Chapter 28 – “Hunger”

Falling, hurled upward, then falling again — endlessly repeating this cycle in a world of extreme cold and emptiness. His thoughts were churned into a tangled mess, and the chaotic sensations stabbed through his mind like sharp blades without pause, until his consciousness nearly shattered. Only then did a feeling of sudden release from the edge of drowning finally arrive, jolting Yu Sheng awake from that cold, dark, infinite descent.

He shot upright in bed, then immediately lost his balance — his body tilted and he nearly tumbled to the floor. At the last moment, he grabbed the edge of the bedside table and barely propped himself up, his head spinning violently.

A sharp, persistent throbbing pain made him almost believe his brain was truly boiling.

Fortunately, the sensation didn’t last much longer. Once he truly came to his senses, all those unbearable feelings in his mind faded away like the dream itself, leaving only a few unpleasant impressions behind.

Yu Sheng sat on the edge of the bed and took a few deep breaths, then looked out the window. The setting sun was gradually drawing close to the rooftops of the distant city blocks, and the sky was slowly darkening.

“…A whole day has already passed…” he muttered in mild surprise. He steadied himself on the bedside table and stood up, first walking to the desk to pour a glass of water and gulp it down. Then he patted his face, trying to shake off the lingering grogginess from that restless sleep, and left the bedroom to head downstairs.

“I really never thought that your ‘sudden wake’ could feel this awful,” Yu Sheng complained the moment he arrived in the dining room, addressing the oil painting on the table. “I figured at most I’d feel a bit dizzy or my heart would flutter for a second — but good lord, when I opened my eyes I nearly threw up last year’s New Year’s Eve dinner…”

He finished his complaints, but Eileen didn’t respond with her usual rapid-fire chatter. Instead, she was unusually quiet. Yu Sheng immediately felt something was off, and turned to look at the oil painting on the table. He found Eileen sprawled in the chair draped with its red velvet cloth as though she had malfunctioned, hugging the Toy Bear and staring blankly into the upper corner of the room. Occasionally her eyes would shift, followed promptly by her lurching upright for a dry heave.

Yu Sheng stared. “…How did your own ‘sudden wake’ end up making you this miserable too?”

Eileen looked up at him, and just as she was about to speak, another wave of nausea welled up — yet as a doll who had been sealed away for who knows how many years, there was nothing in her stomach to speak of, not even stomach acid, let alone New Year’s Eve dinner. (In fact, Yu Sheng even doubted she had a stomach at all.) So she could only drape herself over the edge of the Chair and suffer miserably, retching so hard it seemed her head might shake right off in the next second.

After a long while, the wretched doll finally recovered. She looked up at Yu Sheng, her voice faint as a dying breath: “It wasn’t me who ‘woke’ the two of us — it was you.”

Yu Sheng blinked. “…Huh?”

“That final shout of yours scared the fox awake — I didn’t even have time to react!” Eileen’s expression was one of aggrieved indignation. “Why did you have to yell so loud?!”

Yu Sheng listened with a dazed expression, but eventually understood what she meant. He scratched his hair a little awkwardly. “I didn’t know it would, I just wanted to warn Hu Li — I felt like she was in a really dangerous state.”

“Well, your instincts were right,” Eileen said, then lurched over the edge of the Chair with another “urgh” and dry-heaved twice before catching her breath again. She looked at Yu Sheng with an unamused expression. “Fine. The good news is that you managed to wake that fox before she fell in any deeper — though when she woke up, she ‘flung’ the two of us out in the process. But she herself should be lucid for a little while at least.”

Yu Sheng walked over, pulled out the chair across from Eileen and sat down. His expression gradually grew serious. “And the bad news?”

Eileen was silent for a moment. After a few seconds she gave a soft nod. “You’ve probably already guessed — she won’t last much longer.”

Yu Sheng frowned and said nothing.

Yes, he had felt it too. He had felt it back when they were trapped in the valley — that hunger and madness buried deep in Hu Li’s heart, endlessly gnawing away like some kind of festering corruption. At first he hadn’t known what it was, but during that final confrontation with the flesh-and-blood monster, he had sensed that the “hunger” was not as simple as it appeared on the surface.

And the scene he had glimpsed deep in the Dream just now had only given him a more precise picture of Hu Li’s situation.

“If you want to help that fox, you’d better act quickly,” Eileen said from beside him. “Whatever is bewitching her is trying to turn her into a kind of… ‘nourishment.’ Killing people isn’t its goal — ‘madness born of hunger’ is what it wants. The fact that the fox’s willpower has been strong enough to hold out until now is truly astonishing. But the longer she holds on, the greater the ‘nourishment’ she’ll provide when the ‘conversion’ happens. Things will get very troublesome — very, very troublesome.”

Yu Sheng listened with a darkening expression, mentally cross-referencing what Eileen described with the information he had gathered so far. But suddenly he noticed something and looked up at the picture frame across from him.

“Eileen,” he said with a grave expression, “do you… know something? About the situation in that valley, and about what’s inside it?”

Eileen hesitated for a moment. First she shook her head, then immediately gave a small nod. “Most of it I don’t remember, including how the valley came to be in the first place — all of that is gone. But what the fox ran into… I seem to have a vague impression of it. I must have come across relevant records at some point.”

As she spoke, she furrowed her brow in a brief pause, as though digging through her fragmented and incomplete memories for anything useful.

“…’Entity-Hunger’ — I believe that’s what it’s called,” Eileen said, recalling as she went. “It is an entity with clearly defined malicious intent and a high danger rating. It is born within sealed-off areas. The environment within the region becomes corrupted and hunger spreads. The entity itself is highly aggressive, but more dangerous is its ‘influence’ — people who come under this entity’s attention fall into a terrible hunger, and their willpower is subjected to extreme trials. I can’t recall specific incidents involving its victims; I only remember… that it was very dangerous and had harmed a great many people. And what makes it even worse is…”

Eileen paused and looked up into Yu Sheng’s eyes.

“Hunger turns people into beasts, devouring both dignity and life. The vast majority of people should be unable to withstand it. And those who fall… also become a part of Entity-Hunger, endlessly, without cease.”

As he listened to Eileen’s account, Yu Sheng’s expression grew increasingly taut, and a heavy, suffocating weight pressed down on his chest. And at that moment, he was suddenly struck by something else entirely —

During his confrontation with the flesh-and-blood monster, that urge he had felt deep inside to devour it!

Could it be that he, too, had already come under the influence of “Hunger”?!

Yu Sheng’s heart tightened and he quickly blurted out: “Wait — what are the main ‘symptoms’ of being affected by ‘Hunger’?”

Eileen gave him a peculiar look. “…Well, ‘hunger,’ obviously.”

“That’s not what I mean, I’m saying…” Yu Sheng quickly waved his hand and rephrased his words. “Like, when I saw that monster, I had this overwhelming urge to take a bite — I even thought it smelled pretty good, and when I got back I cooked a couple of dishes. Could that kind of reaction also be a result of ‘Hunger’s’ influence?”

Eileen’s expression visibly went blank for a moment. She immediately thought of the “local specialty” Yu Sheng had brought back, as well as that visually appetizing, aromatic four-dish-and-soup meal.

“Right, right, you actually ate it…” the doll murmured to herself, but then suddenly snapped to attention, and her tone shifted entirely. “No! Of course not! The effect of ‘Entity-Hunger’ is to drive you mad with hunger so you’ll gnaw on other people — not so you’ll gnaw on it! It doesn’t bait people into madness by using itself as the lure!”

Eileen’s outburst startled Yu Sheng, but he immediately understood the logic — hunger and appetite were closely related concepts, yet within the Otherworld and its entities, which operated on strict and clearly-defined rules, the two were entirely distinct definitions. Especially when an entity possessed active malicious intent, its influence would operate strictly in accordance with its own rules.

To put it plainly: if Yu Sheng had truly come under the influence of “Hunger” while in that valley, he should have been gnawing on Hu Li — not on the monster that was the source of the bewitchment.

Of course, the fact that the first time he bit into that monster there had been a slight element of reluctance involved — that part he chose not to mention.

With that thought, Yu Sheng let out a breath of relief, confirming that he had not been infected by that bizarre entity. He also recalled that after eating dinner before going to sleep, he had indeed felt the normal sensation of being full. Thoroughly reassured, he exhaled slowly. “That’s a relief then. Looks like I’m still pretty normal.”

Eileen stared at him at those words and muttered under her breath: “No… I think the fact that you could develop an appetite for that thing in the first place is already not normal…”

Yu Sheng waved it off indifferently and immediately switched to the next topic. “So that monster with the extremely abstract appearance but surprisingly decent flavor is ‘Entity-Hunger,’ right? Taking it out would free Hu Li from its influence — I know entities can’t be permanently killed, I mean temporarily taking it out.”

“Actually… I’m not sure,” Eileen’s answer came with some hesitation. “‘Hunger’ is a rather unusual kind of entity. The monster you saw is its ‘manifestation,’ but as I understand it, the true ‘Hunger’ actually permeates that entire valley. Do you understand what I mean? What you encountered was merely its ‘tentacle’ — something it extends to forage and perceive its surroundings. Its true form… is, true to its name, the hunger that fills every inch of that valley.”

As he listened, Yu Sheng’s expression slowly went blank.

Yes, he understood perfectly.

“Oh hell, it’s a rule-based type?!”