Chapter 27

Chapter 27: Deep Dream Entry

What Irene needed Yu Sheng to do was, in her words, simple.

Find a spot that wouldn’t get in the way. Lie down. And for the love of everything, don’t get up and cause trouble.

Yu Sheng walked up to the still-sleeping silver demon fox. He circled her massive body and those many tails, then found a place that looked reasonably comfortable—a dip where two thick tails overlapped.

He bent down, tugged the fur on one tail to adjust it, then patted another tail until it fluffed up like a pillow. Irene watched, stunned.

“Are you making the bed or what?”

“It’s so I can lie down comfortably,” Yu Sheng said, as if this needed no explanation. He leaned back against the silver tail, sinking slightly into the soft fur. “Who knows how long you’ll need? I care a lot about sleep quality.”

Irene clicked her tongue. Once he was settled, she floated over and dropped the entire frame stiffly onto his chest.

“Catch.”

Yu Sheng fumbled and caught it on instinct. For a split second, he thought she was getting revenge for that laugh in his head and trying to smash him to death.

“Oh, come on!” he hissed. “Can you say something before you drop yourself?”

At least he didn’t get beaten to death by a picture frame. He adjusted his posture, half-reclined against Foxy’s tail, holding Irene’s frame in both hands. He breathed out slowly and waited for the moment they sank deeper.

Falling from your own dream into someone else’s was a completely new experience.

From the painting came Irene’s soft humming, an ancient ballad soaked in distance and nostalgia. Yu Sheng couldn’t understand the lyrics, but the sound seeped into him like warm water, calming his heartbeat. His eyelids grew heavy.

In that half-awake haze, he glanced down at the painting in his hands.

[It feels like I’m holding someone’s memorial photo.jpg.]

Yu Sheng: “…”

[How does this doll always manage to make everything feel like a memorial photo?]

The thought had barely formed when the world cut out from under him.

He plunged into a void, dropping straight into the deepest part of the dream.

He lost his body—or rather, he couldn’t feel it at all. He became a disembodied viewpoint, racing through a flood of memories, thoughts, and sensations that didn’t belong to him. Shadows overlapped around him, countless fragments woven into a long curtain. The curtain stretched into a tunnel with no visible end.

A loud hum filled everything as information poured into his mind. He couldn’t tell whether he was hearing it or whether the memories were simply blooming inside his skull.

Someone shouting.

Something exploding.

A howl from the celestial shuttle’s power core.

They were falling. The celestial shuttle broke out of orbit and crashed into a world that wasn’t on its route, like it had appeared out of nowhere.

A brutal impact.

It slammed into a dark mountain. An artifact spirit burst out of a heaven-scale apparatus and fought with the immortal piloting the shuttle, screaming about “skimming spirit stones,” “reckless driving,” and “reporting to the immortal sect.” Then—an explosion.

The artifact spirit died. Many people died with it.

The survivors died one by one afterward.

All that death and separation flashed past Yu Sheng in a rapid stream. He watched those faded, yellowed figures die of hunger, die of poison in the mountains, die in desperate fighting, die to the malice that filled this valley from end to end—leaving no corner untouched.

The valley itself wanted to kill them.

It did it by driving hunger into their bones.

The endless tunnel vanished.

Yu Sheng found himself suspended in a washed-out scene. After so many chaotic fragments, he had finally reached Foxy’s dream.

Just as Irene had said, a dream’s colors tended to unify. Everything here was drained into the same lifeless gray: a dark sky, a dark forest, filthy gray soil and stone. One glance was enough to make his chest feel tight.

“Irene?” Yu Sheng called silently, because he couldn’t see her.

“I’m here.”

“Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”

“Right with you.” Irene’s voice seemed to come from inside his own mind. The sensation was… wrong. “You can’t see me, and you can’t see your own body either. We’re two outside minds that slipped in. Having a viewpoint at all is already lucky.”

“Oh. So that’s how it is.”

Yu Sheng forced himself to accept it and searched the shadowy woods for Foxy.

He didn’t have to look long. Almost the instant the thought crossed his mind, he heard it.

Scraping. Digging.

He drifted toward the sound, slipping between dark trees, and soon caught that flash of white.

A silver-haired girl in tattered clothes knelt in a clearing, digging furiously at the soil with her bare hands. Her once-fluffy fox tail was filthy, caked with mud. Around her were pits of all sizes, all clawed out by the same frantic hands.

Yu Sheng floated up beside her.

Foxy didn’t look up. She couldn’t see him. She just kept digging, over and over, muttering as her fingers tore into the dirt.

Irene’s voice whispered inside his head, urgent. “Talk to her. Talk to her.”

“She can’t see us,” Yu Sheng thought back.

“It doesn’t matter. Just talk. It’s a dream—she’ll respond. For the dreamer, nothing in a dream is unreasonable.”

Yu Sheng hesitated, then spoke into the empty air anyway. “What are you digging for?”

“Dad… Mom…” Foxy answered without question, as if the voice belonged here. “I remember I buried them here. I buried them right here…”

Yu Sheng’s heart dropped. “Why… why do you want to dig them up?”

“I… I miss them.” Foxy slowed, her eyes hollow and unfocused, yet her voice came automatically. “I’m so hungry. I want to tell them I’m hungry… But I held on. They said not to listen to that monster. I kept holding on, but… I’m so hungry…”

She looked down at her mud-smeared hands and started digging again.

“They should be here. They have to be here, down there…” She clawed at the ground, whispering to herself. “I listened to them. I kept listening. I didn’t listen to that monster…”

“Her mind is wrong,” Irene said inside Yu Sheng’s head. “Very wrong.”

“I know,” Yu Sheng replied silently. “I could tell she wasn’t right the first time I met her.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Irene sounded strained, like she was trying to translate something too big into words. “It’s like something else got mixed into her thoughts. Something is trying to intervene. There’s someone else’s voice inside her voice. Her own will has held on until now, but that outside thinking is about to make her collapse.”

Irene fell silent.

Foxy stopped digging. Blank-faced, she stood and wandered a few steps away, then stood dazed in the clearing.

Yu Sheng followed at once.

And then he heard it.

A faint, blurry voice rose from somewhere deep—so close it felt like it was coming from his own mouth, whispered straight out of his heart.

Dig. Dig them up…

You just want to see them once. You just want to confirm you really listened to them, don’t you? It’s been so long since you’ve seen them…

I miss them so much…

Foxy stared back at the pits she’d carved into the earth.

“I miss them so much…” she echoed.

Yu Sheng jolted. The voice he’d heard wasn’t his at all. His dream and Foxy’s dream were linked—what he’d heard was her inner voice, and it didn’t belong to her.

Foxy turned, numbly, as if she meant to keep digging.

Every handful of dirt was tearing through the last threads of her defenses.

“Foxy!” Yu Sheng shouted, the name bursting out of him on instinct.

The fox girl froze. She turned her head toward the edge of the woods, eyes wide.

A long moment passed. Then a flicker of clarity returned, and she remembered where she’d heard that familiar voice before.

“…Benefactor?”

But the forest was empty. Yu Sheng’s voice didn’t come again. The shout seemed like an illusion, a half-heard echo.

Foxy stood in the gray clearing, trembling. Slowly, she noticed the deep pits all around her.

Fear spread across her face.

She woke—waking violently at the last step before her mind collapsed.