Chapter 183 – Yu Sheng’s Temporary Solution

Yu Sheng wasn’t surprised by Little Red Riding Hood’s answer, because he himself didn’t have any leads either.

Intuitively, he certainly felt the two matters were connected. After all, both Little Red Riding Hood and Old Zheng had entanglements with the Fairy Tale Otherworld, and those Angel Cult followers had specifically targeted the two of them. The sacrifice in the White Exhibition Hall was clearly some kind of meticulously arranged “ritual,” and its targeted nature was self-evident.

But as Little Red Riding Hood had said, there was still a crucial missing “link” between these two matters—namely, what exactly was the Angel Cult’s purpose? A sacrifice must have something it seeks, right? They must have had a reason for choosing Little Red Riding Hood as their target, right?

Inexplicably, a memory suddenly surfaced in Yu Sheng’s mind. It was a detail he had heard from the sacrificial victim when he had “conversed” with them in the White Exhibition Hall.

A phrase that those two Angel Cult followers had repeated continuously while performing their ritual—

“Deliver the Lord from the sea of suffering…”

Little Red Riding Hood heard Yu Sheng’s quiet muttering and instinctively turned her head. “What did you say?”

“The Angel Cult’s purpose—’deliver the Lord from the sea of suffering.’ You should still remember that phrase. And there’s also ‘aid His descent,'” Yu Sheng said. “Is there a possibility that certain properties of the Fairy Tale Otherworld could help a Twilight Angel trapped somewhere break free of its bonds? Or to put it another way… could the Fairy Tale Otherworld as a whole essentially be a ‘sacrificial offering’ that could be used to bring a Twilight Angel into this world?”

Little Red Riding Hood’s eyes widened slightly in an instant.

“Consider it just a line of thinking for now. I’ll mention it to the Special Operations Bureau when I go there,” Yu Sheng said slowly. “Regardless, there’s now one more reason to resolve the Fairy Tale Otherworld.”

Little Red Riding Hood nodded.

It was time to head back.

The orphanage children were still waiting for their guardian, and Yu Sheng also needed to go back and confirm whether the doll and the fox had caused any chaos at home.

“Need me to give you a ride back?” Little Red Riding Hood turned around, the faintly visible wolf pack drifting around her.

“No need, I’ll just open a door and walk through,” Yu Sheng waved his hand, but then just as he was about to leave, he suddenly remembered something. “Oh right, there’s something I forgot to tell you—Xiaoxiao also entered that ‘dreamscape’ of mine.”

Little Red Riding Hood, who had been about to ride off on a wolf, stopped instantly. She looked at Yu Sheng in confusion, and it took two or three seconds before she processed what he meant. “You mean that gray, desolate wasteland?!”

“Yes,” Yu Sheng nodded. “It was around noon. She said she was taking a nap, and then she fell into the Black Forest. While being chased by wolves, she somehow escaped onto that wasteland. I stayed with her for a while. The little girl wasn’t scared at all—and as a result, she actually avoided one instance of the Black Forest’s erosion. So it worked out well.”

Little Red Riding Hood blinked, her expression turning contemplative. “If that’s the case… Xiaoxiao was already awake before I left the house. She was indeed excitedly telling her friends about some strange dream she’d had, but I was in a hurry to head out, so I didn’t pay much attention.”

“Do you remember the circumstances when you entered that wasteland?” Yu Sheng asked curiously.

Little Red Riding Hood furrowed her brow, thinking back carefully. “…It seems like it was also when I entered the Black Forest. I encountered the wolf pack at the time and was about to hide, but after just two steps, I suddenly felt a moment of disorientation. The ground shifted beneath my feet, and I found myself standing on an unfamiliar grassy spot.”

The two looked at each other, then each fell into their own thoughts.

…

An illusory door opened out of thin air, and Yu Sheng’s figure stepped through it.

The moment his feet touched the floor at home, he heard Hu Li’s cheerful yet muffled voice from nearby: “Benefactor, you’re back!”

Yu Sheng followed the sound and saw Hu Li sitting at the dining table nearby, twirling noodles around her chopsticks. She had wound them into a shape like a drumstick and was gnawing away, sauce smeared all over her face.

Then came Eileen’s voice from behind him: “How’d it go? Did things go smoothly? Did you find any new leads after I left?”

Yu Sheng turned around and saw three Eileens clustered together on the coffee table. Two of them were hunched over the computer—one in charge of the keyboard, the other clutching the mouse with both hands. The two bodies coordinated in a flurry of operations, fierce as a tiger. The remaining Eileen had her head tilted up, looking over curiously.

“Old Zheng’s situation is pretty complicated. I’ll fill you in later,” Yu Sheng said casually to the Little Doll while hanging his jacket on the coat rack. Then he went over to wipe Hu Li’s face, but halfway through, he frowned. “Did you use your tail to wipe your mouth again?”

“How did you figure that out, Benefactor?”

“How do you think?! The tip of this tail is completely stained with sauce!”

“…Hehe.” Hu Li immediately gave an embarrassed little laugh, then casually yanked off the dirty tail and ran to toss it into the washing machine in the bathroom.

Yu Sheng stared in stunned disbelief. “…You can wash your tail in the washing machine?!”

“Of course,” Hu Li said matter-of-factly. “You think tails would be such an inconvenient thing?”

The corner of Yu Sheng’s eye twitched. He seemed to finally understand why recently washed clothes at home always seemed to have fox fur on them…

But he had long since grown accustomed to these kinds of bizarre situations. After muttering a few words, he addressed the doll and the fox spirit: “Alright, everyone eating and playing games, pause for a moment. I have something to say.”

“I don’t need to pause. I specifically set aside one body to listen,” the Eileen carrying the picture frame hopped down from the coffee table, her little feet pattering as she ran over to Yu Sheng and tilted her head up. “What’s up?”

“I may have found a way to temporarily protect Little Red Riding Hood and the other children at the orphanage from the Fairy Tale’s influence,” Yu Sheng said with a serious expression. Then after a moment’s thought, he adjusted his phrasing. “Or to put it differently, I’ve found a method for them to take ’emergency shelter’ when they’re being eroded. Though it’s still just a concept for now.”

The moment these words came out, Eileen’s face was full of surprise. “Huh? What method?”

“You remember how Xiaoxiao also entered my ‘dreamscape,’ right?” Yu Sheng sat down next to Hu Li, speaking with a serious expression. “Just now, I cross-referenced the situation with Little Red Riding Hood, and it turns out she also ‘frequency-jumped’ into that wasteland when she entered the Black Forest and was being chased by wolves. And then there’s the fact that Hu Li also suddenly appeared in that wilderness when The Hunger’s erosion reached a critical stage. So now I have a bold hypothesis…”

Before he could finish, Eileen had already caught on: “So you’re saying that individuals who have established a ‘connection’ with you and gained ‘access’ to that wasteland—once they encounter a life-threatening danger, their consciousness is passively pulled into that wasteland as a refuge?”

“It’s just a hypothesis for now,” Yu Sheng nodded, though his words remained cautious. “The specific activation mechanism and ‘effectiveness’ still need to be verified, but from what we’ve seen so far, Hu Li, Little Red Riding Hood, and Xiaoxiao all entered that wasteland under similar conditions.”

Hu Li had also caught on by this point and looked at Yu Sheng curiously: “So what you mean, Benefactor, is…”

“We can’t resolve the entire Fairy Tale Otherworld just yet, but if we can first protect the children currently affected by the Fairy Tale, that would still be enormous progress,” Yu Sheng said. “And even if it doesn’t work, there’s nothing to lose—at most I’d just have to come back and drink a couple extra bowls of brown sugar water…”

Yu Sheng’s final remark left Eileen somewhat speechless. The Little Doll muttered under her breath: “Two bowls might not be enough. You’d be better off ‘sleeping’ for half an hour.”

Yu Sheng waved his hand dismissively. “Those are minor issues.”

“Fine, minor issues. Then let’s talk about the major issue,” Eileen glanced at Yu Sheng. “How exactly do you plan to ‘carry this out’?”

“Carry it out?” Yu Sheng looked blank. “How else? The simplest way—just have them come into contact with my blood…”

Eileen immediately fixed Yu Sheng with a look that said she was staring at an idiot: “So what you’re saying is, you want to gather several dozen minors together—and for efficiency’s sake, probably have them form a circle or something—and then you’d walk around the circle letting your blood and smearing it on the children… right?”

Yu Sheng still hadn’t caught on, staring at the doll with a baffled expression. “What’s wrong with that?”

Eileen: “Try visualizing that scene one more time?”

Yu Sheng started to see the problem and furrowed his brow in thought.

Beside him, Hu Li patted his arm with her tail: “Benefactor, where I come from, even legitimate Techniques of Witch Blood aren’t performed that way. People who do it like that are usually heretical cultivators—they’d get arrested by the Law-Enforcement Immortals halfway through. That’s at least a three-hundred-year sentence.”

Yu Sheng finally got it, though his expression was somewhat dazed: “Well, that does sound like the optics would be a bit off. Even if the orphanage children agreed to it, the security personnel the Council stationed there would probably report me…”

“So you need to think of a more normal approach,” Eileen spread her hands. “At the very least, it can’t look this sinister.”

Yu Sheng continued frowning, continued thinking hard.

He thought for a long time, and then suddenly had a stroke of dark inspiration.

“How about this—gathering the kids to smear blood on them individually might indeed be inappropriate, so how about we gather the kids for a nice meal of maolaxuewang instead?”

Eileen blinked blankly.

A moment later, the doll jumped up as the realization hit her: “Why do I feel like this is even MORE messed up!”

Yu Sheng pursed his lips, then turned to the fox girl beside him: “What do you think?”

But Hu Li was just staring at Yu Sheng wide-eyed. Two seconds later, she started drooling: “Benefactor, can I try it first?”

Eileen gaped at the two of them, and as the pinnacle of normal moral sensibility at No. 66 Wutong Road (self-proclaimed), she felt like this situation had gone somewhat beyond the pale.

Though to be fair, there was never any shortage of beyond-the-pale situations in this house.

Fortunately, before the Little Doll could jump up again, Yu Sheng suddenly smacked his own forehead: “Wait, hold on. We need to think this through more carefully. The maolaxuewang won’t work either.”

Eileen immediately breathed a sigh of relief: “See, I told you, you really—”

Yu Sheng: “Kids might not be able to handle spicy food.”

Eileen: “…What is WRONG with you?!”

(End of Chapter)