Chapter 239

Chapter 239: Something Feels Off

To be honest, his first bite was hard to take. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry. He hadn’t eaten in a long time and was starving. It wasn’t that he didn’t dare challenge the “food” either. He had eaten Foxy’s stew once and knew that even though it looked outrageous, it tasted fine. Plus, the fox was sitting right there with her chin in her hands, big eyes shining at him. He had to try a bite.

The problem was that the stew dodged the spoon.

Yes, whatever strange Cyber Immortal Arts had been used on this mess, it dodged the spoon. It wriggled and puffed up a lump in the middle like it was flipping him off. That was far beyond Yu Sheng’s idea of what food should be.

After a long mental battle while staring at the bowl, he finally raised his head, conflicted: “Is… that normal?”

“Ah, sorry, I forgot one more step!” Foxy slapped her forehead, drew a few glowing symbols in the air, and muttered to the table. None of it looked like “cooking” at all. When she finished, she exhaled and smiled. “Okay, benefactor. It understands.”

Yu Sheng was baffled. [Huh? Understands? Who understands? Why is the last step of cooking talking to the dish so it ‘understands’? Borderland machines have a Machine Spirit. Did Foxy’s pot just refine a food soul?]

He looked down. The shifting, color changing matter had gone still. He thought for several seconds, then checked with Foxy: “Let me be clear. This thing does not have sentience, right?”

“Of course not.” Foxy waved her hands. “Heaven and earth have their own spirit. A stew with a soul just means you temporarily stew Earth Spirit into the food, but if there’s too much soul, it moves around… That’s what Mother said.”

[Even these few sentences would be a sanity check for normal people.]

He took a deep breath, imagined the glowing stuff as an entity’s tentacle or Wolf Granny’s heart, and ate with his eyes closed.

A mild heat flowed through him, then a decent flavor followed. There was no weird taste, and nothing suddenly wriggled in his mouth. He couldn’t even tell what the texture was, but it was clearly normal food.

It tasted better than Foxy’s last try.

“This is… pretty good,” Yu Sheng opened his eyes, surprised as he peered at the fox stew. “It’s better than last time.”

Beside him, the fox squinted with joy. She rocked a little and swished her many tails: “As long as benefactor likes it.”

Yu Sheng took a second bite.

In a few breaths his fatigue melted away. His drowsy head cleared. It wasn’t a sharp, jittery rush. It felt like he’d had full rest and full fuel. The food kept nourishing him, soaking into his limbs and bones.

He frowned. Foxy, meanwhile, pulled two chicklings from her tail and gave each a small bowl of stew: “Bai Qie, Yan Ju, time to eat. You two get to enjoy today thanks to benefactor.”

The two chicklings happily shuffled over.

They had grown a lot, clearly well cared for. Bai Qie already had a tuft of pale gold fluff on its head, and a faint, half transparent glow trailed behind Yan Ju’s tail.

Yu Sheng stared.

[Something is wrong. Let me look again.]

He rubbed his eyes and looked back at Foxy.

“Benefactor, what’s wrong?”

“Let me check,” he said after a pause, pointing at the stew. “This really is the ‘home style dish’ you ate every day back home?”

“No. Only on special days, like when I scored 100 on a test, or on holidays,” Foxy said honestly. “It takes a lot of work and burns up energy, especially during Spirit Infusion. I’m not used to it yet, so I can only make it once in a while.”

[This silly fox definitely mixed up cooking with something else. What is her home like?]

Yu Sheng didn’t ask more. He finished every bite, then watched the two chicklings strut around the table, their feathers clearly glossier than before, and fell into thought.

He and the two little birds stared at each other.

Bai Qie and Yan Ju stopped, tilted their heads, and met Yu Sheng’s gaze without fear. A strange light flickered in their tiny eyes.

[I almost think these two little feathered beasts are about to get smart.]

He had no proof.

…

At the same time, outside the city.

The Borderland was not infinite. Boundary City, though huge and almost like an endless sprawl, still had borders.

At the city’s far edge, the place called The End Web was a ring of heavy factories and Three Dimensional Farmland. Outside the ring stood the council’s City District Walls. Beyond the walls stretched the wide wilderness. Only a few stable settlements dotted that boundless plain, with council observation posts and outposts near those settlements and other key sites. Under normal conditions, the Special Affairs Bureau did not send people deep into that barren zone.

Today was different.

Several “meteors” that had flown over Boundary City had fallen into the city outskirts. They had to be recovered and contained as fast as possible.

Song Cheng jumped down from a vehicle, pulled his coat tighter in the cold wind that swept the plain, and strode ahead.

The land was flat and grassy to the horizon. The far city cut a jagged silhouette against the sky. In the other direction, hazy curtains of light rose like pillars, stabbing into the dull heavens far away. Those were the Boundary Stele at the Borderland’s far edge, the farthest a normal resident could ever walk in a lifetime.

“This landing point is really remote. A little farther and we’d be outside the Border,” a Special Affairs Bureau operative muttered. “Hard to find.”

“Be glad it drifted outward, not toward the city. If it fell closer to the city, that would be a mess,” another operative said. “And it would be the third brigade pulling overtime.”

Song Cheng coughed twice: “What are the instrument readings now?”

“Depth 0. Slight shift toward L-1, still within safe range,” a subordinate reported. “No contamination found.”

Song Cheng nodded.

A shout came from ahead: “Found it! The impact point is here!”

A ten-plus meter wide impact crater, like a black burn scar, had been stamped into the wild grass.

A small drone hummed into position above the crater and watched the environment. A legged robot walked in to set up monitors and basic safeguards along the rim and inner wall. After a long minute, the operators in heavy suits came forward to look into the crater.

A faint glow caught Song Cheng’s eye.

He stared at the object in the pit with a veteran’s serious face. An irregular half transparent white crystal lay there, with marks of melting and resolidifying on its skin. The soil around it still radiated heat and let off a thin white smoke. Tiny glittering shards were scattered near the main crystal, answering the larger piece with a slow, pulsing twinkle.

Someone whispered behind him, tense and wary: “So that’s a Dark Angel’s ‘corpse’…”

“They’re only small fragments. Its main structure ‘evaporated’ during descent,” Song Cheng said. He gestured behind him. “Begin recovery. Start with unmanned contact testing.”

A little later, he backed away from the crater and stopped by the command truck.

“How are the other teams?”

“Teams two and three are still searching within the Director’s window. No debris yet. Team four just reported a small fragment. First stage contact test is under way,” said a headset-wearing comms tech. “One complication: the small fragment landed near a settlement, two to three hundred meters from the wall. The settlement isn’t damaged, but because the impact is close and locals saw the flash during Angel Fall, there may be some risk. An assessment team has left headquarters.”

“Good,” Song Cheng nodded, then looked up at the sky. “Wind is picking up here. Forecast says temporal turbulence. Once the container is on the truck, we withdraw fast. It’s finally the weekend. Let’s not blink and wake up on Monday.”

“Copy!”

Song Cheng grunted. He was about to go supervise recovery in person when the comms tech’s face changed. The tech spoke quickly into a channel, listened, then looked up.

“Chief, there may be a problem,” he said. “Team three just called in. They found an impact crater-”

He swallowed.

“But the pit is empty.”

“…What?!”