Chapter 138

Chapter 138: After Waking Up

The phantom door opened slowly.

On the other side was only hazy darkness, not a clear scene like the doors Yu Sheng opened in the real world—or even in a normal otherworld.

He didn’t step through immediately. He watched first, carefully sensing the connection.

Before this, he’d only confirmed he could open a door inside the Black Forest. He hadn’t actually used it. But now the wolf pack had backed off, Hunter had left, the house was quiet, and even Squirrel was gone. For the first time, he had space to test.

Just as he’d suspected, a door opened inside the Black Forest was different.

Fairy Tale was an abnormal otherworld built on a story collection. As a subset of Fairy Tale, the Black Forest had a warped structure—space and time pulled strange. Here, the power of awareness was amplified to an extreme, while the visitor’s body remained in the real world.

So a door opened here couldn’t be tuned with the same precision.

Yu Sheng could feel it clearly: this door led to a fixed place—his body.

His body was still asleep in the West Building of the orphanage.

That answered a question he’d been circling for a while.

If his awareness entered the Black Forest and he opened a door to somewhere distant in reality, what would happen when his awareness escaped through it?

Would he return to his body?

Or would he truly reach that distant place—becoming a soul without a body?

Now the answer was obvious. In an abnormal otherworld—at least one like Fairy Tale: Little Red Riding Hood—a door opened in an awareness state could only return to the real body.

At least, that was all he could do right now.

Yu Sheng looked down at the wolf leg in his hand. Only one question remained.

Could something obtained in the Black Forest while in an awareness state be brought out?

He took a light breath, held the door steady, dragged the corpse forward, and stepped through.

A brief dizziness.

Then the sudden sensation of falling—like being ripped out of a deep dream.

In an instant, Yu Sheng felt his body again, and the soft touch beneath him. He snapped his eyes open—

And saw a tail.

And Foxy’s ears.

He was lying in the middle of a huge pile of fluffy tails. Two were draped over him like a blanket. The fox young lady peeked at him from between the tails and beamed. “Benefactor! You’re awake! I was afraid you’d get cold…”

Yu Sheng sat there for two seconds, still catching up to reality. Then he started scrambling out of the pile, muttering as he went. “Cold, no. It’s just… kind of hot. Now I know why you hug your own tails to sleep every day. These things are basically a heater.”

Foxy looked smug immediately.

Irene hopped over from the side, her mouth already running. “She was going to pull off all her tails and pile them on you. I had to remind her that even if it didn’t scare you, it could smother you. You should’ve seen it—piled up like a grave. You were lying in the middle looking so peaceful, so lifelike. I wanted to stick a marker next to you, but I couldn’t find one. Anyway—”

Irene cut off with a yelp.

A huge shadow dropped from above with a heavy thud, flattening the doll and covering her completely.

It was a massive wolf.

Yu Sheng shot to his feet and rushed over.

It was the Big Bad Wolf’s body—dead from dissection.

“So you really can bring it out…” Yu Sheng murmured, thinking hard. Then he checked his pocket. Sure enough, the filthy scrap of paper was still there—the one that had fallen from Hunter.

Relief flickered through him, followed almost immediately by confusion. “What’s the principle behind this…?”

One of Irene’s hands stuck out from under the wolf. It twitched twice—and stubbornly flipped him off.

“Yu Sheng, you son of a—!” her voice came out muffled. “Is now the time to talk about principles?! I’m still pinned under here!”

Yu Sheng grinned and yanked Irene out from under the carcass.

Mostly in revenge for lifelike.

Irene hopped up and tried to kick his knee. She jumped three times, got pressed down three times, and finally huffed with a pout. “You’re so petty…”

Then she forgot her annoyance and stared at the corpse. “So this is Wolf Granny? It’s huge. No wonder it could swallow a six-year-old whole. The proportions are wrong, too. It’s creepy.”

Foxy came over, squatted beside the body, and stared in silence.

After a moment, she turned to Yu Sheng with complete sincerity. “Benefactor. I’ve never eaten this.”

“I haven’t either.” Yu Sheng answered without missing a beat. “We’ll try a few methods later. The ribs should be good stir-fried, pan-fried, or deep-fried. The leg meat could be stir-fried or cured. If all else fails, a pressure cooker can brute-force anything. I just don’t know what to do with the organs.”

Halfway through, Foxy was already drooling.

Irene had been staring like she’d gone dumb. When Yu Sheng and Foxy were almost ready to start debating how to cook Wolf Granny’s brain, she snapped back to life.

“You two are talking about this like it’s normal? Like this is what we’re doing right now?!”

Yu Sheng jerked back to reality. He shoved the recipes out of his head and grabbed Foxy’s tail to wipe away her drool. “Right. Business first. Go call Little Red Riding Hood and the others in.”

Irene shot them both a deeply suspicious look and headed for the door. Halfway there, she stopped and glanced back at the corpse, her expression uneasy.

“Wouldn’t this be way too much for Little Red Riding Hood and that kid, Xiao Xiao? If they see it… won’t it trigger them or something?”

Yu Sheng frowned slightly.

He understood Irene’s concern. It wasn’t wrong.

Little Red Riding Hood might manage. She’d fought that nightmare for so long that she could, at least rationally, keep her fear in check. But Xiao Xiao…

Yu Sheng didn’t know what state the child was in right now.

“Fair point.” He exhaled and nodded at Foxy. “Put it away first. And don’t sneak a bite—it’s still raw.”

He couldn’t help adding the warning. Left unsupervised, Foxy really might eat the whole thing, bones and all.

“Oh,” Foxy said obediently. She walked to the carcass, pulled off the tail she used for storage, and flicked it once.

Yu Sheng didn’t even see what happened. The corpse was simply gone.

Only then did Irene leave. When she returned, she brought Little Red Riding Hood and Princess Rapunzel in from where they’d been waiting.

And behind Little Red Riding Hood, moving carefully, was a small girl with a nervous, shy look in her eyes.

Xiao Xiao.

The signs of death were gone from her. The flesh that had been torn apart had healed completely. Her heart and head—once ripped open—looked as if they’d never been harmed at all.

She was alive again.

Through the faint blood-linked connection, Yu Sheng could even feel each steady heartbeat.

Xiao Xiao paused and looked up at him.

Then, in less than a second, her attention snapped to Foxy’s mountain of tails. Wonder filled her face, and she let out a tiny gasp.

“Everything’s resolved.” Yu Sheng smiled and walked to Little Red Riding Hood. “How are you two doing?”

“If you mean right after waking up… dying would’ve been easier,” Little Red Riding Hood said at once, her expression twisting. Just thinking about violent awakening seemed enough to make her stomach churn. “You said it might be intense. I didn’t think it would be that intense.”

“Still able to complain,” Yu Sheng said, nodding. “That means you’re fine.”

His gaze dropped to the child. “Xiao Xiao, right? Do you feel uncomfortable anywhere?”

Xiao Xiao leaned back on instinct, uneasy under his attention. Then she stepped forward again and lifted her head, eyes wide.

“Doesn’t hurt.”

“Good.” Yu Sheng patted her hair gently. “If it doesn’t hurt, that’s good.”

Princess Rapunzel finally spoke, voice quiet with disbelief. “Honestly, it still doesn’t feel real. Her wounds just vanished, like nothing ever happened. Then she opened her eyes and said she had a dream.”

“A dream?” Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow and looked down at Xiao Xiao. “What did you dream about?”

Xiao Xiao lowered her head. Her voice was so soft it was almost a hum. “Lots of people. Lots of people around me, all wearing red cloaks. They kept telling me to run, but I couldn’t… and then I don’t remember.”