon as he set foot inside, he realized that although it was called a 'cafe', it looked more like the fine waiting rooms and silken antechambers of a king's palace.

A serving girl attached to Diao Zhen was already waiting next to the reception desk. With a soft, "Right this way," she led him down a candlelit hallway and beyond a pair of sliding doors to a private room where Diao Zhen was already sitting a very long fir table. Lin Yuchen greeted her with a bow, then sat at the opposite end of the table. Once they were both seated, a pretty young lady rushed in to serve the tea with inaudible footsteps.

Though they were the only two sitting there, the table looked like it could have sat another twenty people.

"Please forgive any uncouthness in my manners. I've never been to a cafe before, apparently." He knew how awkward he sounded.

"That's quite alright, Professor," Diao Zhen replied quietly, "Congratulations on your promotion."

"Thank you very much."

"Well, why don't we get down to business. Tell me about this dream you keep having."

Lin Yuchen recounted the dream down to the most minute detail. Since he had seen it play out exactly the same time and time again, there was no detail too small to escape his notice--not even the color of the string that attached a few tiny jade ornaments to the belt of the strange, gray-robed man.

After he finished talking, he took a few deep breaths. Diao Zhen was silent for about ten seconds after that, her face still as a portrait. Lin Yuchen wondered what she was thinking.

"I...this dream," she began, "This dream is completely inexplicable. I have never heard of a dream like this before. Admittedly, I am still young, so my experience with reading dreams is still not especially rich. Even so, it defies everything I have ever read in the dream-reading classics."

"Really? So you don't know what it means?"

"I'm afraid not. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. Normally reading dreams is just like reading the Memories from artifacts, like you saw with the coin. The fact that my experience of your dream is indirect by virtue of you telling me in words makes no difference, unless your description were too brief or too vague. You, however, spared no detail."

Lin Yuchen didn't know what to say, so instead of talking he took a sip of the tea.

"I guess all I can say about it is that it gave me a very odd feeling. It was almost a mythical feeling. The setting, the people, the food--it all felt larger-than-life. It's what I would imagine a god's dream were like. And if not a god's, then a mighty hero's."

He almost spit out the tea when he heard that.

"A god's dream? And what do you mean by that?"

"I really can't say much. All I know is that this dream is very, very significant. An ordinary person like yourself does not have a dream like this. Sometimes the spirit force that causes dreams flows erratically, and a person may get a dream meant for someone else. Again, all I can say is that there is something extraordinary about it, but I do not know what. Much like looking at a shadow; all you can know is that something is there, you can't know what that something is."

Lin Yuchen scratched his head. This was not the clarity he was hoping for.

"Well, that's quite interesting, but it leaves me with more questions than answers."

"As far as that goes," she said with a quickened pace, "my advice to you would be not to think too much of this. Sometimes the cosmos makes mistakes and people get dreams that weren't meant for them. This is simply a matter of fate. Even when little things get mismatched, you have your fate, and others have theirs. One of the first things we learn as Priests is that there is nothing more futile than seeking beyond what fate has allotted us. You are technically a Priest, too, so you must have learned that."

"That might make more sense if it were a one-time deal," Lin Yuchen retorted, "but as I said, I see this exact same dream every single night, and it always plays out exactly the same way."

"It might be recurring every night, but that too will eventually stop, and you will dream normally again. I've never heard of a case of a recurring dream that lasted longer than six months. Don't worry too much."

"But what about the strange meals that were served at the strange man's house? 'Divine Prospect', 'Sophia', and so on. Do any such concepts exist in this world?"

"That I cannot answer," she replied, "Perhaps they are occult symbols meant to be comprehended only be the dream's intended recipient, just in case something like this were to happen."

Lin Yuchen simply couldn't believe her. There and then, his gut told him that she was lying. But he had no way to prove anything.

He sat there in silence for a while, staring out the window to the right, which opened up into a miniature garden. Then, he checked his pocket watch.

"I will have to be leaving now if I want to make it back to work on time. Thank you for everything."

"My pleasure. Please forgive me if I have not been of any use in finding the answers you seek."

"No worries."

"Take care, then."

And with that, Lin Yuchen left the cafe and returned to the university.

He tried to push this new information out of his head for the time being so he could focus on delivering lectures, but the more he tried to do so, the more scatterbrained his lectures must have become. His students' faces were full of vexation. It was a long, slow journey to the end of the final lecture.

When classes were finally over, Lin Yuchen did not go home as he normally did. Instead he rushed over to the university library, the largest and most comprehensive public library in all the Capital. No subject of knowledge, no discipline of science, ought to be untouched by at least one of this library's more than ten million books. Right?

He began scouring page after page of whatever volume he could find that looked even remotely relevant. Books about dreams, about dream reading, about ancient rites, religious practice, theology, mythology, psychology. By the end of it he had several paper cuts on his fingers from turning over all those pages, looking for even a single mention of 'Divine Prospect', a single index entry for 'Evergreen Dao', and so on. A fruitless search it was, however.

It wasn't long before he gave up on that search, but that didn't stop him from finding a few other shards of interesting wisdom. In a book titled The Psychology of Dreams, he read this:

"Symbols in dreams are not persistent, but may change at any moment, depending on their outward convenience at conveying their underlying meaning. Hence a shape or phenomenon may continually stretch or contort itself in impossible dimensions while still grounded in the same source."

In the same book, he also read this:

"The reoccurring dream is unusual. It is marked by an especially strong stability of symbols and choreography. The lack of mutation in symbols and other phenomena across multiple iterations of the dream is statistically impossible, reflecting the supernatural origins and significance of most reoccurring dreams. There is a high chance they correspond to fragments of Memory from ancestors or past lives."

In a copy of the Authorized Classic of Mythology was another passage he found intriguing:

"Heaven is an ethereal land fixed above the clouds, sun and stars. It consists of islands, some with mountains, others with flat grasslands, floating on a sea of light water. The light water is what gives the sky its blue color. There the highest gods live in the center-most of these islands, in great palace complexes. They move from one island to the next by bridges, or by boats when the islands are too far away to build a bridge in between. The divinities, being as they are perched atop such a high land, command a perfect view of all Creation."

Lin Yuchen's thoughts were racing. He had already filled up half of a notebook with quotations like these, but in the end he decided they amounted to little more than breadcrumbs. They offered insight, sure, the bulk of this mystery remained dark as an abyss.

It was almost three in the morning. His fatigued mind began reflecting on the things Diao Zhen had told him earlier that day. Nothing she had told him was at odds with anything he had just read. Then again, there was ultimately nothing she told him that he couldn't have found out from reading a couple of these dusty books.

She wasn't lying, for sure, he forgave her, but that doesn't mean she was telling the whole truth.

Indeed, this world was full of secrets. The Priesthood especially maintained a strict boundary between the exoteric and the esoteric. A low-ranking man like Lin Yuchen was only entitled to scratching the surface. And a public library like this one? Though it was certainly the largest library in the Capital, it was only the tip of the iceberg.