Chapter 49: Doorstep Execution
The wind in the Valley stirred restlessly.
Yu Sheng wasn’t sure what was happening, but he could distinctly feel the atmosphere throughout the Otherworld undergoing a profound change. It was a sensation difficult to put into words, but if he had to describe it…
It was as if the entire Valley was gradually coming to life.
The distant forest was awakening, the mountains were stirring, the earth itself was coming alive, and even the sky above seemed to be pulsating with a bone-chilling, insatiable hunger, as though an endless number of ravenous eyes were fixated on them.
Next to him, Foxy was trembling slightly. The Demon Fox Maiden clutched the scattered food in her hands with a look of terror etched across her face. She slowly edged closer to Yu Sheng, muttering something under her breath, over and over again. It wasn’t until she drew near that Yu Sheng could make out the words she was repeating:
“When Immortals die, it’s always like this… When Immortals die, it’s always like this…”
“What’s going on now?” Irene demanded hurriedly. The little doll was tense, holding a cleaver tightly in her arms. “Do you know something?”
Foxy didn’t respond, her mind seemingly adrift again, fixated solely on repeating that haunting phrase. Before long, both Irene and Yu Sheng were too preoccupied to worry about Foxy’s state.
Yu Sheng sensed a familiar presence drawing near. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted an Entity taking form at the edge of the abandoned temple ruins. Twisted, swollen masses of flesh layered grotesquely upon one another, sprouting distorted limbs as if stitched together from a myriad of creatures. Dozens of ravenous eyes opened across the abomination’s surface, interspersed with jagged teeth and gaping maws that continuously morphed and rearranged themselves, emitting a low, guttural growl.
Entity-Hunger had arrived at last, appearing right beside its prey.
“Holy shit!” Irene blurted out. “That thing is ugly as sin!”
“Be careful of its sneak attacks,” Yu Sheng warned immediately. “Its limbs can shift shape and sprout tentacles and tails out of nowhere.” He then addressed Foxy without looking at her. “Just focus on protecting yourself. You’re already too deeply corrupted by that thing—you can’t fight it.”
Foxy seemed lost, her gaze still fixed fearfully on the sky even after the creature appeared. Yet, upon hearing Yu Sheng’s words, she nodded absentmindedly, hastily gathering the food that had fallen to the ground and retreating backward—though not too far, as if afraid something might happen to Yu Sheng.
“What’s your plan?” Irene whispered, her eyes fixed warily on the creature. It seemed to be biding its time, making her increasingly uneasy. “Don’t tell me you’re planning to go hand-to-hand with that thing—bare-handed no less! You didn’t even bring a weapon! At least I’ve got a cleaver.”
Yu Sheng knew better than to arm himself. He’d already tested it before—most of the monster’s body was as tough as stone, and even if he hacked off a piece of its softer flesh with an axe, it would barely make a difference. For someone with no real combat training, even wielding a legendary sword would likely result in self-inflicted injuries.
He had prepared a different means of killing it.
“Stick to the plan we discussed back at home,” Yu Sheng said quickly. “You just need to pin it down with your threads. I’ll charge in and tear it open. If I mess up, take Foxy and run. Don’t worry about me. Foxy can survive against this thing, and it won’t go out of its way to chase you.”
Irene hesitated. “Uh… and then what?”
“I’ll resurrect and regroup with you to try again. Eventually, it’s got to die.”
“You son of a—really? Using your resurrection as a basic attack again? We agreed not to treat ‘resurrection’ like it’s some everyday ability!”
“I said I’d try not to,” Yu Sheng retorted, glancing at the monster, his expression growing tense. “Something’s wrong—it’s not attacking.”
Irene frowned too. “It’s almost like it’s deliberately stalling, waiting for something… Could it actually be strategizing?”
“Then we can’t let it keep waiting,” Yu Sheng snapped. “We go first!”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he lunged at the creature. At the same moment, Irene deftly flipped off his shoulder and landed on the ground, her right hand outstretched toward the monster. Her eyes turned pitch black the instant she touched down, and countless thin, shadowy threads unfurled from her fingertips like an overwhelming spiderweb, spreading throughout the entire area with a menacing, eerie chill.
All the threads expertly avoided Yu Sheng’s path as he surged forward, his enhanced body streaking through the air like a blurred shadow, launching himself at the grotesque flesh beast!
The monster finally moved. Confronted by the prey’s proactive attack, it seemed momentarily stunned but swiftly retaliated. A grotesque claw rose high from the beast’s massive back, crashing down upon the inevitable path where Yu Sheng was charging.
In that instant, Yu Sheng once again felt that peculiar sensation—an uncanny sense of ‘anticipation.’
He perceived which muscles of the monster were contracting, felt its desire to attack, and even discerned the true focal point of its gaze. It was as if he foresaw a tendril stretching from behind the claw, sealing off every possible escape route in the next second…
Whether it was a mere illusion or not, Yu Sheng felt that his ‘anticipation’ this time was even more precise than before. In fact… he began to realize that this was not merely ‘Spiritual Intuition.’
Having recently acquired genuine Spiritual Intuition, he had experienced its essence firsthand. When predicting the monster’s moves now, what he ‘saw’ and ‘felt’ bore no resemblance to Spiritual Intuition. Instead, it resembled a first-person perspective, as if viewing the monster’s actions through its own eyes.
All these thoughts flashed through his mind in a split second as Yu Sheng blinked and crossed the final few meters, just as the flesh monster’s claw descended.
He made no effort to dodge, catching a glimpse from the corner of his eye of black threads converging from behind him, merging mid-air. In the next moment, countless pitch-black lines wrapped around the monster’s limbs, intertwining like spectral phantasms and piercing through its claws, tendrils, and monstrous maw…
Coldness, numbness, sluggishness—as if his very consciousness were riddled with wounds, his soul ensnared within layers of an eerie Spiderweb…
A deluge of negative sensations surged forth, and for a moment, Yu Sheng seemed to glimpse a vision—himself trapped within the Spiderweb, countless threads binding and piercing his limbs. At the edge of the web, a sinister shadow with blood-red eyes skulked in the darkness, crawling slowly toward him in a grotesque, menacing posture…
“Yu Sheng! Stop spacing out! I can barely hold it!” A sudden, urgent shout snapped Yu Sheng out of his trance. He looked up to see the flesh monster immobilized in the center of a dense web of black threads, the ends of which were stretched taut, as if about to be forcefully snapped apart by the beast’s sheer power.
No time to ponder the bizarre illusion he had just experienced—Yu Sheng lunged toward a specific spot at the monster’s side. In the precious moment Irene had bought him, he grabbed a strand of the black thread with one hand and reached into the air with the other, focusing all his mental strength and slowly pulling—
A Door appeared, materializing out of thin air with shimmering, phantom-like light flowing across its surface.
Opening a Door from nothing consumed far more effort and concentration than activating an Entity Door. Yu Sheng needed a relatively stable environment to complete the process, and as he watched the monster’s trembling limbs and the slowly fracturing Black Spider Silk, even a few seconds felt like an eternity.
—Though, considering how often his recent ‘eternities’ had been cut short, he wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with the feeling.
Finally, with the sound of the Door fully opening, it stood enormous—larger than any Door he had opened before—so vast it could swallow the entire monster whole.
Blazing fire erupted from within, illuminating a vast area around the giant Door. On the other side lay a lake of surging magma, an inferno constantly roiling and erupting like a glimpse into the depths of Hell.
This was one of Yu Sheng’s ‘discoveries’ during countless experimental Door openings. Though he didn’t know what realm it was, he knew it housed endless lava and raging flames—a vision of Hell itself.
Entity-Hunger was formidable, but its primary threat lay in its psychic contamination and the near-rule-like force of ‘Hunger’ it embodied. Its materialized ‘vessel,’ compared to the abstract power, was far less resilient.
Which meant it could be cooked.
And if it wasn’t done cooking, he’d just turn up the heat.
“Throw it in!” Yu Sheng shouted to Irene.
“On it!” she yelled back, resolute and unyielding.