Chapter 179 – The Secret Letter

The weary-looking young man pushed open the door and left. The living room fell into silence.

After a few seconds, Yu Sheng was the first to break the quiet: “He’s obviously leaving us room to work here… Where should we start?”

Little Red Riding Hood said nothing. She simply stood up, walked to the low cabinet, and carefully lifted the cremation urn down from its surface. “Let’s try.”

This time, it was Yu Sheng who hesitated at the prospect of “giving it a try.” “…We’re really going to try?”

“This is for Old Zheng’s sake too,” Little Red Riding Hood said, her expression calm. “If he truly had something he never got the chance to say, this might be the only opportunity left.”

Looking at the earnest expression on the girl’s face, Yu Sheng finally drew a soft breath, pushed aside the hesitation in his heart, and reached his hand toward the urn…

A moment later, he gently shook his head.

“As expected, it doesn’t work…” Little Red Riding Hood blinked, a trace of regret in her voice, though she quickly let out a breath of acceptance. “But that makes sense. When has anything in this world ever been that simple?”

She turned and solemnly placed the porcelain urn back on the cabinet, then gave it a respectful bow before turning to look at Yu Sheng. “I am a little surprised, though. You usually seem to do everything without considering the consequences—you don’t even seem to care much about your own life. So why were you so cautious and solemn just now?”

“This is different,” Yu Sheng said, his tone unusually serious. “An ordinary person only dies once—and something that happens only once, life and death, is a very serious matter.”

Little Red Riding Hood stared at Yu Sheng for several seconds, as though seeing the “person” before her in a new light. After a while, she finally looked away and raised a hand to point toward the bedroom. “Let’s go see what’s in there.”

The two entered the room and quickly found the items the young man had mentioned—on the desk by the windowsill sat a stack of old books, several notebooks, and an assortment of miscellaneous labels, letters, and slips of paper.

Yu Sheng went over and flipped through one of the notebooks, noticing that the handwriting was clear and neat, as if subtly revealing the writer’s personality and habits.

He looked up and saw a row of sturdy wooden shelves along the opposite wall, lined with various crafts and collectibles—ceramic vessels, metal ornaments… and even two anime figurines.

Little Red Riding Hood noticed where Yu Sheng’s gaze had landed and glanced over as well, then waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t bother looking there. An ‘anomalous collectible’ like the Weeping One statue definitely wouldn’t be kept out in the open like this. In fact, that statue’s whereabouts are currently unknown—the Curiosities Association is searching for it too. It’s either stashed in one of Old Zheng’s secret storage locations, or it may have already found its way onto the black market.”

“I was just admiring the guy’s wide range of hobbies,” Yu Sheng said, shaking his head. “Those two figurines don’t look cheap.”

“…I wouldn’t know.” Little Red Riding Hood muttered, then turned her full attention to the books and notebooks before her.

Yu Sheng settled in as well, examining everything alongside her.

Most of the books were related to art collecting. The two most well-thumbed volumes were filled with all manner of notes—Old Zheng had added extensive commentary of his own beneath entries that interested him. The notebooks, meanwhile, were a jumble of everything from daily trivialities to work memos, most of it unremarkable.

Yu Sheng’s gaze shifted to the slips and letters.

He was surprised. In this day and age, there were still people who communicated through paper correspondence—and some of these letters were very recent, clearly received not long ago.

Yu Sheng picked up the letters that had caught his attention, particularly the last one by date, and scanned it casually.

The top and bottom edges of the paper were somewhat crumpled, as though someone had gripped them tightly. Yet the contents were nothing more than everyday greetings and discussion of certain collectibles. The date was three days ago, and the signature was obviously a pseudonym.

“Is there something on that letter?” Little Red Riding Hood glanced over, asking curiously.

“The content seems normal enough…” Yu Sheng muttered with a frown. But for some reason, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something about this letter was off. He turned it over and over, yet couldn’t figure out what.

His spiritual intuition, however, was practically bouncing inside him, making it impossible to ignore that nagging sense of wrongness.

“Try heating it over a flame? Or soaking it in water?” Little Red Riding Hood suggested as she thought it over. “I know those are old-fashioned letter encryption techniques, but still…”

“No—if this really is some kind of specially treated secret letter, any clues it contains might be destroyed,” Yu Sheng said with a frown. “Now that you mention it, we should have brought Eileen along when we came. She always has some strange tricks up her sleeve when it comes to the mystical arts.”

Little Red Riding Hood thought for a moment and offered tentatively, “Why not bring her over now? There’s no one else around at this hour, and that Door Opening ability of yours is pretty convenient.”

As the saying goes, those in the thick of things often miss the obvious. It took the other’s reminder for Yu Sheng to realize: “Hey, that actually makes sense.”

The words had barely left his mouth before he pulled out his phone to check in with the Special Operations Bureau. Then he raised his hand and grabbed at the empty air beside him—with unusually careful control, a phantom door far smaller than his usual ones opened in his grasp. On the other side was the living room of No. 66 Wutong Road, facing the sofa directly. Eileen sat on the sofa, staring blankly. “…Huh? What?”

“Come help with something.” As he spoke, Yu Sheng reached through the door and plucked the Little Doll right out.

“Hey, what are you doing, I was watching TV—”

Her protest died halfway as she was deposited onto the desk. The scene change had been so abrupt that she froze for a moment.

But she recovered almost instantly, her eyes going wide with fury: “Yu Sheng, you bastard! Who does things like this?! You said you weren’t taking me along and now you pull this out of nowhere! I was halfway through my show and waiting to see which of those two idiots dies first—it was just getting to the good part and you had to go and ruin—”

Yu Sheng cut in before the Little Doll could finish her tirade: “Those two idiots you’re talking about will both die together soon, but in the next episode an even dumber villain shows up to keep stirring trouble. I’ve seen it all—the rest will make you furious. The female lead ends up dying for love with the male lead’s second cousin, the male lead ends up depending on the female lead’s cousin for survival—and in the bonus chapter, they die too.”

Eileen listened with growing shock, and by the end, she predictably exploded: “Who the hell wrote this show?!”

But she’d barely gotten halfway through her leap of outrage before Yu Sheng pressed her back down. “What we’re dealing with here is genuinely important. I can’t figure it out, and I need your help.”

That single sentence extinguished Eileen’s fury completely. The Little Doll’s attitude shifted so fast that even Yu Sheng himself didn’t quite register it. In an instant, her face was the picture of smug satisfaction: “I knew you couldn’t get by without me—so what’s going on?”

Yu Sheng pointed at the desk. “Look at these letters. My instinct says something’s wrong with them, but I can’t tell what.”

Eileen turned to look and gave him an expression of utter bewilderment. “Whether there’s something wrong or not, how about you unfold them first?”

Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood went blank simultaneously, speaking in unison: “Unfold?”

Yu Sheng immediately picked up the letter that had given him the strongest sense of something being off. “This is already an unfolded sheet of paper. This is all there is on it…”

“It’s rolled up! Can’t you see?” Eileen looked at Yu Sheng as though he were an idiot, took the letter from him, and gripped the top and bottom edges with both hands. Then she pulled gently.

The sound of paper sliding against paper reached everyone’s ears.

Phantom flames rose across the surface of the letter.

What had appeared to be a single, complete sheet of paper was being “unfolded”—a plane that had been hidden in some invisible state was gradually drawn out. Yu Sheng’s eyes went wide with astonishment as he watched line after line of text begin to appear between the previously normal writing on the page…

But before the hidden content had fully emerged, the “unfolding” came to an abrupt stop.

Yu Sheng looked up in confusion. “Huh? Why’d you stop?”

Eileen’s face crumpled. “…My arms aren’t long enough.”

Yu Sheng’s expression twitched. “Then I’ll pull another one of you over here.”

“No, don’t! My other self is in the middle of a raid right now,” Eileen hurried to stop Yu Sheng before he could open another door. “You grab this end—it doesn’t require any special technique, just pull it apart slowly. Any ordinary person can do it. Right, go slowly—this paper feels pretty fragile. Pull too fast and it might tear.”

Following the Little Doll’s instructions, Yu Sheng slowly unfolded the letter from its strange state of dimensional compression. At last, the hidden paragraphs were fully revealed before his and Little Red Riding Hood’s eyes—

“…Before the Xth of X month, you must bring her into the White Exhibition Hall. Miracles and blessings await her there. The curse she suffers from will be purged, and she will be freed in both body and soul…

“We have already prepared the ritual. You need not worry about safety—just as you care for those children, we too wish to use the most reliable and effective means to remove that vile curse of the Fairy Tale.

“We understand your reservations these past days, but the world has many misconceptions about us. There have indeed been misguided followers who, driven by the seduction of power and their own stupidity, grossly misinterpreted the Emissary’s intentions. Worse still, some followed false, self-proclaimed Emissaries from the very beginning. They committed countless atrocities, yet the infamy falls upon all our heads. This is both tragic and unjust.

“But you have witnessed that there are also pure and benevolent Emissaries. We showed you His power and His intent. You heard with your own ears and saw with your own eyes—He truly bears no malice, and He truly shelters the children. He spoke to you through a formless voice, and you yourself admitted that you heard it. So you may set all your misgivings aside.

“If you have made your decision, then light the blank sheet of paper we left for you. Remember—it must be lit with an aromatherapy candle infused with rose essence.

“Note: Do not buy the ‘Linglong Pavilion’ brand. They are shameless counterfeiters and frauds. The Emissary’s wrath will sooner or later descend upon such despicable, unscrupulous, profit-grubbing swindlers.

“—The humble and honest Servants of the Angel.”

(End of Chapter)