Chapter 129: The Beginning of “Fairy Tale”
Little Red Riding Hood didn’t seem to doubt Yu Sheng’s explanation—adults with shaky credibility always managed to keep a straight face when covering up the truth, easily fooling a high school girl who wouldn’t turn eighteen until next month.
So, she merely reminded Yu Sheng once again to stay vigilant when dealing with the Dark Angels before swiftly redirecting the topic back to the “Otherworld.”
“The Otherworld is primarily divided into four types. The first three are the easiest to distinguish based on scale and form. They are the Wilderness Type, the Kingdom Type, and the Fortress Type,” said Little Red Riding Hood seriously.
Yu Sheng adjusted his attitude, thinking along as she spoke: “I’ve read up a bit on this… If I recall, the Wilderness Type Otherworld is described as ‘a vast, open space with no clearly visible boundaries, primarily composed of untamed natural environments, and can’t be exited just by walking to the edge,’ right?”
“Correct. That ‘Night Valley’ is a textbook Wilderness Type Otherworld,” Little Red Riding Hood nodded. “Generally speaking, Wilderness Types are expansive and lack fixed entry or exit points. Leaving one typically requires fulfilling specific conditions or waiting for certain times.
“Then there’s the Kingdom Type. These Otherworlds can be just as vast as Wilderness Types, but they are marked by extensive ‘man-made traces’: rows of houses, sprawling cities, even thunderous factories whose outputs are unknown. Kingdom Type Otherworlds resemble relics of civilization trapped in abnormal space, yet everything within them is riddled with irrationalities. Closer inspection reveals their twisted, incongruous nature.
“Moreover, Kingdom Types usually have stable portals to and from reality. That’s their main difference from Wilderness Types.
“The third kind, the Fortress Type, typically manifests as a single, enclosed structure or facility. They’re smaller in scale than Wilderness or Kingdom Types, but that doesn’t mean they’re any safer. On the contrary, Fortresses often have more complex, ever-changing rules and eerie environments. ‘Uncertainty’ is their defining trait. Entry and exit methods vary wildly; some have stable gates, others require specific conditions like Wilderness Types.
“The ‘Museum’ we explored together is a typical Fortress Type Otherworld. And another one you’re quite familiar with…”
She paused, calmly locking eyes with Yu Sheng: “Care to guess which one?”
Yu Sheng blinked, then hesitantly replied, “Don’t tell me… my house?”
Little Red Riding Hood looked a little exasperated: “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Well, yeah, I guess, but I never thought of it that way,” Yu Sheng scratched his nose awkwardly, quickly shifting gears. “Alright, that makes three types. That means ‘Fairy Tale’ has to be the fourth, right?”
Little Red Riding Hood let out a breath, her expression growing complicated as she nodded. “The fourth type: Anomaly.”
Yu Sheng was about to ask more when Irene interjected, “Ugh, the name alone screams trouble.”
Foxy looked down at the little doll in her arms, puzzled: “Why do you say that?”
Irene rolled her eyes. “Duh. The Otherworld is already weird enough, and now there’s a whole type that emphasizes how bizarre it is in its name. That’s like Yu Sheng stepping into Wutong Road No. 66—we’ve officially hit the weirdness jackpot.”
Yu Sheng poked the doll’s forehead. “I told you to stop using my team’s sayings!”
Then he turned back to Little Red Riding Hood. “Explain this one in detail, please?”
“If normal Otherworlds are twisted spaces within time and space,” she chose her words carefully, “then Anomaly Type Otherworlds… are what exists outside of space-time. They are abstract, conceptual, even beyond imagination… things like an emotion, a memory, a sound, or… a story.”
Yu Sheng, Irene, and Foxy stared blankly.
After half a minute, Yu Sheng broke the silence. “Huh?”
Then he waved his hands. “Hold on, I can imagine it, I swear, it’s just my comprehension lagging behind. So you mean emotions, memories, even sounds can be Otherworlds?”
“It’s not that they create the Otherworld. The Otherworld manifests as these things.”
“Got it, got it. No matter how you put it…” Yu Sheng looked both baffled and amazed, as if he’d just peeked through the Door to a New World. “I always thought the Otherworld, no matter how crazy, had to be a place… like something you could touch or walk into. But this stuff… I’m a novelist, and even I barely have the vocabulary for this!”
Little Red Riding Hood blinked. “Wait, you’re a novelist?”
Irene immediately leaned in, “Yep, and his stuff is freaky as hell. You should ask that Special Affairs Bureau girl, Ren Wen Wen, about it sometime…”
Yu Sheng brusquely pushed Irene back down with one hand. “That’s not important,” he said, his gaze locked intently on Little Red Riding Hood. “At least now I understand why a certain class of Otherworlds is referred to as ‘Aberrations.’ So it’s all stuff like this—so twisted and incomprehensible they can’t even be classified properly, huh? In that case, are you saying this ‘Fairy Tale’ is a ‘story-based’ Aberrant-type Otherworld?”
Little Red Riding Hood nodded.
“But the Black Forest I entered… it still seemed like a ‘space,’ didn’t it?” Yu Sheng frowned. “Wait—no. That felt more like a dream.”
“That’s the defining feature of most Aberrant-type Otherworlds,” she replied. “Their essence is abstract, but they manifest themselves through illusions or dreams, ensnaring people in environments that resemble a tangible alternate space. Some trap only the mind, while others drag your physical body in as well. That’s why, in the early stages, many Aberrant-type Otherworlds are misjudged—even by professional Scholars. It can take a long time to realize that these strange ‘spaces’ are only projections of a deeper reality. And by the time they do, for many victims, it’s already far too late…”
She paused then, composing her thoughts, and continued—speaking of her past with the calm detachment of an outsider.
“As for ‘Fairy Tale,’ even among Aberrant-types, it’s particularly unusual. It possesses numerous offshoots—or, more precisely… ‘subsets.’
“The Black Forest is one such subset of ‘Fairy Tale.’
“You can think of ‘Fairy Tale’ as an Invisible Building—unseen, unknowable, untouchable. The building itself is formless, but because of its existence, countless ‘rooms’ are born. The Black Forest where the Evil Wolf resides is but one room. There’s also Dorothy’s Wilderness, the Tower of the Long Haired Princess, and the endlessly looping Cinderella’s Ball—and still others… stranger ones.”
Yu Sheng arched an eyebrow. “Stranger rooms?”
“They don’t correspond to any specific Fairy Tale, but instead reflect archetypal elements—or… ‘fictional scripts,’” Little Red Riding Hood explained, nodding slightly. “For instance, the King’s Castle, or a Dragon’s Hoard. We haven’t yet determined which specific Fairy Tale or ‘character’ these subsets are tied to.”
Yu Sheng furrowed his brow deeply, listening carefully to every word Little Red Riding Hood spoke. He pieced together the traits of this unique Otherworld—the logic behind its workings. Concepts once vague were now beginning to crystallize in his mind. And then her voice rose again.
“This is the place where ‘Fairy Tale’ first erupted.”
Yu Sheng looked up in shock. Little Red Riding Hood was staring out the window, her expression carrying a quiet complexity. Outside, children darted between swing sets, shouting gleefully—their voices filtered through the glass like echoes from a distant world.
“That was many, many years ago,” she said softly. “Back then, these two buildings didn’t exist yet—just some older, shorter structures. But the purpose of this compound has never changed. It’s always been an Orphanage. Then, now, and likely always.”
She went on. “There’s very little surviving information about the original outbreak. Most records are lost or incomplete. All we know is that after the initial eruption, the area was temporarily sealed off. The Special Affairs Bureau believed it to be a ‘typical’ Otherworld event and relocated the affected children to a high-security Containment Facility. But in just a few years, ‘Fairy Tale’ phenomena began surfacing in other parts of the Borderland, and those original children—began changing.”
“Only then did people begin to grasp the truth: an unknown Aberrant-type Otherworld had begun to ‘unfold’ across the Borderland.”
“Since then, the Special Affairs Bureau has tried countless methods to contain the influence of ‘Fairy Tale’—to little effect. Even the most skilled Deep Divers were helpless once inside its subsets. Many paid with their lives.”
“It took tremendous sacrifice to extract even the most basic understanding of its rules. And of all the insights we’ve gained, the most critical remains what I mentioned before…”
She turned her eyes back to Yu Sheng.
“‘Fairy Tale’ doesn’t like adults.”
She gestured toward the window once more, where the laughter of children rang out.
“And so, this Self-Governed Kingdom of the Cursed Children stands.”