"What's what?" Chen Yu asked.
"That," Tang Ze said.
After putting on the costume, he noted that his vision had shifted somewhat. It was like when he had put on his Supernatural Sam costume, in that he could see things that he hadn't been able to before.
There was a strange aura around people that he could only see while in this costume.
But more significantly, there was a huge tree in the middle of the village that he hadn't seen before.
The tree itself was a strange mix of purple and blue in color, though it was barren of any kind of fruit.
Tang Ze looked around and couldn't see anything else like it anywhere else on the horizon, so the fact that this incident had happened right where this strange tree was could not be a coincidence.
Tang Ze described what he was seeing to Chen Yu, who frowned, having never heard of a plant like that. If Yin Tiang were here, he might've been able to help them identify what it was.
Tang Ze willed the horse to move forward, and it obeyed. He did his best not to be thrown off, with the horse moving at the slowest trot possible. As they approached the house with the children in it, Tang Ze could see a strange, amorphous cloud hovering above their heads from the window as he peered in.
"Can you explain to them what I'm going to try to do?" Tang Ze asked Chen Yu.
"How do you expect me to do that - I don't even know what you're going to try to do," Chen Yu muttered.
"Look, I'm going to try to enter their dreams and see what's going on with them," Tang Ze said. "If you want to join me, you can try falling asleep and I'll see if I can take you with me."
Tang Ze had to dismount as he couldn't get in while riding his horse, and then remounted while inside. Chen Yu managed to fall asleep rather fast - a talent of his, now that Tang Ze thought of it, and Tang Ze reached for the amorphous blob that was above Chen Yu's head, which was distinct from the one above the children.
Reality shifted and he was no longer in the house in the village, but was rather in the middle of a dark void.
There were several new sensations within the dream realm were nearly overwhelming to Tang Ze. While he had felt these things before back in the real world, now, in an actual dream, it was as if they had been amplified a millionfold.
It was as if he had been blind and deaf his whole life, and had now regained his eyesight and hearing. Even more than that, it was as if his mind had been contained in a box, confined to a very small space, and had just now been released, letting his mind wander wherever it wished to go.
This was the first time he was using these kinds of powers, and given how abstract they were, it was hard for him to get a grip on things.
'Once I finish the spellcaster costume, I'm going to need to be careful,' - Tang Ze thought. 'With those kinds of powers, if I'm not careful, I could end up causing major mayhem or getting myself into a situation with no way out.'
Right now, even though he had Knightmare Night's powers, or at least, a portion of them, he had none of Knightmare Night's knowledge or skills on how to use said powers. Knightmare Night, was, from what little of the character's backstory that Tang Ze understood, not even human but rather some kind of eldritch horror that had plagued humanity's dreams since the dawn of time. When Tang Ze thought about it, he realized that it would be quite strange if he were able to use that kind of character's powers naturally on the first attempt.
It felt extremely comforting to be inside a dream - it was Knightmare Night's natural habitat, after all. It was similar to how he had felt when he had been dressed up as Deepcurrent and had entered the water.
Tang Ze was powerful here, even if he didn't fully comprehend what those powers were.
It wasn't like dressing up like a superhero or the like, where his powers were still understandable to some extent. After all, punching harder or faster were easy enough concepts to wrap one's head around.
Things like Deepcurrent's ability to speak to and control fish, or Lieutenant Terra Firma's ability to sense pollution were more abstract but still easy enough to understand.
With something like Knightmare Night though, it was essentially a scenario where he had been given all of these powers but his mind had no idea how to comprehend them.
He knew a few other characters from fiction who had odd powers that could bend reality itself in strange ways - he hadn't tried any of their costumes for the simple reason that he might end up breaking the universe in some way that he couldn't fix later on.
He chose to put those thoughts aside for now to focus on the more immediate problems that he had to deal with.
For one, he had been expecting that the horse might panic with the change in scenery, but it was quite the opposite. His horse was rather calm, and within this dream realm, he could feel a strange connection to it that he couldn't otherwise.
However, he wasn't here to understand the horse better.
He needed to find Chen Yu's consciousness. He had just fallen asleep and so wouldn't be sleeping right now, but his consciousness had to be somewhere.
The moment he thought that, he could sense something behind him, and he turned to see Chen Yu standing there.
"Hey," Tang Ze said.
"Hey, you look… weird in this dream," Chen Yu said.
"Weird how?"
As Tang Ze looked at Chen Yu, images began entering his mind.
He saw a younger version of Chen Yu running from a bear in the woods over and over.
'That's a nightmare he's had multiple times in the past,' - Tang Ze realized.
He felt that if he wished to, he could immediately start a similar nightmare to trap Chen Yu's mind under, though he shook his head at that thought.
Right, Knightmare Night was a villain, after all.
"We need to get to the dream realm the kids are trapped in," Tang Ze said.
"Right, how do we do that?"
Tang Ze had initially thought that they would have to get out of his dream into the real world first, though that would pose a problem as to how he would take Chen Yu with him. Tang Ze had wanted to get Chen Yu first and figure out how to deal with that later.
However, he did not need to deal with the issue at all. There was no need for him to go back to the real world. As he thought of leaving, points of light appeared in the black void around them.
'These are other people's dreams,' - Tang Ze realized. He could leap from one to the other without having to go back to the real world. The more he looked around, the more he saw, until the lights were as numerous as the stars in the night sky.
He saw short snippets of them as he looked around. A dream of someone sailing down a river in a giant teacup. A dream where someone was late for school, though from what he could tell, they were at least fifty years old. A dream where someone was flying.
There weren't just pleasant dreams of course, there were nightmares as one would expect. For whatever reason, he was drawn to them far more than the pleasant dreams.
"Tang Ze?" Chen Yu asked, after Tang Ze had been staring off into the distance at something that Chen Yu couldn't see for a while.
"Sorry," Tang Ze said, shaking his head. His mind had nearly been overloaded by all of what he could see and detect. There were hundreds of millions of dreams out there. There was a specific dream that he was looking for, wasn't there?
The moment he thought of that, one of the specks of light became larger, and brighter, until it was about the size of a door.
"Hey - is that…" Chen Yu said, pointing at it.
"Yeah, where we need to go," Tang Ze said. "Hop on."
Chen Yu mounted Tang Ze's horse behind him, and they charged towards the dream realm before them.
They emerged in a large grassy field, a cloudy sky above them. The landscape was draped in shadows, even without any prior experience, Tang Ze could figure out that this was not a pleasant dream.
His horse did not need ground to move, being able to gallop through the air. Knightmare Night's actual steed could also do so, so Tang Ze wasn't too shocked by this - but he was a bit amazed at how well the horse in question was taking this entire scenario, as if it was something completely natural for it.
How did the horse perceive this world? Tang Ze could feel some kind of mental connection with it, likely one of Knightmare Night's powers, so perhaps that explained its nonchalance at what was going on. It might've been a trained horse, but he doubted that any kind of training would have prepared it for a scenario like this.
"This dream tastes weird," Tang Ze said.
"Tastes weird? What does that mean?" Chen Yu asked.
"That it tastes weird," Tang Ze said again, sticking out his tongue and tasting the air like a viper would. He had no other way to describe it, but there was something wrong with this dream's structure.
He cast his mind around the dream, being able to feel its structure and what made it up. His initial impression had been correct - this was not a dream, it was a nightmare.
If he wanted to, he could easily make it a far worse nightmare though, in line with what Knightmare Night's powers were designed to do.
He began to figure out what it was about this dream that was so off-putting. It was made of an amalgamation of multiple consciousnesses, rather than a single one. But they hadn't fused in a way that was desirable or elegant, instead it was as if multiple minds had been crudely crammed together and then someone had poured glue over them, hoping that the final product would be satisfactory enough.
It wasn't - and there was, for a lack of a better term, 'something else' in the dream that he didn't seem to be able to understand. Whenever he thought of it, a bitter taste washed over his tongue, but what was it exactly?
It was as if he was under the mermen lake as Deepcurrent once again, and was gazing at that monster that lurked in the depths of the lake. He didn't know what it was exactly that his senses were telling him, only that it was abnormal.
The difference between this time and that time was that Tang Ze could feel that this unfamiliar sensation was not nearly as dangerous as what had lurked beneath the depths of that lake. Abnormal, yes, but not hazardously so.
"I think I know where the kids are," Tang Ze said, as he urged his horse to go in a particular direction.
Although they were in a vast, apparently endless grassy plain, there was a structure which stood out like a blemish on the landscape itself.
It was a crudely made house, though it would've been more accurate to characterize it as a pile of wood that had been stacked on top of each other. It had no real structural integrity, much like this dream itself. There was a narrow gap in the planks of wood, though all they could really see from the outside was darkness.
However, Tang Ze knew the children were in there.
As they approached, he cast his gaze into the darkness.