Chapter 214 – The Martial Virtue of Hu Li’s Homeland

The interstellar vessel, with its streamlined hull and complex structure, lay quietly buried amid a collapsed mountainside. Though it was barely recognizable, even the remaining fragments were enough to evoke the elegance and mysterious bearing it must have possessed when it once sailed through the sea of stars in its complete form.

Honestly, judging by appearance alone, Yu Sheng found it hard to connect this thing—which screamed “spaceship” at first glance—with all the cultivation terminology Hu Li had been using. He couldn’t even easily reconcile it with its name, the “Immortal Shuttle.” But thinking it over more carefully, he couldn’t exactly picture in his own mind what a spacecraft built by an interstellar-age cultivation civilization was supposed to look like… so maybe looking like this was perfectly reasonable?

Song Cheng and Baili Qing walked up close to the Immortal Shuttle’s wreckage, tilting their heads back to carefully examine this peculiar-looking vessel.

A pair of eyes quietly materialized behind Baili Qing, also observing with curiosity.

“Definitely a style I’ve never seen before—at first glance it looks a bit like the Node-series ships built by the Argladians, but the resemblance is only about thirty to forty percent in the hull design,” Song Cheng muttered under his breath. “If this thing really did bore its way in from ‘outside the known universe’… do you think it could be related to the Twilight Angels’ ‘invasion’ in principle?”

Baili Qing didn’t speak. She pressed her lips together, seemingly communicating something with her “sister” deep in her mind. After quite a while, she gently shook her head. “You can’t tell anything from the exterior, and the internal structure is beyond our understanding. However, the residual energy signatures inside still have analytical value—if possible, it would be best to isolate its power system. By reverse-engineering the power system, we could roughly determine what level of navigation this vessel could support—there’s a world of difference between the energy levels required for intra-galactic flight and inter-galactic voyaging, and the energy needed to punch through the ‘world’ is beyond anything we can imagine.”

“That would require assembling a team of experts, and it’d have to be a cross-disciplinary joint task force—after all, this might be something from ‘outside,’ and nobody can be sure what principles are at work in there,” Song Cheng paused to think for a moment. “…Should we reach out to the Academy? They’d probably be very interested.”

“There are far too many things here that would attract them—it’s not just this one vessel,” Baili Qing said softly. “The first entity to be ‘permanently eliminated,’ the first Otherworld to be parasitized by an angel yet rendered harmless, the ‘portal’ that Yu Sheng opened…”

Song Cheng shrugged. “And the first vegetable garden planted inside an Otherworld.”

“Yes, a vegetable garden planted inside an Otherworld,” Baili Qing said, glancing back slightly at Yu Sheng, who stood not far away. “Even the hardest-to-invite professors at the Academy would probably be unable to sit still once they heard about the situation here.”

Yu Sheng and Hu Li sat on a nearby hillside, enjoying the mountain breeze and the scenery together, while the conversation between Baili Qing and Song Cheng drifted faintly into their ears.

—Of course, Hu Li’s ears were clearly much sharper than Yu Sheng’s.

The fox-spirit girl’s large, fluffy ears twitched nimbly atop her head, angled slightly toward Baili Qing’s direction. After a moment, she leaned over to Yu Sheng and whispered, “They’re discussing bringing in a group of very learned people to study the principles of the Immortal Shuttle, and also to study your vegetable garden, Benefactor.”

“No surprise there. Baili Qing has always been interested in this stuff,” Yu Sheng said, looking entirely as if he’d expected it. He simply reached over and rubbed the fur behind Hu Li’s ears. “What about you? What do you think?”

Hu Li didn’t react right away, staring blankly at Yu Sheng. “Me?”

“The Immortal Shuttle—it’s yours, and it’s one of the few remaining connections between you and your homeland,” Yu Sheng said, looking seriously into the fox-spirit girl’s eyes. He knew that the perpetually scatterbrained Hu Li had very likely never thought about what came next, since this girl’s reactions were always on the slow side, so he had no choice but to bring it up himself. “You have the final say in this matter. Are you willing to let a group of ‘outsiders’ come study it? They’ll almost certainly take it apart. And if you’re not willing, I can refuse on your behalf.”

The fox girl froze for a moment, as if this was genuinely the first time she’d seriously considered the matter. Then she slowly sat down on the hillside beside Yu Sheng, pulled her two tails around from behind her and hugged them in her lap, thinking earnestly.

After quite a while, she suddenly reached up and tugged at Yu Sheng’s sleeve.

“Benefactor, if these things just sit here, they’re nothing but wreckage.”

The fox-spirit girl raised her head and looked very seriously into Yu Sheng’s eyes.

“You can mourn over wreckage for ten thousand years, and it’ll still be wreckage—mourning alone is useless.”

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened slightly as he looked at the fox-spirit girl before him with some surprise.

“Let them study it. Bring in a bunch of scholars if they want, take it apart into components if they want, even ship it off to their own research facilities if they want. I’ve already kept everything I wanted to keep. As for the rest, I have no objections,” Hu Li said, tugging Yu Sheng’s arm and pulling him down to sit beside her. Then, while lazily sweeping her big fluffy tails back and forth across Yu Sheng’s back, she continued in her unhurried way, “I feel like the people from the Special Operations Bureau are reasonably trustworthy. If they really do find any leads, they should tell us—at least share some of it. And even if they really did hide everything from us, the worst case would just be the same as now: we’d know nothing, that’s all.”

Yu Sheng thought for a moment, his expression turning a bit complicated. “But what if it’s even worse… don’t blame me for having an overactive imagination, I’ve probably watched too many movies and read too many novels—what if some faction, not necessarily the Bureau, but those Argladians, the Academy, or some other force we don’t understand—what if they have bad intentions and after obtaining intelligence about your homeland, they actually want to do something terrible… you know, the kind of plot that’s always showing up in stories, like an invasion or something? What then?”

Hu Li looked a bit surprised, but after staring at Yu Sheng for a while, she suddenly broke into a smile.

“They wouldn’t win.”

Yu Sheng took a moment to process what the fox-spirit girl meant by “wouldn’t win.”

“They wouldn’t win,” Hu Li emphasized again, then continued, “And besides, back home, my people and the Celestials wouldn’t even care—risk and threat are normal parts of evolution. As long as you win in the end, that’s all that matters. That’s what they taught us in school.”

“…Your homeland’s martial virtue is that robust?”

“Is it?” Hu Li thought about it, not entirely sure. “Anyway, Teacher said that the order of the stars established by the Celestials is ‘peaceful coexistence’—they killed everyone who didn’t agree with peaceful coexistence, and whoever’s left will agree with you. This process is called ‘Universal Harmony’—and the ultimate form of Universal Harmony is peace.”

Yu Sheng broke into a cold sweat listening to this—this martial virtue seemed a bit excessively robust!

But he also couldn’t be sure how much of what this girl beside him said was actually true—after all, Hu Li had essentially dropped out at the elementary school level, and she’d spent decades in a daze. Heaven only knew how much of her memory about her homeland was real, how much was her own imagination filling in the gaps, and how much was a misunderstanding from not paying attention in class…

And just then, he finally noticed the big tails that had been sweeping back and forth across his back this whole time.

“By the way, what are you doing?”

Hu Li tilted her head. “Rua.”

Yu Sheng: “…”

So because he was always idly petting Hu Li’s tails whenever he had nothing to do, this girl had now learned to pet him right back!

…

After that, Yu Sheng opened a Door to send Song Cheng and Baili Qing back to the Special Operations Bureau headquarters, and before parting, they briefly discussed plans for further research on the Immortal Shuttle. However, given that the more pressing concern was still the threat posed by Fairy Tale and the Twilight Angel An-Ka-Ai-La, Yu Sheng’s attention quickly turned back to the orphanage.

The settlement site in the valley was still being constructed in an orderly but urgent fashion. Yu Sheng left Hu Li and Ailin there to oversee the progress while he went directly to the orphanage.

It was already deep into the night by this point, but at any hour, there would always be a Guardian on night watch in this orphanage.

Little Red Riding Hood was tonight’s night-watch Guardian. When Yu Sheng came by to say hello, she was patrolling the corridors of the East Building.

The corridor at midnight was exceptionally quiet. The cool night air blanketed everything. Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood walked slowly together down the corridor, and as they passed a window, he turned to glance outside.

The outdoor activity area that had been so lively during the day was now a blur of silhouettes in the darkness—the swing set, the sandpit, the slide, and the climbing frame… Everything slumbered silently in the night. Viewed through the corridor window, it all carried a faintly eerie undertone.

Recent events had left Yu Sheng unable to determine whether the slightly unsettling atmosphere of the night outside the window was real or just his own imagination.

Little Red Riding Hood, on the other hand, seemed quite unfazed.

“If you think the night looks eerie, then nothing in this orphanage isn’t eerie after dark. The children’s dreams frequently cause minor interference with the real world—a table suddenly shifting, a light flickering faintly on, a window creaking—we’re all used to it,” the girl said with a smile, speaking at an unhurried pace. “Relax, don’t spook yourself—actual ‘anomalous phenomena’ are far more dramatic than this.”

Yu Sheng replied casually, “I thought Spirit Detectives were supposed to be extra sensitive to anomalies around them, going on high alert at the slightest disturbance.”

“Being perceptive and being anxious are two very different things—a Spirit Detective needs to be able to notice every slight disturbance while also being able to carefully distinguish genuine danger from illusions born of their own paranoia. The balance between the two is key,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a serious expression. “Being too relaxed or too tense are both bad. The former means you’ll get killed by an Otherworld entity before you know it. The latter—the entities don’t even need to lift a finger; you’ll drop dead from a heart attack on your own.”

Yu Sheng pressed his lips together and walked on with Little Red Riding Hood. After a while, he broke the silence. “The settlement site in the valley is already under construction. The move could happen as early as tomorrow.”

“Mm, about what I expected.”

“Do the children know?”

“Everything’s been arranged. They’re very well-behaved,” Little Red Riding Hood said, then paused, tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Hey, looking on the bright side, starting tomorrow we won’t have to patrol these hallways at night anymore…”

“Looking on the dark side, there’s literally no ‘night’ in that valley—getting the kids to maintain a sleep schedule is going to be your next big challenge. The good news, though, is that the blackout curtains the Special Operations Bureau sent over have pretty decent light-blocking ability.”

Little Red Riding Hood: “…Bro, my head’s starting to hurt already.”

(End of Chapter)