Chapter 129 – The Beginning of the “Fairy Tale”

Chapter 129 – The Beginning of the “Fairy Tale”

Little Red Riding Hood didn’t seem to doubt Yu Sheng’s explanation — unreliable adults were always able to keep a straight face when covering up the truth, effortlessly fooling a high school girl whose eighteenth birthday wasn’t until next month.

So she merely reminded Yu Sheng once more to be cautious and vigilant when facing the Twilight Angel, then quickly steered the conversation back to “Otherworlds.”

“Otherworlds are primarily divided into four types. The first three categories are the most straightforward — classified by scale and manifestation, they are ‘Wilderness,’ ‘Kingdom,’ and ‘Fortress,'” Little Red Riding Hood said to Yu Sheng with a serious expression. “You should be able to roughly guess what they mean from the names alone.”

Yu Sheng quickly adjusted his attitude as well. As Little Red Riding Hood spoke, he thought along and said, “I’ve actually already read a bit about this part… If I remember correctly, a ‘Wilderness’-type Otherworld refers to ‘an open space with no visually discernible boundaries, where most of the area consists of pristine natural environments, and one cannot leave simply by walking to the edge,’ right?”

“Correct, which is why that Night-shrouded Valley is a textbook example of a Wilderness-type Otherworld,” Little Red Riding Hood nodded. “Generally speaking, Wilderness-type Otherworlds are very large and lack obvious, fixed ‘entry and exit points.’ You basically need to fulfill specific conditions or wait for a specific time to leave.

“As for ‘Kingdom,’ that’s another type of large-scale Otherworld. Its spatial dimensions can sometimes rival those of a Wilderness, but the difference is that ‘Kingdoms’ tend to contain a large number of ‘man-made traces’ — rows of houses, cities, and even factories rumbling away producing who-knows-what. A ‘Kingdom’-type Otherworld gives the impression of being the ruins of a civilization situated in anomalous space, but in reality, the buildings and facilities scattered throughout the Kingdom are riddled with irrational elements, and even a cursory observation will reveal their twisted, jarring qualities.

“Additionally, in ‘Kingdom’-type Otherworlds, you can generally find stable entry and exit points that allow round-trip access to reality. That’s also the biggest difference between Kingdoms and Wildernesses.

“The third type of Otherworld, ‘Fortress,’ typically manifests as a single, enclosed building or facility. Their ‘scale’ is smaller than both Wildernesses and Kingdoms, but that doesn’t mean ‘Fortresses’ are any safer. Quite the opposite — Fortresses tend to have more complex and unpredictable rules and eerie environments. ‘Uncertainty’ is the defining feature of Fortress-type Otherworlds, and precisely because of this characteristic, the methods of entering and exiting Fortresses are wildly varied. Some have stable entry and exit points, while others, like Wildernesses, operate on ‘conditional access.’

“The ‘museum’ we explored together is a textbook example of a Fortress-type Otherworld, and another ‘Fortress’ you’re even more familiar with…”

Little Red Riding Hood paused here, her calm gaze fixed on Yu Sheng’s eyes. “Can you guess which one?”

Yu Sheng froze for a moment, then quickly caught on and said uncertainly, “It’s not my house, is it?”

Little Red Riding Hood looked somewhat exasperated. “…Isn’t it obvious?”

“Uh, well, yeah, but I never really thought about it that way,” Yu Sheng said, somewhat embarrassed as he rubbed his nose. Then he quickly changed the subject. “Alright, so Otherworlds are divided into four types, and you’ve just rattled off three in one go, so it’s pretty clear — the ‘Fairy Tale’ is definitely the fourth type, right?”

Little Red Riding Hood let out a breath, her expression somewhat complicated as she nodded. “The fourth type — ‘Anomaly.'”

Before Yu Sheng could even respond to the name, he heard Eileen pipe up from beside him: “Ah, you can just tell from the name that this one’s going to be a nightmare.”

Hu Li stared blankly at the Little Doll in her arms. “Why do you say that?”

Eileen rolled her eyes. “Isn’t it obvious? Otherworlds as a whole are already something that feels wrong, and now there’s specifically a category of Otherworld that goes out of its way to emphasize ‘wrongness’ right in its name — that’s like Yu Sheng walking into No. 66 Wutong Road: freaky to the core!”

Yu Sheng immediately poked the doll’s head with a finger. “I told you — no using me to make punchlines!”

Then he turned to look at Little Red Riding Hood. “Care to explain in detail?”

“If a normal Otherworld is a distorted region of spacetime, then an ‘Anomaly’ Otherworld is… the things beyond ‘spacetime,'” Little Red Riding Hood chose her words carefully, trying her best to clearly explain the concepts that were about to become exceedingly abstract and bizarre. “The abstract, the conceptual, things you can’t even imagine… ‘things.’ For example, an emotion, a memory, a collection of sounds, or… a story.”

Yu Sheng, Eileen, and Hu Li wore three equally dumbfounded expressions.

After half a minute of stunned silence, Yu Sheng was the first to break it: “Huh?” Then he immediately waved his hand. “Wait, my imagination actually kept up — it’s my comprehension that’s still catching up from behind… You’re saying that things like emotions, memories, even sounds… can form Otherworlds?”

“It’s not that they form Otherworlds, but that Otherworlds manifest in these forms.”

“Got it, got it, but regardless of how you put it…” Yu Sheng’s face was a knot of bewilderment; he vaguely felt as though he’d opened a door to a whole new world. “I always thought that no matter how outrageous an ‘Otherworld’ got, it at least had to be a ‘place’… like, at minimum, it should be something you can see, touch, enter, and leave. The things you’re describing are all… let me tell you, I’m a novelist and my vocabulary is barely sufficient for this conversation — that’s how absurd this is!”

Little Red Riding Hood blinked. “Huh? You’re a novelist?”

Eileen immediately leaned in from the side. “Yeah, and the stuff he writes is super freaky. You should ask that girl named Ren Wenwen at the Special Operations Bureau about it sometime…”

“That’s not important!” Yu Sheng casually pushed Eileen back and fixed his gaze on Little Red Riding Hood. “Anyway, I now understand why there’s a category of Otherworld called ‘Anomaly.’ So it’s all this kind of freakish stuff that defies classification, right? Then does that mean the ‘Fairy Tale’ is the ‘story type’ among the anomaly-type Otherworlds you just mentioned?”

Little Red Riding Hood nodded.

“But the Dark Forest I entered still seemed to be a ‘space’?” Yu Sheng noticed something that didn’t add up. “No, wait… was that actually a dream?”

“This is precisely the characteristic of most ‘Anomaly’-type Otherworlds. They are abstract in nature, yet through forms like hallucinations and dreams, they trap people inside tangible environments resembling ‘alternate dimensions.’ Some only imprison your consciousness, while others drag your physical body in as well — because of this, many anomaly-type Otherworlds are initially misjudged. Even professional scholars need a very long time before they realize that some hidden ‘essence’ lurks behind those peculiar ‘spaces,’ and by that point, for many victims, it’s already too late…”

At this point, Little Red Riding Hood paused briefly, organizing her thoughts before continuing — she was speaking about her own affairs, yet remained as calm as if she were an outsider. “As for the ‘Fairy Tale,’ even among anomaly-type Otherworlds, it’s a particularly special one, because it has a large number of ‘derivative branches,’ or rather… ‘subsets.’

“The Dark Forest is one of the Fairy Tale’s subsets.

“You can think of the ‘Fairy Tale’ as an invisible, unknowable, intangible ‘edifice.’ This ‘edifice’ itself is formless, but because of its existence, numerous ‘rooms’ have come into being. The Dark Forest where the Wolf lurks is only one of these rooms. Beyond that, there’s also Dorothy’s wasteland, the tower imprisoning Rapunzel, Cinderella’s eternally looping ball — and beyond all of those, there are some special ‘rooms.'”

Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow. “Special ‘rooms’?”

“Ones that don’t point to any specific fairy tale, but rather to a type of classic fairy-tale element, or… a ‘fictional script,'” Little Red Riding Hood said with a gentle nod. “For example, the King’s ‘castle,’ or an evil dragon’s ‘treasure vault’ — we haven’t been able to determine exactly which fairy tale or which ‘character’ these ‘subsets’ correspond to.”

Yu Sheng’s brow furrowed tightly. He listened carefully to every word Little Red Riding Hood told him, understanding and sketching out the various characteristics of this special Otherworld called the “Fairy Tale” and the patterns that might govern it. Vague, broad impressions took shape in his mind, and then Little Red Riding Hood’s next words reached his ears.

“This place is where the ‘Fairy Tale’ first erupted.”

Yu Sheng looked up in surprise and saw Little Red Riding Hood gazing out the window at the open space below with a complicated expression — a group of children were running back and forth between the swing sets, their boisterous shouts carrying through the glass and filling the air with liveliness.

“That was many, many years ago. Back then, these two buildings didn’t exist here yet — there were only some older, shorter structures instead. But this compound’s ‘function’ has never changed. It has always been an orphanage — it was then, it is now, and it will be in the future,” Little Red Riding Hood said slowly. “Regarding the eruption that year, much of the documentation has been lost for various reasons. Only from scattered records can we learn that this place was briefly sealed off for a period after the eruption.

“The Special Operations Bureau at the time believed it was merely some kind of ‘ordinary’ Otherworld phenomenon, and temporarily relocated the children affected by the ‘Fairy Tale’ to another high-security containment facility. But just a few short years later, ‘Fairy Tale’ phenomena began appearing in other parts of the Borderland, and those children who had originally been relocated started exhibiting all manner of abnormalities. Only then did people belatedly realize that an unknown ‘Anomaly-type Otherworld’ had already ‘unfolded’ across the Borderland.

“After that, the Special Operations Bureau tried many methods to contain the Fairy Tale’s influence, but with consistently minimal results. Even the most professional deep-divers were helpless after entering those ‘subsets,’ and some even lost their lives in vain. It took many more sacrifices before people managed to piece together some rudimentary patterns about the ‘Fairy Tale,’ and the most important of those rules… is the one I mentioned earlier: ‘the Fairy Tale doesn’t like adults’ — as you can see, this is the very foundation upon which this self-governed ‘kingdom’ of children exists.”

(End of Chapter)