Chapter 129

Chapter 129: The Beginning of “Fairy Tale”

Little Red Riding Hood didn’t seem to doubt him at all. An unreliable lord could lie without blinking and easily fool a high school girl who wouldn’t even turn eighteen until next month.

She simply reminded him to stay cautious around dark angels, then brought the topic back to otherworld.

“Otherworld is mainly divided into four types,” Little Red Riding Hood said seriously. “The first three are the most straightforward classifications. By scale and form, they are: wilderness, kingdom, and fortress.”

From the names, Yu Sheng could already guess at the basic idea.

“I’ve read a bit of this part,” Yu Sheng said, thinking as he spoke. “Wilderness-type otherworld means open space, no clear visual boundary, mostly a primitive natural environment inside—and you can’t leave just by walking to the end, right?”

“Correct,” Little Red Riding Hood said, nodding. “Nightfall Valley is a classic wilderness-type otherworld. Generally speaking, wilderness-type otherworld are huge, and they don’t have obvious, fixed entrances and exits. You usually have to meet certain conditions, or leave at a certain time.”

She continued, voice steady and practiced. “Kingdom is another large-scale otherworld. Sometimes its spatial scale is comparable to wilderness. The difference is that kingdom-type otherworld often have many man-made traces—rows of houses, entire cities, even factories that rumble and churn, producing who-knows-what.”

Her eyes sharpened as she described it. “A kingdom-type otherworld feels like the ruins of a civilization stranded in abnormal space. But in reality, the buildings and facilities are full of unreasonable details. If you observe closely, you’ll notice their warped, discordant nature.

“And in kingdom-type otherworld, you can usually find entrances that allow stable travel to and from reality. That’s the biggest difference from wilderness.”

She lifted a finger. “The third type, fortress, usually appears as a single enclosed building or facility. Its scale is smaller than wilderness and kingdom, but that doesn’t make it safer. On the contrary, fortresses often have more complex, shifting rules and eerie environments.”

She spoke the key word slowly. “Uncertainty. That’s the biggest feature of fortress-type otherworld. And because of that, their entrances and exits vary wildly. Some have stable entrances. Some only allow condition-based travel, like wilderness.

“The museum we explored together is a classic fortress-type otherworld. And the other fortress you’re even more familiar with…”

Little Red Riding Hood paused and looked straight into Yu Sheng’s eyes. “Guess what it is.”

Yu Sheng froze, then reacted, half-disbelieving. “Don’t tell me it’s my house.”

Little Red Riding Hood looked at him like he was hopeless. “…Isn’t that obvious?”

“Uh. Fair,” Yu Sheng admitted, rubbing his nose. Then he shifted quickly. “All right. Otherworld has four types, and you listed three. So it’s pretty clear—Fairy Tale is the fourth type, right?”

Little Red Riding Hood exhaled and nodded, her expression complicated. “The fourth type: anomaly.”

Yu Sheng heard the word and hadn’t even opened his mouth when Irene blurted out, “Yeah. Just hearing that name, you can tell the nightmare has arrived.”

Foxy stared at the doll in her arms. “Why do you say that?”

Irene rolled her eyes. “Because otherworld is already wrong. Now there’s a whole category that basically shouts wrong right in its own name.” She pointed at Yu Sheng with gleeful cruelty. “That’s like Yu Sheng walking into Wu Tong Road 66. Cursed to the core!”

Yu Sheng poked the doll on the head. “I told you not to turn me into an idiom.”

Then he looked back at Little Red Riding Hood. “Explain it in detail?”

“If normal otherworld is a twisted time-space,” Little Red Riding Hood said carefully, “then anomaly-type otherworld are things outside time-space.”

She seemed to hesitate before going on, like she was trying to translate something too abstract into words. “Abstract, conceptual things. Even things you can’t imagine. They’re… things.”

Like an emotion, a memory, a sound—or a story.

Yu Sheng, Irene, and Foxy all stared at her, completely lost.

After half a minute of blank silence, Yu Sheng was the first to speak. “Huh?”

Then he waved a hand, exasperated. “Wait. My imagination can keep up, but my understanding is still chasing behind. You mean emotions and memories—even sounds—can become an otherworld?”

“It’s not that they become an otherworld,” Little Red Riding Hood corrected. “It’s that otherworld takes those forms.”

“Got it. Got it.” Yu Sheng still looked like someone had just kicked open a door in his brain. “I always thought that no matter how absurd otherworld got, it was still a place. At minimum, something you can see and touch—somewhere you can enter and leave.”

He let out a laugh that sounded more like disbelief than humor. “But what you’re saying… I’m telling you, I write novels, and even my vocabulary is almost not enough right now. How is this so ridiculous?”

Little Red Riding Hood blinked. “Huh? You write novels?”

Irene leaned forward immediately, delighted. “Yeah. And they’re super cursed. Later you can ask the Special Operations Bureau about the one named Ren Wen Wen—”

“That’s not important!” Yu Sheng shoved Irene back with one hand, eyes still on Little Red Riding Hood. “Anyway, now I understand why there’s a whole category called anomaly. It’s all the cursed stuff that can’t be classified.” He leaned in. “So Fairy Tale is the story-type among anomaly-type otherworld?”

Little Red Riding Hood nodded.

“But the black forest I entered looked like a space,” Yu Sheng said, frowning. “Was it a dream?”

“That’s exactly the characteristic of most anomaly-type otherworld,” Little Red Riding Hood said. “Their essence is abstract, but through hallucinations, dreams, and similar forms, they trap people in a concrete environment that resembles an alternate space.”

She spoke like she’d explained this a hundred times before. “Some only trap your mind. Others drag your body in, too. So many anomaly-type otherworld get misjudged early on. Even professional scholars need time to realize there’s a true body behind the strange ‘space.’ And by then, for many victims, it’s already too late.”

She paused and organized her thoughts. Then she continued, calm as if she were talking about someone else. “As for Fairy Tale, even among anomaly-type otherworld, it’s special because it has many derivative branches—subsets.”

“The black forest is one subset,” she said. “You can think of Fairy Tale as an invisible, unknowable, untouchable tower. The tower itself is formless, but because it exists, it creates countless rooms.”

She met Yu Sheng’s eyes. “The black forest where the Big Bad Wolf squats is only one room. There’s also Dorothy’s wilderness. The high tower that imprisons Princess Rapunzel. Cinderella’s ball that loops forever. And beyond those, there are some special rooms.”

Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow. “Special rooms?”

“They don’t point to any specific fairy tale story,” Little Red Riding Hood said, “but to a classic fairy tale element—or a fictional script. Like the King’s castle, or an evil dragon’s treasure vault. We haven’t identified which story, or which role, those subsets correspond to.”

Yu Sheng frowned, listening hard, trying to sketch the structure of this otherworld in his mind. The outline was still blurry when Little Red Riding Hood’s next words landed.

“This is where Fairy Tale first erupted.”

Yu Sheng looked up sharply.

Little Red Riding Hood was staring out the window at the open ground below. A group of small children ran between the swings, shouting, their lively noise drifting up through the glass.

“That was a very, very long time ago,” she said slowly. “Back then, these two buildings weren’t here yet. There were older, lower structures instead. But the function of this courtyard has never changed. It has always been an orphanage—before, now, and in the future.”

She spoke with quiet certainty. “A lot of material about the outbreak was lost for all kinds of reasons. From scattered records, we only know that after the outbreak, this place was sealed off for a short time.

“At the time, the Special Operations Bureau thought it was an ordinary otherworld phenomenon. They temporarily transferred the children affected by Fairy Tale to another containment facility with a higher security rating. But only a few years later, the Fairy Tale phenomenon began appearing elsewhere in Borderland—and the children who had been transferred first began showing abnormalities.”

Her voice tightened slightly. “Only then did people realize, too late, that an unknown anomaly-type otherworld had already unfolded across Borderland.”

She kept going, as steady as she could. “After that, the Special Operations Bureau tried many methods to contain Fairy Tale’s influence, with little effect. Even the most professional deep diver was helpless after entering those subsets, and many died for nothing. People paid far more costs before they finally summarized some rough rules.”

She looked back at Yu Sheng. “And the most important one is what I mentioned earlier. Fairy Tale doesn’t like lords.”

Her gaze drifted toward the courtyard again. “As you can see, that became the foundation for this child-run kingdom.”