Chapter 1: My Dream Was Actually Real

Chapter 1: My Dream Was Actually Real

Far on the horizon, the morning sun lazily rose, just half its crown showing.

A rosy morning glow stretched across the sky.

Chen Feng curled up his legs and sat alone by the window, gazing at the morning glow, petrified like a statue.

His expression at this moment was subtle. Melancholy, confusion, shock, and regret were all mixed together like an abstract painting.

He looked back and examined his room.

It was clean and tidy.

A faded, washed shirt hung on a wire hanger. On the dining table were three bowls of different sizes and a pair of chopsticks.

There were also cooking oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar.

Inside the cloth wardrobe hung a few pieces of cheap suits, T-shirts, and casual autumn and winter clothes.

An old laptop sat on the small table.

This was the rented apartment of an ordinary city office worker—poor, dull, and boring.

Chen Feng rubbed his forehead, trying hard to sober up and pull himself together.

Falling suddenly from heaven back to the mortal world was very hard for him to adjust to.

It took him about ten minutes to accept the reality that he had not traveled through time; he had only had a dream.

Now the dream was over, and he was home.

This was his apartment, his temporary “home” in this city where he made a living.

He didn’t know when it started last night, but Chen Feng had a dream.

The dream was so real that he couldn’t tell reality from the dream.

He spent about several days in the dream before he barely accepted his situation of “traveling through time.”

And he traveled to a future world a thousand years after the real world, becoming a World Army reserve private named Chen Feng.

Yes, the name was exactly the same, and even his appearance was seventy to eighty percent similar.

But Chen Feng did not inherit the memories of the original owner of this body. So when he first traveled there, he was completely confused and couldn’t figure out what was happening.

During those muddled days, Reserve Soldier Chen Feng performed very poorly. He couldn’t do anything right and even lacked basic common sense. So he was tragically discharged from the army and sent back to his place of origin, becoming a glorious Subsistence Allowance Recipient.

A Subsistence Allowance Recipient was someone recognized as having no working ability and no possibility of creating any value.

A Subsistence Allowance Recipient could not enjoy higher education, was not qualified for any job, and could only survive under the minimum guarantee of the welfare system.

It was called survival, but the treatment was actually quite good: good food, good sleep, and even the exclusive use of a two-hundred square meter flat.

Chen Feng could hardly believe it.

In his era, housing prices were high. Unless they came from well-off families, new college graduates found it extremely difficult to get a foothold in a big city.

But in this era, without doing anything, the minimum guarantee provided a two-hundred square meter house for free, to live in as long as he wanted.

This was clearly heaven!

The Artificial Intelligence assistant assigned by the government took care of him meticulously. It was like having food delivered to his mouth and clothes handed to him.

All he had to do was play!

If he wanted to watch movies, there were plenty of holographic film sources to watch to his heart’s content!

If he wanted to listen to music, the near-field speakers gave him an immersive concert-hall-like experience, with an unlimited music library spanning a thousand years, having everything he could want.

If he wanted to play games, there were brainwave resonance cooperative immersive games of all themes, from star wars to history, and even the unspeakable ones—whatever he wanted.

A thousand years later, technology had greatly advanced, and social productivity was largely surplus. Supporting nearly one-third of the total population as Subsistence Allowance Recipients was not a problem at all.

In Chen Feng’s view, the life, medical care, and other services enjoyed by a Subsistence Allowance Recipient were completely unworthy of the term “subsistence allowance.”

It was an emperor’s life!

I want to be such a Subsistence Allowance Emperor for a lifetime.

Chen Feng enjoyed himself so much he forgot about home.

Anyway, whether he could go back or not was not up to him.

If nothing unexpected happened, he originally thought he would live a happy life as a Subsistence Allowance Recipient.

Maybe he could even find a pretty girl among the Subsistence Allowance Recipients to form a Subsistence Allowance Recipient family and have a little Subsistence Allowance Recipient.

But a year passed in a flash. As he slowly adapted to this era through constant entertainment…

Suddenly, on that day, the sky was covered in darkness.

Everyone in the world looked up at the sky, where there was an unbelievably huge, strange object.

It floated quietly high in the sky, blocking out the sun.

It looked like metal, but it floated completely defying the laws of physics.

Then, a faint glimmer of light flickered at the center of the strange object. It grew brighter and brighter until it filled the whole world.

The moment Chen Feng saw this beam of light, intense stinging pain erupted deep in his mind, instantly spreading throughout his body, swallowing him like a tidal wave.

Severe pain struck. He clutched his head and curled up on the ground.

The pain deepened continuously. His soul felt like it was about to leave his body, and his heart felt as if someone was squeezing it slowly, crushing it.

He opened his mouth to scream, but only hoarse sounds came from his throat.

He could feel countless tiny beads of blood seeping out from all parts of his skin.

Other people two or three meters away from him were experiencing exactly the same thing happening to them.

Chen Feng knew he was going to die.

Without any warning, very strangely, he and everyone in the world were all going to die together.

When he actually died and opened his eyes again, he was already back in his own bed.

It took Chen Feng nearly half an hour to recover from that agonizing pain, and he felt deeply relieved.

Thank goodness, that was just a dream, not real time travel.

Chen Feng stood up from the stool and subconsciously snapped his fingers.

“Xiao Wei, bring me my clothes…”

Xiao Wei was the name he gave to the Artificial Intelligence assistant in his dream.

But after waiting for a long time, there was no response.

He shook his head with a bitter smile and muttered to himself, “Forget it. It was just a dream, and now I’m awake. No dream, no matter how good, is better than truly being alive.”

He looked at the wall clock: October 27, 2019, 7:20 a.m.

“I really only slept for one night!”

Chen Feng shrugged, accepted his fate, and hurried to wash up. He still had to go to work.

He splashed cold water on his face, changed into his old suit, and dressed himself properly.

He hurriedly pushed the door open, and a white figure rushed toward him like a ghost.

He almost bumped straight into a slender woman.

The woman had just pushed open the apartment door to enter.

The apartment corridor was very narrow. With nowhere to dodge, she could only gasp and lean back, barely managing to support herself against the wall with her hand to avoid falling to the ground.

“What are you doing!”

She looked up, her eyes wide with anger.

Her voice was clear and pleasant, making it hard to forget.

Chen Feng looked straight at the woman in front of him, feeling a bit confused.

She was about one hundred and sixty-five centimeters tall, wearing a fitted white coat, with long hair flowing down. Against the dark circles under her eyes, her oval face looked slightly pale.

Clearly, she hadn’t slept all night and must have just returned to the apartment after being out.

Her poor mental state didn’t affect her looks; instead, it gave her a lazy, sickly beauty.

Being pretty meant she could do as she pleased, even looking good when disheveled.

Seeing Chen Feng staring at her without looking away, the woman quickly frowned. “What are you looking at?”

Chen Feng quickly shifted his gaze away and asked hesitantly, “No, don’t misunderstand. I didn’t mean it like that. You… who are you?”

The woman curled her lip, frowned, and rolled her eyes. “Stop pretending. Aren’t you the apartment manager? You don’t know the name of a new tenant? Such clumsy pick-up lines went out of style ten years ago.”

After saying this, she stepped aside, passed through the narrow hallway, turned a corner, and went upstairs with quick steps.

Bang!

The door upstairs closed tightly.

Chen Feng didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

He admitted he had been staring, but it wasn’t because he couldn’t look away from a pretty face.

Having experienced so many high-tech immersive and indescribable games in his dreams, he had already had his fill of luxuries and wasn’t that weak.

Chen Feng just couldn’t understand why he felt she looked so familiar, even though he was absolutely sure it was his first time seeing her. It seemed like he had met her somewhere before.

Chen Feng shrugged and decided not to go out in a hurry. Instead, he went back to his room, opened his laptop, and logged into the company’s management system.

Chen Feng’s job was as the community manager for the company called Kelai Apartment.

He was responsible for a total of eighty apartments in this community, including the one he lived in and the one the woman upstairs lived in.

He could look up all the tenants’ personal information in the management system.

The apartment building in the community had a LOFT structure, with a ceiling height of five point eight meters.

The company had converted one apartment into two standard suites, one on the upper floor and one on the lower floor, each with its own entrance door.

The suites on the upper and lower floors shared one outer main door.

Chen Feng rented the lower-floor suite of this apartment at an employee’s internal price.

As for the suite upstairs, because the previous tenant had moved out suddenly, it had been vacant for about half a month.

A few days ago, Chen Feng’s colleague from the marketing department had arranged for a new tenant. Chen Feng had given the keys to his colleague to pass on, and someone had moved into the upstairs suite.

That tenant seemed to have a completely opposite schedule from Chen Feng, so they hadn’t met yet.

Chen Feng didn’t mind. Since it wasn’t time to pay rent yet, he hadn’t bothered to check the other person’s information.

After living a year of a heavenly life in his dream, even memories from a few days ago felt distant and blurry.

Finally, the file was successfully retrieved, and the other person’s information popped up.

“Name: Zhong Lei.”

“Age: 21.”

“Summary: Freelancer, dropped out of Zhonghai Music College.”

“Contract details: One-year contract, monthly rent 2200, paid monthly, deposit 3000.”

Besides this basic information, there was also a scanned copy of the front of her ID card with a watermark.

After reading this information, Chen Feng was stunned on the spot. His mind buzzed, and his heart rate shot up to one hundred and eighty beats per minute.

“How is this possible! How could it be her!”

“This is too absurd!”

“Could my dream be real?”

Chen Feng muttered to himself, almost going crazy.

He stared straight at the ID photo of Zhong Lei in front of him, recalling the tired but still radiant face he had just seen, and then repeatedly recalling the image he had seen many times in his dreams.

It matched perfectly. It was definitely the same person!

In his dreams, as a Subsistence Allowance Recipient who idled around, Chen Feng had listened to a lot of songs.

The massive music database contained countless classic songs.

That was the accumulation of over a thousand years of history.

However, the later it got, the more varied the music styles became, the types of instruments grew even stranger, and musical tastes changed greatly.

Those later classic songs sounded good to Chen Feng too, but they didn’t suit his personal preferences as much as the songs from the early 21st Century.

So his music taste was heavily focused on works from the early 21st Century.

There were a few singers Chen Feng particularly favored, including a female singer named Zhong Lei.

He had listened to each of her songs at least fifty times.

Zhong Lei, one of the greatest music artists of the next millennium.

She became famous at twenty-five and soared to success from then on.

She didn’t have many works, leaving a total of seventy-eight pieces in her lifetime.

Of these, she performed thirty herself and wrote the lyrics and music for forty-eight.

Almost every one was a timeless classic.

Her achievements spanned a thousand years of history.

In many rankings, she was listed among the top one hundred figures in the history of art from year 2000 to year 3000!

One hundred people might seem like a lot.

But look at who the top one hundred figures in art history were before year 2000.

Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci, Monet, Picasso, Wang Xizhi, Li Bai, Du Fu…

Her achievements were equivalent to being the Beethoven of this millennium!

As a loyal listener of the singer Zhong Lei, Chen Feng had read her life story.

One thing that made her particularly unique was that during her studies, she clashed with her mentor over differing views on music and even angrily dropped out.

The school she dropped out from was exactly Zhonghai Music College!

Her appearance and life story were why Chen Feng was certain this Zhong Lei was that Zhong Lei.

But she was actually his new roommate!

And right now, she was unemployed and looked so disheveled.

But this still wasn’t what shocked Chen Feng the most.

The most terrifying part was that he never expected that a historical figure who left a deep impression on him in his dreams actually existed in the real world and was right beside him!

Was my dream really the reality a thousand years later!?