"What are you even saying? Weren't you already gone? Why are you here?"
Charles asked Richard in surprise, but his question didn't receive an answer.
With a "pop", Richard's figure shattered like a bubble, and everything around them began to collapse, including the woman wrapped in black bandages.
As the floor beneath him crumbled, Charles's body flailed helplessly as he fell towards the abyss below, which was not the uneven houses of Hope Island but a pitch-black void of nothingness.
Amid his own cries of alarm, Charles suddenly sat up in bed, panting heavily.
It took him a moment to realize that everything that had just happened was only a dream.
"Dreaming of that woman twice? What is her origin?" Charles furrowed his brows, threw off the blankets, and walked over to a nearby easel, attempting to capture the dream's contents in a drawing.
However, the moment his pen touched the paper, he stopped. He found he couldn't recall the woman's specific features at all.
