Chapter 142 – When Tomorrow Suddenly Becomes Worth Looking Forward To

Chapter 142 – When Tomorrow Suddenly Becomes Worth Looking Forward To

Yu Sheng didn’t waste any words. After getting Little Red Riding Hood’s confirmation, he opened a Door right there in the Corridor, in front of Rapunzel and Xiaoxiao (and of course filed a quick one-click report while he was at it).

An ethereal, faintly glowing door materialized out of thin air, and beyond it lay an unfamiliar landscape.

“Whoa…” Rapunzel’s eyes went wide instantly, her face full of astonishment as she stared at the scene before her. “What… is this?”

Yu Sheng spoke casually while maintaining the door: “My ability. Little Red Riding Hood never told you about it?”

“Um, she did mention something about it, but I didn’t imagine it would be like this.” The amazement still hadn’t faded from Rapunzel’s face, and her curiosity only deepened as she gazed through to the other side of the door. “What’s on the other side?”

“Interested? You can all go together,” Yu Sheng said with a smile, extending the invitation quite openly before turning his gaze to Xiaoxiao. “Want to go over and play? It’s hard to find such a wide-open space anywhere in Boundary City.”

Xiaoxiao immediately looked up, her gaze inquiring and cautious as she turned to her “guardian.”

Little Red Riding Hood was full of questions. For some reason, the landscape beyond the door looked vaguely familiar, though the angle made it impossible to be certain. But after noticing the half-smiling expression on Yu Sheng’s face, she could at least be sure it was a safe place—so after a brief moment of hesitation, she nodded to Rapunzel: “Come along. Since Yu Sheng said you can go too, there shouldn’t be any danger.”

“Um… okay, let me go tell the others first. I’ll be right back!”

Rapunzel turned and dashed down the Corridor, and within a few minutes she came rushing back in a whirlwind—carrying a little backpack in her hand: “I’m back, I’m back! We can head out now!”

Yu Sheng looked at the thing in her hand with some confusion. “Uh… what’s that?”

“Water bottle, tissues, snacks, and band-aids. You have to bring all this when taking a child out,” Rapunzel said as she strapped the little backpack onto Xiaoxiao. “Oh right, and a hat—I forgot the little yellow hat. Wait for me again…”

“We’re not going on a field trip,” Yu Sheng said, caught between laughter and exasperation. “And there are no cars or intersections over there. Besides, if it’s really necessary, I can open a Door back anytime.”

“Huh? Oh, oh, okay.” Only then did Rapunzel belatedly catch on. She seemed to have a somewhat scatterbrained personality. “So what kind of place is it over there?”

“Nothing special, just a vegetable patch,” Eileen remarked offhandedly from the side.

Rapunzel’s face was full of question marks, but before she could ask anything more, Little Red Riding Hood had already stepped through the door, followed by Hu Li and Eileen. Yu Sheng held the door open with one hand and made an inviting gesture toward her and Xiaoxiao with the other: “Go on through. You’ll be amazed.”

A momentary sensation of weightlessness and dizziness, along with the brief sensory disorientation that came from the environment switching—the entire process took less than a second, and those who stepped through the door had already left the orphanage behind, standing in a vast expanse of open land.

Rapunzel stared in astonishment at this place with its blue sky, towering mountains, and sweeping valleys. Then she noticed that Xiaoxiao, who had come through with her, already had her eyes wide open—this girl who had always been somewhat nervous and reserved since arriving in the unfamiliar environment, who rarely spoke up on her own, now had a wondrous light on her face. Such an incredible vista had clearly made a powerful impression on her.

“Wow—”

Xiaoxiao finally let out an exclamation, a big smile breaking across her face. She raised her hand and pointed at the vast mountain ranges in the distance and the Wasteland covered in a thin layer of pale green, then burst into giggles.

Nobody had any idea what she was laughing about—all they could tell was that this child was very happy.

But Little Red Riding Hood, who had stepped through the door first, was standing frozen in place. She seemed not to have heard the laughter behind her, staring fixedly at the mountains on either side of The Valley, her expression gradually shifting from bewilderment to shock, with even a hint of tension surfacing.

She had finally recognized this place—even though it had been utterly transformed, she could still make out the contours of the entire valley.

But in the next second, she saw things that stunned her even more.

She noticed the open platform at the center of The Valley (she was standing right beside it at that moment), noticed the large tracts of land outside the platform that had clearly been leveled by human hands into vegetable plots, noticed the unfinished irrigation channel on one side of the platform, and… the ugly little makeshift toilet at the edge of the platform.

The girl’s train of thought was completely derailed by this mishmash of incongruous sights, and no matter how hard she racked her brain, she couldn’t arrive at any conclusion.

She could only look up at Yu Sheng—and found that Yu Sheng was also watching her with that half-smile of his.

“Remember what I told you? That I was going to deal with that Dark Forest, and even deal with the Fairy Tale problem,” Yu Sheng walked up to Little Red Riding Hood and spoke to her slowly. “You told me that Fairy Tale can never be eradicated, because that’s simply the nature of the Otherworld—but I disagreed. Now look at this place. This is the ‘proof’ I’m giving you.”

“This is… Night-shrouded Valley?” Little Red Riding Hood finally broke her silence, but didn’t know how to continue. She had already perceived that unimaginable changes had taken place here, yet reason made her afraid to think about what it all truly meant.

“It used to be called that, but I’m planning to give it a new name now,” Yu Sheng raised his head, gazing at the distant scenery. “Ever since that big-eyed thing left, there’s been no more night shroud here. Now what I’m actually worried about is how to get a normal day-night cycle going—if it’s always daytime, a lot of vegetables won’t grow well, but I don’t know how to build greenhouses either.”

Little Red Riding Hood blinked. Her ears had kept up, but her thoughts hadn’t. She realized that the biggest problem when dealing with Yu Sheng and his group (though their actual human content was debatable) was that her thoughts could never keep pace.

But two or three seconds later, it finally clicked: “Wait! What about the Hunger Entities that were entrenched here?”

“Gone,” Yu Sheng spread his hands. “That dish you saw when I invited you to stay for dinner last time—that was the last Plate.”

Eileen tilted her head up and added from beside him: “By the way, he’s still pretty bummed about that.”

Little Red Riding Hood: “…?”

Her thoughts had fallen behind again.

“The Hunger Entities… are gone?” Another two or three seconds passed before Little Red Riding Hood finally processed this, and immediately, driven by reason, a storm of chain-linked deductions erupted in her mind. She finally realized the magnitude of what Yu Sheng had said so casually. “Wait! Are you saying that this place will never generate Hunger Entities again?”

Yu Sheng nodded. “That’s right—not only will this place never generate The Hunger again, but I’m also planning to turn it into a meat, vegetable, and grain production base for the lodge. Though it’s still in the early stages right now.”

But Little Red Riding Hood hadn’t paid attention to the second half of what Yu Sheng said. She lunged forward two steps, and in that instant her eyes became as sharp as a Wolf’s: “So, the Rules of this Otherworld have been permanently altered? No, that’s not right… an Otherworld’s Rules are its very essence. A change in Rules would mean… the original ‘Otherworld’ here has perished? No, that’s still not right—this valley is clearly still here…”

“Baili Qing has a very apt way of putting it,” Yu Sheng said, seeing that Little Red Riding Hood’s agitation was making her thoughts somewhat chaotic. He smiled and waved his hand in front of her, signaling her to calm down. “This valley is now like an empty shell left behind after everything inside was eaten away—the Rules that once filled this shell, and the entities born from those Rules, were all consumed and eroded in that feast. What remains of the valley is just a harmless husk.”

He paused here, then added: “Also, this ‘shell’ now seems to be ‘connected’ to No. 66 Wutong Road. I haven’t figured out the spatiotemporal structure between the two yet, but you can think of it as—you’re currently standing in the ‘courtyard’ of No. 66 Wutong Road.”

Little Red Riding Hood said nothing.

She seemed to have completely missed the second half of Yu Sheng’s words.

She just stood there in a daze, motionless for a long time, her eyes as if frozen in their sockets, gazing far into the distance—gazing at the clear sky and the healed earth, gazing at the faint green on the hillsides, gazing at… this Otherworld that was no longer filled with hunger and despair.

Light footsteps came from nearby. It was Xiaoxiao—this child who always kept her head down and stayed silent in the orphanage now wore a radiant smile on her face. She came running up to Little Red Riding Hood, raised her hand high, and held out a bunch of wild grass: “Red Hood big sister! There are flowers!”

The next second, the little girl suddenly froze. She held her hand up, looking up with some unease: “Why are you crying? Does it hurt? Is your body going to crack open too?”

By the end, the child was clearly becoming frightened.

But Little Red Riding Hood suddenly lowered her head, quickly wiped her face, and when she looked up again her eyes were full of warmth and laughter. She reached out and took the bunch of wild grass from Xiaoxiao’s hands, then ruffled the girl’s head: “No, the cold wind just blew into my eyes… This is just a bunch of wild grass, though—there aren’t any flowers in it?”

“They fell on the road,” Xiaoxiao broke into a smile again, “and then the wind blew them away. You have to pretend they’re still in your hand…”

“…Okay. They’re still here,” Little Red Riding Hood said, giving the girl’s hair another vigorous ruffle. “Thank you for the flowers.”

Then she straightened up, searching for Rapunzel’s figure.

She saw that Rapunzel had somehow already climbed onto that strange platform and was curiously examining something next to the weird, ugly “building.” After a while, Rapunzel suddenly looked up and enthusiastically waved her arms toward them.

“Hey! Little Red Riding Hood! There are chickens next to this toilet! A whole flock of them!”

Little Red Riding Hood squinted slightly against the bright sunlight.

How wonderful, she thought—to suddenly have things worth looking forward to in life again. How wonderful.

Only Yu Sheng was suddenly not very happy.

“That’s not a toilet!” he shouted at the girl on the platform, hopping with indignation. “That’s Phase One of our club headquarters!”

(End of Chapter)