Chapter 87 – Snow Inside the Room

The biggest commotion at No. 66 Wutong Road typically consisted of Yu Sheng losing his temper and the Little Doll’s screaming and scratching — though now there was the added sound of a fox girl munching away on potato chips while watching the show from the sidelines.

After more than ten minutes, Yu Sheng successfully subdued and disciplined the doll who had been bouncing off the walls and even trying to bite people, and hung her on the drying rack on the living room balcony.

“Yu Sheng, you bastard! Put me down!” Eileen flailed her arms in midair, kicking furiously. The drying pole ran through both her sleeves, suspending her from behind on the rack, leaving her swaying in the air like a salted fish hung out to dry. “It’s just a temporary ban! Just a temporary ban! Only twelve hours — the account can still be saved! You’re not really going to hang me here for twelve hours, are you? Doesn’t your conscience hurt? At least hang me in a more comfortable position!”

“If I used clips you’d just wriggle free,” Yu Sheng said, sitting on the nearby sofa and glancing sideways at the doll hanging from the pole. “Hanging you up here is to teach you a lesson — stop messing with my stuff. Don’t worry, I’ll definitely let you down before dinner. But if there’s a next time, I’m hanging you in the basement.”

The moment the doll heard this, she erupted into a full-blown tantrum, displaying her indomitable spirit and defiant resistance in the face of violent coercion: “I was wrong, I was wrong! I won’t dare do it again — let me down, let me down…”

Her main form of defiant resistance was having no defiant resistance at all. Despite being terrible at games, foul-mouthed, short-tempered, and forgetful, she caved remarkably fast.

Yu Sheng simply tuned out her commotion as background noise and ignored her entirely.

Hu Li crept over cautiously, still holding a bag of potato chips. She looked up at the doll hanging on the drying rack, then glanced at Yu Sheng, and after hesitating for two or three seconds, spoke in a low voice: “Benefactor, Eileen really does seem to know she was wrong. Why don’t you let her down?”

As she spoke, she held out the bag of chips toward him. “Have some snacks — you won’t be angry anymore.”

Yu Sheng casually grabbed a few chips and tossed them into his mouth, glanced over at Eileen, then reached for the TV remote and turned on the television.

The Little Doll fell silent instantly and began staring intently at the TV screen.

“See? She just makes a lot of noise. When nobody actually pays attention to her, that’s all there is to it,” Yu Sheng sighed and said to Hu Li with the air of someone who’d been through it all. “That’s just how thick-skinned troublemakers are.”

“Oh.” Hu Li nodded with a half-understanding expression, likely not quite grasping what “thick-skinned troublemaker” meant.

Just then, a sudden “bang” came from upstairs, snatching the attention of everyone in the living room.

Eileen, still hanging on the rack, immediately looked up, peering through the ceiling toward the floor above. “Hey, Yu Sheng, what fell up there? Did that ladder in the corner of the attic fall over?”

Yu Sheng rose from the sofa, his brow furrowed tightly as he looked toward the second floor.

“…No, the sound came from the end of the second-floor corridor,” he said in a low voice. “I need to go check.”

Hu Li sprang to her feet beside him, her tail unsheathing with a buzzing “hum.” “I’m coming with you!”

“Hey, let me down too! I’m coming along!” Eileen immediately cried out. “That sound didn’t seem right to me either — if something happens, I need to protect you two!”

“Who’s protecting whom is debatable,” Yu Sheng quipped at her, but still walked over and lifted the drying pole off the rack, tilting one end downward to let the doll slide off onto the floor. “I’ll let it go this time. Next time, you’re really going in the basement.”

Eileen stumbled twice on the ground before finding her footing, puffing out her cheeks as she straightened her clothes, then turned and made a face at Yu Sheng.

An expression that said, “I may cave fast, but I’ll do it again next time — and I’ll do it right now just to show you.”

Yu Sheng paid it no mind. He simply stretched his limbs, then gave Hu Li a look before taking the lead toward the staircase to the second floor.

Once upstairs, he walked straight to the end of the corridor, stopping before the door to the room where Eileen’s oil painting had once hung.

The door was shut tight. Inside, all was silent — nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

But Yu Sheng was now increasingly certain that the loud thud he’d heard had indeed come from the direction of this room.

He remembered that since the last time this room had been opened, it had transformed from an empty space into an ordinary room with simple furnishings. The only thing in the entire room that could possibly produce the sound of something heavy hitting the floor was a mirror hanging on the wall — but that mirror was firmly secured in place. He hadn’t been able to pull it down even using considerable force.

Besides, if the mirror had actually fallen, there should have been the accompanying sound of glass shattering.

Yu Sheng stepped forward and gripped the peculiar handle on the hinge side of the door, turning it quietly.

“Don’t open it yet,” Eileen murmured in a low voice. She spread her hands, and wisps of black “spider silk” extended from her fingertips, threading through the gap beneath the door and slowly spreading into the room. “Let me scout the situation first.”

Hu Li, seeing this, popped off one of her own ears with a soft “pop.” She pressed the fluffy fox ear against the door like a stethoscope, slowly moving it around, her face bearing an expression of utmost concentration.

Yu Sheng couldn’t help muttering at the sight: “Seriously, can you two try to be a little more normal?”

“I’m perfectly normal!” Eileen answered in her mind. “It’s this dumb fox who’s not normal.”

“Benefactor,” the fox girl broke the silence just then, speaking softly as she pressed her ear back onto her head. “There’s no movement inside.”

“I didn’t sense any unusual presence either,” Eileen said, retracting her black threads. “Go ahead and open it.”

Yu Sheng nodded and carefully pushed the door open a crack.

He himself felt this whole production was a bit excessive — after all, they were at home, and just because a single noise had come from upstairs, all three of them were treating it like a dire threat, scouting and standing guard at the door. It was admittedly a bit strange. But he also knew that this caution was born of necessity.

After all, No. 66 Wutong Road was an Otherworld, and the room at the end of the second-floor corridor had been off from the very beginning.

The door opened, and a lingering chill blew into their faces.

Yu Sheng shivered from the strange blast of cold air, instantly on high alert.

Why would there be such a cold draft inside the room? The feeling was… like a frigid wind blowing down from a snowy mountain, carrying the scent of ice and snow.

Yet when the door swung fully open, he found the room was… still that same ordinary room.

A simple bed, a table and chairs, a mirror hanging on the wall, an aged floor, wallpaper that had faded with curling and cracking at the edges, and plain curtains.

Everything in the room looked the same as before. No invader had crawled through from another world, and no gaping portal to another dimension had torn open anywhere.

Yu Sheng didn’t let down his guard, still cautiously scanning his surroundings as he slowly stepped into the room.

Eileen followed him in, curiously looking around this room that theoretically “belonged to her.”

The Little Doll suddenly spotted something. “Hey! Yu Sheng, look at the base of the wall! The side near the door!”

Yu Sheng immediately turned to look in the direction Eileen was pointing.

On the floor near the base of the wall on both sides of the door, he saw small accumulations of something white, along with several tiny puddles of water that were gradually evaporating from the floorboards.

“…Is that snow?” Yu Sheng leaned in for a closer look, incredulous to discover that the white deposits were indeed snow — and due to the warmth inside the room, it was rapidly melting into water stains.

Eileen looked dumbfounded. “…It snowed inside the room? How is that even possible?”

“Judging by the shape of these snow deposits, it looks like they were blown against the wall by strong wind and gradually accumulated,” Yu Sheng frowned, carefully examining the traces of snow that hadn’t yet fully melted and clung to the wall. His confusion only deepened.

Hu Li crouched down beside them, pressed close to the wall, and sniffed hard, carefully smelling something.

“The scent of living things,” the Fox-Spirit Girl said with great seriousness. “This snow came from a place where living creatures exist.”

Eileen was stunned. “You can tell that just by smelling it?!”

Hu Li looked rather pleased with herself. “Fox — very good nose.”

“That’s way more sensitive than a dog’s nose…” Eileen couldn’t help but marvel.

Just then, something at the edge of Yu Sheng’s vision caught his attention.

He walked over to the nearby table, bent down, and picked up a dark, palm-sized metal object from the floor beneath it.

It was a metal component of unknown purpose. It looked like some kind of manifold designed to connect multiple pipes and valves — a flow-splitting device with several threaded openings. It was hollow inside, not heavy in the hand, yet seemed remarkably sturdy.

Eileen walked over as well, and froze for a moment when she saw the strange device in Yu Sheng’s hand. “Um… I’m guessing this thing wasn’t originally in this room?”

“Of course not,” Yu Sheng shook his head. “Just like it doesn’t snow indoors, there’s no way something like this — it looks like some kind of weird part taken off a machine — would have been here before.”

As he spoke, he cautiously approached the mirror that faced the door.

The mirror reflected the scene within the room.

But he suddenly furrowed his brow.

Because deep within what appeared to be a perfectly normal reflection of the room, he could faintly make out another image superimposed in the mirror — what looked like a cave, not very large, with heavy snow falling beyond its mouth.

(End of Chapter)