Chapter 36 – The One Who Couldn’t Sleep All Night (Not Yu Sheng)

Regardless of how well they got along, Li Lin had to admit that Xu Jiali was undoubtedly the most capable deep-diver he had ever met — the fact that such a formidable fighter had come to back him up at least showed that the Bureau still took fairly good care of him, a newcomer.

That is, as long as he could put up with this hulking brute’s big mouth and bragging personality — especially every time the man came back from a mission.

“I’m telling you, I ran into something seriously bizarre on this mission,” the hulking figure on the sofa said, casually grabbing a bottle of water from the coffee table beside him, unscrewing the cap as he rambled on. “I caught that angel cultist who’d slipped into Aymein, and after a lot of effort I had him cornered in the uninhabited zone. Right in the middle of the fight, I look up — guess what?”

Li Lin rolled his eyes. “You big mouth, is this something you should be talking about out in the open?”

“It’s fine, I already filed my report at the Bureau. This portion of intel was cleared for disclosure to you,” Xu Jiali waved his hand dismissively, not caring in the least whether Li Lin wanted to hear it, and kept right on talking. “I look up, and holy shit! There’s a person just standing right there! You know what they looked like? Just a shirt and thin trousers, standing in the toxic hot winds of Aymein-IX — oh, and there was a door frame just stuck in the ground beside them. I was absolutely stunned at that moment — I was literally one second away from finishing off that angel cultist, and that shock gave the bastard a chance to catch his breath. Lucky for me, in the end my skills won out…”

Li Lin impatiently waved his hand, walking toward his surveillance equipment set up by the window and saying offhandedly, “Alright, alright, every single story always ends with ‘lucky for you, your skills won out.’ Can’t you think of a more original way to wrap things up?”

“But I really did win because my skills were better,” the hulking man said, eyes wide, watching Li Lin’s movements. “Hey, wait, you’re not even surprised? I saw a person standing in the toxic hot winds of Aymein-IX! Not even wearing powered armor! Even the captain isn’t that tough!”

“Last time on Tata-V, during the acid rain, you also ran into someone who suddenly appeared without any protective gear — it was a professor from the Academy out gathering research material,” Li Lin said without turning his head. “It’s not like the world is short on bizarre characters. Besides, deep-diving too much can cause all kinds of hallucinations. I’ve heard similar creepy stories from you at least eight hundred times by now, and I don’t believe a single punctuation mark anymore. Come back and tell me when you’re on a shuttle at the star port just picking up speed on the orbital track and you see someone standing outside the porthole flying alongside you — at least that would sound somewhat original.”

“I have seen that,” the hulking man grinned broadly, came right over to Li Lin’s bed and plopped himself down. “It was a Daoist master from Qianfeng Numinous Mountain. Damn it, I was just about to accelerate when he held up a mirror at my surveillance camera and waved it back and forth, saying he was going to overtake me… overtake my ass. If he’s so capable, let him enter warp jump in the flesh…”

Li Lin finally couldn’t help but stop what he was doing. He turned his head and looked at Xu (hulking) Jia (brute) li for a long moment before sighing, “You people who do special field work really do lead incredibly colorful lives.”

“Why don’t you get your deep-diving certification? Maybe next time we could run special field ops together,” the hulking man urged. “What’s so great about staying in the Borderland? It’s dangerous, it’s a pain, and every little thing you do carries enormous responsibility.”

Li Lin thought about it, then shook his head. “The Borderland is always short on manpower. Someone has to guard this biggest ‘hub.’ And honestly, I don’t think suiting up in powered armor and risking your life against angel cultists on some wasteland planet is any safer than staying in the Borderland dealing with Otherworld threats. Besides… you run special field ops and you still end up dealing with the Otherworld anyway.”

“That’s different. The Otherworld density out there isn’t this high. It’s nothing like the Borderland — damn, seven out of twenty stops on a single bus route are Otherworld…”

Li Lin glanced back at Xu Jiali, tempted to say that ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of people under normal circumstances could only see those thirteen ordinary stops, but then he thought about what was written in this hulking man’s file — that at the age of twelve he had accidentally wandered into an Otherworld “platform” and survived there alone for a full six years, then became a deep-diver after psychological rehabilitation because he couldn’t escape the Otherworld’s pursuit — and in the end, he swallowed his words.

The Bureau’s frontline combatants came in two types: those who came up through the normal training and assessment process, and those who had been pulled out of the Otherworld.

Don’t show off your knowledge in front of someone with a traumatic past — even if they don’t care about it at all.

Li Lin lowered his head and focused on checking the various parameters recorded by the equipment.

The hulking man beside him seemed somewhat bored. He was a through-and-through combat operative, here primarily as added firepower, and had little interest in work like “keeping watch.”

“The Bureau is a complete mess right now,” he said suddenly after a while, bored. “The captains of several action teams have all been called in to work overtime. I heard even the Director showed up.”

“I know,” Li Lin said without looking up. “This is the Borderland, after all.”

“Is this kind of thing common in the Borderland?” the hulking man scratched his hair. “Have there been similar ‘anomalous phenomena’ before? I’m out on special field ops all year round, so I don’t really know…”

“If you’re talking about tonight’s spatial displacement phenomenon specifically, then no, it hasn’t happened before. But if you mean ‘anomalous phenomena’ in general, the Borderland has never been short of those. This place is… the Borderland, after all.”

“Alright, charming Borderland. I just love this place to death,” the hulking man stretched his arms and shoulders, then leaned back and lay down on Li Lin’s bed. The rickety single bed let out a creak under his considerable weight. “Both the people who want to destroy this world and the people who want to protect it love this place to death — lucky for me I don’t have to be on duty at the Bureau. I heard the captain and the others are working overtime every day.”

Li Lin didn’t respond, focusing entirely on his surveillance and logging duties.

And right at that moment, a phone ringtone suddenly broke the silence of the room.

Li Lin glanced at the screen and immediately picked up. “This is Li Lin… yes, yes? Ah, alright, understood.”

The hulking man sat up on the bed, curiously watching Li Lin’s changed expression. “What’s going on?”

Li Lin’s expression was peculiar. He raised his head and looked out at the calm night outside the window.

“That was the Bureau just now. The rift phenomenon… has stopped.”

The hulking man froze. “Stopped?” He stared wide-eyed. “Just stopped? No follow-up attack, no angel cultists or anything? Not even an Otherworld entity appeared?”

“Nothing. It just stopped. All the surveillance nodes across the entire Borderland have gone quiet now.”

“So I pulled an all-nighter for nothing?”

“It wasn’t for nothing — and you still have to keep going. The Bureau hasn’t stood down either,” Li Lin held up his phone. “Everyone continues monitoring. We’re watching to see whether that force behind the rift phenomenon makes any further moves. For now, go next door and sleep. I’ll wake you in six hours to take over for me.”

“Got it,” the hulking man stood up immediately, and at that moment he said not a single unnecessary word. “Wake me directly if anything happens.”

Li Lin nodded, his gaze drifting back out to the night beyond the window.

“Another sleepless night…” he murmured softly.

……

Yu Sheng slept soundly for the rest of the night.

After successfully reproducing a “door” leading to some distant space and time, he had firmly memorized that feeling. He now knew how to control the so-called Spiritual Guidance, how to give the door a certain specific “frequency” when opening it, so that the door would stably lead to a designated location.

He felt that most things in this world could be summed up as “a stranger the first time, a friend the second.”

After that, he continued practicing and reinforcing the process of opening the door, successfully reproducing all kinds of passages, until he was completely exhausted.

Sleep after total exhaustion is always especially sound. He felt it had been many years since he’d slept so well.

Yet he also felt a little regretful — in that good night’s sleep, he hadn’t dreamed of the fox. He hadn’t even dreamed at all.

It seemed the dream containing Hu Li was not one that appeared reliably.

This left Yu Sheng with a touch of unease, and a slight sense of urgency.

After waking up that morning, he told Eileen what had happened.

“It’s fine, don’t overthink it. That fox has survived in the Otherworld for so many years already — she’s not going to run into trouble in just a day or two,” Eileen, for once, didn’t spout any nonsense, and instead spoke quite sincerely to comfort Yu Sheng. “Dreams are unstable by nature. Who knows, maybe next time you dream, you’ll see her again?”

“Hopefully,” Yu Sheng said offhandedly, picking up a piece of meat with his chopsticks from the table and placing it in his bowl.

This was still meat cut from that “local specialty.” He had eaten it three meals in a row now, still hadn’t finished it, and still wasn’t tired of it.

Only, he could no longer feel any physical strengthening from eating it. It seemed the item had reached its limit in terms of the effect it could have on him.

But regardless, it still tasted good.

“What are you planning to do after eating?” Eileen’s voice came from nearby. “Keep practicing Door Opening? Or try to reproduce the passage leading to the ‘valley’?”

“I need to go out and buy a few things first. Once I’m back, I’ll start trying to construct the path to the valley. It might take a lot of attempts — I can’t quite remember what that ‘feeling’ was like anymore,” Yu Sheng said, then suddenly noticed the look on Eileen’s face, as if she wanted to say something but held back. “Hm? Do you have something on your mind?”

Eileen stared straight at him. The doll-faced girl seemed to be hesitating, and after several seconds she finally spoke. “…Give me half a day first.”

Yu Sheng was taken aback. He very rarely saw such a serious expression on this doll’s face.

“Give you half a day… to do what?”

“Make me a body,” Eileen said, calmly and firmly.

(End of Chapter)