Chapter 13 – Encounter

Ah, the familiar darkness, the familiar sense of oppressive weight, and the familiar feeling of consciousness sinking endlessly downward.

Yu Sheng’s thoughts drifted in the depths of a chaotic darkness. Along with that crushing pressure bearing down from all directions came an overwhelming sense of helplessness and exhaustion.

He had anticipated that there might be many more twists and turns before he could leave that “Otherworld,” and had even considered that he might have to “die” more than once — but while he had guessed the beginning and the ending, he had not foreseen the process. As he floated and sank through the darkness, he couldn’t help but recall the last scene he had witnessed before losing consciousness: the brief, blurred flash of a pair of golden-red pupils reflecting in his eyes, and those magnificent fox tails blooming like flowers in the night.

And that subsonic headbutt.

So just who was that girl who headbutted him to death? Where had she come from? And why had she appeared in this Otherworld?

And furthermore… what had happened to his body while he was fighting that monster? That strength which had surged out of nowhere, that agility, and…

That hungry, ravenous impulse.

What exactly had happened to him?

Yu Sheng felt his tangled, chaotic thoughts swirling like a whirlpool in his mind. Freed from the constraints of a physical body, these unruly “thoughts” even began to manifest before his “eyes” as all manner of bizarre and fantastical visions, intermingled with countless memories rising up from the depths — he saw the monster assembled from countless heaped-up limbs, then saw the girl with fox ears and tails who had suddenly appeared and headbutted him. But a moment later, he saw an oil painting: Eileen lying in pieces around a chair, the puppet’s limbs connected by threads like a spider’s web, while a strange shadow loomed faintly in the depths of the image.

Then, all at once, Eileen vanished, and new images surfaced from the depths of Yu Sheng’s memories — crimson clouds and sky, sunlight flowing like water, soaking into the familiar old streets and lanes.

Ah, that was where Yu Sheng had been born and raised: his familiar Boundary City, an unremarkable coastal town. He had left that place two months ago… but for some reason, as those images rose from the depths of his memory, he felt as though they were from a very, very long time ago — so distant they felt almost like another person’s memories, presenting themselves coldly before him.

All the images faded away, and in the end only a gentle darkness enveloped everything around him.

Yu Sheng felt his mind grow slightly clearer. After a moment’s hesitation, he tried calling out from the bottom of his heart: “Eileen.”

In the darkness, there was no response.

It seemed that when he was in a state of “death,” the connection between himself and Eileen would be severed.

Next, Yu Sheng tried to shift his “gaze,” searching the darkness for other objects and confirming whether his limbs existed.

He saw nothing. This place was utterly empty, and here he seemed to be nothing more than a drifting, rootless “consciousness” — no body existed at all.

Yu Sheng silently tried out more things.

During his previous two “deaths,” he had had no experience whatsoever, and had returned to the “mortal world” in a daze each time. But now he began to consciously sense this process, testing all manner of hypotheses.

He knew that he had been stumbling through this whole period in a fog — an unfamiliar world, bizarre phenomena, mysteries surrounding himself, dying and coming back to life… too many incomprehensible things piled on top of each other, leaving him without any direction.

But ever since Eileen had told him about the concept of the “Otherworld,” he knew he had a goal again — he needed to go back, to return to the “normal” side.

When the holes of the Otherworld occasionally opened toward people, ordinary people, in the very instant they glimpsed the scenes leaking out from those holes, would cross the edge of reason and arrive at the other side beyond normalcy. This process might happen because one got off at the wrong stop on a bus, because one took an extra step going down the stairs, or even because one turned one extra page of a book, misread a character, or… opened the wrong door.

But no matter the cause, the most crucial thing was that this process was not irreversible.

According to the information Eileen had revealed, there were people in this world who studied the Otherworld, people who had identified its patterns, and even specialists dedicated to resolving Otherworld problems. Even ordinary people, after falling into an Otherworld, had a chance to return.

The valley shrouded in night was an Otherworld. No. 66 Wutong Road, where he now lived, was an Otherworld. But Yu Sheng believed that his first contact with the Otherworld had been even earlier —

When he had pushed open his front door two months ago, he had perhaps already fallen into an Otherworld centered on himself, one called “Boundary City.”

Now, he needed to explore as much as possible, to understand all these strange and bizarre things, to grasp the knowledge related to the Otherworld, and then… to leave this wrong world.

And so, he opened his eyes.

A cold night wind blew through the gaping hole in the wall. Beyond the half-collapsed roof was a murky night sky.

He sat in a corner of the ruined temple, but he did not stand up immediately. Instead, he held perfectly still in the posture of someone who had just woken up, cautiously sensing everything around him while straining to hold onto the memories and “impressions” that were rapidly slipping away from his mind.

He was trying to recall the feeling of the instant he had awoken, to pinpoint the boundary between returning from the darkness to the “present world.”

He felt this might be the key to understanding his process of “dying and coming back to life.”

At the very least, it could bring him a little closer to the truth behind these mysteries.

Faintly, he began to recall certain scenes he had “seen” in the instant before waking. He remembered rising up through the darkness, crossing a hazy boundary, then sinking back down toward reality… but what came after that? Between “sinking toward reality” and “opening his eyes,” what had happened in that brief instant?

He seemed to have glimpsed several flashing images — fast, blurry — but among the clearer ones were a few… including the small path near his home, the front of the door at No. 66 Wutong Road, and… this very corner deep within the ruined temple.

Yu Sheng’s eyelids drooped slightly as the thoughts in his mind gradually settled. He formed some hypotheses, then set those ideas aside for the time being. Afterward, he let out a soft breath and began to gently flex his hands and feet.

This body was pure and robust. He could even feel the surging power flowing through his veins. His hearing was sharp, his vision far-reaching, and his limbs brimmed with strength — although not long ago he had been headbutted at subsonic speed and severed from the neck down, he was now fully restored and brimming with vitality.

He rose from the corner, preparing to call out to Eileen.

But in the very next second, he abruptly stopped himself.

Because a faint rustling sound was coming from outside the wall.

Upon hearing it, Yu Sheng’s first thought was — had that delicious-smelling monster actually chased him all the way to the ruined temple?!

But he quickly felt that something was off, because that monster had always made an earth-shattering racket, not a careful, cautious sound like this.

Taking a quiet breath, Yu Sheng, with a measure of caution, slowly moved to the hole in the wall and peered out through the opening.

The night was deep and dark, but his eyes could see with perfect clarity.

He saw a girl, carefully picking her way through the ruins of the ruined temple.

The girl was wrapped in a tattered robe-skirt that seemed to have once been a magnificent garment, now reduced to nothing but filthy, ragged scraps of cloth. Her long white hair, unkempt for what must have been a long time, tumbled down in a disheveled mess, obscuring most of her face. And atop the girl’s head… was a pair of pointed fox ears.

But more than those fluffy ears, Yu Sheng’s gaze fell more on what trailed behind the girl — those tails.

Fox tails, more than one, though from his vantage point Yu Sheng found it hard to count exactly how many. And because the girl looked so thoroughly bedraggled, he even wondered if it was just one very large tail that had become matted from going far too long without being groomed…

By now Yu Sheng had naturally recognized her.

It was the subsonic headbutt girl.

But the headbutt girl did not seem to have noticed Yu Sheng nearby at all. She simply moved warily through the ruins of the ruined temple, occasionally twitching her nose as if trying to sniff out and find something. After a moment, she seemed to find what she was looking for; her eyes lit up and she dashed quickly toward a certain spot.

The sound of a plastic bag being rummaged through drifted through the night.

Yu Sheng’s eyes went wide.

That was the bag of kitchen scraps he had brought with him when he had been “thrown” into this valley, which he had casually tossed into the ruins.

Inside were vegetable leaves and eggshells discarded during dinner preparations that evening, along with leftover food he had cleaned out of the refrigerator earlier.

He pressed himself against the wall and watched as the fox-tailed girl, delighted yet clumsy, tore at the plastic bag, accidentally spilling everything inside. He then watched as she grabbed a clump of leftover vegetables without a second thought and stuffed it into her mouth —

As though she had been starving for many, many years.

Yu Sheng suddenly felt a wave of suffocation.

He didn’t know why, but he felt terrible. He thought… no one should be starved to this state.

Even if she didn’t look much like a “human.”

Even if she had headbutted him once — but she had come to save him at the time.

And just then, the girl seemed to finally sense the presence of a “living person” inside the ruined temple.

She crouched on the ground, a wilted vegetable leaf hanging from her mouth, and turned her head in startled, tense alarm.

Yu Sheng stood at the collapsed corner of the ruined temple, separated from her by the ruins, and their eyes met.

(End of Chapter)