Chapter 13

Chapter 13: Meeting

Ah.

Familiar darkness. Familiar crushing pressure. That familiar feeling of consciousness sinking.

Yu Sheng’s thoughts floated in the depths of chaotic black. The pressure from all sides pressed in, heavy and endless, carrying a kind of helpless exhaustion.

He’d expected trouble before he could leave this Otherworld. He’d even expected he might have to die more than once. He’d guessed the start and the end.

He just hadn’t guessed the process.

As he drifted and sank, he couldn’t stop replaying the last thing he’d seen—gold-and-red eyes flashing into view, gorgeous fox tails blooming in the night…

…and that headbutt.

Who was that girl?

Where had she come from?

Why had she appeared in this Otherworld?

And besides… what had happened to him during that fight? The sudden increase in strength and agility, and that hungry urge that had nearly swallowed his mind whole.

What had happened to him?

His thoughts spun like a vortex. Without the restraint of a body, those runaway ideas even seemed to twist into hallucinations before his “eyes.” Memories and images overlapped: the limb-stacked monster, the fox-eared girl, the painting.

In the painting, Irene lay shattered around a chair. Silk threads like spiderwebs ran through the doll’s limbs, and a strange shadow stood in the depths of the image…

In an instant, Irene vanished.

New images surfaced from the depths of Yu Sheng’s memory: crimson clouds and sky, sunlight flowing like water, bathing familiar old streets and alleys.

That was where he’d been born and raised—Boundary City, an unremarkable coastal town.

He’d left it two months ago… but as the images rose, they felt impossibly distant, like someone else’s memories displayed coldly in front of him.

Then everything washed away, leaving only gentle darkness.

Yu Sheng tried, half on instinct, to call, “Irene.”

No answer.

It seemed that in this dead state, his connection to her was cut off.

He shifted his focus, searching the dark for anything else—testing whether his limbs existed, whether he had a body at all.

There was nothing.

This place was empty, and here he was nothing but a drifting, rootless thought.

So he tried something else.

The first two times, he’d died without any experience and returned in a blur. This time, he forced himself to stay aware. He began to sense the process consciously, testing guesses the way you tested a locked door: one handle, one hinge, one hidden latch at a time.

He knew he’d been muddled these days. A strange world, bizarre phenomena, his own mystery, resurrection—too many unknowns piled together until he had no direction at all.

But ever since Irene told him about the Otherworld, he’d had a goal again.

He wanted to go back. Back to the normal side.

If a hole into the Otherworld opened for people, an ordinary person only needed to glimpse the scene leaking out to step over the edge of reason. It could happen because you got off at the wrong stop, took one extra step on a staircase, turned one extra page in a book, misread a word… or opened the wrong door.

But no matter the cause, the key was this:

It wasn’t irreversible.

People in this world studied the Otherworld. They’d summarized its patterns. There were experts who specialized in dealing with it. Even an ordinary person had a chance to return after falling in.

This valley under the night sky was an Otherworld. The place he lived now—Wu Tong Road No. 66—was an Otherworld.

But Yu Sheng believed he’d touched the Otherworld even earlier.

Two months ago, when he’d pushed open his front door, he might already have fallen into an Otherworld centered on him—one called Boundary City.

Now he needed to explore as much as possible, understand as much as he could, learn what he could about the Otherworld… and then leave this wrong world.

And then he opened his eyes.

Cold night wind swept through a hole in the wall. Beyond the half-collapsed roof, the sky was still murky.

Yu Sheng sat in a corner of the ruined temple, but he didn’t get up right away. He kept the posture of someone newly awakened, holding still while he carefully felt out the world around him—and tried to hold onto the fading impressions in his mind.

He tried to recall the instant he woke, to pin down the boundary between the dark and the real.

He had a feeling this was the key to understanding his resurrection. If nothing else, it might pull him one step closer to the truth.

Vaguely, he remembered fragments he’d seen just before waking. He remembered rising out of the darkness, crossing a hazy boundary, then sinking back toward reality…

But what happened between sinking and opening his eyes?

In that short instant—what occurred?

He seemed to have seen a few images flash past, fast and blurry. A handful were clearer: the path near his home, the door of Wu Tong Road No. 66, and this corner inside the ruined temple.

Yu Sheng lowered his gaze. He let those thoughts settle. A few guesses rose, and he set them aside for later.

Then he breathed out and flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders, tested his legs.

This body felt pure and strong. He could feel power flowing through his veins. He could hear clearly, see far. His limbs brimmed with strength—even though not long ago that headbutt had taken everything below his neck.

Now he was whole.

He started to stand, ready to call Irene—

—and stopped.

A soft rustling came from outside the broken wall.

His first thought was that the “prime meat” monster had tracked him all the way into the temple.

But that thing always made earthshaking noise. This was careful. Quiet.

Yu Sheng drew a silent breath, crept to the hole in the wall, and peered out.

The night was deep, but his eyes saw clearly.

A girl moved through the ruins, cautious and light.

She wore a tattered robe-dress. It had once been beautiful, but now it was nothing but filthy rags. Unwashed, white hair hung in a messy sheet, hiding most of her face.

And on top of her head—

Sharp fox ears.

But compared to those ears, Yu Sheng’s gaze locked on her back.

Tails.

Fox tails—more than one. From his angle, he couldn’t count how many. With how ragged she looked, he even wondered if it was one massive tail that had matted into several strands over time.

By now, of course, Yu Sheng recognized her.

She was the subsonic headbutt.

But the girl didn’t seem to notice him at all. She prowled through the temple ruins, sniffing from time to time as if sorting scents in the air. After a while, she seemed to find something. Her eyes lit up, and she hurried toward a spot.

A plastic rustle cut through the night.

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened.

It was the bag of kitchen garbage he’d brought when he’d been thrown into this valley—something he’d casually tossed into the ruins.

Inside were vegetable scraps, eggshells, and leftovers he’d cleaned out of the fridge.

Pressed to the wall, Yu Sheng watched the fox-tailed girl tear open the plastic with clumsy excitement. She spilled everything out, grabbed a wad of leftovers, and shoved it into her mouth without hesitation—

as if she’d been starving for years.

Yu Sheng felt his chest tighten.

He didn’t know why, but it hurt to watch.

A person shouldn’t be starved like this.

Even if she didn’t look fully human.

Even if she’d headbutted him—

She had been trying to save him.

And then, finally, the girl seemed to notice the presence of a living person in the ruined temple.

She froze in a crouch, a rotten leaf hanging from her mouth, and turned her head with startled tension.

Yu Sheng stood in the collapsed corner of the temple, staring at her across the rubble.

In the deep night, they faced each other—silent, wary, and very much awake.