Chapter 52 – Connection

The moment he heard those four words, Li Lin felt his blood run cold.

One moment he had been feeling sorry for Yu Sheng, who had died from a monster’s ambush — and the next, he felt that he himself might not live much longer.

“How could this be… the files never mentioned anything about a Twilight Angel parasitizing this place…” Li Lin muttered to himself, and under that cold, indifferent gaze from the sky, he felt more and more chaotic noise rising in his mind. “How could this be…”

“Dormant state, every Twilight Angel has different traits… This is honestly worse than staying on the wasteland and brawling with the Angel cultists!” Xu Jiali couldn’t help but curse. He couldn’t figure out how a routine return trip for work, a relaxed tailing assignment in the Borderland, had somehow spiraled so catastrophically downhill.

Everything had been so far beyond his expectations — suddenly falling into the Otherworld, suddenly coming face to face with that ‘Door Opening weirdo’ he’d encountered once before on the wasteland planet, then seeing a half-meter-tall puppet and a fox-spirit who looked like she’d been exiled for a century standing at the weirdo’s side, and before he’d even managed to exchange two words, the mysterious ‘Door Opening weirdo’ had died cleanly right in front of his eyes, the puppet’s reaction had been absolutely absurd, and then came more Hunger entities, and a Twilight Angel appearing in the sky on top of everything…

Even if he pooled together every ounce of imagination he’d ever had in his life, he still couldn’t have simulated this insane chain of events from today!

Uneasy growls from the wolf pack spread from all around. The shadow-formed wolves circled and prowled nearby, and the cold gaze of that indifferent eye floating in the sky was pressing down on these eerie creatures with enormous pressure — even fear — yet Little Red Riding Hood, seated atop one of the wolves, furrowed her brow: “…Strange, why aren’t those monsters coming over?”

Eileen, currently being held in Hu Li’s arms, was startled by those words, and then she too noticed that something was wrong.

The massive amalgamated beasts crowding around the ruins of the broken temple were still roaring and prowling in chaos, but strangely, some time had passed since just now, and not a single monster had taken a step forward — not one had launched an attack.

The lone, cold eye floating in the sky was simply watching in silence, seemingly with no intention of taking any further action.

“I think we’d better take this chance and run,” Li Lin broke the silence. “Don’t worry about why these monsters are spacing out for now.”

Little Red Riding Hood cut Li Lin off, speaking calmly: “Run where?”

The indifferent lone eye in the sky was watching every inch of the valley, and the entire Otherworld was changing as if it had come alive. Under that eye’s gaze, any thought of escape would be instantly shattered by the despair of having nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

But just then, Eileen seemed to remember something. She lifted her head from within Hu Li’s arms: “You said earlier, something like this happened before? The day the immortal died it was the same, and your father and mother hid you in a cave?”

Hu Li froze for a moment, then nodded frantically.

“Where is that cave?!”

Hu Li finally snapped to her senses and turned to go, holding Eileen as she moved: “I remember! It’s near the back of the mountain. I’ll take you all there!”

But suddenly she stopped again, hesitating as she looked down at Yu Sheng’s corpse on the ground.

Her benefactor’s eyes were still open. He looked rather like someone who had died with grievances.

“Benefactor… what about Benefactor?” the Foxgirl asked, at a bit of a loss.

Although she was aware of Yu Sheng’s ability to ‘die and revive’, she didn’t know many details, because the last time they’d spent time together had been limited, and Yu Sheng had never had the chance to explain the situation to her in much depth.

“Just leave him here, don’t worry about it,” Eileen said immediately. She had communicated quite a lot with Yu Sheng, and clearly knew far more than the fox did. “He’ll be gone in a bit, and he has a way to find me.”

Hu Li stared blankly for a moment, then nodded in a daze.

Eileen immediately thought of something else and quickly added: “Right, where’s that kitchen knife I had earlier… oh, there it is on the ground over there, help me pick it up. Hey, first hang the oil painting on me — I can’t be separated from that painting… The knife’s not damaged, right? Good, if this thing gets lost he’ll definitely say I — don’t bother with the body, it’s not useful for anything…”

The little puppet rattled off instructions one after another, and the Foxgirl carried them out in a daze. The trio of Li Lin standing to the side, however, found the whole scene profoundly bizarre to watch — they watched Hu Li carefully pick up that kitchen knife, the kind that would sell for at most a hundred or so yuan in a supermarket, while completely ignoring the body of her companion lying on the ground. After holding back for a long while, Little Red Riding Hood finally couldn’t stand it anymore: “You’re just going to leave him here like this?!”

Eileen poked her head out from Hu Li’s arms: “It’s hard to run with a body in tow!”

Little Red Riding Hood opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something more, but was interrupted by a rumbling that came from deep within the valley.

The mountain range in the distance was splitting apart. Countless pitch-black boulders came rolling down from the peaks, and within the widening cracks, flesh and sinew began to form from the mountainside itself — enormous teeth ground against the rock, producing a bone-chilling roar.

The forest shook, and trees toppled one by one, as though shedding a disguise. Countless tentacles lined with sharp teeth sprouted up from where the trees had fallen, letting out a unified shriek.

And the amalgamated beasts that had been prowling around the ruins of the broken temple in their strange, sluggish state seemed to be jolted, and began to stir with restless agitation.

At the sight of this, Eileen let out a startled cry and raised her arm — the one that was nothing but a stub — and slapped Hu Li hard on the shoulder: “Good grief! We can’t stay here any longer! We’re getting out of here first — you three over there, come or don’t, your choice!”

Before Eileen had even finished speaking, Hu Li was already turning around with Eileen in her arms and sprinting toward the rear of the broken temple ruins, dashing toward a gap at the bottom of the valley.

Li Lin’s trio exchanged a glance. Their heads were full of question marks, but at this point there was only one option left. They quickly followed after the fox who had already sprinted far ahead, running at full speed toward some supposed ‘shelter’.

Little Red Riding Hood turned back one last time, looking in the direction where Yu Sheng had fallen.

She gritted her teeth. One wolf broke away from the pack and charged toward Yu Sheng’s remains.

But the wolf had only run a few steps before it seemed to completely forget its mission and came to a stop. It wandered in place for two seconds, then turned and rejoined the wolf pack at Little Red Riding Hood’s side.

Little Red Riding Hood did not look back either. She simply drove the wolf pack forward in a full sprint, guarding the others in the group while keeping pace with the silver-haired fox demon ahead.

She had already forgotten the pool of blood she had left behind.

Back at the ruins of the broken temple, the restless amalgamated beasts had, at some unknown point, gradually grown quiet again.

These entities born from ‘Hunger’ seemed to have fallen into confusion. They stood among the crumbling walls, their grotesquely overgrown eyes scanning in every direction, their hideous and misshapen limbs swaying aimlessly through the air. Their enormous jaws gaped open, and from those maws filled with jagged teeth came murmuring sounds, slurred like sleep-talking.

Suddenly, amid the murmuring of the amalgamated beasts, a single clear word emerged —

“How fragrant.”

A single will was speaking through their mouths.

How fragrant.

It is time to feed.

The beasts swayed their bodies. The eyes that had been scanning the surroundings gradually ceased their aimless movement, one by one settling into stillness. Their gazes fell upon each other.

To feed — yet not from hunger.

That which devours all things, that which surpasses all things… to feed, yes, this is the time to feed.

And after, there would be cold serenity, and merciful eternity — for it is, in the end, the devourer of all things, the most absolute of fairness, and the final destination.

The first amalgamated beast moved. It lurched and swayed over to another entity’s side. There was nothing flashy about its attack — it simply opened the largest mouth on its body and bit down with boundless greed.

The one being bitten did not dodge. It did not even cry out.

As if entirely unaware that it was being devoured by one of its own kind, the monster simply swayed its body and walked onward, carrying the ‘kindred creature’ gnawing at its side, stepping toward the nearest entity.

Not a single Entity-Hunger made any attempt to chase after the prey that had already fled. It was as though in some fleeting instant just now, their very nature had changed — drawing upon the power of hunger had become something inconsequential, and the noble act of feeding had become their sole mission.

At the center of the broken temple ruins, the last trace of blood left behind after Yu Sheng’s death was slowly seeping into the earth. Where the bloodstain spread, the color of the soil was gradually changing — slowly at first, then quickening, unstoppable.

Yet the massive, cold eye floating in the sky seemed to pay no attention at all to these changes occurring on the ground. It simply hung in the high sky, its enormous eyeball showing no trace of any emotion or sign of thought that a human could comprehend. It continued to observe the valley, and because of its sheer scale, it was impossible from a ground-level perspective to determine where its ‘line of sight’ was actually focused.

If that transcendent gaze truly had a ‘focal point’ at all.

But Yu Sheng could feel this ‘focal point’, because that focal point was now trained directly on him.

After drifting in darkness for some time, a certain indescribable feeling of ‘connection’ jolted him awake. At first, he thought he had revived, but very quickly he realized he was still in a state of ‘Death’ — only this time, the ‘Death’ seemed somewhat different from before.

He discovered that a new layer of ‘perspective’ had appeared to him in the darkness. At first, this perspective left him deeply confused, because the bizarre angle of observation and the multi-layered, overlapping information threw his thoughts into complete disarray. But gradually, he came to realize something.

He was responding to the gaze from the sky through the eyes of this Otherworld itself.

He had formed a connection with this valley.