Chapter 143

Chapter 143: The Story in the Lord’s Eyes

Yu Sheng carefully shared his plans for building in the valley. He described the grand temple in his mind and a ring of related buildings that would rise around the platform, even if he hadn’t decided what they would do yet. He also explained why the square little house by the platform was not a toilet.

Both girls listened very seriously, especially in the second half when they were trying not to laugh.

Yu Sheng could only sigh. He felt it looked like a toilet too, which didn’t help.

So he ended the topic and tried to distract his guests: “These are the chickens Foxy is raising. Once the ecosystem recovers, we’ll let them roam outside.”

Little Red Riding Hood had the same reaction Irene once had. She stared: “You asked a fox to raise chickens?!”

Yu Sheng corrected her earnestly: “She’s a Fox Demon. Big difference. I’m serious. She takes good care of them.”

While he spoke, Foxy finished adding water and feed, checked on the chicklings one by one, then skipped over. She reached into her fluffy tail, pulled out two chicklings, and showed them off: “These are Bai Qie and Yan Ju. I plan to make them the chiefs of the flock.”

Little Red Riding Hood needed a second to realize those were the chickens’ names.

Before she could speak, Yu Sheng tugged her along to see the rest: “This area is for vegetables. See that channel? It runs from the foot of the mountain and can water the fields. I’m going to build a cistern on one corner of the platform. Another plot will be for pigs later, but I don’t have time for that yet. Farther out there’s an open ground. You noticed it, right? I plan to set a fixed The Door there. It’s only an early plan, and I still have to study how to do it. For now the main focus is farming and building.”

Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel were both stunned into nodding. Little Red Riding Hood’s mind was still stuck on the days when this place bred Hunger. Every time Yu Sheng listed a project, a voice in her head said, [But this is an Otherworld,] and her worldview flipped over again and again.

Yu Sheng didn’t think about it that much. After finishing with pride, he looked at the two young ladies with bright expectation: “How is it? What do you think of this valley?”

Rapunzel opened and closed her mouth, then blurted: “What kind of valley is this? It’s Stardew Valley.”

Yu Sheng thought about it and felt her summary was spot on, but he didn’t own the rights, so he couldn’t use that name.

A fresh breeze blew from deep in the valley, smelling of grass and soil. Xiao Xiao’s happy laughter rode the wind as she ran across the field with Irene, who chased her and yelled: “Can someone deal with this little troublemaker? What, Dolls don’t get rights now?”

Rapunzel glanced up with a helpless smile: “I’ll watch her,” then she lifted Xiao Xiao’s tiny backpack and walked off at a quick clip, calling, “Xiao Xiao! Take a break and drink some water, then keep playing!”

Yu Sheng sat on the edge of the platform with a smile. He watched Rapunzel care for the child, Xiao Xiao chattering with excitement, and Irene trying and failing to reason with a whirlwind. Then he looked back at Little Red Riding Hood and asked softly: “Does tomorrow feel worth looking forward to now?”

Little Red Riding Hood kept her eyes on the distance. When she finally spoke, her voice was very light, as if she feared a louder one would break a new beam of light: “The Black Forest, and the other subsets inside Fairy Tale… can they become like this too?”

Yu Sheng answered without rushing: “I still don’t know how to fight the core body of Fairy Tale, but we can start with the Black Forest. Even though it’s a space of mind, it still follows the normal rules of an Otherworld. The Entities it creates, mainly wolves, aren’t invincible, and my blood affects them.”

He went on, thoughtful: “The key now is finding the most central, essential part of the Black Forest. I don’t think it’s a wolf.”

Little Red Riding Hood widened her eyes: “Not a wolf?”

Yu Sheng asked calmly: “In Little Red Riding Hood, what is so special about the wolf?”

Little Red Riding Hood fell silent, not quite catching his point at first.

Yu Sheng continued, laying out his idea: “Little Red Riding Hood, with title marks. If Fairy Tale’s essence is a library of stories, and each subset is a story, then no single element can stand for the whole story. A lone wolf can’t. A single Hunter or a single Little Red Riding Hood can’t. Not even the Black Forest itself can represent Little Red Riding Hood.”

Understanding dawned on her face.

Yu Sheng pointed toward the valley: “This valley is different from the Black Forest. Here, Hunger was the only core. All the rules and even the environment of the valley were built around Hunger. That’s how most ‘regular’ Otherworlds work. But in the Black Forest the rules are unusually complex. Every character in the forest, including Little Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, Grandma, the Hunter, and maybe even that odd squirrel, is only one link in the system of rules. They’re the surface.”

He waved a hand in the air. With a scrape of soil and stone, a patch of ground by the platform swelled up into a little stage. Crude stone figures rolled and ran across it. Some broke apart, and new “actors” crawled free to carry on their blind, pointless motion.

“I thought of this after I saw what happened to Xiao Xiao,” he said as he guided the toy stage. “You, as the person inside the story, are limited by Little Red Riding Hood’s view, so your eyes are always on the evil wolf. It’s natural to treat the wolf as the final villain of the Black Forest subset. But standing outside the story, I realized the one I need to kill isn’t the story’s villain.

“Or put it this way. I already killed one ‘villain’ once, the Wolf Granny who swallowed Xiao Xiao. That was the final villain from Xiao Xiao’s point of view. But when I killed it, I felt nothing but… emptiness. The Black Forest didn’t change because one Wolf Granny died. The wolf pack remained. The forest remained. I could feel those watching eyes. Xiao Xiao would still fall into the forest next time, and a new Wolf Granny would still be waiting for her at the End Web in the dark.

“Because the script of that story wasn’t hurt at all.”

Silence settled over the platform. Little Red Riding Hood watched the stone “actors” rolling on the crude stage, then said in thought: “So the one we need to kill is the story itself…”

“Yes, the story,” Yu Sheng agreed. “But we may not be able to ‘kill’ it. Maybe we can control it, rewrite it, even tear it apart. To do that, we can’t fix our eyes on the surface actors. We have to find the weak point of the whole story.” He pointed at the stage. “For this stage, what do you think its true essence is?”

Little Red Riding Hood hesitated, thinking hard, but no answer came at once.

Yu Sheng smiled and tapped his head: “The answer is right here. It’s me.”

He swept his hand again. The dirt-and-stone stage collapsed with a thud and melted back into the ground.

Little Red Riding Hood gasped: “You mean there’s a storyteller behind the Black Forest?”

“Not necessarily a person, but definitely a source,” Yu Sheng said evenly. “It might be the body of Fairy Tale. It might be a tendril reaching out from it. From the first time I entered the Black Forest, I’ve been looking for that tendril. This time we found a special Little House in the very deepest part. I thought the tendril was there, but it wasn’t. It was only a special corner of the stage. We’re still circling on the front of the stage, while the thing shaping the Black Forest hides behind the stage.”

Little Red Riding Hood stared at him with real surprise: “I never thought about the Black Forest like this.”

Yu Sheng laughed: “Because I’m a hateful lord. Hateful lords use dry, rational thinking to poke holes in the stories of Cursed Children. Our favorite line is: ‘Someone made it all up.’”

Little Red Riding Hood blinked, then smiled: “No wonder Fairy Tale doesn’t like lords.”

“That’s fine. I’m not here for it to like me,” Yu Sheng said as he stood and brushed off his hands. “Okay. Field trip over. Time for the kid to go home.”