Chapter 27: Dream Entry
What Irene needed to do was surprisingly simple—just find a place to lie down and avoid making things worse.
Yu Sheng walked over to where the silver-white Demon Fox lay, still deep in slumber. Circling her massive form and the tangle of tails, he found a spot that looked comfortable—a sunken area formed by two intertwined tails.
He bent down, tugging at the silky fur of one tail to adjust its position, then patted the other to make it even fluffier. Irene, floating nearby, couldn’t help but stare in confusion. “Are you making a bed?”
“It’s just for comfort,” Yu Sheng replied nonchalantly, leaning against the voluminous, furry tail. “Who knows how long this will take? I’m a guy who cares about sleep quality…”
Irene snorted dismissively. Once Yu Sheng settled in, she floated closer, her entire painting frame dropping straight onto his chest. “Catch.”
Yu Sheng scrambled to catch the frame falling from midair, briefly suspecting that Irene was trying to avenge his earlier amusement by squashing him. “Jeez! Can you at least warn me before you drop down like that?”
Fortunately, he managed to catch Irene without getting smashed. Adjusting his posture, he leaned back against the fluffy tail, holding the painting frame carefully in his hands. Taking a deep breath, he waited for the moment of Dream Entry.
Sinking into a deeper dream within one’s own dream—this was truly a novel experience.
From the painting, Irene began to hum softly—a melody that felt ancient and filled with nostalgia. Though he couldn’t make out the words, Yu Sheng could sense a calming power subtly seeping into his mind. His eyelids grew heavy, and just before sleep claimed him entirely, he glanced at the painting he was cradling.
It almost felt like he was holding someone’s memorial portrait.
Yu Sheng: “…”
[This doll always manages to make things feel so… poignant!]
In the next instant, his thoughts abruptly cut off as he plummeted into the void, diving straight into the deepest depths of the dream.
He felt as though he’d lost all connection with his body—or rather, he could no longer perceive his physical form. It was as if he had become a formless perspective, hurtling through a flood of memories, thoughts, and sensations that weren’t his own. Shadows and fragmented images wove into endless veils, forming a tunnel stretching far beyond his sight.
Buzzing sounds echoed around him, and waves of information surged through his mind. He couldn’t discern whether these were actual sounds or memories surfacing directly into his consciousness.
Someone was shouting. Explosions erupted. A howling noise came from the Celestial Shuttle’s power structure. They were falling—plunging out of orbit into a world that seemed to manifest out of nowhere.
A massive impact followed. The Celestial Shuttle crashed into a dark mountain, and the Artifact Spirit burst out from the shuttle’s core, quarreling furiously with the celestial pilot over issues like ‘spirit stone embezzlement’ and ‘reckless driving,’ threatening to report them to the Celestial Sect. Then, another explosion. The Artifact Spirit died, and many others perished too.
The survivors soon followed, one by one, succumbing to hunger, venomous creatures lurking in the forest, desperate infighting, and the suffocating malice suffusing the entire Valley.
The Valley itself seemed determined to kill them—fueling their ravenous hunger.
Abruptly, the seemingly endless tunnel vanished. Yu Sheng found himself in a faded, desolate scene—after passing through countless chaotic memory fragments, he had finally entered Foxy’s dream.
As Irene had described, the dream’s tone was monotonous and lifeless. The sky loomed dark and oppressive, the forest was drab and heavy, and the ground was smeared with muddy, ashen earth and stone. Just looking at it induced an overwhelming sense of despair.
“Irene?” Yu Sheng called out inwardly, seeing no sign of her.
“I’m here,” her voice responded, echoing directly in his mind. The sensation was strange and surreal.
“Where are you?” He glanced around. “I don’t see you.”
“I’m with you,” Irene replied, her tone oddly reassuring. “You can’t see me or yourself. Right now, we’re just two ‘foreign consciousnesses’ entering the dream. It’s a miracle we even have a viewpoint.”
“Oh, that makes sense.” Yu Sheng nodded to himself before setting off through the gloomy forest in search of Foxy’s presence.
He didn’t have to search for long. In fact, the moment the thought of finding her crossed his mind, he heard it—a sound coming from not far away.
The sound of digging.
Yu Sheng immediately followed the noise, his perspective floating through the shadows of the dense forest, slipping between flickering patches of light and darkness. Before long, he spotted a flash of white.
A silver-haired girl in tattered clothes knelt at the edge of a forest clearing. Her once lush, beautiful fox tail was caked in mud, looking filthy and pitiful. Head bowed low, she dug frantically into the earth, mumbling to herself as she worked. Around her lay numerous pits of varying sizes, all clawed out by her bare hands.
Yu Sheng ‘floated’ over, stopping beside the Demon Fox Maiden.
She couldn’t see him—kept digging with desperate determination, her hands plunging into the soil over and over.
Suddenly, Irene’s voice whispered into Yu Sheng’s mind, “Talk to her. Say something.”
“She can’t see us,” he replied in thought.
“It doesn’t matter. Just speak to her. This is a dream—she’ll respond. To a dreamer, nothing that happens in a dream seems unreasonable.”
After a moment’s thought, Yu Sheng looked at the fox maiden and spoke, “What are you digging for?”
“Father… Mother…” the fox girl answered without hesitation, as if it were the most natural thing to respond to a disembodied voice. “I remember burying them here… Right here…”
A heavy feeling settled in Yu Sheng’s heart. Without thinking, he asked, “Why do you want to dig them up?”
“I… I miss them,” the fox girl whispered, slowing down her frantic digging. Her eyes were empty, dazed, but she kept answering almost reflexively. “I’m so hungry… I want to tell them… I’m so hungry… But I held on. They told me not to listen to that monster. I kept holding on… but… I’m so hungry…”
She looked down at her mud-caked hands, then resumed digging, murmuring to herself as if trying to convince herself, “They should be here… they have to be here… safe and sound, right under the ground… I listened to them. I never listened to that monster…”
Irene’s voice broke through again, tense and urgent, “Something’s wrong with her mental state. Really wrong.”
“I know. I felt it the first time we met,” Yu Sheng replied in thought.
“No, not just that,” Irene insisted. “There’s something else invading her mind—something trying to interfere with her thoughts. It’s like another presence mixed with hers. Her own will is holding on, but the foreign thought is pushing harder and harder.”
Abruptly, Irene’s voice cut off.
The fox maiden stopped digging, got to her feet in a daze, and wandered a few steps away, standing blankly in the clearing.
Yu Sheng followed, and in the next moment, he seemed to hear a faint, distorted voice. It sounded like it came from the depths of his own mind—as if he himself were whispering softly—
“Dig it up… Bring them out…
“You just want to see them again, right? Just to make sure you really did listen to their words… It’s been so long since you’ve seen them, hasn’t it?
‘I’ miss them…”
The fox girl turned back, staring at the pits she had dug with an almost forlorn look.
“I miss them…” she murmured.
Yu Sheng snapped to attention, realizing with sudden clarity that the voice he had just heard—the one that seemed to rise from his own heart—was actually the foreign intrusion that Irene had warned about!
Because his mind and the fox maiden’s dream were connected, he had heard the voice as if it were from his own thoughts.
The fox maiden slowly moved toward another part of the clearing, preparing to dig again. Each handful of dirt chipped away at the fragile line of her sanity.
Yu Sheng finally understood—the voice was trying to break her spirit. A chill surged through him, and without thinking, he shouted, “Foxy!”
The fox girl froze, dazed, and glanced toward the edge of the forest, her eyes struggling to clear.
After a long moment, a flicker of recognition crossed her face.
“…Benefactor?”
Yet the forest remained empty, and no more voices answered her. It was as if that one desperate call had been nothing but an illusion.
Foxy stood still for a while, noticing the holes she had dug. Gradually, terror dawned on her face.
She had awakened—snapped back to reality just before her mental defenses shattered.