Chapter 124

Chapter 124: Savoring Yu Sheng

Yu Sheng’s consciousness drifted in endless darkness. That familiar emptiness and pressure flowed silently at the edge of his senses. His thoughts slowed down, slower and slower. In this lonely yet familiar after-death world, he even started to enjoy the quiet.

There was no suspense in how it ended.

Big Bad Wolf, bigger than a house, pounced down. Yu Sheng died on the spot, and he didn’t last any longer than Squirrel.

Of course, the biggest reason it ended so quickly was that Yu Sheng didn’t dodge at all. Not only did he not dodge, he offered himself up—blood, flesh, spirit, and that pure, burning joy and curiosity.

He lay quietly in the darkness after death.

He flowed quietly through Big Bad Wolf’s spirit and flesh.

He seeped quietly into the black forest, searching within it for the fairy tale’s tendrils.

Yu Sheng held his thoughts together, refusing to be pulled under by the strange, chaotic ideas and fractured memory shards in the dark.

For him, every death was practice. At first, he revived in a fog without understanding anything. Later, he became aware of the darkness around him. Later, he learned to sense the process of returning to the living world. And now, not only could he think clearly in the dark, he could even try to steer this purest, most extreme form of thought, free of the burden of flesh.

He deliberately tempered the strength of his thinking. He tried to count time in the dark, and even tried to sense what was happening outside.

He knew his body was still asleep in the real world. Irene and Foxy were with him. This time, only his soul had died—just like the last time he had made direct contact with Entity-Hunger and been swallowed.

But this time was clearly different.

This time, Yu Sheng could vaguely feel his shredded soul fragments breaking down, gradually becoming part of another being—like a swallowed seed sprouting, the sprout turning into winding tendrils. He sensed one of those tendrils, and in the darkness, he tried extending his will, gently… plucking it.

He saw himself running through the forest—blind, furious, wrapped in endless night, casting an enormous shadowspawn.

He could even feel fur that wasn’t his. He could feel the night wind in the black forest against his ears. Wolf howls rose all around him. Invisible wolves followed him, running without end through the night.

He could feel that these wolves fed on fear. That was the fairy tale’s oldest, most essential purpose when it was first born: to frighten children away from wilderness and unfamiliar places, so they would stay obediently at home.

That fear grew in the black forest and became this wolf pack that fed on it.

But now they were starving.

Because in the hunt just now, they gained no nourishment at all. They swallowed the flesh and blood of a strange intruder, but all they tasted was fearless emptiness, and a joy and curiosity the wolves couldn’t recognize—feelings that left them confused.

The enormous Big Bad Wolf crossed an open patch of forest. Its muddled mind couldn’t understand why this had happened. Eating wasn’t supposed to be like this. Whatever was swallowed should contain fear.

But what it had eaten wasn’t afraid at all. It even felt more like the food was the one eating—devouring in wild delight.

Had it swallowed that human, or had that human crawled into its body and started devouring it from the inside out?

The wolf didn’t understand. The wolf only ran by instinct through the forest, patrolling every place where Little Red Riding Hood might appear, searching out hiding places, destroying hiding places.

“Are you just going to keep running like this?”

A voice appeared abruptly—Yu Sheng whispering beside the wolf, whispering to it through the wolf’s own low whine.

The giant wolf stopped. It lifted its head in a daze and looked around at the black forest that seemed no different from its memory.

It still couldn’t understand where the voice came from, nor could it connect it to its meal.

But it could feel that something had appeared. Something faintly familiar—like prey, yet also like a hunter.

The chorus of wolf howls around it gradually quieted. The invisible wolf pack prowled uneasily through the forest, searching by instinct for that equally invisible intruder.

Leaves and branches rustled. Wind swept through the treetops. A leaf spun as it flew past the giant wolf, and in the gaps between its rotations, a curious eye stared at it.

“Are you… tasty?”

The leaf vanished. The giant wolf felt that strange presence disappear from its senses as well. It lowered its head and let out a confused, muddy growl. The wolf pack whined around it, the whines rising higher, until the entire black forest filled with overlapping howls.

In a distant thicket, a pair of tense eyes watched all of it and whispered, “It’s getting weird. It’s getting weird…”

…

Yu Sheng suddenly fell downward through the darkness. That familiar feeling of crossing some boundary washed over him. In the final moment of the fall, he regained sensation in his body. Soft bedding pressed beneath him, and he snapped his eyes open.

The first thing he saw was two Irene heads pressed together right in front of his face—two pairs of crimson eyes staring without blinking.

Freshly revived, Yu Sheng almost got sent straight back on the spot. He practically lost it. “Holy shit! You scared me to death!”

Irene made even more noise. When the two dolls saw Yu Sheng open his eyes, they both yelped and sprang back—then dropped in sync from the bedside to the floor with two heavy thuds.

Just hearing it sounded painful.

“You scared me!”

“Oh, and you have the nerve to say that?” Yu Sheng glared at Irene as she climbed back up onto the bed with both hands and feet. Then he saw Foxy standing properly by the bed, smiling at him gently. “Look how well-behaved Foxy is. She knows to stand quietly at the side and smile hello…”

“She’s smiling because she feels guilty!” Irene snapped.

“…Huh?”

“She ate all the meat filling! No baozi tonight!”

Yu Sheng stared, brain still catching up. He turned to the demon fox girl. The smile on Foxy’s face stiffened. She lowered her head, and even her ears and tail drooped. “…I just wanted to taste it. To check the seasoning…”

“And then the first bite was salty so you drank water, and the water tasted plain so you took another bite of filling, right?” Irene said smugly. “A whole bowl. You ate it all!”

Yu Sheng had just woken up and already had a mess dropped on his head. It took his brain a few seconds of noisy spinning to catch up. He turned to Irene. “What about you? If Foxy was sneaking meat filling, what were you doing?”

Irene answered righteously, “Pouring her water! So she wouldn’t choke.”

Yu Sheng slapped his palm to his forehead.

In his last life, he must have owed these two clowns a debt.

“Benefactor… I’m sorry…” Foxy crept closer when she saw Yu Sheng wasn’t speaking, thinking he was truly angry. She sounded nervous. “Next time I won’t eat it all.”

As she spoke, a silver-white fluffy tail landed across Yu Sheng’s chest.

“You can pet my tail. Don’t be mad.”

Yu Sheng looked up once and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Uh, it’s nice that you’re offering your tail,” he said, “but you don’t have to pull it off and hand it to me. It looks kind of creepy.”

“Oh.”

“Forget it. I’m not mad. My head’s just a little scrambled because I literally came back to life, and you two made such a fuss I couldn’t react,” Yu Sheng said, exhaling. He handed her tail back properly. “I’ll boil some noodles later. I’m guessing you still aren’t full. You two go downstairs and wait for me. I’m going to rest a bit more.”

Foxy nodded and left. Irene walked to the bedside, then suddenly turned back. “Oh right, you still haven’t told me how it went over there. Judging by how long it took you to wake up, you really died again, didn’t you?”

Yu Sheng smiled faintly. “That thing’s front teeth were thicker than my thigh. What do you think?”

Irene’s expression turned strange. “…And you’re still in a pretty good mood.”

Yu Sheng paused, as if savoring the memory. After a long moment, a hard-to-read smile appeared on his face. “Yeah. Pretty good. I didn’t get to taste the flavor, but it seems… worth looking forward to.”

Irene recoiled. “Damn. Of course it’s you.”

She jumped off the bed and pattered out after Foxy, shouting as she ran, “Hey! Silly Fox, listen! In a few days we might be adding a dish!”

“Huh? Adding what dish?”

“Maybe wolf meat…”

Listening to their voices fade down the hallway, Yu Sheng found himself smiling without noticing. He finally let out a long breath, relaxed, and leaned back against the headboard.

After a moment, he reached out and picked up the phone on the bedside table.

He opened border comms and found Little Red Riding Hood’s profile picture. As a high school student, she should still be at school at this hour.

Yu Sheng always found it a little strange that a spirit realm detective like her still had to go to class like a normal kid, but after dealing with this city for a while, he had gotten used to it.

There was never any shortage of strange people in this boundary city.

He typed quickly and sent a message to the girl who lived alongside wolves:

“I entered the black forest. I saw the invisible and visible wolves. I also saw the forest path, the cabin, and that Squirrel. Do you have time to talk?”