Chapter 275

Chapter 275: Yu Sheng Mulled It Over

After mulling it over, Yu Sheng stared at the street outside—which looked completely normal—and stood in the doorway for a long moment. Then he heard pitter-patter footsteps behind him. Irene had run out of the living room too, and now she froze beside him, just as blank.

“…Wait—where’s the fog outside? It was so thick a moment ago!”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He only frowned at the street for a while, then seemed to think of something and turned back into the living room.

Outside the window, everything was still drowned in heavy fog.

He checked again and again. The result never changed.

Was the fog limited to what you saw through the window?

Yu Sheng went back to the glass, stared into the mist for a long time, and finally decided to test it. He opened the window.

It opened easily. When he leaned out and looked directly onto the street, everything looked completely normal again. But when he glanced back through the fixed pane that couldn’t be opened, he could still see that thick fog—as if the glass itself was acting like a filter, showing an entirely different world.

Irene and Foxy watched beside him, both just as stunned. Irene spoke first, eyes wide.

“Do we have to look through window glass to see the fog?”

“An illusion?” Foxy followed.

Yu Sheng quietly closed the window. Looking at the fog-filled street beyond it, he thought for a moment, then said softly, “We need to check the other windows, too.”

With a whoosh, Foxy bolted upstairs. Irene’s other two bodies pattered up right away. After a brief pause, Yu Sheng went as well—he wanted to personally check the room at the end of the second-floor hallway.

A moment later, the three of them returned to the living room and compared notes.

Irene blurted, “There’s fog outside the master bedroom window! Outside the attic window, too!”

Foxy nodded. “Same for me. But once you open the window, you can’t see it anymore. You only see it through the glass.”

“The room at the end of the second floor is the same,” Yu Sheng said at last, summing it up. “Looks like the fog has completely surrounded the outside, but you can only see it through windows. If you open one and look out directly, everything still looks normal. Through a window, you see it… see it…”

He repeated the word, and his brow furrowed deeper.

Irene sprang up from the sofa at once. “What did you think of?”

“It’s just a weird idea,” Yu Sheng said, hesitant. “What if there really is fog outside right now, and this house really is surrounded—only it’s surrounded on the ‘other side’? And whether we look through a window or through a door, what we’re seeing is actually two different scenes on the two ‘sides.’”

That chain of logic tangled Irene up on the spot. Little Doll’s brain wasn’t exactly built for heavy lifting, and she took forever to react—but Foxy understood faster.

“Benefactor… you mean ‘fog’ and ‘no fog’ are two different ‘realms,’ and our house is stuck between them?”

That fox really was sharp.

After hearing Foxy put it that way, Irene finally caught up. She blinked, translated Foxy’s terms into concepts from this world, then slapped her palm.

“Oh. Wu Tong Road 66 is falling into the Otherworld.”

Then she stared at Yu Sheng with those crimson eyes, wide and unblinking.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?!” Before anyone else could speak, she started yelling herself. “I’ve heard of people falling into the Otherworld. At most, some machine with a machine spirit falls in. But a house falling in? Does your house have a house soul or something?!”

Yu Sheng still didn’t say anything. He only raised a hand and pointed at the fog-filled street outside.

Irene ran out of words.

“So what do we do now?” Foxy blinked her big eyes, looking from Irene to Yu Sheng with open curiosity. “If our house really is ‘falling’… do we need to find a way to pull it back up? Or should we try going to the other side first and see what’s going on? Maybe something over there is dragging our house down…”

Irene stared at Foxy, amazed. “Silly Fox, that imagination of yours is something… but a whole house falling into the Otherworld—how are we supposed to ‘pull’ it back up?”

“No idea… How do you pull a person back 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 seem to have legs.”

“Duh!”

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

He felt like he should. After all, Wu Tong Road 66 was his foothold in this world now, and the house was showing changes he’d never seen before. If Foxy and Irene were right, and the entire place was gradually sinking into the Otherworld, then this was huge—far worse than him falling in himself.

But he just couldn’t get tense, as if… he could precisely sense Wu Tong Road 66’s state right now. Sense that it existed steadily and normally where it was supposed to be, and that the fog outside wasn’t affecting it in the slightest.

With that strange feeling—whether it counted as “spiritual intuition” or not, he didn’t know—Yu Sheng thought for a long time. Then he suddenly broke the silence.

“Let’s go into the fog and see what’s going on first.”

Irene and Foxy stopped their pointless argument instantly. Both of them looked straight into Yu Sheng’s eyes.

“How?” Irene asked. “If we push the door open and go out, it still looks like a normal street. The house hasn’t fully sunk yet… Or are you going to open a door to the place where you rescued my big nephew before? Then run all the way from the other side back here? That’s kind of far, and who knows what we’ll run into on the way…”

“I’ll try going out directly with a door opening,” Yu Sheng said—something that sounded totally out of nowhere to Irene.

He stood up and went straight to the front door, then put his hand on the knob.

The doll and the fox watched with curiosity.

Yu Sheng ignored everything else. He simply kept his hand on the knob and narrowed his eyes slightly.

He hadn’t done this in a long time.

He was going to push open the door at home—but not assign it directly to that familiar open ground in front of the door.

He always avoided assigning the front door of Wu Tong Road 66 to other coordinates on purpose, because he’d always had… special feelings tied to it. He always remembered that one day, he’d pushed open the door at home by mistake, and that was how he came to this strange and dangerous world, how he left the hometown he knew. He’d always hoped that one day, this front door might also bring him back to that familiar home—but before that, he first had to fully understand his own power and master the eerie, mysterious rules of the Borderland…

But now, a bold idea suddenly rose in him.

Maybe the first thing he needed to truly understand was Wu Tong Road 66 itself. He still didn’t know enough about this house that had already become “home.”

He sensed a few drops of blood he had left in that thick fog earlier.

The connection made by a few drops of blood was incredibly weak, but a connection was still a connection. As long as it existed, it could point accurately to the other side.

Using the faint information that drifted back through that link, Yu Sheng carefully distinguished the foggy world, distinguishing the subtle differences in assignment between the two worlds separated by fog.

He wasn’t planning to use a door opening to go to the neighborhood where Zheng Zhi had been trapped before. It wasn’t that simple.

He was trying a brand-new way of locating.

He wanted to find the overall signature of that foggy world, then map the entire Wu Tong Road 66 to the corresponding coordinates.

Since Wu Tong Road 66 could sink as a whole toward the Otherworld, that meant the house might not be “fixed” here at all, and this operation should be possible. As his first bold attempt, all he needed to do was speed up that process and keep it under his control.

Try it. Maybe it would work.

Yu Sheng opened his eyes and gently turned the knob.

Outside the door, heavy fog rolled.

…

Deep in the Old Quarter, in the shop at the end of Wu Tong Road that had just hung up a “Stellar Express Pickup Point” sign, the lights were on. Two Special Operations Bureau agents temporarily stationed there had just finished tuning and testing the equipment when they heard a strange noise coming from one of the machines.

“Hold on, what was that?” one agent said, moving to the machine at once. Weird noises and interference false alarms were common right after installation, but strict procedures and daily training kept him from ignoring even a small anomaly. He immediately began checking the data automatically recorded by the device. “…Looks fine, but it feels like it caught a signal just now. Why isn’t it in the log?”

The other agent stood up and went to another sensor, ready to compare the readings.

And right as he stood, his peripheral vision swept past the window and caught a glimpse outside.

Outside was the deepest part of Wu Tong Road’s street. A few old houses stood in the narrow lanes. The abandoned homes were black and hollow, their mottled walls lit by streetlights, and the tight alley was utterly silent.

The young agent blinked. For the first few seconds, he didn’t even feel anything was off—he only glanced outside, then lowered his head and continued fiddling with the equipment installed earlier that day.

Then, almost ten seconds later, he jolted.

His hands froze. He snapped his head up like he’d been electrocuted, staring dead at the narrow alley and the old houses right in front of him.

The colleague beside him didn’t look up. “What’s with you jumping around… Come help me check this thing…”

“Check, check, check my ass!” the young agent shouted, staring out the window as cold sweat visibly burst across his forehead. “Out-out-out there—that empty… open ground is gone!!”

“…What?!”

“Wu Tong Road 66 is gone!!”