Chapter 172 – Information

A door flickering with faint light opened from thin air. Yu Sheng pushed through it and stepped out, immediately spotting Hu Li standing in the living room with her head turned toward him, while on the sofa opposite sat three Eileens, lined up in a neat row.

Yes, there were three Eileens now.

“Benefactor, you’re alive again!” Hu Li was the first to happily rush over, grabbing Yu Sheng’s hand and shaking it vigorously. “All better? Nothing hurts anymore?”

The fox-spirit girl had tremendous grip strength, and Yu Sheng immediately felt his shoulder creaking and groaning: “All better, all better — stop shaking me, you’re about to yank my arm off…”

Then the three Eileens on the sofa spoke up, perfectly in unison: “Did you see the Hunter?”

Yu Sheng rubbed the soft fur behind Hu Li’s ears, then walked over to the other sofa with visible fatigue and sat down. Hearing Eileen’s question, he couldn’t help but sigh. “Yeah… I saw them.”

“Then what are you sighing about?” One of the Eileens looked at him strangely. “What happened? Did the negotiation not go well? How did your conversation go?”

Yu Sheng waved his hand with a gloomy expression. “One shot, instant kill. What’s there to talk about?”

Eileen was confused for a moment before realizing what Yu Sheng meant, and immediately furrowed her brows. “The Hunter shot you? That doesn’t make sense… Didn’t you show them the group photo? They still shot you after seeing it? Did they think you were running a scam? Or did the sight stir up grief that turned to hatred?”

“Enough with the dramatics,” Yu Sheng sighed, reaching out to poke the forehead of the Eileen who was talking — but his finger couldn’t budge it at all, and his index finger ended up aching from the impact instead. Apparently this was the one made of rebar and stone. “I suspect they mistook me for a wolf. I’d been contaminated by Grandmother Wolf’s blood at the time, and the contamination might have been a bit heavy.”

Eileen listened as Yu Sheng explained, and when he finished, her expression stiffened. “…Huh? That actually works?!”

“There’s no other explanation,” Yu Sheng sighed wearily, leaning back into the sofa. Although his physical injuries had fully healed after his ‘resurrection,’ the mental exhaustion from the mutual contamination with Grandmother Wolf and his ‘intervention’ in the Black Forest’s cycle wasn’t so easily relieved. “I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. I just showed them the photo, but no matter how you think about it, that photo shouldn’t have been a reason for them to pull the trigger…”

At this point, Yu Sheng trailed off, unable to stop himself from frowning in thought.

The scene of that hollow, formless husk raising a hunting rifle toward him replayed again and again in his mind — that empty hood, the gaze that seemed to exist yet couldn’t be seen, that hunting rifle…

Whether it was just his imagination or not, Yu Sheng kept feeling that the Hunter’s act of shooting him hadn’t been so simple. He kept sensing that the other party had wanted to communicate with him, and that perhaps… that single shot was their way of communicating.

But Yu Sheng couldn’t understand it.

He furrowed his brows deeply, and just then, he suddenly felt his phone vibrating.

The instant he instinctively reached for his pocket, Yu Sheng suddenly remembered something he’d forgotten. Looking down at the screen, he saw exactly what he’d expected — messages and missed calls from Little Red Riding Hood. There were over a dozen messages and seven or eight missed calls.

Cold sweat broke out immediately. Beside him, one of the Eileens craned her head over for a look, instantly let out an “oh boy,” and then launched into a rapid-fire commentary: “It’s over. Back then you kicked her out without a second thought, and now the debt collector’s come calling. Let me tell you, humans at sixteen or seventeen are the hardest to deal with, especially the kind of girl who’s been through hardship, cares about her pride, and has been fiercely competitive since childhood. The moment you booted her from the team, you should’ve known—”

Yu Sheng casually shoved the endlessly chattering little chatterbox aside, and all three Eileens toppled over like dominoes, erupting in a cascade of colorful profanity and creative expletives — Yu Sheng was instantly drowning in a triple dose of cursing.

Yu Sheng ignored the little doll’s triple-strength tirade and answered the phone with a pained expression. Before he could even get a word out, he heard Little Red Riding Hood’s voice from the other end — furious yet unable to hide her worry: “Why did it take you so long to answer?! Where the hell did you die?!”

Yu Sheng felt rather awkward too. “…Died at home.”

Little Red Riding Hood: “…?”

Clearly, the young Spirit Detective had prepared a whole barrage of questions and a mountain of complaints during the time she’d been unable to reach him, but Yu Sheng’s single sentence had choked every last word right out of her.

After several seconds of silence, the girl’s voice finally came through the phone again, noticeably softer by at least eight degrees, sounding hesitant: “You really… died again?”

She was obviously deeply uncomfortable saying those words, and her voice was kept very low, as if terrified that someone nearby might overhear.

“It’s nothing serious. You’ll get used to it eventually,” Yu Sheng consoled her. “That’s not what’s important. What matters is that we successfully killed ‘Grandmother Wolf’ once — after you left.”

Little Red Riding Hood suddenly fell silent, not speaking for a long while.

After a prolonged pause, her somewhat subdued voice finally came through the phone: “It’s no use. It’ll appear again.”

“Yes, it’ll appear again, but we’re weakening it each time. The next time you face it, it might not be as dangerous. And more importantly, I’ve now successfully found some clues about what lies ‘behind’ the Black Forest,” Yu Sheng said calmly, his mind recalling the visions he’d witnessed during the worst of the wolf-poison’s corrosive haze — those interwoven structures on the ‘other side’ of the Black Forest, branching like blood vessels and neural networks. “I’ve successfully planted a ‘backdoor’ in the Black Forest’s ‘cycle’ system. We made significant gains today.”

A soft intake of breath came from the other end of the phone.

Yu Sheng continued without pause: “Now I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

Yu Sheng hesitated briefly. “When you were dealing with the ‘Hunter’… did they ever shoot at you?”

“The Hunter shot at you?!”

“How do you think I ended up dying?” Yu Sheng sighed. “Got blown away by a single shot.”

“…The Hunter only shoots at ‘wolves’ — usually meaning Grandmother Wolf,” Little Red Riding Hood said after a moment’s hesitation. “But theoretically, if Grandmother Wolf has already been killed, the Hunter would disarm. Under normal circumstances, their aggression isn’t actually that high…”

“What if I had Grandmother Wolf’s blood contaminating my body at the time?” Yu Sheng pressed. “Could the Hunter have misjudged and treated me as a wolf too?”

Unexpectedly, Little Red Riding Hood’s answer was swift and definitive: “Absolutely not.”

“You’re that certain?”

“The Hunter can accurately identify ‘wolves.’ They wouldn’t misjudge based on something as trivial as blood contamination. I don’t know the exact mechanism they use to make that determination, but the accuracy is something I can confirm without question,” Little Red Riding Hood said with absolute conviction. “I’ve had the Hunter’s gun pointed at me many times. I’ve been devoured by Grandmother Wolf, devoured by the Big Bad Wolf, and contaminated by their blood. In terms of ‘wolf’ composition, I’m definitely higher than you — but the Hunter’s bullets have never once been wrong…”

Yu Sheng listened silently to the intelligence Little Red Riding Hood was conveying. After a long while, he gave a small nod. “I understand. Then it seems I’ll need to think this over carefully.”

He exchanged a few more words with her, mutually confirmed each other’s safety, and endured a few complaints from the girl before hanging up.

The three Eileens had already climbed back onto the sofa as if nothing had happened, and one of them leaned in close: “So what’s the verdict? What did the Hunter’s shot actually mean?”

Yu Sheng shook his head and opened his mouth to say something, but suddenly felt an itch in his throat.

He coughed twice, but the itching sensation in his throat not only didn’t subside — it grew increasingly unbearable.

He began coughing violently, uncontrollably, as if he might cough out his very heart, as if his lungs and trachea were being wrenched from his body.

Eileen and Hu Li beside him were both startled by the sudden fit of violent coughing. They immediately rushed over to pat his back and help him breathe. Hu Li was so panicked that even her tail had puffed up: “Benefactor, are you okay?! Benefactor, are you allergic to my tail…”

Eileen was no less frantic, vigorously pounding Yu Sheng’s back while exclaiming: “Holy crap, I think you’re about to cough yourself to death! What’s going on all of a sudden… You’re not about to die again, are you? You just came back!”

Yu Sheng coughed ferociously, dry-heaving several times near the end before finally managing to stop with great difficulty. Then he raised a hand to wave off Hu Li, pushed Eileen’s arm away, and rasped hoarsely: “Stop hitting me — you nearly beat me to death… Next time you’re not allowed to pat my back with that body. Who smacks people with rebar?”

Eileen was wide-eyed and about to protest when she saw Yu Sheng, still breathing heavily, straighten up and open his right hand.

It was something he had coughed up from his mouth during the violent fit.

Hu Li looked at the small metal lump with confusion. “What is that?”

Eileen’s gaze went slightly blank too. “…A bullet?”

Yu Sheng said nothing. He simply steadied the lingering discomfort in his chest while staring fixedly at the object resting in his palm.

It was indeed a bullet. Its surface was still streaked with bright red traces of blood, but its appearance was rather peculiar — short and thick, with spiraling ridges along the tip. It didn’t resemble a conventional rifle round, nor did it look like shotgun pellets, and it was a size larger than a pistol bullet. Along its base and midsection, layer upon layer of fine, dense patterns could be seen. They looked as though they’d been machine-pressed, yet they didn’t seem like mere decoration — rather, they carried a certain… mystical quality, as if symbolizing some extraordinary power.

The discomfort in his chest gradually faded, and his breathing became smooth again.

Eileen clung to Yu Sheng’s hand and looked up at him. “So this is…”

“A ‘message’ from the Hunter,” Yu Sheng murmured softly.

Eileen frowned slightly. “So how should we handle this—”

Before the little doll could finish her sentence, Yu Sheng had already picked up his phone.

Photograph, compose message, send to Baili Qing — all in one smooth motion.

(End of Chapter)