Chapter 9 – A Bit of Truth

The voice that echoed through his mind jolted Yu Sheng out of the daze he had fallen into from the cold wind sweeping through the valley — and then left him even more dazed.

He was so stunned that it took Eileen shouting in his head a second time before he snapped back to his senses.

“…Eileen?” Yu Sheng blinked. At that moment, he was carefully watching the situation in the valley while cautiously moving toward the crumbling, collapsed old temple, trying to find a temporary corner to take shelter in. At the same time, he attempted to respond inwardly, “How did you… get in touch with me? I mean, you’re just talking directly inside my head…”

“Is that so hard?” Eileen’s tone was completely matter-of-fact. “I’m Alice’s Doll, after all!”

Yu Sheng thought about it and still couldn’t connect the two things… Did that mean all of Alice’s Dolls could do this? They could all talk inside someone’s head?

“Didn’t I already dive into your Dream once? Dive in once and you know the way,” Eileen noticed Yu Sheng hadn’t responded and patiently offered another explanation, but then her tone immediately shifted, “Wait, no — where on earth did you run off to? I can’t sense you at all…”

Yu Sheng was silent for two seconds, raising his head to look at the surrounding deep valley and dense forest. He had a feeling that a seven or eight-meter-tall monster was going to spawn any second now, complete with a rousing dramatic soundtrack, and the thought chilled him to the bone: “…I may have taken a trip somewhere far away, and it’s probably not easy to get back…”

There was an obvious pause on Eileen’s end, and her voice took a few seconds to come through: “…Didn’t you say you were just stepping out to throw away the trash? Did the garbage truck scoop you up?!”

Yu Sheng had no idea where this girl got such a wild imagination from…

Still, he had to admit that after hearing Eileen’s voice, the sheer panic he had felt at being suddenly dumped in this remote wilderness did settle down just a little bit… just a tiny bit.

That voice at least proved his connection to his original world hadn’t been completely severed. Since Eileen could contact him, there should still be a possibility of returning — even if he had no idea how, no reason he could think of to support that assumption. But right now, he had to believe it with absolute certainty.

As for the present moment, the first thing he needed to do was ensure his own safety.

The valley was very quiet. All he could hear from time to time was a hollow whistle of wind, but Yu Sheng felt an uncomfortable, oppressive sensation in his heart. He kept feeling as though something in this place was watching him — something with no warmth, an empty yet hungry gaze, sweeping over and over across this place, across him.

This made him increasingly uneasy, urgently wanting to find a corner to hide in. At the very least, he couldn’t keep standing out in the open like this.

But the only visible shelter seemed to be that nearly completely collapsed old temple — the forest in the distance was dense, but its atmosphere was even more eerie and ominous. On top of that, “entering a deep forest in the dead of night” was a classic death flag in horror stories, so he had absolutely no desire to go near it.

The problem was that sneaking into a ruined temple in the dead of night was also a standard death flag. The difference between the two options was that the forest was more likely to spawn ferocious beasts, while the temple was more likely to spawn monsters…

Both were likely to trigger a rousing dramatic soundtrack.

Yu Sheng steeled himself and walked toward the one corner of the ruined temple that still looked relatively intact.

At the same time, he reached out to Eileen in his mind, giving her a rough explanation of his situation — though there wasn’t much to explain, since even he didn’t know how any of this had happened. From start to finish, all he had done was open a door…

After Eileen heard everything, she was silent for a long time before hesitantly speaking: “It sounds like you might have fallen into an ‘Otherworld’?”

Yu Sheng, standing amid the ruins of the old temple, was startled. He suddenly reacted: “Otherworld? You call this place an Otherworld? You know where I am?”

Eileen’s voice sounded somewhat confused for some reason: “Huh? There are plenty of Otherworlds out there. How would I know which one you fell into…”

Listening to Eileen’s muttering, Yu Sheng furrowed his brows. He suddenly realized that he had just gained more knowledge about the “supernatural realm,” and more importantly, he grasped something crucial:

He might not have been thrown into “another world” at all, but rather encountered some kind of “natural phenomenon” that Eileen didn’t find strange in the least.

While Yu Sheng was mulling this over, Eileen apparently thought of something and spoke into his mind with an incredulous tone: “…Don’t tell me you’ve never even heard of ‘Otherworlds’ before?”

Yu Sheng’s expression turned odd: “…Should I have? Is this common knowledge that ordinary people are supposed to know?”

“Oh, it’s perfectly normal for ordinary people not to know about Otherworlds. After all, the vast majority of people will never encounter anything like this in their entire lives,” Eileen said casually, but her next sentence left Yu Sheng stunned. “But you shouldn’t be in the dark about it.”

“Me? Why would I need to know?” Yu Sheng looked confused. “I’m just an ordinary person…”

“…But you live inside an Otherworld every day.”

…

Shadows darted through the night, hunters taking shape within the darkness. A ferocious wolf leaped out from the shadows, nimbly bounding across the uneven rooftops of the Old City District before landing silently in the middle of an empty street, looking left and right.

“Get back here!” An irritated female voice came from the shadows of a building at the corner of the alley.

The wolf instantly tucked its neck in, letting out a muffled whimper, and quickly trotted back into the shadows along the roadside buildings.

The Girl in the dark red coat and black short skirt stood in the corner between two old houses. She reached out and rubbed the head of the wolf that had just come running back, then lifted her eyes to look at the houses at the end of this old street.

It was a very short street. The whole street only had a few dozen households. The road was clear from one end to the other, and the situation on it was obvious at a glance — even without her wolf’s eyes, she could assess the situation in an instant.

The Girl furrowed her brows, and at that moment her phone rang right on cue — still that classic opening theme from the 1986 version of Journey to the West. This time she picked up right when the Monkey King had just flipped to his second somersault: “It’s me. Yes, I’m in the Old City District, on Wutong Road.”

The voice on the phone belonged to a middle-aged man who had been working overtime to the point of confusion, rambling on endlessly.

Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while, then tugged at the corner of her mouth: “I’m here, but I haven’t found anything — my wolves have already searched the entire length of this street three times over, and there are no traces of an Otherworld opening, nor any signs of something escaping from an Otherworld.”

The phone went silent for two or three seconds before the voice on the other end spoke: “But our surveillance personnel can confirm there was a Reaction to an Otherworld opening on Wutong Road in the Old City District. A passage leading to an Otherworld must have briefly appeared there…”

“I believe you,” Little Red Riding Hood said somewhat helplessly, “I do trust the professionalism of the Special Operations Bureau’s surveillance personnel. But I equally trust my wolves — perhaps a brief passage really did appear here, but now it’s definitely disappeared without a trace… Considering that under normal circumstances an Otherworld can’t sever its connection to the present world this quickly, maybe someone else stepped in and handled it.”

“There aren’t many people capable of severing an Otherworld’s connection in such a short time. The factions they belong to all have records and communication channels with the Special Operations Bureau,” the voice on the phone sounded somewhat weary, “but I haven’t received any communications about this tonight…”

“Then maybe it was someone from the Hermit Society. They’re always being cryptic and mysterious…”

The Girl said it offhandedly, then unsurprisingly heard another round of rambling from the phone and could only sigh and agree repeatedly: “Alright, alright, I know — they’re esteemed scholars, is that better? I’ve always had great respect for scholars. Okay, okay, I’ll take my wolf pack and search through the shadows one more time. This ‘Wutong Road’ isn’t big anyway — sixty-five building numbers in total. Searching it one more time is no trouble…”

She hung up. Her ears were finally granted some peace. Little Red Riding Hood looked at the darkened phone screen and sighed, then looked down at the wolf heads — well, wolf heads — bobbing up and down in the shadows around her, and couldn’t help but sigh again.

“I still haven’t finished my homework… Sigh, the life of a freelancer is really rough…”

…

Yu Sheng sat in the corner of the ruined temple, beneath a section of wall that still looked fairly solid, as cold wind blew in through the large holes in the wall. He looked up at the murky, pitch-black night sky visible through the holes in the roof, trying to let his mind go blank — but failed.

Just moments ago, he had learned a truth.

His one stable refuge in Boundary City — what he considered the safest and most normal place in the entire city — was in fact an anomalous… “location” known as an “Otherworld.”

In Eileen’s words, the so-called “Otherworld” was a realm beyond normalcy, a dimension at the edge of reason. The world where ordinary people lived — orderly and rational — appeared to be a mountain with a solid foundation and stable structure. But in reality, the tiniest crevices of that mountain were riddled with “holes” leading to the irrational and the disordered.

For the vast majority of people, they would never encounter these “holes” in their entire lives, and would never see the bizarre and fantastical sights on the other side.

But the faint light leaking out from those holes would always find its way into the eyes of certain others — for them, the moment they inadvertently caught a glimpse of those sights, some things could never go back to the way they were.

— Still, even for a well-traveled painted doll, a person being able to live long-term inside an Otherworld was, to say the least, a little outrageous…

(End of Chapter)