Chapter 25 – The Fox in the Dream

Eileen’s reaction didn’t seem fake.

In fact, from the moment Yu Sheng had started interacting with this doll until now, he’d never once caught her being insincere. Everything she said and did radiated a kind of crystal-clear honesty, as if the inside of her skull were solid all the way through—either her acting skills were extraordinarily high, or her skull really was solid all the way through.

Yu Sheng cautiously maintained the first hypothesis, but leaned more toward the second possibility.

He then described to Eileen the appearance of the dead doll, as well as the massive “shadow monster” that had seemingly perished alongside it. The answer he got was still “I don’t know.”

Yu Sheng furrowed his brow and sank into deep thought.

Eileen couldn’t help but grow curious: “Hey, why’d you suddenly come down to ask me all this? Didn’t you go upstairs to sleep?”

Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment, but ultimately decided to tell the doll about the changes in that room—it didn’t involve his secrets, and it might even be related to Eileen herself. Sharing it might actually help unravel the mystery.

“Something happened with the room upstairs…”

Yu Sheng gave Eileen a thorough account of everything he’d seen when he went upstairs. For once, Eileen didn’t chatter throughout the entire explanation. She just listened, her eyes growing wider and wider, and after he finished, she sat dazed for quite a while before finally coming back to her senses and drawing out a long: “Whoa—”

Yu Sheng immediately felt that even telling her hadn’t helped unravel any mystery whatsoever.

“Looks like you don’t know what’s going on either,” Yu Sheng sighed. “And you’ve definitely never seen that mirror before, right?”

“Never seen it, don’t know about it,” Eileen nodded with perfect confidence, then quickly added, “But I think this house of yours is getting weirder and weirder.”

“You don’t need to tell me that—I think so too,” Yu Sheng sighed at her words. “Door Opening might drop you who-knows-where, a room might suddenly rearrange its furnishings, a mirror might reflect scenery from god-knows-when or where… And to think I always used to feel this place was quite livable. Sigh…”

Eileen stared at Yu Sheng’s expression with her crimson eyes, unblinking. After listening to his grumbling, she hesitated for a moment: “So… are you planning to move? Not going to live here anymore?”

Yu Sheng didn’t respond right away, but he had to admit he’d genuinely considered it.

After all, he could tolerate the occasional haunted mirror, furniture of unknown origin, suspicious appliances, or a chattering doll sealed inside an oil painting popping up in the house. Since he wasn’t even afraid of dying, he could just treat it all as adding a bit of spice to life. But the characteristic of opening a door and potentially falling into some random Otherworld—that was truly a problem. That wasn’t something you could just grit your teeth and endure.

For Yu Sheng, the most fatal thing about the Otherworld wasn’t that it could be fatal—it was that you might not be able to come back. That alone had genuinely given him the idea of moving somewhere else.

Seeing that Yu Sheng remained silent for a long time, Eileen waited quietly for a moment before continuing on her own: “Well, if you’ve got your eye on a place somewhere, let me know first, okay? You figure out how to get me into their neighborhood, and I’ll drive down their housing prices for you…”

Yu Sheng blinked in surprise: “I was just joking back then… And now you don’t mind that it’s an insult to the Ancestral Doll and your sisters?”

“I thought it over carefully just now, and I actually think your plan makes a lot of sense,” Eileen said with utmost seriousness. “Besides, if I’ve already helped you drive down the housing prices, that should at least count toward offsetting the debt of living in your house, right?”

Yu Sheng suddenly realized that she was simply worried he might move away and leave her behind.

But he didn’t call her out on it. He just shook his head: “Let’s not talk about that for now. I’ve had some thoughts, but I’m not actually planning to move yet—don’t worry, if I really do move, I’ll bring you along. A single painting doesn’t take up much space.”

“Oh, okay then!” Eileen immediately cheered up.

But before long, a hint of worry crept back onto her face: “Um… that dead doll you saw in the mirror—were her eyes closed?”

“…I don’t think so,” Yu Sheng recalled after a moment. “Why do you ask?”

Eileen opened her mouth, looking a bit sad: “When a Living Doll is broken beyond repair, if her eyes close, it means her soul has returned to the garden at Alice’s Cottage. We’re reborn there. But if her eyes are still open… then she’s still ‘there.'”

Yu Sheng froze, suddenly regretting that he’d answered without thinking first. He should have asked why before responding.

“We don’t actually know what place the mirror was reflecting,” he said softly after a moment of silence. “But since she appeared in the mirror, maybe she’s already connected to this house somehow. Maybe someday we’ll find her. For now, don’t think too much about it—you’re still trapped here yourself.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Eileen sighed. “Sometimes a sister goes out and we lose contact… We’ll run into her eventually. Yeah, we will.”

Yu Sheng suddenly felt that this doll wasn’t quite as heartless as he’d imagined.

He chatted with Eileen a while longer before heading back up to the second floor.

He went to check the room at the end of the hallway once more, confirmed it still looked exactly as he’d seen it earlier, and left it alone. He turned and entered his own bedroom.

Pulling the curtains shut, he lay down on the bed. Yu Sheng tossed and turned for a long time. He was both drowsy and exhausted, yet his mind was such a jumble that he couldn’t fall asleep no matter what. All sorts of thoughts and recent experiences surged through his mind like chaotic currents—Eileen’s situation, that valley beneath the night sky, the knowledge about the Otherworld, the fox girl who had fought to stay rational until the very last moment and told him to run, and… his own death and resurrection.

He struggled like this for who knew how long before gradually drifting into a hazy sleep.

He felt his consciousness slowly sinking into a pool of water that was gentle yet chaotic. Even in sleep, those messy “currents” still swirled around him in the pool. Through a layer of chaotic mist, he observed fragments of his own memories and thoughts, hearing many muddled, indistinct sounds by his ears, until his consciousness touched the bottom of the “pool” and the surroundings gradually fell into silence.

Yu Sheng wandered through the dream, drifting beneath a dim sky. He saw himself walking across a vast wilderness, and far in the distance there seemed to be a small hill.

He felt as though he’d been wandering around this little hill for a very, very long time, without purpose, not even knowing who he was.

But a flash of unusual color at the corner of his eye suddenly made him stop.

Between the dim, chaotic sky and earth, Yu Sheng spotted a patch of brightness. He instinctively walked toward that silvery-white glow, and in the next instant his vision blurred and he found himself standing right before it.

He saw a fox spirit with silver-white fur—even lying down, she was a good two or three meters tall—sleeping quietly on the wilderness.

Beautiful. Elegant. Serene.

A breeze drifted in from afar, stirring the slender wild grass and the silver-white down on the fox spirit’s body. She showed no sign of waking, simply curled up in peaceful stillness. Many thick tails swept forward from behind her—some she held in her embrace, others draped over her body like a blanket.

Yu Sheng stared in astonishment at this fox that had appeared in his dream—at some point he couldn’t pinpoint, he had become lucidly aware that he was dreaming.

After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped forward and tentatively touched the great fox’s front paw: “…Hu Li, is that you?”

But the white fox continued to slumber, showing no reaction whatsoever to Yu Sheng’s touch or call.

Yu Sheng called out several more times and even tried tugging on her tail, but nothing could wake Hu Li.

The feeling it gave was as though she wasn’t merely sleeping—it was more like something had blocked off her senses entirely.

Yu Sheng furrowed his brow and took a couple of steps back.

Why had this fox appeared in his dream?

He admitted that before falling asleep, his mind had been all over the place, and he had indeed thought about this fox trapped in the Otherworld. But the current situation was clearly not an ordinary case of “you dream about what you think about during the day.” He could sense it—Hu Li was truly “right here.”

As he pondered, Yu Sheng suddenly felt a stirring within him. He sensed something and immediately looked down at his right hand.

A tiny bead of blood was seeping from his finger, and around the droplet he could make out a faint ring of tooth marks.

Those were from earlier, when he’d snatched the chocolate back from Hu Li and her food-guarding instinct had kicked in, making her bite him.

Yu Sheng stared at this sight, and suddenly recalled what had happened in the valley—how he had abruptly “seen” fragments of Hu Li’s memories and sensed some of her thoughts.

“Because of the blood?”

An understanding dawned on him. He guessed that her appearance here might also be connected to the fact that she had accidentally “consumed” his blood.

But then another doubt surfaced—the frog in the rain and that grotesque flesh monster had also consumed his blood, so why hadn’t they shown up here? That flesh monster had even had several meals’ worth, far more than Hu Li had ingested…

Just as Yu Sheng’s train of thought was veering in an increasingly bizarre direction, he suddenly sensed something. The next moment, he heard a low, mocking chuckle drifting from the grass behind him.

It sounded somewhat familiar.

Yu Sheng whipped around toward the source of the sound. The very next second, he heard Eileen’s exasperated complaint rising from the grass: “I told you not to laugh, don’t laugh! Would it kill you to hold it in?! See, now we’ve been found out…”

Yu Sheng stared expressionlessly at the oil painting frame sticking up from the grass, and at Eileen inside the frame, hugging her Toy Bear and giving him a silly grin in an attempt to look cute and get away with it.

“Watching TV got boring, so I came to watch you dream…”

(End of Chapter)