Chapter 182 – Old Zheng

After sending Eileen back early, Yu Sheng returned to the living room and saw Little Red Riding Hood sitting on the sofa with the young man in his twenties, talking about something.

The latter still wore that same exhausted expression. Clearly, handling the funeral arrangements for his relative had left him without proper rest for many days.

Seeing Yu Sheng emerge from the bedroom, the young man half-rose to greet him, then pointed to the hot milk tea sitting on the coffee table. “You’ve been working hard. I just bought these.”

“Uh… thanks.” Yu Sheng didn’t stand on ceremony with him. He sat down beside Little Red Riding Hood, and the two of them sipped their milk tea together.

The young man sitting across from them broke the silence. “Did you find anything?”

Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood exchanged a glance. After a moment of thought, she gave a slight nod. “We did find some clues… but I’d like to confirm something first. Do you know about the ‘nature of your uncle’s work’? How much do you know? What I mean is… regarding those things he collected, and the ‘special nature’ of the things he dealt with.”

“I know a bit. He mentioned the ‘Curiosities Association’ to me, and even showed me some… relatively ‘safe’ things,” the young man said with a nod. “I know he was dealing with unusual things, and that it was sometimes quite dangerous. Actually, I was interested too—I even almost went through the Special Operations Bureau’s peripheral recruitment at one point—but my uncle wouldn’t let me do it. He said my curiosity was too strong, and that I had some kind of… oh, spiritual aptitude, the high-sensitivity low-stability type. He said it would be too dangerous for me.”

“Your uncle was right. High sensitivity, low stability, and excessive curiosity—you definitely can’t do this kind of work. You probably wouldn’t even make it through the probation period,” Little Red Riding Hood sighed. “Since you know this much, I’ll give you a rough overview of the situation. Old Zheng likely came into contact with extremely dangerous contamination, and he was involved with an illegal secret cult. But from what we can tell so far, he was just a victim. That’s all I can say—the Special Operations Bureau may be willing to share more details with you as a ‘family member’ later on.”

The young man just sat there quietly, saying nothing—or perhaps not knowing what to say.

Yu Sheng broke the silence. “In the last period before your uncle passed, did he come into contact with any suspicious people? Do anything suspicious? For example, a strange ‘friend’ who suddenly appeared out of nowhere, or some new habit or taboo he’d never had before?”

“I’m not sure,” the young man shook his head and said slowly. “My uncle stopped keeping in regular contact with the family over twenty years ago. Back then, he was volunteering at an orphanage, and then something happened to him—some say it was a romantic thing, others say he was frightened by something. After that, he moved here and lived alone. I was too young to remember much at the time; I heard all this from the adults in the family.”

He paused at this point, carefully searching his memory before hesitantly speaking again. “But I did occasionally get messages from him. If I had to say, he seemed quite happy recently—starting about two months ago, I think. He said the burden he’d been carrying in his heart finally had a chance of being lifted. He also mentioned recently that he was planning to come home in a couple of days. He said there was a notebook in the old family house and asked me to look for it and see if it was still there… But after that, the accident happened.”

“A notebook?” Yu Sheng’s heart stirred the instant he heard this, and he hurried to follow up. “Did you find it? Did you bring it?”

“I brought it,” the young man said, getting up and walking over to the TV cabinet. He rummaged through a black suitcase, and after a moment, pulled out a thick notebook with a deep blue cover from the very bottom of the case. He brought it over to Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood. “This is it—I haven’t looked at the contents. I brought it exactly as I found it.”

Yu Sheng exchanged a glance with Little Red Riding Hood, then immediately took the notebook—which was over twenty years old—and began flipping through it rapidly.

Most of what was recorded inside seemed to be nothing more than mundane trivialities. There were daily reminders, as well as observations and work records from his time as an orphanage volunteer. Among them were entries that could help Yu Sheng understand the situation at the orphanage from over twenty years ago, but this content clearly had no connection to what he was currently investigating—to Old Zheng’s death.

Was this notebook, spanning so many years, merely a “keepsake” that the nearly fifty-year-old Old Zheng had suddenly wanted to use to revisit his youth?

Just as this thought crossed Yu Sheng’s mind, something in his peripheral vision caught a detail on a page he’d already flipped past. He quickly reached back and turned to that page again.

It was a drawing—sketched in pencil by the notebook’s owner. The technique wasn’t particularly skilled, but it had clearly been drawn with great care.

On the slightly yellowed page, a woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties stood before a swing set at the orphanage, wearing a plain long dress, smiling with calm warmth.

Yu Sheng furrowed his brow, instinctively wondering who this young woman in the notebook was, what story she shared with the deceased Old Zheng, and why she had appeared at the orphanage where Little Red Riding Hood lived. She was clearly an adult, yet she wasn’t wearing the uniform of a Council employee.

Then he heard Little Red Riding Hood suddenly let out a soft “Huh?” beside him.

Before Yu Sheng could ask, Little Red Riding Hood had already pulled out her phone and dialed a number. “Rapunzel, I need you to take a photo for me. The one hanging in the center of the display room wall in the East Building… yes, that one—the ‘Cinderella’ photo. Take it and send it to me right away.”

She hung up, and after a moment, her phone buzzed. Yu Sheng leaned over to look and saw a photograph appearing on the screen.

It was a young woman in her twenties—almost identical to the drawing in Old Zheng’s notebook.

“This is…?” Yu Sheng asked curiously.

“A Cinderella from many years ago… she lived to be twenty-six,” Little Red Riding Hood said softly, gazing at the smiling figure in the notebook. “The longest-lived one in the orphanage’s history. After she died, the ‘role’ of Cinderella remained vacant for ten years, until a new Cinderella appeared just over a decade ago. We all say that she used her own life to temporarily suppress the functioning of the ‘Eternal Ball’ subset, though there’s no real basis for that claim.”

Little Red Riding Hood pressed her lips together, then continued, “They say that at the time, she was even considering whether to try living the life of an ordinary person.”

Yu Sheng listened in silence, then lifted his head and looked toward the nearby table.

Old Zheng’s memorial portrait stood there quietly. At nearly fifty years old, the skin on his face had gone slack, wrinkles had crept silently around the corners of his eyes, and the weariness beneath them seemed to chronicle a journey spanning more than twenty years.

He had spent twenty years seeking “curiosities,” trying to fight against an endlessly repeating curse. But in the end, he had lost to a con.

He was not the first person to try to defy the Fairy Tale, nor would he be the last.

Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood stood up. Little Red Riding Hood solemnly returned the notebook to the young man sitting across from them.

“Thank you for the lead,” Yu Sheng said in a low voice. “We’ll get justice for Old Zheng.”

“Thank you,” the young man said, taking the notebook. He seemed to want to ask something, but in the end—perhaps recalling his uncle’s warning from years past—he held back. He simply waved at the two “detectives” before him. “I won’t see you out. There’s still a lot here that needs to be sorted through.”

“Right,” Little Red Riding Hood nodded, then remembered something and added a warning. “There are some ‘things’ under the carpet in the bedroom. In theory, they’ve already lost their power, but you’d best not touch them. Just wait for the professionals to come handle it.”

“Okay, I understand.”

After leaving the apartment building, the sky outside had gone completely dark.

Neon lights illuminated this city so vast it seemed to have no boundaries. The wolves carried Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood to the rooftop of the tallest building nearby. Standing there, Yu Sheng looked down over Boundary City and watched the lights flow between the forest of towers, the enormous city continuing its clamor beneath the curtain of night.

How many people lived in this strange city? Millions? Even tens of millions? How many of them were ordinary people? How many were detectives and investigators who had touched the “other side”? How many were the city’s protectors and keepers of order? And how many lurked in the shadows between those lights, like the tendrils of some chaotic, formless thing, watching for careless victims…

For the first time, Yu Sheng felt that this unfamiliar, bizarre, even eerie city was also alive—flesh and blood.

Little Red Riding Hood broke the silence. “After I get back, I’ll continue the investigation. I need to visit the Curiosities Association headquarters, and I plan to meet with the other spirit detectives and investigators that Old Zheng was in contact with before he died.”

“Need me to come along?” Yu Sheng asked.

“No,” Little Red Riding Hood shook her head. “I’d like to ask you to make a trip to the Special Operations Bureau.”

Yu Sheng frowned. “The Special Operations Bureau?”

“Go tell them about Old Zheng’s situation. Intelligence related to Angel Cult followers will naturally draw the Bureau’s attention on its own, but if you go to them in person, they’ll undoubtedly take it even more seriously.”

Yu Sheng thought about it, uncertain. “…Will they?”

The girl looked at him helplessly. “…Do you really have zero self-awareness?”

Yu Sheng laughed awkwardly, then nodded with genuine earnestness. “Alright, I’ll go tomorrow.”

Then the two of them fell quiet at the same time. After a few more seconds, Yu Sheng spoke thoughtfully. “Do you think there could be some connection between the Twilight Angel and the Fairy Tale Otherworld?”

Little Red Riding Hood considered this seriously. After a long while, she shook her head. “I have no leads. Although many things have coincidentally happened at the same time, they’re missing the most critical ‘link’ between them. Those Angel Cult followers targeted Old Zheng, who was trying to fight the Fairy Tale curse, and used him to lure me into that White Exhibition Hall. But the key question is: what exactly were they after? Were they targeting my identity as a member of the Fairy Tale, or were they simply looking for a ‘victim’ of sufficient strength?”

“When it comes down to it… there’s more than one Twilight Angel in the world. We still don’t even know which ‘angel’ those cultists follow, so naturally, we can’t determine what their true objective is.”

(End of Chapter)