Chapter 8 – Don’t Go Opening Doors Randomly

He walked into the kitchen and shut the door behind him. Turning on the range hood, the loud, clattering noise of the machine running filled the air — and yet, Yu Sheng felt his mind slowly grow calm.

It was as though the thin wooden door of the kitchen and the racket of the range hood had temporarily sealed away a chaotic and bizarre world on the other side. He had finally returned to a place that was entirely his own, where he could even pretend for a little while that he wasn’t in that massive, eerie Boundary City, but back in his familiar, truly real “home.”

This great house was different from his original “home” in every way, yet this small kitchen alone came close to the layout he remembered. So after settling in somewhat to this world, he had done his best to arrange it to resemble something familiar.

Every day when he cooked here, he pretended he was still in his real home — pretending that on that particular morning he had never pushed open his front door, never stepped into a strange city teeming with eerie shadows. Sometimes, bustling around in here, he would almost feel that if he just looked up, he would see through the window the familiar street scene from before: the old lane outside bathed in the orange-red glow of clouds at dusk, with the reddish sunlight streaming down the exterior walls of the apartment buildings he remembered…

But the view outside the window always shattered those fleeting illusions. Looking out now, all he could see was a bare, empty lot and some low, worn-down bungalows not far away. There were no apartment buildings here — only a mess of tangled utility poles — and the warm, comfortable sky he remembered, he had not seen for a very long time.

The sky in this city was always either blindingly bright white or oppressively dim and dark.

Yu Sheng sighed, reached over to close the venetian blinds over the glass window, and stopped paying attention to the night outside, which always seemed to linger in shadows.

He plucked the vegetables, washed them, heated the wok with cold oil, and after the scallions had fragrant, he nimbly tossed the ingredients in. Listening to the sizzling sounds coming from the pan, he heard the noise of a TV program coming from beyond the door. This strange city did have access to all sorts of information channels, including television and mobile phones. In those first days, almost everything he had learned about Boundary City had come from watching TV programs and scrolling through news on his phone, and even now, it remained one of his important ways of understanding this “World.”

“Yu Sheng! The TV volume is too low! Turn it up for me! Please!”

A girl’s loud and boisterous voice suddenly rang out from beyond the door, giving Yu Sheng a start. His hand jerked, nearly flipping the food right out of the wok.

He had almost forgotten that Eileen was out there.

Back when he used to cook in the kitchen, there was never anyone talking outside!

“Hold on!” Yu Sheng called back rather bluntly, then couldn’t help muttering under his breath, “…She sure makes herself at home…”

But soon he pulled the corners of his mouth into a somewhat helpless smile.

Fine. It was fine. It at least gave the house a bit more “life” — at the very least, it was some noise.

After a while, Yu Sheng carried the steaming hot food out and set the bowls and plates on the dining table. He reached over and turned the TV up two notches, then sat down with his back to the TV, facing Eileen’s painting frame. He didn’t have the habit of watching TV while eating, but he would leave it on as background noise — which, as it happened, meant he wouldn’t be competing with Eileen for the viewing angle, since she could only watch from one fixed direction.

Inside the oil painting, Eileen hugged her Toy Bear and craned her neck to look at the food on the table. Her gaze flickered between the TV program and the dining table as she muttered, “That’s quite a spread…”

“Just some home-style dishes,” Yu Sheng said casually. “I quite enjoy cooking.”

“Oh.” Eileen gave a short “oh” and went back to dutifully watching TV, but after Yu Sheng started eating she began peeking over at the table again. She held it in for quite a while, but finally couldn’t help blurting out: “So it’s just you eating while I sit here watching?”

Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow and waved his chopsticks in front of Eileen’s painting frame: “Want a bite?”

Eileen stared wide-eyed at him, but then drooped her Head and began silently sulking.

“…Alright, alright, let’s at least go through the motions.” Seeing her expression, Yu Sheng couldn’t help but sigh. He went back to the kitchen, fetched an empty bowl, scooped some food from his own bowl into it, and placed it in front of Eileen’s painting frame. “Here are some chopsticks and a bowl for you — think of it as smelling the aroma. You won’t actually eat any of it anyway; in the end it’ll still be me eating it.”

Eileen frowned at the bowl of food placed before her painting frame, thought about it, and decided that was acceptable. She hopped down from the Chair and moved to the edge of the painting frame, her face occupying nearly half its area, staring at Yu Sheng very earnestly. “Okay, that works — thanks, you’re actually quite considerate…”

Yu Sheng lowered his Head and scooped a mouthful of rice, mumbling a vague response. Then he looked up and saw Eileen in the painting frame, only her Head visible — and then his gaze fell on the bowl of food placed in front of the frame, and he suddenly felt like something was off…

Eileen didn’t notice anything wrong at all. She found it a little strange that Yu Sheng had suddenly spaced out. “What are you staring at?”

Yu Sheng quickly lowered his Head and scooped two more mouthfuls, then looked up at Eileen again —

A dark, deep painting frame. A dark, deep background. The face of a doll-like Girl. And a bowl of food set before the painting.

The whole thing looked exactly like a memorial portrait with an offering placed before it — as if her voice and likeness lived on.jpg.

The muscles on his face twitched twice, but no matter how long he held it in, he didn’t dare say what he was thinking out loud — not for any particular reason other than the fact that Eileen’s insults were truly something awful.

Since things had already come to this, all he could do was eat. He had no choice but to pretend nothing was wrong, keeping his Head down and shoveling food into his mouth under Eileen’s puzzled gaze, doing his best not to look at that “living portrait” across the table… The whole meal felt like a funeral reception.

After he finally managed to finish, Yu Sheng wiped his mouth and quickly whisked away all the bowls and plates from in front of Eileen’s painting frame, tossing them into the kitchen sink to soak until morning — mainly because his back still ached terribly, and hunching over the sink to wash dishes was a bit much for him right now.

The dishes could wait, but the trash couldn’t. In this season, a bag of kitchen garbage could not be left inside the house overnight — so he gritted his teeth against the back pain, gathered up the trash, grabbed the bag, and headed for the door.

Eileen, who had been watching TV, looked up and asked curiously: “Hey, it’s this late — where are you going?”

“Do I have to report to you even in my own home?” Yu Sheng replied irritably to this overly familiar Person in the Painting, but still held up the trash bag for her to see. “I’m stepping out to throw away the trash.”

“Oh, come back soon then,” Eileen’s gaze had already returned to the TV. “This house is so big — I’m scared being alone. What if a thief breaks in…”

Yu Sheng rolled his eyes, thinking to himself that in a gloomy, forbidding house like this, if someone really did break in and the first thing they saw was a ghostly figure drifting around inside a painting, the one who’d drop dead of fright definitely wouldn’t be the one inside the frame. The way Eileen was, any thief who came in would probably end up calling the police first…

But he didn’t dare say any of that to Eileen’s face.

Yu Sheng shook his head, grumbled internally for a moment, walked to the entrance, changed into his outdoor shoes, and reached out to grip the Door handle.

He applied a little force, turned it, and pushed the Door open.

For reasons he couldn’t explain, he suddenly recalled two months ago — that perfectly ordinary morning that had seemed just like every other ordinary day of his ordinary life.

Back then, just as he was doing now, he had pushed open his front Door, stepped outside — and walked straight into a vast, suffocating, and bizarre city, from which he had never managed to return —

The strange association flickered through his mind and vanished. Yu Sheng laughed at himself with a self-deprecating smile, shook his head, and pushed the Door open.

The crisp snap of a dry twig breaking shattered the silence of the valley. The cold night wind carried with it a disturbing scent of decay and rot, and the chill in the air made Yu Sheng — who had come outside in only a thin shirt — instinctively shiver. Then it took him several seconds to get his mind, which had momentarily stopped working, to start up again.

He found himself standing amidst a desolate stretch of crumbled rubble. In the distant darkness lay what appeared to be a dense and eerie forest. On both sides, tall mountains loomed against the night sky like silent, grim giants, gazing down from both flanks into the valley below, bringing with them a nearly unbearable sense of crushing oppression.

Yu Sheng stood rigid in the cold night, then slowly turned around to look at where he had come from.

A pile of collapsed, crumbling bricks and rubble met his eyes, looking like a ruined temple that had fallen into ruin and disrepair perhaps a hundred years ago. A tattered Door — or rather, what could only be described as a crooked door frame with half a door panel propped against it — stood alone amid the wreckage. When the night wind blew, hollow, mournful wails drifted out from the gaps between the broken door panel and the rubble.

Yu Sheng stared wide-eyed. “Where the hell did I end up now…”

He slowly began to understand.

With his act of “opening the door,” what had happened two months ago had repeated itself.

He had been thrown into an unfamiliar place once again.

And this was even worse than two months ago — that massive, eerie Boundary City, while different in many ways from the Boundary City where he had grown up, was at least still a modern city where one could survive. But this time, the situation was far less promising.

He had been thrown into the middle of the wilderness.

Dense forest ahead, treacherous mountains on either side, and nothing behind him but a ruined temple that had been crumbling for who knows how many years. Just looking at the place, Yu Sheng felt that if it didn’t spawn thirty or fifty mountain bandits or a few wolf demons and fox spirits on the spot, it would be a complete waste of such scenery…

And the only thing he had in his hands was a single bag of kitchen trash he’d just brought out from home…

Yu Sheng thought about it, and the curses he was muttering internally were truly something colorful.

And then, at that very next second — just as the most eloquent stream of internal profanity was reaching its peak — a sudden, jarring voice rang out in his mind:

“Yu Sheng! The TV’s lost its signal! When are you coming back?”

(End of Chapter)