Chapter 250

Chapter 250: People Outside

[Before opening the message from “Wicked Disciple 3000,” Yu Sheng had already imagined every kind of outcome, even the wild idea that this online friend who had only chatted a few times might explain where his cloth strip came from, but he never thought the other person would take out another scrap of cloth.]

The color of that scrap wasn’t quite the same as the one he found in his room, but the patterns along the edge matched perfectly.

Yu Sheng snapped to attention, sprang to his feet, and typed fast on his phone: “You have one too? Where did you get it?”

The reply came quickly from Wicked Disciple 3000: “It’s something kept by my brothers from The Door. I don’t know its origin. I saw it years ago. When I saw the picture you sent, it felt familiar. After thinking for a while, I remembered.”

A moment later the phone buzzed again, and a new message popped up from Wicked Disciple 3000: “After I talked with you last time about that item, I got tied up with other things and never had time to think. Recently I was free and looked back. The ‘writing’ on what you found looks forty to fifty percent like the lines on this cloth. They seem to share the same source.”

“I think so too,” Yu Sheng typed right away, adding: “I’ve now found this kind of ‘foreign object’ in that strange room twice in a row. I sent the earlier Metal Component to the Special Affairs Bureau, but they still haven’t figured it out.”

This time Wicked Disciple 3000 took two minutes to respond: “Special Affairs Bureau? Oh, you’re in Borderland?”

Yu Sheng blinked at that and wrote back without thinking: “You’re not in Borderland?”

The phone hummed, and a new line appeared in the Border chat window: “I’m in Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain.”

The unfamiliar name flashed across the screen. Yu Sheng searched his memory and came up empty, so he slid open Border’s built-in search and typed in Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain to dig up information.

[He felt a small thrill as he tapped search, not for any big reason, just because the person named “Wicked Disciple 3000” had said he was from outside the Borderland.]

He had never expected to use Border to talk with someone who lived outside. Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain was the first place name from “out there” he had ever known.

Of course, he already knew the world beyond Borderland was huge, and he had personally opened a Door leading outward. Knowing is one thing. Actually chatting with a person far away through an app felt totally different.

As these thoughts flashed by, the results loaded. The first thing he saw was a bright red headline:

“Warmly celebrating the successful close of the 337th Beast Taming Summit at Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain; Beast Taming Peak’s Immortal Yuan He delivers an important speech.”

Under the headline was a thumbnail: a tall, thin, immortal-looking middle-aged man stood on a floating round disc with a Dust Whisk in hand. The background showed a blessed land of misty mountains and rivers. In front of him was a packed sea of people in white robes dressed like cultivators, so many you couldn’t see the end of the crowd.

Farther back, pavilions and towers peeked through green hills, clear water, and rosy clouds.

Yu Sheng frowned, looked again at the headline, then at the thumbnail, then at all the details on the page, and started to think.

He didn’t even know what he was thinking about, he just drifted into it.

Foxy leaned in, stared at the picture for a while, and sighed: “Oh, pretty retro!”

Yu Sheng paused his thinking, glanced at Irene who had also leaned in, and asked: “Do you think it’s possible that…”

He hadn’t finished when Irene muttered: “The style of those buildings looks familiar.”

“It can’t be that much of a coincidence,” he said.

“It’s just… you know, the universe is huge, lots of places have a similar look, and last time you did Door Opening you only took a quick glance,” she said, sounding weirdly nervous as if she sensed his lack of confidence, then added, “Even if it is a coincidence, so what? Look at that crowd. Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain sounds like a pretty large region.” She trailed off and began seriously picking at a loose thread on Yu Sheng’s clothes.

Foxy looked from Irene to Yu Sheng, baffled. She hadn’t been around when Yu Sheng stayed up all night testing Door Opening and shook the whole Borderland, so none of this made much sense to her.

Yu Sheng didn’t speak. He quietly recalled the eldest senior brother spinning while hanging from the beam, and the old man working hard among immortal peaks and rosy clouds, swinging a Copper Headed Belt. When he tabbed back to the chat and saw the ID “Wicked Disciple 3000,” the feeling that something was off only grew stronger. [Could it really be this coincidental? Could it be even more coincidental?]

He forced his thoughts to calm down, set the coincidence aside, and replied: “Sorry, I was looking things up. This is my first time talking to someone from outside the Borderland. Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain looks like a great place.”

He wanted to fish for more details about the other side’s identity, like a surname, a given name, and what he did in this place called “Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain,” but after a quick weigh he held back. They weren’t that close. Asking too much would look suspicious.

The reply was quick: “Makes sense. Most people who use ‘Border’ are from Borderland. Outsiders don’t use it much, even less so here in Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain. Especially my fellow senior brothers, always busy with their own affairs and short on wider vision…”

Seeing the other person chatting as if everything were normal, Yu Sheng finally relaxed, even though he knew there was nothing to be nervous about in the first place. He hurried to steer the topic back to the cloth scraps: “You said your ‘cloth’ belongs to a fellow senior brother from The Door, but you don’t know the origin. Wouldn’t he know? Can you ask him?”

“Senior brother…” Wicked Disciple 3000 seemed to hesitate. The “typing” bubble blinked a few times before the message came through: “Sigh. He went wandering years ago. If I could find him, this would be simple.”

Another message followed: “Senior brother loves to roam. In his early years he traveled all over the world and often brought back strange things. He even caused a lot of trouble in The Door because of them. Compared to most of those weird treasures, this cloth is one of the few ‘well-behaved’ items. It just lies quietly in the Treasure Pavilion. It doesn’t make a fuss, doesn’t fight the other oddities, and has never tricked or bullied the disciples. Because of that, I managed senior brother’s Treasure Pavilion for many years and almost forgot the cloth pressed under the box lid.

“I was curious and asked why he kept such a plain ‘mortal object’ in the Treasure Pavilion, and whether it had any special power. But he was very drunk at the time and didn’t wake for three years. I asked several times and got no answer, then I forgot. Thinking about it now, it’s a real pity.”

Wicked Disciple 3000 sent a long string of updates about the “rag.” Yu Sheng read every word. His first reaction was: [What on earth has that wandering senior brother been collecting?!] The idea of the collection in the Treasure Pavilion breaking out into fights sounded like it was normal. As for “not waking for three years,” that didn’t faze him much. They were cultivators. Immortal business doesn’t follow common sense. The Fox Immortal next to him could eat over twenty steamed buns in one meal.

He grumbled in his heart for a while, but in the end took it as a “regional feature” and didn’t pry. He sent one line: “If your senior brother returns, or you learn more from other channels about that cloth, could you let me know?”

The answer came fast: “Of course. I don’t roam and collect like senior brother, but I’m interested now. You and I are far apart, and Borderland is the strangest place in the universe, yet the same kind of item ended up in both our hands at the same time. That’s rare. Very rare.”

They chatted a bit more, then said goodbye.

When he looked up again, it was fully daylight outside.

“Well now… it’s already morning,” Yu Sheng said as he climbed off the bed. He took a deep breath and shook his head with a wry smile: “In the end I still didn’t figure anything out. But I sure bumped into a lot of new information I never expected.”

He stretched, and to his surprise he didn’t feel very tired. He had only slept three or four hours total, yet his energy was decent.

[Must be the two bowls of ‘Fox stew.’ Forget the looks and taste. The aftereffect is the real deal,] he thought, and reached out to rub the fluff behind Foxy’s ear. Then he walked to the window and looked down at the sunlit street.

Irene ran over and climbed onto the sill to look with him, then asked after two seconds: “Do you want to visit Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain?”

Yu Sheng stared at her: “How did you jump to that?”

“You haven’t gone outside, but you’re interested in it. You never knew anyone out there, now you do. You didn’t know what places lay on the other side of your doors, now you have a clear location,” Irene said, ticking off points on her fingers, and concluded, “So you want to go see Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain.”

Yu Sheng and the little doll locked eyes.

This kid’s thoughts jumped really far.

…But her gut feeling was scarily sharp.