Chapter 197 – The Squirrel’s Story

“You—which Little Red Riding Hood are you?”

Yu Sheng stared intently into Squirrel’s eyes, his tone more serious than it had ever been.

Squirrel began swaying its body uneasily, shifting its weight from one hind leg to the other, then frantically scratching at the fuzz on its face. “I… I’m Squirrel…”

Yu Sheng was completely unmoved. “Fine. Then which Little Red Riding Hood is Squirrel?”

Squirrel: “…”

“Answer my question,” Yu Sheng continued, calm yet resolute. “You should have already noticed—I’m bringing ‘change’ to this Black Forest. If you truly want to help Little Red Riding Hood, this might be your closest chance at success.”

The palm-sized “little creature” finally stopped swaying. It stared straight at Yu Sheng, and after a long while, it seemed to finally steel itself with some kind of resolve—or perhaps it had simply been backed into a corner with nowhere left to retreat. It lowered its head in resignation. “The zeroth.”

Yu Sheng immediately furrowed his brows. “…What does that mean?”

“You’ve already seen it—the first Little Red Riding Hood brought the original hearth fire and candlelight to the Black Forest. This Black Forest gradually evolved and filled out into what it is now,” Squirrel said, wringing its paws together tightly, keeping its head lowered the entire time. “But have you ever wondered about what came before that? Before the ‘Black Forest’ itself even existed? Perhaps… all of this had a starting point.”

Yu Sheng didn’t speak, only urging Squirrel to continue with his gaze.

“I… am the original mistake. It all… started with me,” Squirrel said slowly. Its manner was still resistant, as though every word it uttered brought immense anguish and inner turmoil. “I’m the squirrel in the Black Forest, the first living thing on the stage, the… the bad child who handed over the fairy tale book back then… I, I didn’t know things would turn out this way…”

Yu Sheng’s eyes flew wide open, as if a bolt of lightning had struck the depths of his mind. The moment he realized what kind of intelligence this squirrel had just revealed, he immediately spoke up. “Handed over the fairy tale book? To whom?”

“I don’t know what it was, or where it came from. I… I can’t remember the details clearly anymore,” Squirrel flinched at Yu Sheng’s suddenly raised voice, but this time, it finally didn’t flee. Instead, it seemed to have made some kind of decision. “I only remember seeing something fall from the sky. It was after lights-out at the Orphanage. Everyone was asleep. I should have been asleep too, but I couldn’t fall asleep. It… it fell into the courtyard without making a sound, as if it melted right into the ground…”

“I was terrified. I didn’t dare make a peep, just hid under my covers. Then a glowing thing drifted in from the windowsill, swaying in front of my eyes. It said it had come to ask for help—its child was in terrible condition and needed comforting. It had come to this place with many children, hoping to find someone who could help… I was so scared at the time, I didn’t know what to do, so I gave it the fairy tale book from my bedside…”

“I told it, read stories. When the children at the Orphanage can’t fall asleep, the teachers read us stories…”

“I should have been sleeping. I shouldn’t have looked outside the window. I…”

“If only I had fallen asleep. I should have been a good child and gone to sleep…”

Squirrel mumbled on, its voice growing increasingly incoherent, until at last it seemed to slip back into a daze. Its mumbling devolved into endless repetition, insisting over and over that it should have been a good child and gone to sleep back then—like a child trapped in the shadow of a childhood trauma, still not having grown up after decades, still firmly believing to this day that if only it had eaten its meals on time, gone to sleep when told, and learned to dress itself, it could have lived the “originally” happy life it was meant to have.

Yu Sheng could finally confirm it.

This squirrel before him was also a child from that “Orphanage”—long, long ago, even before the deep-dive operation seventy years prior, even before the first outbreak of “Fairy Tale,” a child who had once lived in that orphanage.

And from what Squirrel had divulged, there was a great deal more information that could be inferred.

Yu Sheng steadied himself, setting aside for now the conjectures he couldn’t verify. He reached out and gently touched Squirrel’s body, snapping the “little creature” out of yet another daze.

“I still have questions,” he said with a grave expression. “That thing that ‘fell from the sky’—what did it look like?”

Squirrel’s body gave a jolt, finally breaking free from its previous loop. After hearing Yu Sheng’s question, it sank into laborious recollection, and only after a long while did it speak again. “…It was hard to see clearly. The thing was glowing. I… I only remember there being an oval-shaped outline within the ball of light, like an ‘egg’ with strange patterns on it. At first it was enormous—when it was falling, it looked like it could crush half the Orphanage flat. But then it immediately shrank, and by the time it landed in the courtyard, it was only about the size of the small sheet-metal shed where they kept the tools.”

“It burrowed straight into the ground without kicking up a single speck of dust or making any sound at all. At first I even thought I was seeing things.”

Yu Sheng listened carefully, a pensive look on his face.

Glowing all around, bearing strange patterns, looking like an “egg”…

He couldn’t yet determine the reason behind the “growing and shrinking” phenomenon Squirrel had mentioned, but the shape it described—he had seen something like it before.

“The voice that spoke to you—did it tell you its name?”

Squirrel scratched vigorously at the fuzz on its cheeks.

“I, I can’t remember, but it does seem like it said something. It’s been too long, too long. Squirrel’s memory isn’t very good—can’t even remember the things the teachers taught us… But, but there’s one syllable. It started with ‘An’… Something like ‘An’-something…”

“An-Ka-Ai-La,” Yu Sheng said slowly. The moment the words left his mouth he tensed up, but after a moment he noticed that the forest around them seemed undisturbed, and the small box in his hand remained quiet. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief and continue. “Is that the name?”

Squirrel froze, then instantly leaped up in shock. “…Yes! Yes! That’s the pronunciation! But how—how could you possibly know?”

“I’ve already traced things back to this point through my recent investigation,” Yu Sheng said, reaching out to gently press down on Squirrel’s body. He could feel it trembling all over. He figured if he didn’t step in to calm it down, this “little creature” was going to stress itself into a panic attack. “Relax. Just relax. I still have questions.”

Squirrel instinctively shrank back, but didn’t seem to dare actually pull away. “But… Squirrel doesn’t want to answer anymore. Squirrel is tired.”

“One last question.”

“…Fine, okay.”

“The voice that spoke to you—its ‘child.’ What did it look like? Have you ever seen it? Or did it ever describe it to you?”

“No,” Squirrel answered this time with extraordinary speed. “Squirrel can say for certain—never seen it, and never heard it described.”

Yu Sheng stared intently into Squirrel’s eyes. A few seconds later, he gave a slight nod.

“Alright. I understand.”

Squirrel finally seemed to relax.

It let out a long breath, paced slowly back and forth along the windowsill, then sat back down in place. From somewhere it produced a thin little stick, used the tip of its tail to rub out a flame, lit it, stuck it in its mouth, and took a hard drag.

This wasn’t the first time it had “smoked” in front of Yu Sheng, and he was long accustomed to it.

It was no longer the child who had lived in the Orphanage all those years ago. Now it was the squirrel of the Black Forest—a squirrel so damn cute it was practically bubbling over with adorableness.

So Yu Sheng merely sighed and stopped paying attention to it. Instead, he opened the wooden box containing the Angel’s Umbilical Cord and checked on its condition once more.

The thing still lay quietly on its lining of red velvet, showing no further signs of “revival.”

Yu Sheng breathed a sigh of relief. But just as he was about to close the lid, he suddenly felt a stunned gaze directed at him from nearby.

Looking up, he saw Squirrel staring wide-eyed, gaping in shock at the wooden box in his hands.

The cigarette butt had fallen from its paws to the ground and it hadn’t even noticed.

“You… how do you have this?!” Squirrel shrieked.

“You know what this is?” Yu Sheng was also startled. “You know what it is?”

“An umbilical cord!” Squirrel cried out, but immediately afterward, as if terrified of disturbing something, it instantly lowered its volume. “I’ve seen this before! But, but I can’t remember exactly when. It must have been very early on, when the Black Forest had just appeared. Later… later An-Ka-Ai-La lost it. It kept searching, but couldn’t find it… After that, it stopped appearing altogether. It hid somewhere very deep…”

Yu Sheng couldn’t help but furrow his brows at this. He didn’t doubt Squirrel’s words, but a question arose in his mind—An-Ka-Ai-La had lost the umbilical cord? Then why had Old Zheng obtained this thing during a ritual to An-Ka-Ai-La?

Just then, Squirrel also mustered its courage and took two steps forward, craning its neck to carefully examine the umbilical cord inside the wooden box.

After a moment’s hesitation, it made a puzzled sound. “Hm? No, something’s not right… This one looks… different from the one I saw before.”

“Different?”

“Yeah. It looks very similar, but it seems more like a replica,” Squirrel said uncertainly. “The real umbilical cord was longer, not so shriveled, and even though it was soft, it had a texture like metal. The one in your hand… is a counterfeit.”

“A counterfeit?” Yu Sheng was somewhat taken aback. “Are you sure?”

“I feel, I feel like it is,” Squirrel quickly switched to a more cautious phrasing. “I’m just a squirrel… I can’t remember a lot of things clearly…”

Yu Sheng frowned in silence, then raised his head to look at Eileen and Hu Li beside him.

The two of them hadn’t said a word this entire time—afraid that any interruption would send the already somewhat neurotic Squirrel into a stress response.

“Old Zheng prayed to the ‘Twilight Angel,’ and it gave him a counterfeit umbilical cord…” Eileen said with furrowed brows, her expression subtly strange. “Why does this whole thing feel so bizarre? What was the point?”

Hu Li also furrowed her brows and thought seriously for a moment before saying with some uncertainty, “Maybe it made a fake one as a sample, so Old Zheng could help look for the real one?”

Eileen stared blankly. “…Are you serious with that answer?”

“Of course,” Hu Li said matter-of-factly, nodding with conviction. “If I lost something, I’d definitely ask for help the same way.”

Then she turned to Yu Sheng. “Right, Benefactor?”

Yu Sheng thought about it and nodded. “I think that’s reasonable.”

Eileen: “…?”

“In any case, the counterfeit clearly has power of its own,” Yu Sheng said, not dwelling on the topic any further. He gazed pensively at the counterfeit Angel’s Umbilical Cord in the wooden box, then looked up at this small cabin illuminated by the original hearth fire and candlelight. “Perhaps it’s precisely because we’re carrying it that we’ve been able to see the phantoms left behind by the original Little Red Riding Hood in the Black Forest.”

(End of Chapter)