Chapter 025

Chapter 25: Fox in the Dream

Irene’s reaction did not seem fake.

To be honest, in all his time with this doll, Yu Sheng had not seen her act insincere. Everything she said and did felt clear and straightforward, like her head was solid inside. That either meant her acting was extremely good, or her head really was solid.

Yu Sheng stayed cautious with the first guess, but he leaned toward the second.

He then described the look of the dead doll and the huge Shadow Abomination that had likely died with her. Irene’s answer was still: “I don’t know.”

Yu Sheng frowned and fell into deep thought.

Irene, curious now, asked: “Hey, why did you suddenly come ask me this? Weren’t you on your way to bed?”

He hesitated, then decided to tell her about the change in that room. It was not his secret, and it might be connected to Irene. Saying it out loud might help solve the mystery.

“There’s a situation with the room upstairs,” he said.

He told her exactly what he had seen. For once, she didn’t babble. She listened, eyes growing wide, and when he finished she stared for a good while before drawing out a long: “Waaah.”

Yu Sheng felt at once that telling her would not unlock anything.

“Looks like you don’t know what’s going on either,” he sighed. “You’ve never seen that mirror, right?”

“Never. No idea,” she said, nodding firmly. Then she added, just as firmly: “But I think your house is getting weirder and weirder.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I think so too,” Yu Sheng sighed. “Open a door and who knows where you’ll end up. A room suddenly changes its furniture. A mirror shows who-knows-when and who-knows-where. I used to think this place was pretty livable. Sigh.”

Irene stared at his face with those scarlet eyes, unblinking. After his muttered complaint, she hesitated and asked: “So… are you planning to move? Not live here anymore?”

He did not answer at once, but he had indeed thought about it.

If the house sometimes grew a haunted mirror, suspicious furniture, odd appliances, or a chatterbox sealed in a painting, he could tolerate it. He wasn’t even afraid of death, so he could treat it as a bit of spice in life. But a door that might open onto some Otherworld was a real problem. That was not something a person could just “put up with.”

To Yu Sheng, the worst thing about the Otherworld was not dying in there. It was not being sure he could get back. That alone made him consider moving.

When he stayed quiet, Irene went on after a short pause: “If you set your sights on a new place, tell me first, okay? Find a way to slip me into their neighborhood. I’ll help drive their housing prices down for you.”

He blinked and said: “I was joking back then. And wouldn’t that insult the Progenitor of Dolls and all your sisters?”

“I thought it through carefully and felt your plan makes a lot of sense,” said Irene, very serious. “And if I help push the price down, that kind of counts as paying you back for letting me stay here, right?”

He suddenly realized she might just be worried that if he moved, he would leave her behind.

He did not point that out. He only shook his head and said: “Let’s not talk about that. I’m only thinking about it. I’m not moving yet. Don’t worry. If I do move, I’ll bring you. A painting doesn’t take up much space.”

“Okay, cool,” said Irene, brightening at once.

But soon a bit of worry showed on her face as she asked: “Um… the dead doll you saw in the mirror, were her eyes closed?”

“I… think they weren’t,” Yu Sheng said after a moment of recall. “Why?”

Irene opened her mouth, looking a little sad, and said: “When a Living Doll gets broken, if her eyes close, her soul returns to the garden in Alice’s Little House. We are reborn there. But if her eyes stay open… she is still there.”

Yu Sheng froze and wished he had asked a question before blurting out that answer.

“We don’t know what place the mirror showed,” he said softly after a quiet moment. “But since she appeared in the mirror, maybe it’s connected to this house now. Maybe one day we can find her. For now, try not to think too much. You yourself are still trapped here.”

“Okay, true,” Irene sighed. “Sometimes a sister goes out the door and loses contact. We’ll run into each other. Yes, we will.”

Yu Sheng suddenly felt she was not as heartless as he had thought.

They talked a little longer. Then he went back upstairs.

He checked the room at the end of the hallway again and confirmed it looked the same as before. He left it alone and went into his own bedroom.

He drew the curtains and lay down. He tossed and turned for a long time. He was sleepy and tired, but his head was a mess. Thoughts and recent events swirled like currents around his mind: Irene’s situation, that Valley under the night, knowledge of the Otherworld, the fox who stayed clear-headed to the last moment and told him to run, and… his own Resurrection.

After who knew how long, he finally drifted off.

He felt his awareness sinking into a gentle, murky pool. Even asleep, those messy currents circled the pool. Through a fog he looked at his own bits of memory and thought, and heard many hazy voices around his ears, until his awareness touched bottom in the water and the world grew quiet.

He wandered in a dream, under dim sky. He saw himself walking across open ground. In the distance stood a low hill.

He felt he had wandered around that hill for a very long time, with no goal, not even knowing who he was.

Then a flash of color at the edge of his vision made him stop.

Between the dim sky and dim earth, he saw a bright patch of silver-white. He moved toward it without thinking. The scene jumped, and he was already there.

He saw a demon fox with silver-white fur. Even curled up, she was two to three meters tall. She slept quietly in the open.

She was beautiful, graceful, and peaceful.

A breeze blew from far away, bending the thin wild grass and the demon fox’s shining fur. She showed no sign of waking. She simply curled in silence. Many thick tails folded forward from behind. Some she hugged in her arms, and some spread over her like a blanket.

Yu Sheng stared in amazement at the fox that had appeared in his dream, and at some point he became clearly aware that he was dreaming.

He took two careful steps forward, reached out, and tapped the great fox’s forepaw as he asked in a low voice: “Foxy, is that you?”

The white fox kept sleeping, not reacting to his touch or his voice.

He called to her several more times and even tugged one of her tails, but he could not wake her.

It felt not only like she was sleeping, but also like something had blocked her senses.

Frowning, Yu Sheng took two steps back.

[Why is this fox in my dream?] He admitted that before sleep his mind had been wandering and he had thought of the fox trapped in the Otherworld. But this did not feel like a simple case of “daytime thoughts become nighttime dreams.” He could tell that Foxy was truly here.

Suddenly a thought struck him. He looked down at his right hand.

A tiny bead of blood welled from his fingertip, ringed by a shallow bite mark.

That was from when he had snatched the chocolate back from Foxy and her food-guarding reflex made her bite him.

He stared at it and remembered how, back in the Valley, he had suddenly “seen” Foxy’s memory fragments and sensed parts of her thoughts.

“Because of blood?” he wondered.

He felt he had guessed it. Maybe she was here because she had accidentally “eaten” his blood.

But then another doubt popped up. The frog in the rain had drunk his blood too, and so had that abstract flesh monster. Why hadn’t they appeared here? The flesh monster had eaten several meals of it, way more than Foxy…

Just as his thoughts started to drift in odd directions, he felt something and heard a low, mocking chuckle from the grass behind him.

It sounded a little familiar.

He spun around toward the sound. In the next second he heard Irene’s aggrieved whisper from the grass: “I told you not to laugh, not to laugh. Hold it in, okay? See, we got caught.”

Expressionless, Yu Sheng looked at an oil painting frame poking out of the grass, and at Irene inside the frame hugging a teddy bear, grinning stupidly at him as if acting cute could cover it up. She said, cheerful as ever: “TV got boring, so I came to watch your dream.”