Chapter 177

Chapter 177: With the Wolf Pack

Have I ever offended anyone?

Yu Sheng’s question left Little Red Riding Hood stunned for a moment. A few seconds later she understood why he asked. She frowned: “You mean the museum job was a trap set for me?”

“Don’t blame me for being paranoid. There are a lot of suspicious parts, but the biggest is why it landed on you,” Yu Sheng said, face serious. “Remember that ‘sacrifice’? If not for me, Foxy, and Irene buying you time with that Evil Wolf crawling out of the shadows, you would have lost control. And you stepped into the white exhibition hall at that exact time because you took a time-limited commission to retrieve an item. Now we checked, and the commission was fake. That ‘coincidence’ is hard to swallow.”

“The ones who made the sacrifice were two Angel Cultists.” Little Red Riding Hood’s face turned ugly. She hated anything related to those lunatics. “You’re saying the people who follow the Dark Angels set a trap for me? Why? That makes no sense.”

“That’s why I asked if you’ve offended anyone.”

“What kind of ‘offense’ would make those crazies target me?” Little Red Riding Hood’s brows squeezed together. “You know I never deal with anything tied to the Dark Angels. I usually take mid-level jobs through proper channels, and half of them come from the Special Affairs Bureau. The Fairy Tale organization is very careful with outside contacts. We might have competitors in the spirit realm detective business, but that doesn’t turn into ‘enemies.’”

“Then there’s another possibility. You didn’t offend the Angel Cultists, but you have ‘value’ to them,” Yu Sheng said after a thought. “You just said it. They’re lunatics. Lunatics don’t think like normal people. Maybe they believe you help their ‘cause,’ so they acted.”

Little Red Riding Hood stayed silent, trapped between doubt and thought.

Yu Sheng knew he was casting too wide a net, and you cannot figure out the motive of Angel Cultists by sitting around guessing. He coughed twice and pulled the topic back.

“Anyway, let’s talk about the commission itself. What do you know so far?”

“I contacted the client directly. Looking back, because we knew each other well, I didn’t check the details closely,” Little Red Riding Hood said, taking a slow breath. “The electronic commission file did have the Curiosities Association’s mark and a one-time serial number, but it wasn’t sent by the association’s liaison department. The client forwarded it to me with a personal account. We’ve done it that way before, so I didn’t think twice.”

Yu Sheng frowned: “Do big organizations allow such loopholes?”

“In principle, no. In practice, it’s hard to stop,” she said. “It’s year end. Big organizations like the Curiosities Association keep tight deadlines for outsourcing. Every year around now, the people in charge rush to assign jobs before the cutoff. That way the dispatch timestamp jumps the line during settlement. Everyone has KPI pressure.”

“…That reason is shockingly realistic,” Yu Sheng muttered.

Little Red Riding Hood pointed at the nine tailed fox dragging a tail on the floor: “Doesn’t your fox also drag a tail on the ground for a very realistic reason?”

“Fair.” Yu Sheng made peace with reality in an instant, then sighed as he leaned back on the sofa: “The world is a huge makeshift troupe. That line is pure gold.”

He rubbed his brow for a couple seconds and looked up: “So right now, we can’t confirm whether the original commission was forged by that contact, or if someone higher up in the Curiosities Association deleted the record after dispatching it?”

Little Red Riding Hood shook her head: “No way to confirm yet, but the Special Affairs Bureau will investigate. This kind of loophole gets hidden when nothing goes wrong. Now that something did, it’s on the table. They’ll check everyone from top to bottom.”

“Then we should ask around at the Special Affairs Bureau later,” Yu Sheng said under his breath. “What about the contact who died? What exactly happened?”

“Not clear yet. From what I heard, he fell from a height and hit his head. He died on the spot,” Little Red Riding Hood said. “I’ve arranged a visit tonight. He lived alone. A nephew is handling things.”

“I’m going with you,” Yu Sheng said at once.

Little Red Riding Hood hesitated and looked at him: “You want to…”

“Maybe we can still ‘ask’ something. Like at the museum,” Yu Sheng said, face firm. “I don’t know what the limits are for a ‘Conversation with the Dead,’ but we can try our luck.”

She thought it over, then nodded: “Okay. Should we leave now?”

“Now,” Yu Sheng said, standing up. He glanced at Irene. “You and Foxy stay home. I’ll go alone this time.”

Irene jumped up: “Huh? Why?”

“We’re going to the home of the deceased to ask questions. Do you think it’s proper to show up hugging a doll?” Yu Sheng rolled his eyes.

Irene bared her teeth, very unhappy, but in the end she had to accept his reason and sat back down: “Fine. I’ll stay home… then I’m using your computer to play games!”

“Go ahead, but use your own account, and do not touch my personal files.”

“Got it.”

After he settled the little doll, Yu Sheng turned and found Foxy standing behind him with worry all over her face: “Benefactor, are you sure you don’t need me? I can help fight.”

Yu Sheng’s eye twitched. He had to repeat that this trip was to a dead man’s home to investigate, not to fight. Starting a fight in a mourning hall would be wrong, whether with the family or the deceased.

Listening to them, Little Red Riding Hood stared again. She gained a deeper understanding of the strange spirit of the people in this house.

After telling Foxy there were leftovers in the fridge and she could heat them up if hungry, and warning her not to burn down or tear down the house, Yu Sheng finally changed into going-out clothes and stepped out of 66 Wutong Road with Little Red Riding Hood.

In the short walk from the door to the other side of the street, Yu Sheng looked back three or four times.

“You’re that worried?” Little Red Riding Hood asked.

“This is my first time going out alone and leaving both Foxy and Irene at home,” he said, sounding worried. “I’m afraid I’ll come back to a demolished house.”

“She’s a nine tailed fox, not a husky with nine tails,” Little Red Riding Hood sighed. “And Irene seems pretty steady to me. Maybe she just talks a bit too fast.”

“You’re giving her way too high a rating. If you knew what she’s done, you wouldn’t say that,” Yu Sheng said with feeling. “Leave her alone and she’ll stew herself, believe it? Last time we almost set the house on fire. The first thing that caught fire was her.”

“?”

“You’ll see one day,” Yu Sheng waved. “Anyway, how are we getting there?”

The contact lived in another district closer to the city center. A taxi would take more than forty minutes.

Yu Sheng had never been there. Without a saved coordinate, he couldn’t reach it directly with door opening.

To save time and avoid trouble, Little Red Riding Hood offered him a special invitation:

Travel with her Wolf Pack.

In a quiet corner of an alley, Yu Sheng eyed the giant wolf before him, its whole body made of shifting shadow. Its outline rose and fell, never stable.

“Be honest… it won’t bite, right?” he asked, full of doubt. “And can it really carry a person?”

“Of course it can carry people,” Little Red Riding Hood said, helpless at how tense he looked. She felt the simple emotion coming from the shadow wolf and looked even more helpless. “And you’re worried it’ll bite you? It’s worried you’ll bite it.”

“How can you say that!” Yu Sheng glared. “Am I the kind of person who eats anything that moves?”

“…”

Seeing her look, and remembering how he had once urged her to eat Wolf Granny’s meat, Yu Sheng felt awkward. He dropped the argument and copied Little Red Riding Hood, climbing onto the wolf’s back.

“Is this really okay? The wolf is shaking. Maybe it can’t carry heavy loads?”

Little Red Riding Hood shot him a look and slapped the wolf’s head under him: “Coward.”

Then she simply gave the order to the Wolf Pack: “Move out.”

Yu Sheng was about to ask how to control the wolf he was riding, and how to jump between shadows like Little Red Riding Hood did. Before he could speak, his vision lurched.

In the next second, his world changed.

Color drained into heavy blacks and whites. The city’s buildings turned into silhouettes. The roads vanished, replaced by broken “bridges” between clumps of shadow. The normal, orderly scene from one moment ago now looked like a reflection in a shattered mirror. Then the city curled. The floating shards of buildings formed a three-dimensional maze in this black and white world. Near and far, big and small, all rearranged in an instant.

The Wolf Pack sprang forward, light and sure, and flew into the strange sea of shadows.