Chapter 250
Chapter 250: People Outside
Before Yu Sheng opened the message from “Three Thousand Wayward Disciples,” he’d already run through every possibility. He’d even imagined that this online friend—someone he’d only chatted with a handful of times—might identify the cloth strip in his hand with a single sentence.
He did not expect the other man to pull out another scrap of fabric.
The color wasn’t quite the same as the one Yu Sheng had found in that room, but the pattern along the edge matched perfectly.
Yu Sheng snapped fully awake. He shot to his feet, opened the editor in his phone, and fired off a message: “You have one too? Where did you get it?”
“It belongs to my sect brother. I don’t know where it came from,” Three Thousand Wayward Disciples replied quickly. “I saw it once years ago. When I saw the photo you sent, it looked familiar. I had to think for a long time before I finally remembered.”
A moment later, Yu Sheng’s phone buzzed again.
“After we talked about that item last time, I got held up with random chores and never had time to really think it through. I only got some free time recently,” Three Thousand Wayward Disciples wrote. “Looking back now, the ‘text’ on the thing you found earlier is actually four or five parts similar to the patterns on this cloth scrap. It really looks like they came from the same source.”
“I think so too,” Yu Sheng typed back immediately. “This is the second time I’ve found this kind of ‘foreign object’ in that weird room. I sent the metal component I got before to the Special Operations Bureau, but they still haven’t gotten any results.”
Two minutes passed before the reply came. “The Special Operations Bureau? Oh. You’re in the Borderland?”
Yu Sheng froze. “You’re not in the Borderland?”
Another buzz. A new message appeared in the Border Comms window.
“I’m at the Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain.”
The name was unfamiliar. Out of habit, Yu Sheng searched his memory for anything that matched and came up empty. He swiped over, opened the search function built into Border Comms, and typed in Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain.
The moment he hit search, excitement rose in his chest—sharp, ridiculous, undeniable. Not because of the cloth, not because of the patterns, but because Three Thousand Wayward Disciples had just said he was from outside the Borderland.
Yu Sheng had never expected that, on Border Comms, he could actually contact someone who lived beyond the Borderland’s edge. Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain was the first place name from “outside” he had ever learned.
He’d always known the world beyond the Borderland was vast. He had even opened a door leading out there with his own hands. By rights, none of this should have made him so keyed up.
But knowing and feeling were two different things.
Talking to someone through a communication tool—someone far away, somewhere he didn’t even recognize—felt completely different from the abstract idea of “outside.”
The search page refreshed.
The first thing he saw was a red-highlighted headline:
“Warm Congratulations on the Successful Conclusion of the 337th Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain Beast Taming Summit Tournament; Beast Taming Peak Immortal Yuan He Delivers an Important Speech”
A thumbnail sat beneath it. A tall, thin middle-aged man with an otherworldly air stood on a round disk floating in midair, holding a dust whisk. Misty mountains and gleaming waters stretched behind him like a blessed painting. In front of him was a sea of white-robed people—cultivator disciples from different sects packed so densely the crowd had no visible end.
Farther away, pavilions and halls lurked among green peaks and clear rivers, half-hidden by glowing auspicious clouds.
Yu Sheng frowned, looked back at the headline, then down at the picture again. He tried to process the sheer amount of information and found his thoughts sliding, unbidden, into a familiar groove.
He wasn’t even sure what he was thinking. He was just thinking.
Foxy leaned in, stared at the screen for a long moment, and sighed. “Oh—pretty retro.”
Yu Sheng’s thoughts snapped off. He looked down at Irene, who had leaned in as well. “Do you think there’s a chance…”
Before he could finish, Irene muttered, “This architecture looks kind of familiar.”
“It can’t be that much of a coincidence.”
“I mean…” Irene drew out the words, and her voice tightened as if she could hear his own lack of confidence. “The universe is huge. Places can have the same vibe. And last time, when you did the door opening, you only saw a quick glimpse. No details. How could it match that perfectly?”
She hesitated, then pushed on anyway. “Besides, even if it really is that kind of coincidence, it’s not a big deal. Look at that crowd. Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain sounds like it’s covering a massive area…”
Her voice trailed off. She dropped her gaze and started picking at a loose thread on Yu Sheng’s clothes like it was the most urgent task in the world.
Foxy glanced between Irene and Yu Sheng, completely lost. She hadn’t been there for the overnight door-opening tests that had made the entire Borderland shudder, so she had no idea what they were talking about.
Yu Sheng didn’t explain. He only kept remembering things he shouldn’t be able to picture so clearly: Senior Brother spinning while dangling from a roof beam, and the old man among immortal peaks and auspicious clouds, swinging a copper-headed belt like he was working a field.
When Yu Sheng switched back to the chat and saw the ID “Three Thousand Wayward Disciples” again, the uneasy feeling only deepened. His imagination kept drifting.
Was it really that coincidental?
Could it get even more coincidental?
In the end, he forced himself to stop spiraling. He set the coincidence aside and replied, “Sorry, I went to look something up. This is my first time talking to someone from outside the Borderland. Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain seems like a nice place.”
What he really wanted was to dig for identity details—real name, background, what kind of work someone did at a place like that. But after a moment’s thought, he swallowed the urge. He and Three Thousand Wayward Disciples weren’t close. They’d only exchanged a few conversations, and prying too hard would be suspicious in the most obvious way.
The reply came quickly. “That’s normal. Most people who use Border Comms are from your Borderland. Outsiders don’t use it much, and it’s even worse here at Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain—especially my few senior brothers in the sect. Busy with their own affairs all day. Narrow horizons…”
The tone was casual. The conversation still felt normal.
Yu Sheng told himself there was no reason to be nervous, but the tension eased anyway. He steered the topic back to the cloth scraps. “You said your cloth scrap belongs to a senior brother in your sect, but you don’t know where it came from. Then he should know, right? Can you ask him?”
“My senior brother…” This time, the reply hesitated. The typing indicator flashed, vanished, flashed again, and only then did the message come through. “Sigh. He went wandering years ago. If I could find him, this would be easy.”
After a pause, another message arrived.
“My senior brother has always loved roaming. In his early years he traveled the world, and he often brought back strange, bizarre objects. He even caused quite a few incidents in the sect. Compared to most of the oddities he brought back, this cloth was one of the few ‘well-behaved’ items. On ordinary days it just lay quietly in the Treasure Pavilion. It didn’t make noise, it didn’t brawl with other oddities, and it never tricked or bullied the sect’s disciples.
“That’s why, after I managed my senior brother’s Treasure Pavilion for so many years, I almost forgot about the cloth scrap pressed at the bottom of a box.
“I was curious too. I asked my senior brother why he kept such a plain ‘mortal object’ in the Treasure Pavilion, and what was special about it. But at the time he was terribly drunk and didn’t wake for three years. I asked several times and got no answer, so I forgot about it. Thinking about it now, I truly regret it.”
Yu Sheng read the long explanation carefully, and his first thought was not about the cloth at all.
What kind of junk did that wandering senior brother usually collect?
Since when was it normal for items in a Treasure Pavilion to get into brawls?
As for “didn’t wake for three years,” Yu Sheng barely blinked. Cultivators were cultivators. Why would common sense apply?
He even had Foxy sitting right beside him, and she could eat more than twenty steamed buns in one meal.
He complained to himself for a while, but at least now he understood: this was probably just their local flavor. He didn’t dare push further. Instead, he sent, “If your senior brother comes back, or if you learn more about this cloth through other channels, could you tell me?”
The reply came at once. “Naturally. I may not love roaming the world to collect oddities like my senior brother does, but I’m interested in this item now. You and I are far apart, and the Borderland is the strangest place in the universe. Yet similar objects are in your hands and mine at the same time—this is rare. Very rare.”
They chatted a little longer, then said goodbye.
When Yu Sheng looked up again, daylight had filled the room.
“Well… it’s morning already,” he said as he climbed out of bed. He took a deep breath and shook his head, half amused, half helpless. “Still didn’t investigate anything… but I did stumble into a pile of intel from directions I never expected.”
He stretched and realized he wasn’t even that tired. He’d slept three or four hours at most, but he still felt strangely energetic.
After thinking it through, he decided it was probably the two bowls of “fox stew.” Forget the look and the taste—the aftereffects were terrifyingly strong.
He absentmindedly rubbed the fluff behind Foxy’s ear, then went to the window and looked out at the street washed in sunlight.
Irene pattered over, climbed onto the windowsill, and watched with him. Two seconds later, she looked up and asked, “Do you want to go see Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain?”
Yu Sheng stared at her, expression blank. “How did you make that jump?”
“You’ve never been outside, but you’re interested in outside. You’ve never known anyone outside, and now you do. You never knew what places were on the other side of your doors, and now you have one exact location,” Irene said, counting on her fingers. “Therefore, you want to go see Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain.”
Yu Sheng stared back, eye to eye with the Little Doll.
This little thing’s mental leaps were outrageous.
…But her instincts were also annoyingly accurate.