Chapter 203

Chapter 203: Mind Shelter

Yu Sheng placed this “first door” at the end of the platform’s central axis. Then he raised a wall behind it. After that, he formed two rows of tall pillars in front of the door and shaped a smaller rock platform between the pillars, finishing the initial decoration.

It was still just a rough outline, but as the Hotel’s base, it finally looked the part.

Yu Sheng had originally planned to go deeper into the valley and check the crash site of the celestial shuttle. He still remembered telling Bai Li Qing he’d bring a group of Special Operations Bureau experts over to investigate. But building the teleportation door took longer than expected, so he had to push that back for now.

Now it was time to enter the wasteland and confirm whether the mind shelter worked as planned.

Dream Entry: Sinking.

His consciousness slipped through that murky veil of shadows. Yu Sheng had grown more and more practiced at entering the wasteland on his own. He almost didn’t need Irene to “hypnotize” and “guide” him anymore. By sheer will, he could sink into the wasteland within his dream. When he opened his eyes on the other side, the first thing he saw was the dim, gloomy sky and the boundless plain stretching out beneath it.

Yu Sheng took a slow breath and started walking by instinct across the vast emptiness.

Irene and Foxy followed a beat later, stepping into this mind space as well. The three moved forward together. Before they’d gone far, two familiar figures appeared ahead.

Little Red Riding Hood was resting on the grass with her wolf pack. Nearby stood Princess Snow White, thin and small as ever. Farther off, Thunder Titan’s massive shadow was gradually fading into the air.

As Yu Sheng walked up behind them, he heard Little Red Riding Hood muttering to herself: “Ambush… almost had it… no honor…” and other angry fragments.

“Didn’t win again?” Yu Sheng asked cheerfully. “Get beat up pretty badly?”

“If I’d won, I wouldn’t be here,” Little Red Riding Hood snapped, glancing up at him. Then she flopped backward onto the grass. “I’m so mad. I had it under control, and then something suddenly came up from under my feet. I didn’t notice, I panicked, and once I panicked it was over. I’m so mad.”

She kept grumbling, still simmering. Princess Snow White stood beside them with a helpless look. After listening for a moment, she sighed. “You’re not bad. I got beat worse than you. Bronze Titan and Frost Titan almost got killed by that crazy woman.”

Little Red Riding Hood pouted, then rolled over and sat up. “Next time I’m going to try a new tactic…”

“That’s what you said last time,” Princess Snow White said.

Yu Sheng listened without interrupting, but his expression slowly turned strange.

Little Red Riding Hood noticed at once. She stopped mid-sentence and frowned at him. “Why are you looking at me like that? Is something wrong with me?”

“Two things,” Yu Sheng said, snapping out of it. “First, your mindset changed. Did you notice? Your fear of the black forest is weakening.”

Little Red Riding Hood froze. Then, as if she only realized it now, she lowered her head and studied herself in silence.

“Seems… yeah,” she murmured. After a long pause, she whispered, “Is this what having confidence feels like?”

Something in her expression softened. She smiled.

“Feels pretty good,” she said, looking up at Yu Sheng. “So what’s the second thing?”

“Second—did you see Squirrel this time?”

“Squirrel?” Little Red Riding Hood raised her brows, clearly thrown. Then she frowned, thinking. “Now that you mention it… I did see it. But it was really strange this time. It kept spacing out. No matter what I asked, it wouldn’t say anything. It only told me, ‘You’ll know.’ I don’t know what’s going on.”

So Squirrel hadn’t brought those old truths to her on its own.

Yu Sheng let out a quiet breath. He wasn’t surprised.

Then, suddenly, he felt something and looked up toward the distance.

A massive phantom appeared above the plain. An inverted, shattered spire abruptly formed in the air. Within the crumbling illusion, wildly growing golden hair snapped and faded. Countless shadowy monsters roared and vanished into deep cracks in the broken spire. A slender figure wrapped in golden hair fell out of the collapsing nightmare—and as she fell, that fluttering gold quickly lost its magic and turned into black strands.

A sharp scream tore through the sky.

A pumpkin carriage, already breaking apart, burst out of a light-warped rift and caught Princess Rapunzel as she fell. Behind it, hot fragments and smoke kept collapsing and spraying out, like an out-of-control airship wobbling toward a crash.

Roses erupted from the earth, surging upward like an inverted geyser to cushion the dangerous landing. A scream came from inside the pumpkin carriage: “Ahhh! Thorns! Thorns! Sleeping Beauty, you might as well not have caught me—ow, ow, ow! Thorns!”

Before Yu Sheng could even process that, another tearing sound shook the wasteland.

In the middle of the rose field, a fireball erupted. A burning fighter jet—so wildly out of place it almost felt like a joke—blasted out over the roses and crashed into the nearby wilderness with a shriek of metal. Smoke spread in all directions. A figure in a strange commander’s uniform crawled out of the rose field, roaring into the radio in her hand, “Scarecrow! Move your machine-gun position fifty meters left! The witch division is pushing up!”

Yu Sheng stared, dumbfounded, at the commander crawling out of the roses.

As the two of them locked eyes in mutual shock, smoke rose in the distance. The sky flared with dragon fire. A red dragon wailed as it broke through the clouds and spiraled down, crashing crookedly into the far-off land.

Where the dragon fell, a massive beanstalk exploded upward, twisting into the sky. A raging sea of fire climbed the stalk. Within the phantom flames came a girl’s wild laughter—

“Hahahahaha—today! Every single one of you has to meet your great-grandmother! I said so!”

Then that laughing girl got kicked off the beanstalk by a mighty black figure in medieval plate armor. The armored brute shouted as it kicked, “For the King’s glory!”

Yu Sheng caught a glimpse of the crest on the brute’s shield.

A kitty head.

For a while, the scene was impossibly lively.

Irene floated beside Yu Sheng’s head, gasping like she was watching fireworks at point-blank range. Every few seconds she blurted, “Whoa.” Even Foxy—who could usually accept anything—stared wide-eyed. Then, after a long moment, Foxy clapped hard, tails fanning like a peacock. “Whoa—so lively!”

She even looked happy about it.

Eventually, the sudden chaos began to taper off. Rifts still opened now and then, and some unlucky loser who’d lost a nightmare would tumble into the plain in a ridiculous pose, but at least they weren’t pouring in all at once anymore.

The flames faded. The rose field withered like a dream. The smoke scattered. The fallen red dragon dissolved into mist.

The fairy tale members seemed to understand what had happened. They hurriedly reined in the power that had leaked out of their nightmares, checked themselves and each other, then gathered toward Yu Sheng.

Little Red Riding Hood, being the oldest among them, naturally took charge of keeping order and explaining.

As for Yu Sheng, he was numb.

He’d thought his imagination was decent. After last time’s “baptism” with Princess Snow White and the seven Thunder Titan, he’d assumed he could handle anything the fairy tale organization threw at him.

Apparently not.

After holding it in for a long time, he finally muttered to Princess Snow White, “Is your whole group always like this?”

Princess Snow White blinked, clearly not understanding. “Like what? This is normal.”

Yu Sheng: “…Sure.”

“Oh.” Princess Snow White’s expression shifted as she finally grasped what he meant. “It’s actually fine. They just fell in together this time, so it got messy. When you met Little Red Riding Hood alone, weren’t you used to it?”

Yu Sheng pointed at the black-haired figure in a commander’s uniform, bandages wrapped around her head, several guard drones parked beside her in stern silence. “That’s Dorothy?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s her subset like?”

“In the war-ravaged Oz kingdom, Dorothy’s resistance army fights a long, drawn-out war against the evil witch division.”

“And the one with a head full of thorns is…”

“Cinderella. Subset: ‘eternal ball.’ Every day after midnight, she has to drive the pumpkin carriage and fight her way out. Good news: her carriage can fly. Bad news: the prince set up anti-air positions around the castle.”

“And the blonde one earlier…” Yu Sheng frowned. “Princess Rapunzel, right? She’s always black-haired when I see her. I didn’t recognize her for a second.”

“Yeah. Princess Rapunzel. Subset: ‘high tower.’ Random floors spawn demons. Honestly, she’s not too bad. She just has to fight demons in the tower. The setting’s pretty simple.”

Yu Sheng said nothing.

He sat down on the grass with a blank expression, tilted his head at a forty-five-degree angle, and stared up at the sky—waiting to see if it planned to drop any more princes or princesses on him.