Chapter 008

Chapter 8: Don’t Open Doors Randomly

He walked into the kitchen, shut the door, and turned on the range hood. As the machine roared, Yu Sheng felt his heart slowly calm down.

It was like the thin wooden door and the noisy hood sealed off that strange, messy world outside. He was back in a place that belonged only to him. He could even pretend he was not in the huge, eerie Boundary City but in his real home, the place he truly knew.

This big manor was different from his old home in every way, except for this small kitchen. Its layout was close to what he remembered, so after settling here, he arranged it to match his old kitchen as much as he could.

When he cooked here each day, he pretended he was still in his real home. He pretended he had not opened his front door that morning and stepped into a city full of creepy shadows. Sometimes, while he busied himself, he felt that if he looked up he would see the old street outside his window, bathed in orange clouds. Warm light would flow over the walls of the apartment buildings in his memory.

But the view outside always broke that short dream. Now, when he looked out, he saw only a bare stretch of open ground and some low, old one story houses. There were no apartment blocks, only a mess of power poles and wires. He had not seen that warm, easy sky from his memories in a very long time.

The sky in this city was either glaring white or heavy and dim.

Yu Sheng sighed, pulled down the blinds, and stopped looking at the night that always seemed hazy and unsettled.

He picked and washed the vegetables, heated the pan with cool oil, and tossed in scallions until they sizzled. When he slid the ingredients into the pan and heard the sharp crackle, he also heard a TV show drifting in from outside the door. This strange city had TVs, phones, and other ways to get information. At the start, most of what he learned about Boundary City came from TV and scrolling news on his phone. Even now, it was still one of his main ways to understand this world.

From outside the door, the girl suddenly yelled: “Yu Sheng! The TV is too quiet! Turn it up for me, please!”

He jumped so hard his hand almost flipped the food out of the pan. He had nearly forgotten Irene was out there.

Back in his old life, no one talked to him while he cooked.

He shouted back without much patience: “Wait!” Then he muttered under his breath, [She is awfully quick to act like she lives here.]

Soon he tugged up one corner of his mouth in a helpless smile. [Fine. At least it makes the house feel alive.]

A little later, Yu Sheng came out with steaming dishes. He set the bowls and plates on the table, turned up the TV volume by two notches, and sat with his back to the screen, facing Irene’s frame. He did not watch TV while eating, but he liked to keep it on for background sound. That way he would not block Irene’s view, since she could only see the TV from a fixed angle inside the painting.

Hugging a teddy bear inside the painting, Irene craned her neck to peek at the food. Her eyes flicked between the program and the table as she mumbled: “Looks like a feast.”

He said casually: “Just homestyle dishes. I like to cook.”

She answered with a short “Oh,” and went back to the show. But once he started eating, she edged forward to look again. After holding back for a long moment, she finally said: “So I just watch you eat?”

Yu Sheng raised his eyes and waved his chopsticks in front of her frame: “Why don’t you take a bite?”

Irene stared, then dropped her head and sulked.

Seeing that, he sighed and gave in: “Fine, fine, let’s do it for form’s sake.” He went back to the kitchen for an empty bowl, split some of his food into it, and set the bowl in front of her frame: “I’ll save you a bowl and chopsticks. You can at least smell it, though I’m the one who will finish it.”

Irene frowned at the bowl on the table, thought about it, and decided it was acceptable. She hopped down from the chair and leaned close to the edge of the frame, her face filling half the painting. She looked at Yu Sheng very seriously and said: “Okay, that works. Thanks, you really think about other people.”

Yu Sheng shoveled a mouthful of rice and mumbled a reply. Then he looked up and saw only Irene’s head in the dark frame, and the bowl of food set before the painting. Something felt wrong.

She did not notice anything off. She only felt odd that he had gone quiet: “What are you spacing out for?”

He quickly looked down and ate two more bites, then glanced at her again. The dark frame. The dark background. The doll girl’s head. The bowl of food before the portrait.

[Just like one of those memorial photos.]

The muscles in his face twitched twice. He did not dare say the comparison out loud. It was not that he was scared. It was that Irene’s cursing could be brutal.

There was nothing to do but eat. He pretended nothing had happened and dug in hard, doing his best not to look at the lifelike face across the table. The whole meal felt like a funeral reception.

When he finally finished, Yu Sheng wiped his mouth and hurried to clear away every cup, plate, and bowl in front of Irene’s frame. He dumped them in the sink, planning to soak them and wash them in the morning. His back still hurt, and bending over the sink was too much right now.

He could skip the dishes, but not the trash. In this season, kitchen garbage could not stay overnight. He gritted his teeth through the back pain, tied up the trash bag, and headed for the door.

Irene looked up from the TV and asked, curious: “Hey, where are you going this late?”

He shot back at this overly familiar portrait doll: “Do I have to report to you in my own house?” Then he lifted the trash bag for her to see and added, calmer: “I’m going out to take out the trash.”

She said without looking away from the screen: “Okay, come back soon. This house is huge. I get scared if I’m alone. What if a thief comes in?”

Yu Sheng rolled his eyes. [In a creepy manor like this, if someone broke in and saw a ghost like figure moving around inside a painting, the first one terrified to death would not be the person in the painting. With Irene like this, even a thief would call the police.]

He kept that to himself.

At the door, he changed shoes and took hold of the doorknob.

He pressed, turned, and pushed.

For no reason, a memory from two months ago rose up. It had been a normal morning, as ordinary as any day in his ordinary life.

Just like now, he had opened his front door, stepped out, and walked straight into a vast, suffocating, strange city. He still had not made it back.

The odd thought flashed by. Yu Sheng gave a self mocking smile, shook his head, and pushed the door open.

The crisp snap of a dead branch broke the valley’s silence. The cold night wind carried a rotten, fishy stink that set his nerves on edge. The chill in the air made him shiver in his thin indoor clothes. It took several seconds for his shocked brain to start working again.

He was standing among ruined stones. In the distant dark stood a grim, unnatural, dense forest. On both sides, high mountains loomed like silent, fierce giants, bending over the valley floor with a heavy, crushing pressure.

Stiff in the cold, he slowly turned back toward the way he had come.

He saw a heap of collapsed bricks and rubble, like a temple that had been abandoned for a hundred years. A broken door frame with half a door plank still hanging on it stood lonely amid the ruins. The night wind slipped through the cracks and made a hollow wail.

He stared and muttered: “Where did this dump me?”

Then he understood.

With his simple act of opening a door, what had happened two months ago had happened again.

He had been thrown somewhere strange.

And this was worse than last time. The eerie Boundary City was at least a modern city where people could survive. This time, he was in trouble.

He had been thrown into open country.

Forest ahead. Steep mountains on both sides. Behind him, a temple that had fallen apart who knew how many years ago. He looked around and felt like the place was begging to spawn thirty bandits or a handful of demon foxes.

And the only thing in his hand was a bag of kitchen trash.

He thought about that and cursed in his heart, [Fantastic.]

Right then, as those colorful words were about to burst out, a voice suddenly sounded in his head.

Irene yelled in his mind: “Yu Sheng! The TV has no signal! When are you coming back?”