Chapter 152

Chapter 152: Action Record

As soon as he heard Bai Li Qing’s account, Yu Sheng understood that the failure of that old operation had been set from the start: they had made a huge, unbelievable mistake. [It was doomed.]

Yet this misjudgment was almost impossible to avoid.

Fairy Tale had strange traits no first-time observer could guess. In the beginning it spread slowly, felt weak, and seemed to target only children, which was very misleading. More important, it had a special structure of core and subsets. The real heart of Fairy Tale hid behind the dream stages it wove. Decades ago, the Special Affairs Bureau could not have known any of this.

Yu Sheng opened the file and let his eyes move over the action record code named “Adulthood.” At the start there was an extra section, a set of notes that listed when the Fairy Tale Otherworld first appeared and its early impact events. Most of it matched what Little Red Riding Hood had told him in the Orphanage.

The first outbreak happened inside Warm Sun Orphanage, which was attached to a charity under the Organization. In the half month before the outbreak, several children woke from nightmares and wandered the halls or fainted during the day. At night, patrol staff reported hearing odd sounds from the dorms, like wolves howling, wind rushing, or soldiers marching in formation.

According to the record, the officials did take this seriously. The day after the patrol report, a Special Affairs Bureau investigation team entered the Orphanage for a full check. An anomalous physician came with them and examined the children who had nightmares or fainted. As far as standard procedure went, the Special Affairs Bureau and the Organization did well. There were no major gaps.

Even so, the team found no trace of Fairy Tale. Maybe the tools back then were not enough, or maybe Fairy Tale was still too small and in hiding. Even the anomalous physician, with all those skills, could not find any clues in the children’s nightmares.

Soon after that early investigation ended, Fairy Tale showed its fangs in the real world, if only a little.

Over one night, a wild thicket of roses grew from the dorm area and covered the entire grounds. At dawn, the roses faded away. A young girl and two night guards were missing and never found.

Bai Li Qing said in a calm voice: “We later confirmed the first story to lose control was Sleeping Beauty. At first, the Special Affairs Bureau judged it as a leakage from some unknown Otherworld and believed that Otherworld was parasitic on the Orphanage. The Organization evacuated everyone from the Orphanage and moved the Cursed Children to other facilities. Then an action team of elite investigators from the Special Affairs Bureau went into the Orphanage and did an extremely thorough search.

“The result was easy to guess, they found nothing connected to any Otherworld. While the investigation stalled, a second loss of control happened. One child who had been moved fainted and turned into an out-of-control Giant Wolf.

“Luckily, when we moved the children we had already considered possible contamination. The new Containment Facility had higher security. The Giant Wolf was subdued quickly. We could not save the child, but the damage did not spread. Because we stepped in on time, we finally caught some clues about Fairy Tale. We confirmed the existence of the Black Forest. That was the first subset to be named.”

She pointed at the file in front of Yu Sheng.

“After that came the Adulthood operation.”

Without looking up, Yu Sheng turned the page and asked: “At first you thought the Black Forest was the entire unknown Otherworld?”

“Yes. We had not yet confirmed other subsets,” said Bai Li Qing with a nod. “Mapping the structure of Fairy Tale came much later.”

Yu Sheng hummed softly and kept reading.

He saw that the Special Affairs Bureau had used technical means to lock onto the Black Forest’s entry window and then attempted a Deep Dive. The heart of the Adulthood operation was this Deep Dive.

When he saw the words “Deep Dive,” Yu Sheng thought at once of Xu Jiali. That strong man was a veteran Deep Diver. From what he had learned from Xu Jiali and Li Lin earlier, a Deep Diver was a kind of special operator, stronger, more versatile, and more elite than regular Bureau agents. They were good at extreme missions in dangerous places and, with special gear and methods, could enter battlefields beyond normal imagination to fight things outside reason and common sense.

He asked with curiosity: “This Deep Dive here, how did it work exactly?”

“You can think of it as a controlled and targeted descent into a specific Otherworld,” said Bai Li Qing, open about it as if it were not secret. “By injecting an Inducer and overlaying neural signals, we can guide an operative’s consciousness to the edge of the rational world. Then, with a dedicated device called The Door, those hypnotized personnel can be sent into the Otherworld and woken up on the other side. It does not always work, but it works for most Otherworlds.”

Irene muttered: “That sounds very troublesome, and very dangerous.”

“Yes, troublesome and dangerous,” Bai Li Qing said, her gaze falling on Yu Sheng. “Especially compared to your The Door. But the advantage is that the process is controllable, repeatable, and scalable. We can use it on more people. To fight the many Otherworlds and Entities, we need many hands.”

Yu Sheng said nothing and turned the next page.

What met his eyes first was a long list of names.

The moment he saw it, his expression changed.

Bai Li Qing’s voice reached him. It was still even, but carried a heavy, solemn weight: “In the operation code named Adulthood, twelve Deep Divers, thirteen Special Affairs Bureau agents, and seven logistics and support staff were killed or went missing. Four children died on site due to a loss of control in the Otherworld. Six outer monitoring staff suffered shock effects and, over the next few years, fell into madness and died early.”

Even Irene, who was usually all jokes, went quiet. The little Doll stared at the file with a complicated look and said nothing for a long time.

With a serious face, Yu Sheng read on. He skipped parts that were too technical or already known and scanned the action logs line by line.

The Deep Divers made three dives. The first attempt failed. The Inducer put the team to sleep for a time. In the hazy border of awareness, they found only a chaotic barrier and could not enter any Otherworld.

During the second attempt, some members briefly entered a space that was empty and dim and tangled with strange webbed structures. The space rang with a noise like crying. It did not seem to be any subset of Fairy Tale.

On the third attempt, the mass casualties happened.

The Deep Dive Team almost all got lost the instant they entered the alien space. Only two made it back, and they died within minutes for unknown reasons. Then the contamination burst out. Some unknown thing came into the real world and began to kill every adult on site.

At the critical moment the safety protocol worked. The facility was shut at once, and the pollution was held inside the lab. The price was the lives of Bureau agents and staff who could not evacuate, and the lives of four children.

Yu Sheng’s brow drew tight. He studied the observations from the second dive and the loss of control during the third. Something was wrong. [This does not match.]

Soon he realized where the mismatch came from.

He raised his head and asked, eyes on Bai Li Qing: “Did they go into the Black Forest?”

Then he added: “I have been in the Black Forest. It is dangerous. There are wolves, shadows, and rules that can kill you. But in my view, if you act with care, at least in the short term it does not kill you right away. Even if adults face targeted malice there, it should not be as bad as the report says.”

He shook his head and did not finish the rest.

Those well trained, battle tested Deep Divers should not have been wiped out that fast even if they were doomed in the end. The Black Forest did not have a mechanism that swallowed intruders in an instant. It was not a place that was empty and dim and woven with weird nets, full of crying noise.

“That is the key,” said Bai Li Qing with a small nod to his question. “Based on the direct records at the time, they did not enter the Black Forest.”

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened: “Then where?”

“It may have been a subset open only to adults. Or it may have been the void between subsets. It could even have been deeper, the core of Fairy Tale. There are too many possibilities,” Bai Li Qing said with a soft sigh. “Look at the two appended records. One is a later recollection by an outer monitoring staff member. The other was written in his last moments by a person inside who died on site.”