Chapter 203: Psychic Sanctuary
Yu Sheng placed the “First Door” at the far end of the main platform’s central axis. Behind the Door, he raised a wall. Then, he built two rows of tall pillars in front of the Door, shaping a smaller platform between them out of stone. This finished the initial “decorations” for the place.
Though it was still only a rough beginning, at least the “Hotel” base was starting to look like a real stronghold.
After completing this, Yu Sheng originally planned to return once more to the deepest part of the Valley, where the “Celestial Shuttle” had crashed. He still remembered discussing with Bai Li Qing about calling in a team of Arcane Commission experts to investigate. But the time he spent constructing the Teleportation Door was longer than he expected, so that plan had to be postponed temporarily.
Now, he was finally free to head over to the Wasteland and confirm if the “Mind Shelter” he had put into place was working as intended.
He performed a Dream Entry, sinking down until his consciousness slipped through a shroud of hazy shadows. Yu Sheng felt he was getting more skilled at entering the Wasteland on his own initiative. He no longer needed Irene to hypnotize or guide him; by simple willpower, he could drift into the dream and enter the Wasteland. When he opened his eyes on the other side of that veil, he saw the gray, gloomy sky and the endless desolate plains stretching out before him.
Yu Sheng took a soft breath and strode across the vast landscape, following an inner sense of direction. Irene and Foxy appeared after a brief delay, joining him in this “realm of consciousness.” Together, they walked forward. They had not gone far before two familiar figures entered their view.
Little Red Riding Hood was resting on the grassy ground with her pack of Wolves. Near her stood the small and slender Snow White, while the enormous specter of Thunder Titan slowly faded from the air in the distance.
As Yu Sheng approached, he heard Little Red Riding Hood muttering words like “ambush,” “almost won,” and “no sense of fair play.”
“You didn’t win again, huh?” Yu Sheng said cheerfully as he came up behind the young girl. “Got beat up pretty bad?”
“If I’d won, I wouldn’t be lying here,” Little Red Riding Hood snapped. She glared at Yu Sheng, then let herself fall flat on the grass. “Makes me so mad! I had the upper hand. But then something shot up from the ground, and it threw me off. I panicked, and once I panicked, it was all over… Ugh!”
The girl in her red uniform kept complaining in frustration. The skinny Snow White stood aside, sighing after listening to her rant for quite a while. “You’re actually better off than me. I got beaten much worse—Bronze Titan and Frost Titan nearly got killed by that lunatic.”
Little Red Riding Hood pouted, then suddenly sat up. “Next time, I’m trying a new tactic—”
Snow White interrupted dryly, “You said that last time, too.”
Yu Sheng quietly listened to their exchange, not saying a word. A subtle expression began to spread across his face.
Little Red Riding Hood finally noticed. She paused and frowned at him. “What’s with that weird look in your eyes? Is there something wrong with me?”
“Two things,” Yu Sheng said, snapping out of his thoughts and focusing on her. “First, your mindset has changed—did you notice? Your fear of the Blackwood Forest is getting weaker.”
She froze for a moment, as if she had only now realized it. Bowing her head, she gazed down at herself with a thoughtful look.
“Seems so,” she murmured softly. After a few seconds, she spoke again in a low voice, almost as if to herself: “[Is this because I feel stronger now?]”
Then she laughed. “It’s not bad at all,” she said, raising her head to look at Yu Sheng. “So, what’s the second thing?”
“The second: did you see Squirrel this time?”
“Squirrel?” Little Red Riding Hood lifted her eyebrows, surprised that Yu Sheng would suddenly mention it. Then her face took on a puzzled look. “Now that you mention it… I did see it, but it was acting odd this time. It seemed distracted, and it wouldn’t answer any of my questions. All it told me was something like ‘You’ll find out,’ and that was it. No clue what that was all about.”
It looked as if Squirrel had not taken the initiative to reveal the truth of the past to her. Yu Sheng let out a quiet breath. He was not too surprised.
Just then, he felt something else stir around them and glanced off into the distance.
A second later, a huge phantom suddenly appeared in the sky. A fractured, upside-down tower manifested above the Wasteland, crumbling piece by piece. From the cracks in that broken tower, shining gold hair burst forth, only to snap and fade away. Vague, shadowy monsters roared from deep within those splits in the walls but vanished one by one. Then, a slender figure with floating golden locks dropped out of the dissolving shadows. As she fell, her glowing hair shed its magic, swiftly turning black.
An instant later, a piercing shriek tore across the sky. A half-disintegrated pumpkin carriage burst from a jagged tear in midair, catching the Long Haired Girl before she hit the ground. Smoke and flaming debris spewed from the carriage’s rear like a crippled airship, causing it to plummet in a crooked descent.
Roses bloomed in a spectacular surge from the earth, exploding upward like an upside-down waterfall of blossoms to cushion the “emergency landing.” From inside the crashing carriage came a panicked shout: “Aah! Thorns! Thorns! Sleeping Beauty, you might as well have let me fall… Ow! Ow! Too many thorns!”
Before Yu Sheng could react, another sharp blast ripped through the air. At the center of the rose thicket, a raging fireball erupted. A strange-looking warplane, wreathed in flames, burst out from the blazing flowers. It immediately crashed in a nearby patch of wasteland. Then the smoke billowed once more, and a young girl in a peculiar officer’s uniform crawled out from the rose bushes. She was shouting into a handheld communicator while scrambling forward, “Scarecrow! Move your machine-gun nest fifty meters to the left! The Witches platoons are charging in!”
Yu Sheng stared, speechless, at the girl in the officer’s uniform. She locked eyes with him in equal shock. In the distance, billows of smoke were rising, and the sky above the plains was suddenly lit by the flames of a dragon. A Red Dragon roared in pain as it burst through the clouds and crashed somewhere far away.
Where the Red Dragon fell, a colossal beanstalk sprouted, and blazing fire spread along its length. Through the swirling flames, a girl’s wild laughter echoed:
“Ha ha ha ha ha! Today, every last one of you will meet your great-granny! I swear it!”
Then that laughing girl was kicked off the beanstalk by a hulking knight clad in medieval plate armor. As he booted her down, he bellowed, “For the glory of the King!”
Yu Sheng glimpsed a catlike crest on the knight’s shield.
For a moment, the scene was pure chaos.
Irene was floating near Yu Sheng’s shoulder, letting out continuous gasps of “Wow!” every few seconds. Even Foxy, usually unflappable, gawked at the display, then clapped her paws and spread out her tails like a fan. “Ooh—this is so lively!”
Surprisingly, she seemed delighted.
It took a long while before this sudden uproar gradually settled down. Though occasional rifts still opened and dropped the occasional unlucky soul—someone who had lost a nightmare battle—at least it was no longer happening all at once. The flames burning across the field faded away, the roses that covered the plains withered like a dream, and the smoke drifted off on the wind. The fallen Red Dragon melted into illusion, becoming a swirl of vapor. Meanwhile, all the Fairy Tale members collected themselves from the confusion and reined in their powers before they spread any further out of control. They confirmed each other’s condition, then gathered around Yu Sheng.
As the oldest of them, Little Red Riding Hood naturally took it upon herself to maintain order and explain the current situation to the newcomers.
As for Yu Sheng, he was stunned speechless.
He had to admit that his imagination was weaker than he thought. Even after seeing Snow White with seven Thunder Titans before, he still was not prepared for the entire Fairy Tale group showing up at once.
After a long silence, he muttered quietly to Snow White, “Are… are all your members like this?”
She did not get what he meant at first. “Like what? This all seems pretty normal.”
Yu Sheng just stared at her. “…”
“Oh, I understand now,” Snow White said, seeing his face. A subtle expression crept over hers as well. “It’s really not too bad. They just happened to drop in all at once, so it’s extra messy. When you only met Little Red Riding Hood, you got used to her style quickly enough, right?”
Yu Sheng said nothing for a moment. Then he pointed to the black-haired girl in the officer’s coat, the one who had bandages around her head and a cluster of hovering drones by her side. She was resting quietly with a serious face. “That’s… Dorothy?”
“Yep.”
“What’s her ‘subset’ like?”
“In the war-ravaged Oz Kingdom, the Dorothy Resistance Army fights an endless war against the evil Witches platoons…”
“Right.” He nodded stiffly, then gestured toward the girl with all the thorns in her hair. “And that one with the spiky tangle…?”
“That’s Cinderella—her subset is ‘Eternal Ball.’ Every night after midnight, she has to drive a pumpkin carriage through armies of foes. The good news is, her carriage can fly. The bad news is, the Prince set up anti-air batteries around the Castle.”
“And that golden-haired… well, black-haired girl now… I’ve seen her before—the Long Haired Girl, right? Last time I met her, she already had black hair. I barely recognized her just now when it was golden.”
“Yes, that’s the Long Haired Girl. Her subset is ‘The Tower,’ which generates a tower with random floors filled with Demons. Compared to the others, she actually has it pretty easy—she just fights some Demons inside her tower.”
Yu Sheng said nothing else.
He sat on the grass with a blank expression, gazing up at the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, watching to see if any more “princesses” or “princes” would rain down from above.
(This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation.)