Chapter 30 – The Door Opener

The door of the small supermarket slammed shut, cutting off the scorching heat drifting from that charred planet and the sudden burst of killing intent from the two black-armored soldiers. Yu Sheng stood quietly in the doorway, slightly dazed.

He stood there in a daze for several seconds before suddenly drawing a sharp breath, then turning his head to look around.

There were few pedestrians on the street. The occasional passerby seemed completely oblivious to the strange occurrence nearby. Only Yu Sheng had faced that bizarre scene head-on a few seconds ago, and now he stood in the wind, thoroughly rattled.

After standing there rattled for a while, Yu Sheng slowly turned back and looked at the front of the small supermarket.

In the two months he had been living here, he had come to this place more than once. This small supermarket located in the Old City District didn’t carry much, but it had the basic daily necessities and staple goods. The owner was a young couple, and Yu Sheng had gotten somewhat familiar with them by now.

The storefront of the small supermarket was nothing special — just the kind of ordinary ground-floor shop you’d find anywhere. The side facing the street had a large glass display window, almost completely packed with promotional signs and shelves of small goods stacked behind the glass. One side of the glass door’s hinge was broken, and a sheet of A4 paper reading “This door is out of order” was stuck to the corresponding half of the door. Through the door, one could see the somewhat cramped shelves inside, and the owner moving things around near the shelves.

It looked completely normal. There couldn’t be anything more normal than this sight.

But Yu Sheng would never dismiss what he had just seen as some kind of “hallucination” — he still felt that scorching, faintly sulfurous breath lingering in his nostrils.

He had nearly stepped through, but fortunately the aftereffects of his fall into the Otherworld were still with him. They had made him not just sensitive about his own front door, but nervous about any door at all. After opening a door, he would always instinctively hesitate for a moment. The other reason he had hesitated at the doorway was the feeling he had gotten at the very instant of opening the door — a sudden chill that ran straight through him.

Yu Sheng steadied himself at the supermarket entrance, thought for a moment, then reached out and gripped the door handle again. He pushed it open slightly and leaned in to look inside.

Inside was a perfectly normal supermarket. There was nobody around at this hour. The owner was still busy behind the shelves and seemed not to have noticed the commotion at the door.

Yu Sheng stepped back, closed the door again, then firmly gripped the handle once more. He took a deep breath, as if bracing himself for a fight, set his jaw, and shoved it open hard.

A tall woman with golden hair cascading over her shoulders, dressed in a silver-white robe, was standing on a platform on the other side of the door, and she turned her head in surprise to look at Yu Sheng.

She was beautiful. Beneath her golden hair, however, her ears were not like a human’s — they were elegant, slender, and pointed. Several softly glowing tubes and data cables extended from behind her ears, connecting to something behind her.

But what Yu Sheng paid more attention to was the wheel-like structure extending from the hem of her silver-white robe, and the mechanical articulated limbs on her back that were grabbing various tools and waving them around in midair.

A voice came from somewhere on the other side of the door: “…Boss! The customer is asking if that superluminal core sent over last week has been repaired yet.”

The golden-haired woman did not respond. She just stared fixedly at Yu Sheng standing in the doorway, and after a long moment of holding it in, she let out a loud shout —

“How the hell did you get in here?!”

Yu Sheng slammed the door shut.

But the very next second, he shoved it open again — because just now he hadn’t gotten a good look. Was that an elf on the other side of the door? He had never seen an elf in his entire life! Was that actually an elf?! And wasn’t something about that whole picture completely off?!

The door flew open to reveal a young child in a coarse brown Daoist robe, staring back at Yu Sheng, completely dumbstruck. The frame around the door was scorched with soot. The child was holding a fan mid-wave, eyes so wide they looked ready to pop out.

The next second, before Yu Sheng could even open his mouth, the child flung the fan away as if he had seen a ghost and went bouncing and leaping outside, shouting at the top of his lungs: “Master! Master! Senior Brother did it! Senior Brother’s pill furnace refined a human head! It’s got a nose and eyes! And it’s still breathing!”

“What the hell…”

Yu Sheng let out a startled cry, slammed the door shut with all his might, and stumbled back several steps before catching himself.

He turned to look at the street again and found that a few passersby were staring in his direction with puzzled expressions — but they seemed to only be reacting to his strange behavior. Since he had closed the door quickly, no one had noticed anything unusual about the door itself.

Yu Sheng could only quickly straighten out his expression, act as if nothing had happened, and step to one side for now. Once no one was paying attention to him, he let out a few ragged breaths and stood at the street corner, staring blankly, beginning to contemplate the meaning of life.

The situation was too chaotic and too bizarre. He didn’t even know whether to call what he was feeling shock, a shattering of his worldview, or relief at surviving a near-death experience. All he knew was that his mind felt like it had been hit by twelve storms — or perhaps two hundred Eileens all chattering at once, with a jumbled mass of wild, crashing thoughts thundering through his heart. It was a full seven or eight minutes before he came back to his senses.

But there was one thing he confirmed fairly quickly.

What was on the other side of those doors… was not the Otherworld.

At least, the place where that elf-beauty who looked like some kind of mechanical monster and that Daoist child waving a fan were located was definitely not the Otherworld. As for those two powerful soldiers in powered armor who had clearly been in the middle of a fight at first — the environment around them was indeed harsh, and it was hard to say whether that might have been the Otherworld…

After a long while, Yu Sheng’s chaotic mind finally settled down. The wild torrent of guesses and thoughts was forcibly sorted and suppressed, and he lowered his head to look at his own hands.

After hesitating several times, he slowly reached out and stretched his hand toward the side —

He was standing in the corner of a back street. Beside him there was only a wall — a bare, plain concrete brick wall.

He ran his fingers over the rough, bare surface of the wall, slowly closed his hand, and imagined… that there was a door there. Just as he had done at the end of the hallway in his home, outside the room where he had found Eileen, where he had discovered a hidden door handle. Just as he had done in that valley under the night sky, when the monster had flung him into the air and he had instinctively grabbed at nothing, pulling open a door back to the real world out of thin air —

He felt it. A door.

He couldn’t see it, but the door had appeared. He gripped the handle, and the door began to gradually materialize, gradually take shape. He turned his head slowly, expression frozen — that door flickered with a faint light in his field of vision, as if it could be easily opened at any moment.

“What the hell!”

Yu Sheng let out a low startled cry, and with the sudden jolt of nerves, his hand instinctively let go. The “door” silently and instantly dissolved back into the surface of the wall.

Yu Sheng’s heart pounded wildly, as if it was about to leap straight out of his mouth at any second.

He took several deep breaths before calming down, then recalled the sensation of grabbing the door handle just now, and curled his lips into a wry expression.

“Eileen,” he called out inwardly, carrying… a complex, hesitant feeling he couldn’t quite put into words himself.

“Hmm?” Eileen’s voice sounded immediately, light and cheerful as always. “I was just about to contact you. You’ve been out for a while now — didn’t you say the supermarket was right at the Intersection… did you buy too much stuff?”

Yu Sheng said, “…I haven’t even gone into the supermarket yet.”

Eileen said, “Did you get lost?”

“I’m just letting you know — I probably won’t be thinking about moving anymore,” Yu Sheng said, ignoring Eileen’s nonsensical guess.

“Huh?! Really?” Eileen sounded a little happy, but also curious. “Why? Didn’t you say you felt like something was off about the house? Especially how every time you open a door you might get ‘thrown’ somewhere…”

“It’s nothing. I just suddenly realized… when it comes to this biggest problem, the issue might not be with the house,” Yu Sheng sighed. “It seems like the issue might be with me.”

Eileen said, “…?”

She said nothing, but just imagining it, Yu Sheng could picture the expression on that doll’s face right now — a head full of question marks.

“It’s a bit complicated to explain. The point is, you don’t need to worry about moving anymore,” Yu Sheng leaned against the wall and rubbed his forehead. “If I get the chance later… I’ll tell you about it then.”

Eileen’s curiosity was overflowing, but she sensed that Yu Sheng didn’t want to go into a detailed explanation right now, so she just made a small sound of acknowledgment.

After that, Yu Sheng ended the conversation with Eileen.

He hadn’t shared the specific details of his “door opening” experience with her. It wasn’t that he had other concerns — mainly, his own thoughts were still in disarray, and many of the details around the “door opening” hadn’t been properly thought through yet. Things had been too chaotic at the time; he had missed a lot of details, and he would need to slowly recall and sort them out afterward.

Yu Sheng decided he would wait until he got home to calm down before discussing the matter with Eileen.

Of course, he also knew that even if he told Eileen, she would probably be just as clueless as he was, and they would be confused together. But regardless, having someone to discuss it with was better than puzzling it out alone.

That doll at least had some knowledge of the supernatural — though not much.

A few minutes later, Yu Sheng stepped out from the street corner, gathered himself in the gradually cooling night breeze, and looked again in the direction of the small supermarket not far away.

After a moment’s hesitation, he started walking toward the supermarket after all.

He decided he would still carry out today’s shopping plan first — the matter of the “door” was unsettling, but he couldn’t very well stop opening any door ever again starting today.

This time, however, he was far more careful than he had ever been when pushing open the supermarket door.

He focused intently, sensing every tiny detail as the door opened — the sensation transmitted through his hand, the thoughts in his mind, the warnings of his instincts, even the sound of the wind around him, the shadows reflected in the glass door…

If anyone had been watching at that moment, they might have thought Yu Sheng’s process of opening the door looked like it was in slow motion.

Then the supermarket door swung open.

Between the somewhat cramped shelves, the young shop owner looked up, and upon seeing it was Yu Sheng, broke into a smile: “Oh, what are you looking to buy?”