Chapter 274

Chapter 275: Yu Sheng Thinks It Over

Staring at the ordinary street outside, Yu Sheng froze for a long moment, and then he heard quick footsteps behind him. Irene had run out from the living room and stood with him at The Door, equally stunned.

“Wait, where’s the fog? It was huge just now!”

Yu Sheng said nothing. He stared out for a bit with a frown, then turned and went back to the living room.

Through the window, the fog was still there.

He checked again and again. Same result every time.

Was the fog limited to what the windows showed?

Back at the window, he studied the mist for a while and decided to open the window.

It opened easily. When he looked through the open space, the street was normal. But when his eyes shifted to the part of the glass that could not open, he still saw fog, thick as if it filled the world.

Irene and Foxy watched the whole thing with him, just as confused. Irene blurted out first: “So you can only see the fog through glass?”

Foxy followed at once: “An illusion?”

Yu Sheng quietly closed the window. Staring at the fog outside the glass, he thought for a moment and said softly: “We need to check every other window too.”

Foxy whooshed upstairs, and Irene’s other two bodies pattered up as well. After a short pause, Yu Sheng went up the stairs. He wanted to check that room at The End Web on the second floor himself.

A moment later, the three gathered again in the living room to compare notes.

Irene reported: “There’s fog outside the master bedroom window, and the attic window too!”

Foxy nodded: “Same for my room. If I open the window, the fog disappears. You can only see it through glass.”

“The room at The End Web is the same,” Yu Sheng said last, summing up in a low voice. “Looks like the fog has fully surrounded outside, but you can only see it through windows. If you use Door Opening and look out directly, it’s a normal street. Through the window you can see… see?”

He repeated the word and suddenly frowned.

Irene sprang up: “You thought of something?”

“A strange idea,” Yu Sheng said, hesitant. “What if there really is fog out there, and our house is really surrounded by it, but on the ‘other side’? Opening or not opening the window, and looking through a window versus through The Door, might be showing us two different ‘sides.’”

That string of words left Irene totally lost. Her brain wasn’t great to begin with, and this took a while to sink in. Foxy understood faster and put it into simpler terms: “Benefactor, you mean ‘fog’ and ‘no fog’ are two different ‘realms,’ and our house is stuck between them?”

The fox brain really worked.

Hearing Foxy’s version, Irene finally got it. She blinked, converted Foxy’s terms into this world’s concepts, and clapped her hands: “Oh, Wutong Road 66 is sliding into the Otherworld.”

Then she stared at Yu Sheng with her scarlet eyes, and he stared back.

“What is this!” she yelled first, not waiting for anyone else. “I’ve heard of people falling into the Otherworld, and at most machines with a Machine Spirit falling in. But a house? Does your house have a house spirit?”

Yu Sheng didn’t argue. He just pointed at the fog outside the window.

Irene fell silent.

“So what do we do now?” Foxy looked from Irene to Yu Sheng with wide eyes and asked curiously: “If our house is really ‘falling,’ should we pull it back up? Or should we go to the ‘other side’ and take a look? Maybe something over there is pulling our house down.”

Irene looked at Foxy in amazement: “Silly Fox, that imagination of yours… But if a whole house is falling into the Otherworld, how do you ‘pull’ it up?”

“I don’t know… How do you pull a person up when they fall into the Otherworld?”

“If they didn’t fall too deep, you find an exit and walk out.”

“…Our house doesn’t have legs.”

“Obviously!”

Yu Sheng listened to the Doll and the fox bicker, but for some reason he didn’t feel nervous at all.

He felt like he should be nervous. Wutong Road 66 had become his base in this world, and now it was showing a change he had never seen. If things were as Foxy and Irene guessed and the whole house was slowly sinking into the Otherworld, that was a huge problem, much worse than him falling in alone.

But he just couldn’t get tense, as if… he could precisely sense Wutong Road 66’s state, sensing that it existed steadily and normally where it should be, and that the heavy fog outside had no effect on it.

With that odd feeling, which might even count as [Spiritual Intuition], Yu Sheng thought for a long time, then broke the silence: “Let’s go into the fog and see.”

Irene and Foxy stopped their pointless debate at once and looked into his eyes.

“How?” Irene asked. “If we push The Door open right now, it’s still the normal street. The house hasn’t fully sunk yet. Or do you mean you’ll open The Door to that place where you saved my nephew earlier and run back to here from the ‘other side’? That’s kind of far. Who knows what we’ll hit on the way…”

“I’ll try going straight out with Door Opening,” Yu Sheng said something that sounded incomplete to Irene, then went to the entry, put his hand on the handle, and stood there.

The Doll and the fox watched, curious.

Yu Sheng ignored everything else, fingers on the handle, eyes half-closed.

He hadn’t done this in a long time.

He pushed open his home’s Door, but did not assign it to the familiar Open Ground in front of The Door.

He always avoided assigning the entry’s Door to other coordinates. He had special feelings about this Door. He remembered that pushing his home’s Door wrong one day had brought him to this strange and dangerous world and taken him from his old home. He kept hoping that someday, this entry Door might also take him back there. Before that, he needed to fully understand his power and the rules of this mysterious Borderland.

Now he had a bold idea.

Maybe he should first understand Wutong Road 66 completely. For a place that had become “home,” he still knew too little.

He felt the few drops of blood he had left in that thick fog.

The link made by a few drops was very weak, but a link is a link. As long as it existed, it could point to the “other side.”

Using the faint information coming through, Yu Sheng studied the fog world, and the subtle differences in mapping between the two sides divided by the fog.

He wasn’t going to Door Opening back to the exact street where Zheng Zhi had been trapped. It wasn’t that simple.

He was trying a new way to aim.

He would find the “global signature” of the foggy world and map the entire Wutong Road 66 to its matching coordinates.

If Wutong Road 66 could sink into the Otherworld as a whole, that meant the house might not be fixed here. This should be possible. For a first bold attempt, he only needed to speed the process up and keep it under his control.

Try it. Maybe it would work.

Yu Sheng opened his eyes and gently turned the handle.

Beyond The Door, fog boiled.

…

Deep in the old city, the small shop at The End Web of Wutong Road, with a newly hung sign that read “Stellar Express Pickup Point,” was still lit. Two Special Affairs Bureau agents on temporary duty had just finished calibrating the equipment when a strange noise trilled from one machine.

“Hold up, what’s that sound?” One agent hurried to the device. He knew new installs could make odd noises or throw false alarms, but training and protocol kept him alert to even small anomalies. He checked the auto-logged data: “Looks fine… but I think it just caught a signal. Why isn’t it in the record?”

The other agent stood and went to the paired sensor to compare readings.

As he stood, the corner of his eye glanced through the window.

Outside lay the far end of Wutong Road. A few old houses stood in the narrow lane. The empty homes were dark, their peeling walls lit by a streetlight. The cramped alley was silent.

The young agent blinked. For the first few seconds nothing felt off. He glanced outside, then looked back down at the equipment they had installed that afternoon.

About ten seconds later, he jolted like he’d been shocked. He snapped his head up and stared hard through the window at the narrow alley and the old houses just across the way.

His coworker didn’t look up: “What now, jumping at nothing… Come help check this thing…”

“Check, check, check what!” the young agent shouted, eyes wide and sweat beading on his forehead. “Th-the empty… Open Ground is gone!”

“…What?!”

“Wutong Road 66 is gone!”