Chapter 203 – Mind Sanctuary

Yu Sheng positioned this “first door” at the far end of the platform’s central axis, then raised a wall behind it. After that, he sculpted two rows of tall pillars in front of the door, and between the pillars he shaped a smaller platform from rock, completing the initial “decoration” of this place.

Though still in its rudimentary form, this place finally had the makings of a proper base camp for the Lodge.

After finishing all this, Yu Sheng had originally planned to make another trip to the deepest part of the valley to check on the Immortal Shuttle’s crash site. He still remembered his earlier discussion with Baili Qing about having a team of Special Operations Bureau experts come to investigate. But constructing the portal had taken even longer than he’d imagined, so he could only postpone that matter for now.

It was time to go check on that Wasteland and confirm whether the “mind sanctuary” was working as planned.

Dream Intrusion. Descending. His consciousness passed through that murky veil of shadows. Yu Sheng felt increasingly at ease each time he actively entered the Wasteland. Now he barely needed Eileen’s help with “hypnosis” or “guidance”—he could sink into the Wasteland from within the Dreamscape purely through his own will. When he opened his eyes on the other side of the veil, what greeted him was already the endless Wasteland’s dim, overcast sky and its boundless expanse of wilderness.

Yu Sheng took a soft breath and followed his instincts, striding across the vast Wasteland. Eileen and Hu Li’s figures appeared after a brief delay, also entering this “consciousness space.” They walked forward together, and before they’d gone far, two familiar figures came into view.

Little Red Riding Hood was resting on a grassy spot with her wolf pack, with the thin, petite Snow White standing nearby. Not far away, the enormous phantom of a Thunder Titan was gradually dissipating into the air.

The moment Yu Sheng walked over, he heard Little Red Riding Hood muttering away—something about “ambush,” “almost won,” “fighting dirty,” and the like.

“Lost again, huh,” Yu Sheng said cheerfully as he came up behind the girl. “Got beaten up pretty bad?”

“If I’d won, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Little Red Riding Hood snapped, shooting Yu Sheng an irritated glance before flopping straight back onto the grass. “I’m so mad. I had the situation totally under control, and then something suddenly burst out from under my feet. I wasn’t paying attention, panicked for a second, and the moment I panicked, everything fell apart… I’m furious.”

The red-clad girl in her JK uniform kept grumbling, clearly still fuming. The thin, petite Snow White just stood helplessly beside her, and after listening to the complaints for a good while, let out a sigh. “You had it easy. I got beaten way worse than you—the Bronze Titan and Ice Titan nearly got killed by that crazy woman.”

Little Red Riding Hood pursed her lips, then suddenly sat bolt upright. “Next time I’m going to try new tactics…”

Snow White: “You said that last time too.”

Yu Sheng listened silently from the side without interrupting, but a subtly peculiar expression gradually appeared on his face.

Little Red Riding Hood finally noticed. She paused and looked at Yu Sheng curiously, frowning. “Why are you looking at me like that… Is something wrong with me?”

“Two things,” Yu Sheng said, snapping out of his thoughts as his gaze settled on her. “First, your mindset has changed. Have you noticed? Your fear of the Black Forest is diminishing.”

Little Red Riding Hood froze for a moment, seeming to only belatedly realize something. She looked down at herself, lost in thought.

“It seems like… yeah,” she murmured to herself, and after a long pause whispered, “Is this what it feels like to have confidence?”

Seeming to understand the change that had taken place within her, Little Red Riding Hood suddenly broke into a smile.

“Feels pretty good,” she said with a grin, looking up at Yu Sheng. “So, what’s the second thing?”

“Second thing—did you see Squirrel this time?”

“Squirrel?” Little Red Riding Hood raised her eyebrows, seemingly confused about why Yu Sheng would suddenly bring that up. Then her expression turned puzzled. “Now that you mention it… I did see him, but he was acting really strange this time. Totally distracted the whole time. Wouldn’t answer anything I asked, just kept telling me ‘you’ll find out,’ whatever that means. No idea what’s going on with him.”

It seemed Squirrel hadn’t taken the initiative to tell Little Red Riding Hood the truth about those past events.

Yu Sheng let out a quiet breath, unsurprised.

Just then, he sensed something and immediately turned his gaze toward the distance.

The next second, he saw an enormous phantom suddenly appear in the sky above the wilderness—an inverted, shattered spire materializing in the heavens. Within the spire’s constantly crumbling illusion, wildly growing golden hair was fracturing and receding, countless shadowy monsters shrieking as they vanished into the fissures of the crumbling spire. Then a slender figure wreathed in golden hair fell from those dissipating shadows—and as she continued to plummet, the billowing golden hair rapidly shed its magical power, transforming into jet-black strands.

Immediately after, a piercing shriek tore through the sky as a pumpkin carriage in the process of disintegrating burst from a spatial rift of warped light, catching the long-haired figure falling from above. Behind the pumpkin carriage, scorching fragments and smoke cascaded and erupted continuously as it careened toward the ground like a runaway airship, listing wildly from side to side.

An endless bloom of rose bushes erupted from the earth, surging upward like an inverted geyser to meet the plummeting pumpkin carriage, cushioning the dangerous “forced landing.” From within the carriage came a girl’s shriek: “Ahhhhh thorns! Thorns! Sleeping Beauty, you might as well not have caught me… Owww the thorns!”

The next instant, before Yu Sheng could react at all, another ear-splitting crack of tearing space shook the Wasteland. He watched as a fireball erupted from the center of the rose bushes, and a burning fighter jet of bizarrely incongruous design burst out above the flower field, only to crash-land on the nearby wasteland moments later. Then, amid billowing smoke, a girl wearing a strange commander’s uniform crawled out of the rose bushes on her belly, screaming into a walkie-talkie as she went: “Scarecrow! Move your machine gun emplacement fifty meters to the left! The Witch Brigade is charging!”

Yu Sheng stared slack-jawed at the commander girl crawling out of the rose bushes. As the two locked eyes in mutual stupefaction, smoke rose in the distance, the sky above the wilderness was illuminated by dragon fire, and a red dragon cried out mournfully as it pierced through the clouds and crashed crookedly into the distant earth.

Where the red dragon fell, an enormous, winding beanstalk sprouted from the ground. Raging flames burned along the beanstalk, and from within the illusory inferno came a girl’s maniacal laughter—

“Hahahahahaha—today! Every last one of you! Is going to meet your great-grandma! I have spoken!”

Then that cackling girl was promptly kicked off the beanstalk by a mighty shadow clad in medieval plate armor, the armored brute shouting as he kicked: “For the glory of the King!”

Yu Sheng could vaguely make out that the heraldic crest on the plate-armored man’s shield was… a cat’s head.

For a moment, the scene was indescribably chaotic.

Eileen was floating beside Yu Sheng’s head, exclaiming nonstop since the spectacle began—letting out a “whoa” roughly every few seconds. Even Hu Li, the cyber fox who normally took everything in stride, was wide-eyed now, staring at the scene alongside Yu Sheng in utter stupefaction. After a long moment, she clapped her palms together hard, her tail fanning out like a peacock’s display. “Ooh—how lively!”

She was actually quite delighted.

It was a long time before this sudden “excitement” finally subsided. Though rifts still occasionally appeared out of nowhere, depositing some unlucky soul who’d lost their nightmare battle in all manner of spectacular fashion, at least they’d stopped arriving in clusters. The raging flames gradually died down, the rose bushes covering the wilderness withered away like a fading dream, the smoke cleared from the sky, the fallen red dragon dissolved into ethereal mist. The Fairy Tale members gradually figured out the situation and began hastily reining in their scattered, uncontrolled powers amid the chaos, then converged toward Yu Sheng’s location while checking on their own conditions and confirming their companions’ states.

As the eldest among them, Little Red Riding Hood naturally took on the responsibility of maintaining order and explaining the current situation.

As for Yu Sheng, by this point he was completely numb.

He admitted his imagination had been somewhat lacking—even after being baptized by the spectacle of Snow White and the Seven Thunder Titans last time, the impact of having every single member of the Fairy Tale organization pile in at once still exceeded anything he’d envisioned.

After holding it in for a long time, he couldn’t help but mutter to Snow White beside him: “…Is everyone in your organization like this?”

Snow White clearly didn’t understand: “Like what? This is pretty normal.”

Yu Sheng: “…”

“Oh, I see what you mean,” Snow White said, finally catching on, and a subtle expression crossed her face. “It’s actually not that bad. It’s mainly because they all fell in at the same time, so things got a bit chaotic. See, when you met Little Red Riding Hood on her own, you adapted just fine.”

Yu Sheng was silent for a moment, then pointed at the black-haired girl in the commander’s uniform, bandages wrapped around her head, several escort drones hovering beside her, resting with a serious and silent expression. “…This one, Dorothy?”

“Yes.”

“What does her ‘subset’ look like?”

“In the war-ravaged Kingdom of Oz, Dorothy’s resistance forces wage an endless war against the evil Witch Brigade…”

“And the one covered in thorns is…”

“Cinderella—subset ‘Eternal Ball.’ Every day after midnight she has to carve a bloody path of escape in her pumpkin carriage. Good news: her carriage can fly. Bad news: the Prince has set up anti-aircraft emplacements around the castle.”

“The golden-haired one from earlier… oh, I’ve seen her before. Rapunzel, right? She had black hair the other times I saw her, so I didn’t recognize her at first.”

“That’s right, Rapunzel. Subset ‘The Tower.’ Random floors of the tower spawn demons—her situation is actually not too bad. She just needs to fight demons inside the tower. Pretty simple setup.”

Yu Sheng said nothing.

He just sat there on the grass, expressionless, silently tilting his head back at a forty-five-degree angle to gaze at the sky, watching to see if any new “princesses” or “princes” would come falling from above…

(End of Chapter)