Chapter 103

Chapter 103: A Quiet, Sleepless Night

Night ran deep.

In a high-rise apartment in the center of Boundary City, Bai Li Qing, draped in a robe, poured herself a stiff drink and strolled to the wide floor-to-ceiling window.

She left the lights off. Only a dim nightlight traced the edges of the furniture. Outside the glass, the night view was vast. The huge city glowed with neon; rich colors flickered and flowed like a living thing between the layered ranks of towers. The cityscape stretched on and on until it faded into the hazy dark, and in that darkness, her own reflection on the glass looked very thin.

Fog formed outside the window.

A thin mist seemed to appear out of nothing, spreading fast and evenly across the night, turning into a rolling gray-white curtain. Boundary City’s skyline went vague and dreamlike in the fog, and then a pair of cool eyes appeared beyond the glass and calmly watched Bai Li Qing.

The eyes had a human shape but almost no color, their faint pupils nearly identical to Bai Li Qing’s own. They seemed to float in the fog, yet also seemed printed onto the glass, filling the whole window.

A voice dropped straight into Bai Li Qing’s mind, mechanical and flat, but in her exact tone: “Night drinking is not a good habit, sister.”

Bai Li Qing swirled her glass and answered: “It helps me settle down, especially after a phone call yanks me out of a nightmare.”

“Nightmare?” the voice asked.

“I dreamed I turned into you,” she said.

“Oh, that is a nightmare,” the eyes blinked in the mist as the voice continued: “Be careful. Don’t let me bewitch you or take control-though you’ve done fairly well so far. So, why did you call me out now?”

“I woke up and wanted an update. About that ‘one-eyed’ thing in Night Valley-what did you find?” she asked.

The eyes narrowed, and the voice flowed into her mind again: “I searched every place I have ever watched, including the Otherworlds we experienced together and the Death Voids in Deep Space that Dark Angels punched through. I found nothing connected to that giant eye. It has never appeared in any of those places.”

“I thought so. Even you can’t find it,” Bai Li Qing said with a small sigh. “As expected.”

“Your mood is worse, sister,” the voice noted. “And you’re worried.”

“…Because more and more clues point to that huge eye entering this world without anyone noticing,” she said softly. “Also, months ago the Algladians found in Deep Space what looked like the wake of another unknown Angel. That means more Dark Angels may already have pierced our world. There could be more holes we haven’t found. Even right now, the number of holes might be growing.”

She tossed back the drink, felt the burn spread across her mouth, then set the empty glass on the floor.

“Also, I told you to scan the Old City and look for the hidden Wutong Road 66. Did you find anything?” she asked.

“I found some twisted traces, but I can’t see clearly,” the eyes said, and the flat voice held a faint hint of frustration.

Bai Li Qing finally looked surprised as she asked: “Even you can’t see clearly?!”

“Yes,” the eyes blinked again. “Whenever I try to focus, my gaze seems to be… absorbed by something. When I come to, I realize I’ve been drifting. But I have a guess.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“That so-called ‘Wutong Road 66’ might not be there at all. It could just be an entrance…” the voice began.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Bai Li Qing cut in with a shake of her head. “The Special Affairs Bureau operatives who went to investigate reached the same conclusion. They think it’s a special space in a seam, like other fortress-type Otherworlds in Boundary City, lodged in the cracks of Borderland’s spacetime…”

“No,” the eyes interrupted, cool and sure. “I mean it might not be in Borderland at all. It does not float anywhere. It is simply too deep and too far. What we see in Borderland as ‘Wutong Road 66’ is only a thin shadow. When I feel my sight getting swallowed, it’s because I’m looking at somewhere so far away I can’t see it.”

Bai Li Qing’s face went briefly stiff. She hesitated and said: “Too deep, too far? You know what that means. Your sight can even reach Subspace.”

“So, deeper and farther than that,” the voice answered. “This is logical analysis, sister.”

She blinked.

A moment later, the mechanical voice sounded again in her mind: “So what exactly is the ‘person’ living at Wutong Road 66?”

“I don’t know,” Bai Li Qing said softly. “All current intel says his personality and self-awareness are as close to a Human as possible. And just now, he called me.”

“Ah, so he’s the one who dragged you out of that nightmare with a phone call,” the voice said. “What did he want?”

“He said he was going to open ‘The Door’ and wanted to report it. According to a briefing from the action department a few hours ago, he should have visited the Museum.”

“…Interesting,” the voice murmured.

The eyes thinned and faded into the mist. The fog slipped away from the window, and the endless city night returned.

…

Yu Sheng barely slept in the second half of the night.

He lay in bed, tossing and turning as thoughts, facts, and clues crawled all over his head like a crowd of little Irenes, squirming, climbing, squeaking, and yelling.

[Okay, that’s an exaggeration. If there were really a whole crowd of little Irenes, it would be way louder.]

Even so, his mind was a mess.

There was new knowledge about the Otherworld, Little Red Riding Hood and the Fairy Tale organization behind her, the Angel Cultists and the Dark Angels, the poor victim in the white Exhibition Hall, and… the moment when the dead spoke to him.

He unlocked his phone and searched the Border communication database for entries about “talking to the dead,” and he actually found some.

The articles said that a few rare experts outside Borderland can communicate with the dead. Some called necromancers can, after complex rituals, temporarily fix a soul in the real world and hold a simple face-to-face talk.

But none of those descriptions matched what happened to him in the white Exhibition Hall.

Those techniques either needed complicated rituals, or very advanced devices, or worked like “holographic reasoning,” using huge data to rebuild a scene from before death. Even the methods that claim to “talk to the dead” directly only get hazy, simple answers, sometimes nothing more than a “yes” or “no” from leftover brainwaves or a so-called “soul.”

None of them looked like this: you touch a bit of blood at the scene and the dead suddenly turn their head and start rapping at you.

He set down his phone, sighed in the dark room, and then heard rustling on the bed.

He looked over and saw Irene squirming near the foot of the bed, rolling around. She kicked once at the air, then flopped with a thud.

Yu Sheng’s face went blank.

Another big reason he couldn’t sleep was that there really was one Irene crawling around on his bed.

And she kept kicking in circles.

A second later, Irene suddenly rolled over, then the little Doll sat bolt upright with her eyes still shut, pointed ahead, and declared: “I, from Alice’s Little House! Pay up, or I’ll hit you!”

Then she toppled sideways off the bed with a thump, clung to the sheet to crawl back up, and inched toward Yu Sheng while mumbling: “Stop kicking me… I fell off…”

Yu Sheng let out a long sigh.

There was no way he was sleeping tonight.