Chapter 27 – Deep Within the Dream

What Eileen needed Yu Sheng to do was actually quite simple.

Basically, he just had to find a spot out of the way, lie down, and not get up to cause trouble.

Yu Sheng came to the side of the still-sleeping Silvery Foxgirl, circled around her massive body and her great pile of tails, and found a spot that looked fairly comfortable — a hollow formed where two large tails overlapped each other.

He bent down, grabbed the fluffy fur on Hu Li’s tail and adjusted its position, then patted the fur of another tail to make it a bit more voluminous. Eileen watched from the side, utterly baffled: “Are you making a bed?”

“Well, I want to be comfortable lying here,” Yu Sheng said naturally as he leaned back against that large silver-white fluffy tail, “Who knows how long you’ll need, and I’m someone with very high standards when it comes to sleep quality…”

Eileen let out a scornful “tch,” and once Yu Sheng had settled in, she drifted over, then dropped her entire picture frame straight down onto his chest: “Catch.”

Yu Sheng scrambled to catch the frame as it fell from midair, momentarily thinking this person was getting revenge for the quiet laugh he’d stifled in his heart moments ago and was trying to smash him to death: “Damn it! Could you give me a warning before dropping yourself!”

He managed to catch Eileen without getting clocked by her frame, then adjusted his position, half-reclining against one of Hu Li’s large tails, holding Eileen’s picture frame in both hands. He let out a soft breath and waited for the moment he would sink into the dream.

Sinking from within one’s own dream into yet another dream — this was truly an unprecedented experience.

A soft humming drifted from within the oil painting. It was some kind of ancient folk song, seemingly carried on an atmosphere of distant nostalgia and longing. He couldn’t make out the lyrics, yet he could feel a gradually calming force seeping little by little into the depths of his heart. Yu Sheng felt his eyelids growing heavy, and in that half-awake, half-dreaming state of consciousness, he lowered his head and glanced once more at the oil painting he held before him.

It felt rather like holding someone’s memorial portrait.jpg.

Yu Sheng: “…”

How did this doll always manage to create such a “forever in our hearts” kind of situation!

The very next second, his thoughts abruptly cut off mid that rather unrestrained notion, and then he plunged suddenly downward through a void, falling straight into the deepest part of the dream.

He felt as though he had lost all control of his body — or rather, he could no longer feel his body at all. It was as if he had become an incorporeal point of view, racing through a series of memories, thoughts, and sensory information that didn’t belong to him. Shadowy shapes surrounded him on all sides, as though countless overlapping fragments of imagery had woven together into a continuous curtain, and the curtains converged into a tunnel with no visible end.

Sound rumbled and buzzed, information flooded into his mind, and he couldn’t even tell whether what he was hearing were sounds he had truly perceived or memories that had surfaced directly in his head —

Someone cried out in alarm, something exploded, a howling sound came from within the propulsion structure of the immortal shuttle. They were falling — the immortal shuttle had burst free of its course and plummeted into a world that lay off its path, as if it had appeared out of nowhere.

A tremendous impact. The immortal shuttle crashed into a dark, looming mountain. The artifact spirit escaped from the celestial vessel and came to blows with the immortal piloting the shuttle, arguing about things like “withholding spirit stones,” “reckless piloting,” and “reporting to the immortal sect.” Then, in the wake of an explosion, the artifact spirit died, and many people died.

Those who survived continued to die, one after another.

All the deaths and farewells transformed into a string of fragments that rushed past before Yu Sheng’s eyes. He watched those yellowed, blurred figures die of starvation, die from poisons in the mountain forests, die in desperate struggle, die from… the malice that permeated every corner of this valley, present everywhere, inescapable.

The valley itself wanted to kill them, by driving the force of hunger.

That seemingly endless “tunnel” suddenly vanished, and Yu Sheng found himself standing in a faded scene — after passing through so many chaotic fragments of memory, he had finally truly arrived at the heart of Hu Li’s current dream.

Just as Eileen had said, the color palette within the dream was uniform. Everything here was tinged with a worn, lifeless, grayish quality — a dark and heavy sky, dim and somber forests, murky gray earth and stones. One look was enough to feel utterly oppressed.

“Eileen?” Yu Sheng tried calling out from within his mind, as he could not see her anywhere.

“I’m here.”

“Where are you?” Yu Sheng looked around. “How come I can’t see you?”

“I’m with you,” Eileen’s voice came as if directly from within his mind — a very… curious sensation. “You can’t see me, and you can’t see your own body either. Right now we are two ‘outside consciousnesses’ that have slipped in. Being able to have a viewpoint at all is pretty good.”

“Oh, I see.” Yu Sheng understood, and immediately began searching the small grove for Hu Li’s figure.

He didn’t search for long. In fact, almost the very instant he had the thought of going to look for her, he heard a sound coming from not far away.

It was the sound of digging in the earth.

Yu Sheng immediately followed the sound, his perspective drifting through the dim and shadowy trees. Before long he spotted that flash of white.

A silver-haired girl in tattered clothes knelt at the edge of a clearing in the forest. Her once fluffy and beautiful fox tails were caked in mud, looking filthy and wretched. She hung her head, digging desperately at the earth, muttering to herself as she dug. All around the girl were deep pits of various sizes that she had dug out with her bare hands.

Yu Sheng “floated” over and came to Hu Li’s side.

Hu Li could not see him, and continued digging with all her strength, her hands plunging into the earth again and again. Eileen’s voice suddenly entered Yu Sheng’s mind: “Talk to her. Strike up a conversation.”

“She can’t even see the two of us.”

“Doesn’t matter, just talk to her. This is a dream — she’ll respond. For someone who is dreaming, nothing in a dream is unreasonable.”

Yu Sheng thought for a moment, then looked toward the fox demon girl: “What are you digging for?”

“Mom and dad…” Hu Li, sure enough, showed not the slightest confusion at the voice she had suddenly heard, and answered quite naturally, “I remember I buried them here… I’m sure I buried them right here…”

Yu Sheng felt his heart sink for reasons he couldn’t quite explain, and instinctively asked again: “Why… do you want to dig them up?”

“I… I miss them,” Hu Li gradually slowed to a stop, a faint blankness and hollowness in her eyes, yet she still answered instinctively, “I’m so hungry, I want to tell them, I’m so hungry… But I held on. They said not to listen to that monster, and I’ve always held on. But… so hungry…”

Hu Li lowered her head, stared at her mud-covered hands, and continued digging, muttering to herself as she did: “They should be right here, they’re definitely here, they’ve always been right down here, safe and sound… I listened to them, I always listened to them, I never listened to that monster…”

“Her mental state is wrong,” Eileen’s voice entered Yu Sheng’s mind. “Very, very wrong…”

“I know, I could already tell her mental state wasn’t right the first time we met.” Yu Sheng answered in kind, from within his mind.

“That’s not what I mean. I mean… it’s like something else has mixed into her mind. Something is trying to intervene and interfere with her thoughts,” Eileen explained, trying to make a complex situation clear to Yu Sheng, who was an outsider in this regard. “Within her voice there is another voice — her own willpower has been holding on, but the outside thoughts are almost too much for her to bear.”

Eileen stopped speaking abruptly.

Hu Li stopped digging, rose to her feet with a blank expression, walked a few steps to the side, then stood motionless in the clearing.

Yu Sheng immediately followed, and in the next instant he seemed to hear a faint, indistinct voice.

That voice appeared to come directly from the depths of his own heart — it even sounded as though he himself had quietly spoken it —

“Keep digging, dig them up…

“You only want to see them once. You only want to confirm that you really have been listening to them faithfully. It’s been so long since you last saw each other, hasn’t it…

“‘I’ miss them so much…”

Hu Li turned around with a dazed look and stared at the pits she had dug.

“I miss them so much…” she murmured softly.

Yu Sheng suddenly understood — that voice he had heard coming from his own heart was precisely the “outside intervention” Eileen had mentioned!

He was connected to Hu Li’s dream and spirit, so what he had just heard was not from his own “heart” at all, but from Hu Li’s heart!

Hu Li slowly turned toward another part of the clearing, seemingly intent on digging there next.

Every handful of earth she dug was gradually tunneling through her own mental defenses.

Yu Sheng finally understood what that voice was bewitching her toward. A chill surged from the depths of his heart, and he instinctively cried out: “Hu Li!”

The fox demon girl stopped blankly, turning to look at the empty edge of the forest.

After quite a while, a trace of clarity finally returned to her eyes, and she recalled where she had heard that familiar voice before.

“…Benefactor?”

Yet the forest was empty, and no further sound from Yu Sheng reached her. That call from a moment ago seemed as though it had only been an illusion.

Hu Li stood in the clearing in a daze. After a while, she finally noticed the large pits she had dug all around her.

At last, an expression of horror slowly crept across the fox demon girl’s face.

She woke up, jolting awake at the very last step before her defenses would have crumbled.

(End of Chapter)