Chapter 54 – Yu Sheng’s Return

The chewing sounds that filled the entire valley swelled like crashing waves. The whole Otherworld had become a grand feast, and soon, every person hiding in the cave realized what those sounds meant.

Li Lin mustered his courage and crept to the cave entrance, his scalp tingling as he peeked outside.

The jagged teeth within the mountain range were tearing at each other. The trench-like maws were collapsing inward, continuously splitting into more fissures that devoured and dissolved one another. The foraging tendrils covering the ground had already begun digesting themselves, while flesh-and-blood beasts kept spawning from certain shadows, only to be consumed in the blink of an eye by invisible forces.

Against the backdrop of this horrifying feast, he spotted a figure—Yu Sheng was standing in the open space outside the cave, gazing somewhat absently at the scene of mutual consumption playing out across the valley.

Li Lin felt momentarily dazed, but in the blink of an eye he forgot that fleeting sense of wrongness—he had already forgotten the scene of Yu Sheng’s death, and simply felt that the other man had gotten separated from the group for a while.

Hu Li and Eileen, who were keeping watch at the cave entrance, also spotted Yu Sheng’s figure immediately.

“Benefactor! I knew you weren’t dead!” Hu Li was the first to cry out, but immediately grew anxious. “Benefactor, get in here quick! It’s dangerous outside!”

Only then did Yu Sheng turn around. He walked briskly into the cave, muttering as he went: “I get the feeling that thing up in the sky is pretty sinister, but it doesn’t actually seem to have any desire to attack…”

Eileen didn’t care what Yu Sheng was muttering about. She just examined him up and down with considerable anxiety: “Are you really okay? Is your mental state still normal?”

“Can’t you wish me well for once?!” Yu Sheng immediately glared at the puppet. “You think it was easy for me to make it back?”

As he spoke, he lifted his head to glance outside the cave entrance again. “The Hunger should be almost finished, but I don’t know where that giant eyeball in the sky came from. It’s not part of Entity-Hunger—it doesn’t even seem like something native to this valley.”

Eileen had prepared quite a bit of trash talk to lighten the mood, but his words caught her off guard. “Huh? It’s not from this valley?”

“No,” Yu Sheng shook his head. Even now, he still maintained that subtle connection with this Otherworld, and could therefore clearly distinguish the gaze falling from the sky—could discern the ‘boundary’ between that eye and the valley. “All the Hunger Entities are currently within my perception. I can clearly feel that the eye is something foreign—it’s just that for many years now, it has been ‘crouching’ above this Otherworld, replacing the sky that was originally here.”

Eileen’s mouth hung open, seemingly frozen in astonishment. A deep voice then came from the depths of the cave, breaking the momentary silence.

“That’s an ‘angel.'”

Yu Sheng looked up in surprise to see the nearly two-meter-tall burly man walking out from the depths of the cave. The blue-green Fox Fire cast sharply defined shadows across the big man’s cheekbones.

The burly man looked Yu Sheng up and down, his expression carrying a peculiar gravity and caution. “Did you get separated from the group earlier?”

Whether it was his imagination or not, Yu Sheng couldn’t help feeling that the way the other man looked at him was somewhat strange—full of great vigilance and wariness. It wasn’t exactly hostile, but it wasn’t the kind of concern or curiosity one would normally show toward a “returning straggler” who was a temporary companion.

But Yu Sheng didn’t dwell on it at the moment. He was more interested in the peculiar name the burly man had just mentioned.

“I fell behind earlier. Don’t worry, it was nothing serious,” Yu Sheng waved his hand dismissively, then immediately asked, “What do you mean by ‘angel’?”

“The more precise term is ‘Twilight Angel’—a type of… dangerous thing of unknown origin. Sometimes the term also refers to the special phenomena triggered by these dangerous entities,” the burly man considered his words carefully before speaking slowly. “Every Twilight Angel is different—from form to abilities to the manner of their appearance, there are enormous variations. The one currently occupying the sky probably parasitized this Otherworld many years ago—it’s precisely because of its influence that the entities here underwent their mutations.”

Yu Sheng listened to the explanation with surprise, and quickly realized that this big fellow probably knew much more. About these so-called “Twilight Angels,” there had to be far more detailed materials.

But the man hadn’t shared everything, whether due to some confidentiality requirement or some other concern.

That was perfectly normal, though. After all, none of them knew each other. They had fought side by side, sure, but they hadn’t even introduced themselves yet. Under such circumstances, being willing to share intelligence upon meeting was already a gesture of goodwill.

“I’m Yu Sheng,” Yu Sheng extended his hand to the other man. “These two here are Hu Li and Eileen—both friends of mine.”

The two-meter-tall burly man hesitated for a moment, but reached out and shook Yu Sheng’s hand. “Hello, I’m Xu Jiali.”

Yu Sheng froze.

After a moment, he opened his mouth: “Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Your name is…?”

“He said his name is Xu Jiali. Jiali as in ‘beautiful lady,'” the red-clothed girl sitting on a stone stool broke the silence, looking up at Yu Sheng. “You can call me Little Red Riding Hood.”

Yu Sheng blinked, then had a sudden realization: “Oh, I get it. You’re obviously in the business—when you’re out in the field, everyone uses codenames, right?”

The two-meter-tall burly man replied in a muffled voice: “Hers is a codename. Mine is my real name.”

Yu Sheng: “…”

What could he say? He could only offer an awkward compliment that the name was actually quite nice and had a cultured ring to it, before his gaze fell on the last person who hadn’t yet spoken—the young man.

He kept feeling that the other man’s face looked vaguely familiar, as if he’d seen him somewhere before, but he couldn’t place it.

Li Lin didn’t hesitate. Seeing the gaze fall on him, he walked over openly: “I’m Li Lin.”

Before Yu Sheng could respond, Eileen suddenly blurted out: “Hey! Now that’s a normal name!”

Li Lin was instantly speechless. He looked at the composition of Yu Sheng’s group—a fox spirit sprouting a bunch of tails, a puppet barely half a meter tall from head to toe. The three of them combined could just barely make up one human being, and they had the nerve to comment on whether other people’s names were normal or not…

But his attention quickly shifted elsewhere.

The chewing sounds coming from outside the cave were gradually dying down, and the tremors pervading the entire Otherworld seemed to be weakening rapidly.

Xu Jiali rushed to the cave entrance in a few strides, craning his neck to look outside. The entire valley had been transformed beyond recognition.

It was as if everything from the distant mountains to the nearby valley floor had been gnawed down by a full layer. Only countless jagged rocks and bare soil remained on the mountains. The forests in the distance had vanished entirely, and the lowlands below the slopes were crisscrossed with ravines.

He spun around abruptly, his gaze landing on Yu Sheng, who was standing next to Hu Li.

“Was this… your doing?”

Xu Jiali seemed somewhat hesitant as he asked. He knew it sounded absurd—the eerie, terrifying scene in the valley didn’t look like something a human could possibly accomplish. Yet his instincts told him that all of this was connected to Yu Sheng’s brief “separation” from the group.

“More or less,” Yu Sheng responded quite readily. He was in a good mood right now—a sense of satisfaction, as if he had finally eaten his fill, suffused his heart. He nodded cheerfully. “Though it took quite a bit of effort.”

Li Lin had also seen the state of the valley by now, and when he looked back at Yu Sheng, the shock on his face was beyond measure: “…How is that possible…”

Yu Sheng thought about it and decided it would be hard to explain to outsiders what had actually happened—that he’d been eaten by the Hunger, but his appetite far exceeded the Hunger’s? That a human (debatable) had mentally contaminated an entity, and the Hunger Entity, having eaten something ‘tainted,’ went into such a feeding frenzy that it devoured itself?

This wasn’t even a question of whether it was easy to explain. The problem was that even after explaining, you couldn’t tell who the villain was.

Besides, he didn’t want these people he barely knew learning too much about him.

“Got lucky, found the entity’s weakness,” Yu Sheng said casually. “I’m not sure exactly what happened either, but it looks like it triggered a chain reaction of self-consumption among the entities in this valley…”

His answer was obviously evasive, and deliberately so. Li Lin understood immediately—some things were other people’s secrets.

And just then, Eileen’s excited commotion interrupted the questions forming in Li Lin’s and Xu Jiali’s minds: “Hey! Is that thing in the sky slowly floating upward?”

Hearing this, Yu Sheng quickly moved over and craned his neck to look at the sky above the valley.

He saw the enormous eye that had covered the entire valley slowly rising. It made no sound whatsoever, like a projection displayed upon the sky that was gradually shrinking. In just a dozen or so seconds, the giant eye had already reduced to only a third of its original size.

It was rapidly fleeing from this place.

A brighter, more normal daylight spread in from between the distant mountain ranges. The churning clouds reappeared in the sky. The eye quickly shrank to a palm-sized disc floating in the center of the sky, and then after a few more breaths, that disc vanished completely from everyone’s sight.

“It… it ran away?” Eileen craned her head upward, looking momentarily at a loss for what to do. Then she turned to look at the two-meter-tall burly man nearby. “That ‘angel’ you mentioned—it ran away! What do we do?”

But Xu Jiali merely let out a soft sigh of relief. Hearing the puppet’s question, he managed a smile:

“What can we do? Celebrate, of course—and after celebrating, I’ll go back and write my report.”