Chapter 67 – Hu Li’s New Life

Chapter 67 – Hu Li’s New Life

Regardless of anything else, Yu Sheng now understood why Hu Li could launch her own tails like projectiles.

He didn’t know how other fox-spirits in this world operated, but clearly Hu Li’s lineage had taken the mecha-beast route when passing down their techniques…

Right now, the fox-spirit girl was sitting across the dining table, clumsily gripping a pair of chopsticks, shoveling food from her bowl into her mouth at breakneck speed.

It was just the simplest boiled noodles with some vegetable leaves, sliced ham, and two fried eggs, yet Hu Li ate as though it were the finest delicacy in the world. Her table manners were anything but elegant — but her enjoyment was absolute.

Strictly speaking, this was the first hot meal she’d had in years. The cookies and instant noodles Yu Sheng had brought her before were nice too, but sitting at a safe dining table eating steaming hot food from a bowl — that was an entirely different feeling.

“Slow down, there’s more in the pot if you want,” Yu Sheng said, watching with a pang of sympathy as Hu Li blinked and had nearly finished her bowl. He gently touched her hand. “That’s not how you hold chopsticks. Watch me.”

Hu Li looked up from the rim of her bowl, glanced at Yu Sheng’s right hand, then awkwardly adjusted her grip on the chopsticks while still chewing on fried egg.

She learned quickly.

“Benefactor, did I eat too fast…” After finishing the entire bowl of noodles, Hu Li looked up somewhat sheepishly. She noticed that Yu Sheng had only eaten half of his noodles, and that Eileen also had a bowl placed in front of her on the table, completely untouched. “I… I just always feel like if I don’t eat fast, the food might be gone at any moment.”

“It’s fine, you’ll adjust over time. With your constitution, eating a few big meals won’t affect your health,” Yu Sheng couldn’t help but laugh. “If you want more, I’ll go get you another serving.”

“Mm-hm.”

Before Yu Sheng could even stand up, Eileen spoke from her seat on the table: “Let her have my bowl first.”

The little doll pushed the bowl in front of her toward Hu Li with both hands.

Hu Li said thank you without questioning why there was a serving placed in front of a doll who couldn’t eat, then lowered her head and began devouring the food again.

After the meal, Yu Sheng discovered that the bowls and chopsticks Hu Li had used barely needed washing — she’d licked them so clean you could see your reflection in them…

After tidying up the kitchen, Yu Sheng changed into clothes for going out.

He found another set of his own clothes for Hu Li — honestly, they didn’t fit at all. Yu Sheng was much, much taller than the fox-spirit girl, and no matter how they adjusted, his clothes hung loose and baggy on her.

Pajamas could get away with being a few sizes off, but going-out clothes were another matter. In the end, Yu Sheng had to use numerous hidden safety pins and improvised stitching to get his clothes to stay on Hu Li without looking too absurd.

Even so, a girl of about one-sixty-something walking around in obviously ill-fitting men’s clothes would certainly look peculiar. But fortunately — Hu Li’s looks made up for it.

As it turned out, being beautiful really did let you get away with anything, and the fox-spirit was genuinely beautiful. This meant that at most, she looked like a pretty girl with a somewhat eccentric sense of fashion.

While Yu Sheng was busy adjusting clothes for Hu Li, Eileen sat cross-legged on top of the shoe cabinet nearby, chin propped on both hands, watching the show. Only when Yu Sheng was nearly done did she mutter: “Hu Li, you can ‘retract’ your ears and tail, so how come you can’t shapeshift your height? And what about your clothes — I ‘created’ this outfit I’m wearing myself. Can’t your fox-spirit ‘transformation’ abilities do that?”

“Powerful fox-spirits can!” Hu Li immediately defended the honor of her kind. “Papa said that powerful fox-spirits can even grow as tall as a mountain in the blink of an eye! They run through mountains and forests with several thousand law-enforcement immortals chasing after them, and getting caught means a sentence of over five hundred years. But I can’t do that! All I’ve learned is how to refine my ears and tails…”

Eileen listened in stunned disbelief, her expression quite peculiar: “Uh, that… doesn’t exactly sound like something to be proud of… Wait, your speech has gotten a lot smoother, hasn’t it?”

Hu Li immediately narrowed her eyes, looking very pleased: “The more I talk, the more natural it gets.”

Eileen’s gaze shifted to Yu Sheng. Who knew what was going through that little head of hers, but she suddenly spoke up: “So you two are going out together…”

“Obviously,” Yu Sheng nodded. “She doesn’t have any clothes, shoes, or socks, and she can’t go out shopping on her own. Of course I’m going with her.”

Eileen propped her chin on both hands: “I want to go out too.”

Yu Sheng was shocked the moment he heard this. He finally realized what the doll had been intermittently deep in thought about since they woke up that morning, but it caught him completely off guard: “You? How would you go out? A sixty-something-centimeter living doll strutting down the street? You’d scare half the people out there!”

“You carry me,” Eileen said matter-of-factly. “I’ll disguise myself.”

Yu Sheng didn’t follow: “How would you disguise yourself?”

Eileen immediately went limp, her limbs and joints drooping, eyes open in a died-with-unresolved-grievances stare.

Even the highlights in her eyes vanished.

Her voice echoed in Yu Sheng and Hu Li’s minds: “See? Much more normal like this — doll shops are full of one-third scale figures. Toss me in there like this, and I could sit in a display window all day without anyone noticing…”

Yu Sheng stared in disbelief, utterly astounded by Eileen’s creativity.

But it actually made him feel even more uncomfortable: “Wouldn’t a grown man carrying a one-third scale doll around while shopping look kind of… creepy?”

The highlights in Eileen’s eyes instantly returned. The next second, she launched herself from the shoe cabinet straight onto Yu Sheng’s head: “You didn’t think it was creepy when you carried me into the Otherworld to fight monsters! Now that the fighting’s done, you can’t even be bothered to take me out the door! You want me to cover your head in bite marks? I’ll make sure you can’t even stick band-aids on them!”

Yu Sheng frantically fended off the doll flailing on top of his head. After finally prying her off, he tossed her directly to Hu Li, who had been watching in a daze: “Fine, fine, fine, I’ll take you out. But she has to carry you.”

Eileen was immediately satisfied — she just wanted to go outside. As long as she could go out, it didn’t matter who carried her.

In fact, she wouldn’t even mind being dragged along in a suitcase. She could just unzip it a crack and peek at the outside world.

It had been a very, very long time since she’d seen the world outside.

“The problem is this painting of yours,” Yu Sheng frowned, looking at the picture frame strapped to Eileen’s back. Because of the frame, Hu Li had to hold the doll’s body in an awkward position while also keeping the frame from blocking her view. “It’s eye-catching for one thing, but more importantly, it’s in the way.”

“Then take it off and carry it separately?” Eileen reached back and removed the picture frame from her back. “Just don’t let it get too far away from me.”

Hu Li nodded and, without waiting for Yu Sheng to say anything, took the doll’s picture frame. Then with a “poof,” a mass of tails burst out behind her, and she stuffed the frame into one of them.

This time Yu Sheng finally couldn’t hold back. He realized that the way Hu Li stored things in her tails wasn’t quite what he’d initially imagined: “…How exactly do you stuff things in there?! Don’t tell me that’s a dedicated storage space?!”

Hu Li blinked, only then belatedly turning around and spreading her tails out to give Yu Sheng a detailed introduction for the first time: “This one is specifically for storage. These two are for hugging to keep warm while sleeping. These ones can be used as blankets, and they’re also flexible enough to grab things. Aside from the storage one, all the others can be used in combat…”

Yu Sheng’s expression went blank: “…You mean launched as projectiles?”

“Yep.”

“This is all the result of ‘refining’?”

“Yep.”

Yu Sheng thought about it, but in the end could only marvel that fox-spirits were truly wondrous.

Far more wondrous than the human body.

…

Special Operations Bureau, Second Squad — Song Cheng walked into the office more than twenty minutes later than usual today.

And almost the very second he settled into his desk chair, the monitor on his desk lit up. Bureau Chief Baili Qing’s perpetually cold, seemingly unchanging face appeared on screen.

“Looks like you’ve already been to the ‘Train,'” Baili Qing’s calm voice came through the speaker beside the screen. “Didn’t go smoothly?”

“It did, but there was nothing smooth about it either,” Song Cheng wasn’t surprised by the chief’s sudden call. He just shook his head somewhat awkwardly. “Today’s ‘Train’ car layout was more complex than usual. By the time I returned to the real world, I’d already gone past my stop.”

“How did the exchange with Passenger No. 22 go?” Baili Qing asked directly.

“…Chief, something seems off,” Song Cheng immediately adjusted his posture, leaning slightly forward. “Regarding No. 66 Wutong Road, the passenger’s response was ‘no such stop’ — that’s unusual, but not outrageous. What’s really concerning is when I asked about ‘Night-shrouded Valley’…”

He paused, his expression turning unusually grave: “Passenger No. 22 said that stop has been canceled.”

It was the first time he’d ever seen such obvious surprise on Baili Qing’s face.

He’d always thought the chief’s face was frozen.

“This response is a first,” Song Cheng said cautiously, observing the changes in Baili Qing’s expression. “What do you think…”

“Immediately arrange for a deep-diver to execute a deep dive,” Baili Qing said rapidly.

(End of Chapter)