Chapter 66 – Morning at Yu Sheng’s Home

When Yu Sheng woke up, the first thing he saw was Eileen sprawled out in a corner at the foot of the bed, limbs splayed in every direction. Her picture frame had been placed on the nightstand beside the bed, leaning against the wall.

Yu Sheng sighed. Last night, he’d ultimately failed to kick this doll out of his room—mainly because every time he tried to carry her toward the door, she’d throw a screaming fit loud enough to make his brain throb.

Sighing deeply once more, he noticed Eileen showed no signs of waking up, so he stretched out his foot and gave her a couple of kicks.

“Get up. If you don’t get up soon, I’m taking your picture frame away and making you sleep back inside the painting.”

Eileen, still splayed out at the foot of the bed, finally stirred. She slowly sat up, her hair a tangled mess atop her head, and looked at Yu Sheng through bleary, half-open eyes. “Good morning… heh…”

“Good morning my foot! It’s almost noon!” Yu Sheng suppressed the urge to kick this wretched doll right off the bed. “Do you have any idea how many times you rolled around on the bed last night?! It’s already weird enough that a doll needs to sleep at all—how can your sleeping posture be that restless on top of it?!”

“I wouldn’t know. Yaaawn—” Eileen rubbed her eyes and stretched lazily while muttering, “Don’t be so grumpy about it. I’m this pretty and sharing a room with you, and you’re still not happy…”

Yu Sheng stared at this little creature, only 66.6 centimeters tall, cold sweat forming on his brow. He could feel his temples twitching. “You’re not big but your ego sure is. Do you even hear yourself?”

Eileen didn’t care in the slightest. Hair disheveled, she crawled right up to Yu Sheng, lowered her head forward, and declared with absolute conviction: “Comb my hair.”

A vein popped on Yu Sheng’s forehead. He rolled off the bed, went to the bathroom, grabbed a comb, and tossed it onto the bed. “Not my problem. Do it yourself.”

Eileen gripped the comb—which was about the same size as her entire head—with both hands, rolling her eyes dramatically. “Does it look like I can do this myself? I can barely hold this thing with one hand. Unless you want to go get me a doll-sized comb…”

Then came a whole string of complaints—”normally when my hair gets messy I can only claw at it with my fingers,” “the first day I could only sleep on a chair,” “nobody ever cares about a doll’s feelings”—on and on without pause, enough to make your ears feel like they were shooting sparks.

“…I must have owed you a debt in a past life.” Yu Sheng finally couldn’t take it anymore. He walked over, snatched the comb from Eileen’s hands, and set her on the nightstand. “Sit here. Don’t move.”

Eileen immediately broke into a triumphant grin, sitting on the nightstand while chattering away. “You’re the one who made this body, so handling a little after-sales service is perfectly normal…”

Yu Sheng grumpily combed the doll miss’s hair while retorting, “Is that how you use ‘after-sales service’?”

“Close enough—ow, be gentle! Don’t yank it out! A doll’s hair is precious, you know.”

Yu Sheng let out yet another long sigh. He somehow managed to wrestle Eileen’s hair—tangled into a complete mess from tossing and turning in her sleep—back into some semblance of order. Then he hung the picture frame on the doll’s back and went off to wash up.

“Hey, Yu Sheng! What’s for breakfast?” Eileen’s voice came from outside the bathroom before long.

Yu Sheng’s mouth was already full of toothpaste foam by then, and he mumbled back: “I’ll cook some noodles in a bit. We’ll just make do—then head out.”

An “oh” came from outside the bathroom door, and the doll finally fell quiet.

But Yu Sheng had a nagging feeling that Eileen’s temporary silence was just her plotting something even more chaotic—he could feel his spiritual intuition going thump-thump-thump.

Although spiritual intuition going thump-thump-thump in a situation like this did sound a bit… odd.

Yu Sheng finished washing up, wiped his face, and looked up at himself in the mirror above the sink.

Alert and energetic. Good complexion. Even wearing a faint, unconscious smile.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen himself looking this lively in the mirror. For a moment, he felt almost dazed.

He still remembered—not long ago, he’d been living anxious, uneasy days in this city that was so vast it filled him with dread. For those two-plus months, he’d fallen asleep every night in a state of tension and stress, passed through restless nights filled with bad dreams, then woken up exhausted. He’d wash his face once every few days, and the person staring back at him from the mirror was always listless and drained.

But now, all he saw was an energetic young man with a hint of anticipation for the future in his eyes—looking nothing like someone who’d been kicked all night by a doll with terrible sleeping posture.

“…My whole mindset really has changed, hasn’t it…” Yu Sheng couldn’t help but laugh, murmuring to himself.

Then came Eileen’s banshee-like wailing from outside the door: “Yu—Sheng! Did-you-fall-in?! I’m getting Hu Li to come fish you out—”

The smile on Yu Sheng’s face froze instantly. He turned and yanked the door open to find Eileen standing on the floor outside, picture frame strapped to her back, grinning at him with boundless energy.

“You’ve been in there for over half an hour!” the doll declared, tilting her head up.

Yu Sheng stepped right past her, opened the bedroom door, and went to check if the fox had woken up.

He got a fright the moment he opened the door: Hu Li was standing right there in the doorway, leaning forward like a thief, looking as though she was debating whether or not to come in.

Hu Li was startled too by the sudden opening of the door—genuinely startled. The great mass of tail behind her went “poof” and fluffed out like a folding screen blocking the entire hallway, while the two large ears atop her head snapped ramrod straight.

Two or three seconds passed before the bristling fox-spirit finally relaxed. She looked at Yu Sheng with an uncertain expression. “Benefactor…”

Yu Sheng was curious. “What are you doing?”

“I woke up but didn’t know what to do, so… I came to wait. But I didn’t know if you were awake yet, so I… didn’t dare knock.” Hu Li explained nervously, then looked at Yu Sheng with concern. “Benefactor, are you alright? Where did you fall into?”

“I didn’t fall into anything! Don’t listen to Eileen’s nonsense,” Yu Sheng glared, then frowned and looked Hu Li up and down. “You’ve just been standing here at the door waiting this whole time?”

“Mm-hm.”

“…From now on, this is your home. You don’t need to be so nervous all the time. If you’ve got nothing to do, you can watch TV or something… Oh, when I have time, I’ll teach you how to use the appliances.” Yu Sheng said casually as he turned toward the staircase. “Let’s go downstairs and eat first. I’ll cook some noodles to tide us over. I’m taking you shopping today.”

The moment she heard the word “eat,” Hu Li’s eyes visibly lit up, and she followed Yu Sheng’s footsteps with an almost bouncing gait.

But Yu Sheng had barely taken two steps before he stopped again, turning to look at the fox-spirit with a hesitant expression.

Hu Li tilted her head. “Benefactor?”

“I just thought of something…” Yu Sheng’s gaze landed on top of Hu Li’s head. “You can hide your tail—but what about your ears? If you go outside looking like this… you’ll probably attract quite a bit of attention.”

Hearing this, Hu Li looked somewhat bewildered. She hadn’t stepped foot outside the house since arriving here, so she had no idea what the outside world looked like, much less why her appearance might seem out of place.

But if her benefactor said so, she believed him.

The foxgirl rubbed her hands together, then reached up and plucked the ears off the top of her head, stuffing them into her tail. Then she hid the tail away as well.

Dead silence.

Yu Sheng stood frozen in the hallway, still in the exact posture of having been mid-sentence a second ago, petrified like a statue.

It was Eileen’s shriek that shattered the silence: “AAAHH—Fox-fox-fox girl, what did you just pull off your head?!”

Hu Li produced the tail she normally used to store things and fished out the pair of fluffy ears to show Eileen. “My ears.”

Yu Sheng’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his skull. “Those things are detachable?! They’re fake?!”

“They’re real,” Hu Li said matter-of-factly as she tucked the ears away. “Fox-spirits are skilled at shapeshifting.”

Yu Sheng: “The shapeshifting I know of doesn’t quite work like that…”

Hu Li’s face immediately lit up with surprise. “Benefactor, you’ve met other fox-spirits?”

Yu Sheng paused, then instantly calmed down. “…No, I haven’t.”

“For a fox-spirit to learn the art of refinement, the first step is refining oneself. Once mastered, it becomes shapeshifting,” Hu Li explained earnestly, sharing what she considered perfectly obvious common knowledge with Yu Sheng and Eileen. “But Mom and Dad didn’t get the chance to teach me much. I only learned… the basics. I heard from the immortal that truly powerful fox-spirits can even transform themselves into tales from books or shadows from history, and merely through word of mouth among people, they can traverse past and present in an instant and cross the sea of stars. But me—I can’t do any of that!”

Yu Sheng listened with his jaw hanging open. His imagination was running at full throttle just to keep up with the fox girl’s description, but even though his ears understood the words, his brain refused to believe them. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this girl was pulling his leg.

But Hu Li’s innocent, harmless face really didn’t look like one capable of making things up.

“Something about this feels off,” Eileen muttered beside them, rubbing her chin. “My memory’s not great right now, so don’t try to fool me… Where did you even get this ‘common knowledge’? You sure that immortal wasn’t just messing with you? I’m telling you, those tour guide types will say anything…”

Hu Li shook her head vigorously. “I don’t know, but my shapeshifting technique really was taught to me by Mom and Dad. It truly does work like this—”

As she spoke, she studied Yu Sheng’s appearance carefully. The next instant, her hair and eye color changed simultaneously, mimicking Yu Sheng’s to become black-haired and black-eyed.

Now she looked completely like an ordinary pretty girl—clearly a Boundary City local at first glance.

“Is this… okay?” The foxgirl looked at Yu Sheng expectantly.

Yu Sheng blinked, then finally nodded with a somewhat dazed expression.

Everything else aside, at least this time her transformation process looked much more normal…

(End of Chapter)