Chapter 81 – Peach Blossom Spring

Outside, there were still mountains—endlessly repeating mountains, layered one upon another, like ripples produced when space itself crumpled at the smallest scales.

After recovering from the heart-stopping acceleration, deceleration, and dizziness of the journey, Yu Sheng finally saw the “endlessly repeating mountains” that Hu Li had described.

The continuous mountain ranges spread outward like expanding ripples, stretching infinitely across his field of vision. Between the mountains hung a hazy mist, and through its swirling tendrils, not a single outline could be seen apart from “mountains.”

Yu Sheng furrowed his brow and stared for a long time at those distant peaks that seemed copied and pasted in infinite repetition. Then he suddenly recalled the café where he had first met Baili Qing—at the time, that café had also repeated and stretched infinitely in the same manner, extending all the way to the edge of sight.

But there was a difference: the café had only repeated infinitely in two directions, front and back. Beyond that, at least its street-facing window had remained a clear “boundary.” But these surrounding mountains… no matter which direction he looked, there was no visible “end” anywhere.

“This… there’s probably no way to walk out, right?” Eileen clutched Yu Sheng’s head, anxiously peering over the ridgeline. “Are we really going forward?”

Yu Sheng fell silent. He quietly gathered his focus, recalling the perspectives he had “seen” when he first established his connection with this valley, while simultaneously sensing the environment around him.

After a while, he suddenly bent down and casually picked up a small stone from the ground, hurling it into the distance.

The stone flew through the air, but before it could land, it vanished before everyone’s eyes.

“Huh?” Eileen let out a surprised sound at the sight.

Yu Sheng walked slowly forward, approaching the spot where the stone had disappeared with extreme caution.

There seemed to be nothing ahead, yet something like an invisible “boundary” existed there. He bent down again, picked up another pebble, and gently tossed it forward.

This time, he saw the pebble’s disappearance much more clearly—it passed through a “threshold” in an instant. At the moment it vanished, brief and faint ripples spread through the air, as if across the surface of water.

Yu Sheng raised his head and looked along the ridgeline to the left and right.

He could feel it.

The mountains rose and fell, converging again at their distant ends, and that invisible boundary enveloped the entire valley on all sides—from the sky above to the earth below.

After hesitating for a few seconds, Yu Sheng finally took a light breath and stepped forward.

“Hey, hey, hey! You’re really going forward!” the Little Doll immediately shouted from his shoulder. “This feels really sketchy! What if we go through and…”

Before she could finish, Yu Sheng had already crossed the invisible boundary. As faint ripples spread through the trembling air, a brief sensation of weightlessness appeared and vanished. Their vision blurred, and the two of them found themselves standing somewhere in the center of the valley once more.

“…can’t come back!” Eileen was still shouting by inertia. Only after the last two words left her mouth did she freeze, looking around in disbelief. “Oh, we’re back?”

Immediately after, a much larger ripple appeared beside them, and the enormous Silvery Foxgirl passed straight through the air, materializing next to her and Yu Sheng.

“Benefactor!” Hu Li called out anxiously the moment she arrived, searching for them. Only when she saw Yu Sheng and Eileen standing safely nearby did she relax, carefully brushing the tip of her tail against Yu Sheng’s body. “You two vanished all of a sudden—you scared me!”

“Space closes at the boundary and redirects unidirectionally toward the center of the region,” Yu Sheng said after thinking for a long time, finally breaking the silence. “I just don’t know if other Otherworlds share the same structure.”

Eileen blinked repeatedly as she listened, and after a while it clicked: “So you’re saying no matter what, we can never reach the ‘outside’?”

“There is no ‘outside,'” Yu Sheng shook his head. “This valley is the only ‘valid’ region in the entire space. Those infinite mountains we saw earlier are actually just ‘reflections’ endlessly stacking upon one another in curved spacetime due to the spatial closure at the boundary. If you look carefully, you’ll notice they’re all infinite copies of the peaks surrounding this valley.”

Eileen’s eyes went wide. After a very long pause, a look of dawning comprehension finally spread across her face: “…Wow.”

Whether she truly understood or was just pretending was anyone’s guess.

Then, after another moment, Eileen poked Yu Sheng’s head: “So what do we do now?”

Yu Sheng turned his gaze to the Silvery Foxgirl beside them.

“Since this place will no longer generate entities and has become somewhere stable… perhaps we could give your parents a proper burial. At least build a real grave mound. What do you think?”

The fox girl tilted her head, and after a moment, she gave a gentle nod.

Finding the burial site of Hu Li’s parents didn’t take long, and for the current Yu Sheng, raising a grave mound was hardly difficult.

The two sets of remains, hastily buried years ago, were carefully unearthed and re-collected. Yu Sheng made the ground sink and solidify into a proper grave pit, then fused blocks of stone together into a sturdy stone coffin—compared to healing vast tracts of land and rapidly growing vegetation, this series of tasks was actually far simpler for him.

The remains were placed in the stone coffin, the stone coffin was lowered into the grave pit, and earth crawled over it layer by layer. A grave mound took shape in no time.

“We still need a headstone,” Yu Sheng said, looking at the mound before him. Noticing a somewhat blank look in Hu Li’s eyes, he added, “It stands in front of the grave, as a memorial…”

Hu Li nodded immediately: “I’ll go get one.”

The moment the words left her mouth, the Silvery Foxgirl turned and dashed into the distance. A series of air-splitting roars and a sonic boom later, she vanished from Yu Sheng and Eileen’s sight in the blink of an eye.

Then, before long, she came barreling back with all the same thunder and fury, an oddly-shaped silver-white metal plate clamped in her jaws.

It was roughly half the height of a person.

“This was a gift my mom and dad bought for me,” Hu Li explained to Yu Sheng as she set the metal plate down. “It’s… a kind of musical instrument. Back then I kept begging to sign up for an interest class, so they bought me this, but I never got the chance to learn… Now, it’s broken anyway.”

As she spoke, she deftly curled one of her tails around the metal plate and planted it in the earth before the grave, then patted the soil down with her paw, packing it as hard as stone.

“Actually, a headstone isn’t really supposed to be…” Yu Sheng muttered instinctively, but he swallowed the rest of his words halfway through. “Never mind. If you think this is fitting, then that’s what it’ll be.”

“Where we come from, we don’t have customs like these,” the Silvery Foxgirl said, lying down beside the grave. She nuzzled the tip of her nose gently—truly gently this time—against Yu Sheng’s arm. “When demons die, a small piece of bone is kept as a memento—teeth or finger bones, usually. When immortals die, their hair is kept. Beyond that, the body is returned to nature, or refined by descendants into artifacts as keepsakes. Either way, no separate ‘burial’ is needed. There are also those who, while still alive, extract their spiritual consciousness and merge it with the Great Dao—with their consciousness immortal, the body can be abandoned to heaven and earth.”

As she spoke, she shifted her head along the ground, turning her gaze toward the freshly made grave.

“But I heard from the immortals that long, long ago—before the Celestials came—there were customs for burying the dead too. Back then, people would very solemnly inter their ancestors’ remains or keep them in ossuaries. But that was ages ago. According to what they taught at the academy, it was called ‘the pre-interstellar era’—a cultural characteristic from when civilization was still propagating within the gravity well… After leaving the gravity well, people’s thinking and way of life would no longer be strongly tied to the ‘surface,’ and the ethics around life and death would be reshaped, so ‘funerals’ would change along with them.”

Eileen listened from the side with wide-eyed amazement: “Why does it feel like you’re talking about something incredibly profound…”

“It’s all from what they taught at the academy, and I’ve forgotten a lot of it anyway. Back then… my grades weren’t exactly great either.” Hu Li’s large tail swept back and forth across the ground, then she turned her gaze back to the grave mound before her.

After two or three seconds of silence, she spoke softly: “This is actually quite nice. From now on, I can come here and talk to Mom and Dad… Benefactor’s suggestions always make a lot of sense.”

Yu Sheng said nothing. He simply walked over and sat down beside the Silvery Foxgirl, leaning against one of her great fluffy tails.

He was curious about Hu Li’s homeland. He tried to imagine what an “immortal-demon civilization” that had left the planet’s surface and could travel among the stars actually looked like. He thought about how one might find such a place in this vast universe. Then, gradually, these thoughts receded from his mind. He emptied his head and gazed absently into the distance.

He looked at this Otherworld—one that would no longer generate entities, no longer produce deadly toxins or corruption, and was now intimately connected to himself.

This place… could it serve as a sort of “base camp”?

But what use was such an enormous “base camp”… For housing people? His team only had three members counting himself, and besides, he still had No. 66 Wutong Road—no matter how old that house was, it was still more livable than the middle of nowhere… For farming? He didn’t even know if crops could grow in an Otherworld. The sunlight was certainly plentiful, and grass did grow on the ground… so maybe it was possible. If grass could grow, then grains and vegetables could too… And if he really wanted to push it, raising cattle and sheep wasn’t out of the question either…

Yu Sheng felt himself drifting off to sleep. Leaning against Hu Li’s soft, fluffy tail, the sensation of comfort and relaxation made his thoughts float as if drifting through cotton. His mind wandered to all sorts of random things, and then he couldn’t help but laugh at some of the more absurd ideas.

The Little Doll on his shoulder suddenly leaned her face in close: “What are you thinking about?”

Yu Sheng replied with perfect seriousness: “I’m thinking about what this place could be used for going forward. The preliminary plan is to level the Wasteland around the Ruined Temple and plant some radishes, green beans, and cabbage.”

Eileen: “…?”