Chapter 081

Chapter 81: Peach Blossom Land

Outside was still mountains, repeating mountains, layer after layer, like ripples made when space wrinkles on a small scale.

When Yu Sheng recovered from the wild bursts of speed and dizziness, he saw the same thing Foxy had described: mountains repeating without end.

The mountain ranges spread like rings on water and stretched to infinity in his sight. Thin mist filled the space between them. In the swirl of fog, there was nothing to see but mountains.

Yu Sheng frowned and stared at those copy-pasted peaks for a long time. Then he remembered the café where he had met Bai Li Qing. Back then, that café had repeated and stretched in the same way until the view reached The End Web.

But there was a difference. The café only repeated forward and backward in two directions, and its street window still made a clear boundary. Here, the mountains wrapped around them, and from any direction he could not see The End Web at all.

Irene clung to his head and looked past the ridge with worry as she asked: “If we go outward, won’t we never reach the end? Are we still going forward?”

Yu Sheng fell quiet, gathered his focus, remembered the angles he had “seen” when he first linked to this valley, and sensed the area around them.

After a while he bent down, picked up a small stone, and threw it far.

The stone flew through the air, then vanished before it touched the ground.

Irene gasped at once: “Huh?”

Yu Sheng walked forward with care and stopped where the stone had disappeared.

Nothing seemed to be there, but it felt like an invisible boundary existed. He stooped again, picked up a pebble, and tossed it lightly ahead.

This time he saw the process more clearly. The pebble flicked through a line and vanished the instant it crossed a boundary. At that instant, a short, faint ripple spread in the air like a ripple over water.

Yu Sheng raised his head and followed the ridge left and right with his eyes.

He had felt it.

The mountains rose and fell, then closed together at a far-off The End Web, and that unseen boundary wrapped the entire valley from all sides, up into the sky and down into the ground.

After hesitating a few seconds, Yu Sheng took a slow breath and stepped forward.

Irene squealed on his shoulder: “You’re really going forward. This feels like The Door. If we cross, will we just…”

Before she finished, Yu Sheng had already crossed the invisible boundary. A slight shiver rippled the air. A brief weightless feeling came and went. Their vision blurred, and they were standing again somewhere near the center of the valley.

Irene was still yelling by habit: “We can’t come ba…” She froze, looked around in disbelief, then said: “Ah, we came back?”

Right then a bigger ripple opened. The huge silver-white Demon Fox passed through the air and appeared beside them.

Foxy hurriedly searched as she called out: “Benefactor.” Seeing Yu Sheng and Irene safe, she relaxed and touched Yu Sheng’s side with the tip of her tail: “You vanished so suddenly. You scared me.”

Yu Sheng broke the silence after thinking for a long time: “The boundary closes space and points one way toward the region’s center. I just don’t know if other Otherworld spaces are built like this too.”

Irene listened with a blank face, then finally caught up: “So no matter what, there is no ‘outside’ to reach?”

Yu Sheng shook his head: “There is no outside. This valley is the only effective area in the whole space. The endless mountains we saw are shadows created by the boundary folding back on itself, stacking reflections in curved space. If you look closely, they are just infinite copies of the mountains around this valley.”

Irene widened her eyes and after a long pause said with awe: “Wow.”

No one could tell if she truly understood or not.

After another moment, Irene poked Yu Sheng’s head and asked: “What do we do next?”

Yu Sheng turned to the silver-white Demon Fox and spoke gently: “Since this place will not Regenerate into Entities anymore and has become stable, maybe we should properly bury your parents again and at least raise a formal grave mound. What do you think?” Foxy tilted her head, then nodded.

It did not take long to find where Foxy’s parents had been laid to rest, and for the current Yu Sheng, building a grave mound was not hard.

The two sets of bones, buried in a rush years ago, were cleaned and gathered again. Yu Sheng sank and packed the ground into a neat burial pit, then fused stones together into a solid stone coffin. Compared to healing a large field and making plants grow fast, this was much easier for him.

The bones went into the stone coffin. The stone coffin lowered into the pit. The soil crawled and layered itself back into place, and a mound took shape.

Yu Sheng studied it and said: “We still need a headstone.” Seeing the blank look in Foxy’s eyes, he explained further: “You set it in front of the grave as a memorial.”

Foxy nodded at once: “I will get one.”

With that, the silver-white Demon Fox turned and ran. A string of ripping booms and a sonic crack followed, and in a blink she vanished from sight.

It was not long before she thundered back, wind roaring around her, a strange silver-white metal plate held in her mouth.

It was a bit taller than half a person.

Foxy set it down and explained: “This was a gift my father and mother bought me. It is a kind of musical instrument. I kept begging to join a hobby class, so they bought it, but I never got to learn it. Now it is broken.”

She looped her tail around the plate, planted it before the mound, and patted the dirt with her paw until it was hard as stone.

Yu Sheng muttered at first: “A headstone is not really…” He swallowed the rest and nodded. “Forget it. If you feel it fits, then this is right.”

The silver-white Demon Fox lay down by the grave and nudged Yu Sheng’s arm very lightly with her nose as she shared: “Where I am from, we do not have these rules. When a Demon dies, we keep a small part of the bones as a keepsake, like a tooth or a finger bone. When an Immortal dies, we keep the hair. The rest of the body returns to nature, or later people use it for Refining into an artifact as a memorial. Either way, there is no need for extra burial. Also, some people pull out their spirit-mind while still alive and return it to the Great Way so the spirit is undying and the body can be left to heaven and earth.”

She shifted her head on the ground and looked at the new mound: “But I heard Immortals say that a very long time ago, before the Skyfolk came, there were burial customs. People would solemnly bury their ancestors’ remains or store them in a Bone Repository Pavilion. That was very ancient. In school they called it ‘before the interstellar age,’ when civilization still lived inside a gravity well. After leaving the gravity well, people’s thinking and way of living no longer tied strongly to the surface, and ideas about life and death changed, so funerals changed too.”

Irene listened, dazed, and finally admitted: “It sounds like you’re saying something really deep.”

Foxy’s big tail swept the ground and then stilled as she looked at the grave: “It was all taught in school, and I forget a lot of it. I did not have good grades back then.” After two or three seconds of quiet, she spoke softly: “Still, this is very good. Later I can come here to talk to my father and mother. Benefactor’s ideas always make a lot of sense.”

Yu Sheng did not answer. He walked over and sat beside the silver-white Demon Fox and leaned against one of her big tails.

He was curious about Foxy’s homeland. He tried to picture an Immortal Demon Civilization that had left the ground and could travel among the stars. He thought about how to find that place in the wide universe. Then those thoughts faded. He emptied his mind and stared into the distance.

He looked over this Otherworld that would not spawn Entities anymore, would not produce poison or corruption, and was now tightly linked to him.

[This place could be a base.] But what could such a big base be used for? [Housing people? Our team is only three. Besides, I still have 66 Wutong Road. Even if that house is old, it is more livable than the wild.] [Farming? I do not know if this Otherworld can grow vegetables. The light is strong, and grass grows on the ground. Maybe it is possible. If grass can grow, then grain and vegetables can grow. If I get bold, I could raise cattle and sheep too.]

Yu Sheng felt like he was about to fall asleep. Leaning on Foxy’s fluffy tail, he felt so comfortable and relaxed that his thoughts floated like cotton. He imagined all kinds of things, and then laughed because some ideas were just too silly.

The doll on his shoulder leaned close and asked with curiosity: “What are you thinking?”

Yu Sheng answered in a serious voice: “I am thinking about what to use this place for in the future. My first plan is to level the wasteland around that ruined temple and plant radishes, beans, and cabbage.”

Irene made a small sound of doubt: “?”