Chapter 15

Chapter 15: Trapped Here

When she said his name, Yu Sheng’s first thought was that this girl was painfully straightforward. Who just called herself “fox”? It took him asking three more times before he finally understood—she wasn’t saying fox at all. She was saying Foxy.

Foxy. A slightly odd name, but it fit all those tails.

“My name is Yu Sheng,” he said, sitting with Foxy in the ruins of the broken temple. “I’m from… well, I’m not sure you’ll understand, but I’m from ‘outside.’ Not just outside the valley.”

“You really are from ‘outside’!” Foxy’s eyes went wide. She seemed to understand him immediately, and her shock carried something else too—she already knew “outside” existed.

She took a small, careful bite of chocolate, her big eyes fixed on his face. “How did you get in? Do you know… the way out? Is it… in the sky?”

As she talked, her speech smoothed out, like she was rapidly relearning how to talk to someone.

Yu Sheng froze. “In the sky? Why do you ask?”

“Before the immortal died, he said we all came from the sky,” Foxy said, trying hard to line up her words. Even now, long sentences made her stumble. “But then the sky suddenly went dark, and we couldn’t go back. Then the ground got more and more dangerous. It became poisoned. So… the people who came with us, a lot of them died, and we couldn’t go back…”

Yu Sheng listened in a daze, forcing his imagination to fill the gaps in her chaotic description. The valley Irene had casually labeled an “otherworld” clearly hid a complicated story, and this girl with all those tails had an origin that made no sense at all.

She was trapped here too.

But when he tried to ask what “the sky” really meant, who the “people” were, and how they’d come here, her answers turned jumbled again.

“The sky… is just the sky,” Foxy insisted, gesturing wildly. “All these years I’ve been trying to go back to the sky, but I can’t. I try to jump up, but I hit something, and it hurts. Everyone… doesn’t remember anymore. There was dad, mother, immortal, and… and other people. We came down on a boat, a really big boat…”

As she spoke, she suddenly remembered something else and pointed deeper into the dark valley. “Over there. The ship fell and became part of the mountain. Dad kept wanting to go back and get something, but later… everyone got killed by something, and then nobody knew how… to get into the ship anymore.”

The picture she painted was eerie enough to put ice down Yu Sheng’s spine.

He did his best to piece it together. Setting aside what she meant by “immortal,” and setting aside what “the sky” even was, the fragments came together into a rough truth:

Foxy, her family, and someone she called an “immortal” had landed in this valley many years ago aboard a huge ship—probably some kind of flying vehicle. Back then, this place likely wasn’t a dead land yet. Later, the sky “went dark,” some unknown catastrophe hit, the valley sealed shut, and everyone who came with the ship got trapped. After that, the group suffered a devastating attack from a powerful enemy and was almost wiped out.

Brutally. In the end, the last survivor was only Foxy.

But Yu Sheng knew this was still mostly something he’d stitched together in his head. Foxy’s words were fragmented, her memories full of obvious holes, and her perspective warped. Whatever the truth was, he doubted even she could remember it clearly.

This girl’s mind was badly damaged.

“How long have you been trapped here?” he couldn’t help asking.

“I don’t know. Anyway… a very long time.” Foxy shook her head slowly, clutching her half piece of chocolate. “This place… never really changes. I don’t know how to count days. When I’m hungry, I pass out, and when I wake up it feels like a long time has gone by…”

Yu Sheng frowned. Looking at her ragged clothes and thinking about what she’d described, he realized she’d been trapped here far longer than he’d imagined—years, at least.

“All these years… how did you stay alive?” he asked before he could stop himself. “What do you eat? Just… rummage through trash in the broken temple? But there doesn’t seem to be anything edible here.”

“No. Food.” Foxy shook her head again. “In the woods… there are sometimes fruit, but it’s poisonous. If you eat it, you pass out. Aside from water, most things here are poisonous, so most of the time, I just stay hungry.”

Then she smiled again, slow and proud, and pointed at herself. “A monster is very strong. You don’t starve to death. It just… feels bad, being hungry.”

Something awful flashed through her, and her smile collapsed. She suddenly jumped up, ran a few steps, and dug the bag of kitchen trash back out from under broken bricks and roof tiles—hugging the stinking bag of leftovers like treasure.

“It’s still edible,” she told him, deadly serious.

Yu Sheng opened his mouth, then closed it again. Of course he wished he could pull out a mountain of food, even open a door back to the real world—but he could barely keep himself alive.

“Benefactor…” Foxy spoke again.

Yu Sheng blinked. “What did you call me?”

“Benefactor,” she repeated, just as serious. “Mother said the one who helps you a lot is your benefactor. You gave me food.”

He waved a hand. “That’s… a little weird. Just call me Yu Sheng. I’m used to it.”

“Oh. Okay, uh…” Foxy let it go, then pointed at his finger, lowering her head. “Sorry.”

“Huh?” Yu Sheng looked down. The wound on his finger—where she’d bitten him in a panic when he offered her bread—had already healed, leaving only a smear of blood. He wiped it away. “It’s fine. Don’t worry. Just a scratch.”

But Foxy still looked worried. “Benefactor, are you really okay? You were bitten by a monster… it wounds your essence. It can’t heal.”

“But it already healed,” Yu Sheng said, skeptical. He rubbed the last bit of blood off his skin. “Look.”

“It really healed…” Foxy stared at his finger in surprise. “Benefactor… are you also an immortal?”

“I’m not. And I’m not even sure what you mean by immortal.” Yu Sheng scratched his head. “If I’m getting it right, it’s someone who cultivates and becomes an immortal? But why would someone like that be with… a ‘monster’?

“From what you said, you were on the same ship as a bunch of monsters, and you were following an immortal around, right? But in all the stories I’ve heard… immortals and monsters don’t travel together.”

That was the question that had been gnawing at him. Foxy had tossed out words he’d only ever heard in stories, and she herself had a pile of enormous tails that looked like something out of an old legend. Yet everything she said pointed to one absurd picture: an “immortal” leading a group of monsters around. Even after their “flying ship” crashed, the immortal and the monsters had stayed together and tried to survive for a while—until it all fell apart.

That wasn’t how stories usually went. In stories, didn’t these two sides meet and turn each other into dumpling filling?

But Foxy only tilted her head, confused by his confusion. After a moment of painful searching, she answered uncertainly, “Because it was the tour guide immortal.”

Yu Sheng stared. “…What?”

He thought he’d misheard something deeply cursed.

He asked again. And again. In the end, he confirmed she hadn’t misspoken.

It was a “tour guide immortal.” Or rather… the immortal was a tour guide.

Long ago, the monsters and the immortal who’d crashed here aboard the “celestial ship” had been—unbelievably—a tour group.

Yu Sheng had just imagined eight hundred and fifty thousand words of a grand xianxia epic for nothing.

Don’t ask why there was a monster tour group led by an immortal. The answer was simple: 99 yuan for four days, pure fun, no shopping. Did it make sense? Of course it did. Cheap tours always have problems.

Yu Sheng sat in the night wind, letting the cold slide through the broken temple and across his face.

More and more, he felt like this world was cursed.

And then he heard the fox girl beside him whisper again, “Benefactor…”

“Just call me Yu Sheng,” he sighed. “What is it?”

Foxy held her stomach, looking miserable. “Benefactor, my stomach hurts.”

Yu Sheng stared at the chocolate she’d already chewed halfway through. “Huh?”

Even a fox demon couldn’t handle chocolate?

“Holy—stop eating!” Cold sweat broke out on Yu Sheng’s back as he reached for the chocolate in her hand. “That stuff is bad for you—”

The moment his hand moved, a low rumble rose in Foxy’s throat, like a guard dog. She lunged and took a huge bite out of his hand.

“Awoooo!!!”

The next second, Yu Sheng’s howl was even louder than hers.