Chapter 15 – Trapped Here

When Yu Sheng heard the other party pronounce his name, his first reaction was that this girl was really straightforward — how could she just take “fox” as a name? It was only after asking several more times that he finally understood she was saying “Hu Li,” not “fox.”

Her name was Hu Li — a name that was a little strange, yet quite fitting for all those tails.

“My name is Yu Sheng,” Yu Sheng said, sitting with Hu Li among the ruins of the dilapidated temple, introducing himself. “I came from… well, I don’t know if you’ll understand, but I came from ‘outside’ — not the outside of the valley.”

“You really came from ‘outside’!” Hu Li’s eyes went wide immediately. She seemed to understand what Yu Sheng meant right away, and the shock in her expression carried an even deeper meaning: she knew the ‘outside’ existed!

Hu Li quickly and restrainedly took another small bite of the chocolate, staring wide-eyed at Yu Sheng’s face. “You — how did you get in? Do you know… the way out? Is it… up in the sky?”

As she talked with Yu Sheng, Hu Li’s speech was gradually becoming more fluent, as though she were rapidly reclaiming her ability to communicate with people.

Yu Sheng was startled by her words. “The sky? Why do you ask that?”

“The celestial immortal said before dying that we all came from the sky, but suddenly the sky went dark, and we… couldn’t go back,” Hu Li struggled to organize her words. Though she was speaking more smoothly now, she still stumbled over these longer passages. “Then the land became more and more dangerous, it started to become poisonous, and… many of the people who came with us died. We couldn’t go back…”

Yu Sheng listened in a daze, relying heavily on his imagination to make sense of the girl’s chaotic description. He realized that this valley — which Eileen had simply classified as the “Otherworld” — seemed to harbor a complex story, and the girl with all those tails before him had an unfathomably mysterious origin.

She was also trapped here!

However, when he tried to ask where exactly “the sky” was, who “the many people” she mentioned were, and how exactly they had come to this place, her answers became jumbled and incoherent again.

“The sky… is just the sky. Over these years I’ve kept trying to get back to the sky, but I can’t,” Hu Li explained with gestures. “I try to jump as high as I can, but I hit something. It really hurts. Everyone… has forgotten too. There was father, mother, the celestial immortal, and… and other people. We came down on a boat, a very large boat…”

As Hu Li said this, she seemed to suddenly remember something else. She raised her hand and pointed in a direction deep within the dark valley. “Just over there — the boat fell and became part of the mountain. Father always wanted to go back and retrieve something, but later… everyone was killed by something, and no one knew how to… get inside the boat anymore.”

What Hu Li was describing started to become eerie and terrifying, and Yu Sheng felt a sudden chill run down his spine.

He did his best to make sense of what she was saying — setting aside the specific concept of “celestial immortal” she mentioned and ignoring what “the sky” might actually refer to — from just the scattered fragments Hu Li managed to convey, he pieced together a rough, fragmented truth:

Hu Li and her family, along with someone called a “celestial immortal,” had ridden a large vessel many years ago — most likely a large flying vehicle of some kind — and landed in this valley. But at the time, this place shouldn’t have been a “death zone” yet. It was only later that the sky “suddenly went dark,” some kind of unknown environmental catastrophe occurred, the valley became sealed off, and the people who had arrived with the vessel were trapped. After that, those who were stranded suffered a devastating blow, attacked by some powerful enemy, and were nearly wiped out.

The process had been utterly brutal, and the result was that the only survivor left was Hu Li herself.

But Yu Sheng knew that all of this was merely a story he had pieced together through his own imagination. Hu Li’s words were a jumbled mess, many of her memories clearly had gaps, and her understanding was muddled by her own limited perspective. What the real truth was, even she herself probably couldn’t understand or recall.

This girl’s mind was already very far from right.

“How long have you been trapped here?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“I don’t know, but… a very long time,” Hu Li slowly shook her head, carefully cradling the half-eaten chocolate in her hands. “Nothing much ever changes here. I don’t know how to count the days. When I get hungry, I pass out, and then when I wake up it feels like a long time has passed…”

Yu Sheng couldn’t help but slowly furrow his brow. He looked at the tattered and ragged dress Hu Li was wearing, and thought back on the disjointed experiences she had described. He realized that the length of time she had been trapped here was probably far beyond anything he had imagined — it was measured in years, at the very least.

“All these years… how did you survive?” he frowned and asked without thinking. “What did you eat? Just by scavenging through trash in the dilapidated temple? But there doesn’t seem to be anything edible here…”

“There’s no food,” Hu Li shook her head again. “The forest… occasionally has fruit, but it’s poisonous. Eating it makes you pass out. Aside from water, most things here are poisonous. So most of the time, I just go hungry.”

As Hu Li said this, she slowly began to smile, pointing at herself with what seemed like a trace of pride. “Monsters are very tough. You can’t starve to death. It’s just… unpleasant, the feeling of being hungry.”

She seemed to be recalling some very unpleasant memories, and the smile on her face crumpled. Then she immediately got up and quickly ran to a spot nearby, retrieving that bag of kitchen scraps from between the broken bricks and rubble — holding it in her arms as if it were a treasure.

“Still edible,” she said to Yu Sheng with great seriousness.

Yu Sheng opened his mouth but didn’t know what to say. He wished he could pull out a mountain of food right now, or even open a door back to the real world — but he was still in a precarious situation himself.

“Benefactor…” Hu Li suddenly spoke up again.

Yu Sheng was taken aback, not quite registering it for a moment. “What did you call me?”

“Benefactor,” Hu Li said again, her expression very serious. “Mother once said that someone who has done you a great favor is a benefactor. You gave me food.”

Yu Sheng waved his hand. “…That title’s a bit strange. Just call me Yu Sheng — I’m more used to it.”

“Oh, alright, ben…” Hu Li mumbled, swallowing the word partway, then raised her hand and pointed at Yu Sheng’s finger, lowering her head at the same time. “Sorry.”

“Huh?” Yu Sheng was momentarily stunned, and it was only then that he noticed the wound on his finger again — it had been bitten in the heat of the moment when he handed Hu Li the bread earlier, but at some point it had already healed completely. All that remained was a little dried blood on the skin. He waved it off without a care. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it. It was just a surface wound.”

But Hu Li looked genuinely worried. “Benefactor, are you really alright? Being bitten by a monster… injures your core essence. It can’t heal normally.”

“But it’s already healed,” Yu Sheng said skeptically, rubbing the dried blood off his finger. “Look.”

“It really has healed…” Hu Li stared at Yu Sheng’s finger in surprise. “Benefactor… are you also a celestial immortal?”

“I’m not. I don’t even know what you mean by celestial immortal — by my understanding, it’s someone who has cultivated to immortality?” Yu Sheng said offhandedly. “But why would a celestial immortal be traveling with… well, ‘monsters’? Based on what you just said, it sounds like you were all a group of monsters on a vessel together, following a celestial immortal — is that right? But from my impression based on various stories… the relationship between celestial immortals and monsters isn’t usually like that, is it?”

Yu Sheng had finally asked the question that had been puzzling him for a while.

Hu Li had mentioned many terms he had only ever encountered in stories, and she herself sported a great long bunch of tails that looked like they’d been cultivated for a thousand years. When all this information was gathered together, what emerged was a picture of a “celestial immortal” leading a group of monsters around — and after the “flying vessel” crashed, the immortal and the monsters even banded together to survive in the wilderness for a time (though ultimately they failed to survive). This didn’t match his stereotypical image of celestial immortals and monsters at all.

In novels, weren’t those two groups usually the kind that tried to chop each other into dumpling filling the moment they met?

Hu Li clearly didn’t understand what Yu Sheng’s reaction was about. Faced with his question, she only tilted her head in confusion, tried to recall for a moment, and then said with some uncertainty: “Because… they were a tour guide immortal.”

Yu Sheng: “…?”

He felt like he had just heard something deeply cursed.

But he asked several more times and eventually confirmed that Hu Li had neither misremembered nor misspoken.

It was a “tour guide immortal” — or rather, that immortal was a “tour guide.”

Who knows how many years ago, the monsters and the immortal who had crashed into this forbidden land aboard the “celestial vessel” had been, of all things, a freaking tour group.

And here Yu Sheng had just been busy imagining some grand eight-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-word xianxia epic in his head! What a waste of imagination!

Don’t ask why there would be a monster tour group led by an immortal. The answer was: ninety-nine yuan, four days, all-inclusive, no shopping stops — perfectly reasonable, actually. Budget tour groups are just prone to problems.

Yu Sheng sat in the night wind, letting the cold breeze sweep through the ruins of the dilapidated temple and blow across his face.

He felt that this world was incredibly bizarre.

More and more so, with each passing moment.

Just then, he heard the fox girl beside him quietly calling his name.

“Benefactor…”

“Just call me Yu Sheng,” Yu Sheng sighed helplessly. “What is it?”

Hu Li clutched her stomach, looking miserable. “Benefactor, my stomach kind of hurts.”

Yu Sheng let out a blank “huh?” and then looked at the chocolate that this fox spirit had already gnawed through half of.

What the hell, even fox spirits can’t handle chocolate?!

“…Oh crap! Stop eating it!” Yu Sheng immediately broke into a cold sweat and reached out to snatch the chocolate from Hu Li’s hands. “This stuff is harmful to you…”

But the moment his hand reached out, Hu Li’s throat let out a deep, rumbling growl, like that of a Tibetan Mastiff — and then she stretched her neck forward and chomped down on Yu Sheng’s hand. “Owww!!”

The next second, Yu Sheng’s yelp was even louder than Hu Li’s.

(End of Chapter)