Chapter 248

Chapter 248: Wind and Snow Cross the Boundary

The bonfire party lasted very late. [Yu Sheng even thought that if kids had endless energy, Little Red Riding Hood and her siblings could have kept going for three days and nights without rest.] After all, the night sky “Brother Yu Sheng” made by hand could have lasted as long as he wished.

But fun always has an end. When the party finally wrapped up, the worn out Cursed Children were carried back to their rooms one by one. Some were so tired they fell asleep by the road, beside walls, or on the grass. The night watchmen King had summoned searched every nook and cranny and tossed each sleepy head onto a bed. A few thirteen and fourteen year olds tried to help the lords clean up, but Teacher Su shooed them away with: “Staying up late is bad for your growth.”

Rapunzel finished the fireworks but still looked unsatisfied. She ran over to ask Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood what excuse they could use to hold another event like this so she could get her fill next time. Her stash of explosives, though, had already made Little Red Riding Hood very alert. Red kept asking where she got so many fireworks and where she had hidden them, but Rapunzel gave up nothing.

Bai Li Qing left before the party ended. It was not because she felt out of place or was killing the mood. Her position is special, and every day, hour, and even minute must be planned. Two hours of doing nothing but watching fireworks and eating barbecue with a bunch of kids was already a rare luxury in her schedule.

Squirrel and Hunter went back to the Black Forest after the party.

Yu Sheng wanted them to stay in the town. Everyone here was happy to welcome these two new neighbors from the Forest. But Squirrel and Hunter insisted on going back.

Squirrel seemed used to life in the Black Forest now. She said she needs the smell of earth mixed with fallen leaves in order to sleep. She needs to go out the Door every day to hunt for acorns to feel at ease. She likes the wind moving through the leaves and the way sunlight turns into spots of light under the canopy. Without these, she gets anxious.

Hunter’s tie to the Black Forest ran even deeper. He also wanted to take care of the little house in the Deep Forest, the one filled with red cloaks.

He and Squirrel were living in that little house now. Together they planned to fix it up so it could be a rest stop when the Cursed Children explored the Forest. As for those red cloaks, they would collect them and send them to the town for the orphanage’s new memorial hall.

They promised to show up a lot in town, like friends who moved nearby and still appear at the door every weekend.

[Yu Sheng felt this was good. As long as they truly liked life now, it was good. There was no need to force everything back into the perfect shape of memory, since memories change with time. The present has its own things worth cherishing.]

Everything grew quiet. The big bonfire in the plaza was almost burned out. Only a red glow pulsed in the ashes. Foxy crouched by the embers, using a stick to roast a few chunks of meat she had found somewhere, very focused.

Yu Sheng lay on the grass at the edge of the plaza. Using the slope to get comfortable, he looked up at the “night” above.

Skirt fabric brushed the grass.

Three little dolls tiptoed over like thieves, clearly plotting mischief. But when they saw Yu Sheng’s eyes open, they all gave sheepish grins and lay down in a neat row on his left.

By the way, Irene, the one with the picture frame on her back, lay on her stomach. If she lay flat on her back, she could not get up again.

“Finally, some peace and quiet,” Irene muttered: “Those kids, wow.”

“But you had a blast,” Yu Sheng said with a glance: “When two kids stopped chasing you, you went over on purpose and smacked them twice.”

“Tch,” Irene hissed through her teeth, then inched closer to his arm and stared wide eyed at the sky.

After a while, the doll sighed: “A quiet night feels great. Too bad there are no stars.”

“Nonsense. I made this night by hand,” Yu Sheng looked at her like she was silly and said: “If you want stars, I have to poke holes in the clouds myself.”

“Then poke them. I want to see stars.”

“Too lazy.”

“Tch.”

Yu Sheng ignored her. He waved at Foxy and called: “Give me a tail.” He borrowed a big, fluffy, toasty tail from the fox maiden, hugged it, and fell fast asleep on the grass.

He slept under the vault of the sky with the fox’s tail as his blanket, beneath the night he had woven himself, and he tried hard to tune out the three dolls’ endless chatter.

He slept soundly.

He had no idea how long he slept. It must have been hours. Then, in the middle of his dream, he felt something.

Wind. A howling wind, like icy air rushing through a cave. It felt like wind and snow blowing into a house, pulsing at the edge of his senses. Cold spread toward him.

Yu Sheng’s eyes snapped open.

The chill at the edge of his senses faded. Warmth returned. He was still lying on the grass in the valley. The bonfire was out. The plaza and the town were quiet. Nothing seemed wrong.

The three Irenes had dozed off at some point. They lay sprawled on the grass, arms and legs everywhere. A pile of warm white tails was pressed against his side. Foxy had curled herself into the ball of tails, only half her body outside. Her head rested on his arm. Her ears twitched softly in the breeze.

Yu Sheng frowned. He was awake now, and reason could tell dream from reality. But the strange feeling from his sleep did not go away. It kept flickering at the edge of his senses.

He gently pushed aside Foxy’s tail and sat up, trying to find the source.

Even though he moved carefully, Foxy woke at once. Like a wary animal, she opened her eyes. A flash of gold red crossed her gaze in the dark, then softened when she saw Yu Sheng. She stretched lazily in the nest of tails and yawned: “Benefactor, you are not sleeping?”

“Did you hear anything?” Yu Sheng whispered: “Wind. Like wind in a cave. A low wooing sound.”

Foxy froze mid stretch. Her eyes turned sharp.

She tilted her head, frowned, and listened. Then she casually plucked both ears off the top of her head, raised them high, and spun them like twin radars to scan the area. She shook her head: “I did not hear anything.”

Yu Sheng’s brow stayed tight.

A second later, his heart jumped. He finally realized something: “Home.”

He yanked open a Door and called over his shoulder: “Wake Irene. I am going home to check. The room at the end of the second floor has something in it.” Before Foxy could answer, he stepped through.

No. 66 Wutong Road was silent. The stair and hall lights were still on, left that way by accident when they went out. Yu Sheng went up to the second floor. After checking that the rest of the place looked normal, he walked to the door of the room at the end of the hall.

The thin wooden door felt like it separated another world. Through the panel he could hear a faint howl, and a thread of cold seeped through the gap under the door.

He gripped the handle, took a breath to steady himself, and pushed.

A sharp wind hit his face, along with a few snowflakes swept up by the air.

Yu Sheng stared, stunned.

The room was still the same room. The roof, walls, and floor were all there. But a steady wind, like air spilling into a cave, swirled in the room. Tiny snowflakes rose out of nowhere from the surface of the opposite wall, spun across the room, and piled in the corners. The snow looked half real, half not, and even covered half of one wall.

He shivered on instinct, shut the door, ran to throw on a down jacket, and came back.

He stepped into the snow filled room. Watching the flakes that drifted out of the wall, feeling the cold that blew in from the same place, his eyes quickly fell on the mirror in the center of the wall.

The mirror showed his reflection, but it also carried another view layered over it. It was the snowy cave he had seen in this mirror once before.

This room at the end of the hall had overlapped again with a cave somewhere unknown. The mouth of the cave was a few meters beyond the mirror. Outside, the wind howled. Blown snow rushed into the cave and piled inside No. 66 Wutong Road.

Yu Sheng pulled his jacket tighter and walked past the mirror. His steps creaked like he was stepping on packed snow. This time, he did not touch the strange mirror. He went to a corner and studied something that kept fluttering there.

It was a torn cloth strip.

He grabbed it and gave a gentle tug. The strip slid into this side of the world.

It seemed to be drifting between two worlds. Yu Sheng did not know why he thought that, but the half real, half unreal way it flapped in the corner made that idea bloom in his mind.

The strip’s other end had not been fixed very firmly. When he pulled, it barely resisted. Once it crossed over, its surface looked solid at once. The edges that had seemed blurry turned sharp. At the same time, the wind in the room grew a bit stronger, but only for a moment. Then it went back to what it had been.

[Did pulling the thing “in” briefly strengthen the link between the two sides? Or did the wind on the other side just happen to gust?] He kept the questions in mind and studied the strip.

It looked torn from a larger piece of cloth. Its edges were jagged. The fabric was light and soft but very strong. Ripping it must have taken great force. It showed a high level of weaving.

He flipped it over. On the other side, pale gold patterns ran along the edge of deep blue cloth, lined up like stylized letters. They gave off a mysterious feel.

After a moment of study, he took out his phone, found the photos he had taken of the iron lump, zoomed in on the symbols carved into it, and compared them to the cloth’s patterns.

They felt similar in style, but he did not dare to draw a conclusion. He was no expert.

Hurrying footsteps sounded in the hall, mixed with a doll’s noisy voice: “He just opened a Door and left, and we had to run all the way to the platform to open a portal… your tail is covering my face… why is it so cold, did the heat shut off or is a window… what the heck?”

Foxy appeared in the doorway. Irene, all 66.6 centimeters of her, shot out from Foxy’s tails and skirt like a tiny rocket. She had not even looked at the room. She slid forward on the snow and slammed into the opposite wall with a very crisp splat.

A moment later Irene got up, took a long breath, and then No. 66 Wutong Road was filled with the “birdsong and sweet fragrance” of very creative language. Yu Sheng lifted her by the collar with one hand, and she quieted down.

“What is going on, how did this happen, what did you do…” Irene stared around and hissed.

Then, feeling it at last, the little doll hugged her arms and shivered. She glanced at the mirror’s view: “Cold cold cold. Yu Sheng, you need to buy me two down jackets.”

“Where am I supposed to find down jackets for a 66 centimeter doll? Also, are you even afraid of cold?” Yu Sheng glared.

“Why can I not be?” Irene wriggled and said: “I just do not freeze to death easily. It does not mean I cannot feel it… ah, thanks, silly fox.”

A tuft of blue foxfire drifted over and circled her, driving away the chill. More blue flames floated around Foxy as she stepped in, scanning the room. She replied without looking: “I am not silly. You are much dumber than I am.”

“This is what I picked up in the corner,” Yu Sheng said before they could start bickering and held up the strip: “It felt like it was floating between two worlds. I compared it to the photos of that iron lump. The patterns seem a bit similar.”

Irene’s attention snapped to the cloth. She grabbed it and studied hard, then gave up. She muttered: “The Special Affairs Bureau still has not replied about the iron lump, and now we have a cloth strip. What do we do? Give it to them too? I do not think they are that reliable…”

“Who else is more reliable? We cannot take it to two fake antique ‘masters’ on the street,” Yu Sheng said. “Things like this are not solved in a day. No reply yet is normal. We should still show them. Maybe putting it with the iron lump will help them figure something out.”

Irene drew out an “oh.” Foxy walked to the mirror, eyes narrowing.

“What are you staring at, silly fox?” Irene asked, looking up: “Is there something weird in the mirror?”

Foxy frowned, then pointed: “Benefactor, are those footprints?”

“Footprints?” Yu Sheng blinked and rushed over: “Where?”

“These,” Foxy said, very serious: “There is a big rock. In the snow beside it, I think I see footprints. And this part looks cleared. It seems someone came.”

With the fox maiden pointing it out, Yu Sheng finally saw the details he had missed.

Faint prints and melt marks speckled the snow near the cave’s mouth. Time had blurred them, but they were clearly left by people, and not long ago.

“So there are people active on the other side, and someone came recently,” Irene said, blinking between the mirror and the torn strip. “With this strip and the iron lump we saw last time… what is that cave? Do people show up and toss things into it from time to time?”

Yu Sheng had no answer.

Just then, he noticed the wind and snow in the room fading fast.

The cold ebbed. The snowflakes that hit his face turned into a faint cool feeling, almost like an illusion. The mirror’s view of the cave turned hazy, as if covered by a thin mist. The mist thinned, the cave scene vanished, and the wind stopped.

“Benefactor, the wind and snow on the other side have stopped,” Foxy said softly.

Yu Sheng looked toward the corner. The piles of snow were disappearing into thin air. In his hand, the strip stayed as it was, just like the metal component last time. “The link cut off,” he said, frowning as he remembered the last time he had seen this. [Could it be that the connection only opens when a blizzard hits on the other side?]

No one could answer.

Yu Sheng led Foxy and the doll out and locked the room carefully, double checking the door.

“We need to buy a camera and aim it at the mirror,” he said at the door: “It needs cloud storage and playback.”

“Better buy a few and cover every corner,” Irene said as she flipped and climbed onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder. “I suspect that when the link opens, more than the mirror changes. Did you notice? The snow blew in from the wall and ceiling corners too. Of course, even with cameras, we might not catch anything useful.”

“We will install them anyway.”

Yu Sheng went back in, spread the strip on the bed pattern side up, and snapped a lot of photos with his phone.

“What about Bai Li Qing right now…” he began.

Irene poked his head: “She is sleeping. It is four in the morning. Do not be a monster. Bother someone else.”

“Fair point. She did sound pretty resentful about this,” Yu Sheng said. He opened the Border forum on his phone, found the oddities board, and posted like last time: “I found another weird thing in the same snowy room, a torn piece of cloth. Size is… The surface has patterns… Other details are in my last post.”

His plan was simple. No one knew what this was. The Special Affairs Bureau would not have results soon. Casting a wide net costs nothing. Maybe an expert would bite one day.

As it turned out, experts sleep at four in the morning.

The post sat for almost half an hour with zero clicks.

Sleep washed over Yu Sheng. He lay back, ready to nap. Just as his eyes were closing, his phone buzzed.

Foxy, who had just turned to leave the doorway, spun on her heel and came back. She stared wide eyed at the letters on the screen, read them, and nodded at Yu Sheng: “Benefactor, someone replied to you. The user is called ‘Wicked Disciple 3000.’”

“Great timing,” Yu Sheng said, picking up the phone from the nightstand. He was about to tap when he froze, staring at the fox maiden. “Wait. You can read this?”

“Yes,” Foxy nodded: “I can read most everyday words now.”

“When did you learn?”

Foxy pulled out the old phone Yu Sheng had given her: “While playing with this. Also by watching Irene argue with people online. I learned a lot.”

Yu Sheng was stunned. “I was going to teach you after the Fairy Tale mess calmed down and we had time. Your learning speed is scary.”

Foxy only scratched her hair and grinned.

Yu Sheng looked at Irene, who was spaced out and had no idea what was going on. She turned, clear eyed and blank, and met his gaze: “What?”

With a caring look, Yu Sheng patted the little doll’s head: “Nothing. Go play.”

“Oh.”

Yu Sheng opened the message from Wicked Disciple 3000. This was the first contact since that person’s last reply to his old post.

There was only one image.

It showed another torn piece of cloth. The edge patterns were exactly the same as the ones on the strip in his hand.