Chapter 275

Chapter 276: Just Like That, It Was Gone

For ordinary people, Wutong Road 66 cannot be seen.

But for agents of the Special Affairs Bureau who have some spiritual talent and focused training, the “keep out” Open Ground around Wutong Road 66 and the strange wall called The End Web are visible.

Now the Open Ground and the wall of The End Web were gone, swallowed by the calm night without a sound, as if they had never existed.

Two Special Affairs Bureau agents all but blinked out of the station and rushed into the narrow alley. The night wind was cold on their faces, yet sweat ran from the napes of their necks all the way to their feet.

Their sharp eyes, honed by The Door training, quickly judged the state of the nearby houses in the dark. They confirmed that every building around them had shifted or warped by different degrees. Some structures that used to sit across the Open Ground had moved to only a few steps away. Some empty houses that never touched before were now joined in a row. The feeling was as if something had once forced the space here to “stretch open,” and now that foreign thing had suddenly left. So the time and space, long deformed and unnoticed, quietly returned to their original shape.

One agent wiped the cold sweat on his forehead and looked at his partner: “What do we do?”

The other agent’s face didn’t look any better as he answered: “What else can we do, report it. This will definitely alarm the Director.”

“How are we even supposed to say it?”

“We just say what we saw. This is way beyond what the two of us can handle,” the younger agent sighed, then tensed up again and muttered, “You don’t think we did something that scared it off, right?”

“I don’t think so. When Yu Sheng took Foxy out with him, I said hi. They looked like they were in a great mood at the time.”

Thick fog rolled and heaved along the street like a heavy, sticky liquid, but it stopped a few meters outside Wutong Road 66. It formed a clear border there, and not a wisp of fog infiltrated inside.

Yu Sheng brightened and waved to Irene and Foxy who had come to watch: “Hey, it worked! With one Door Opening, we came to the foggy side!”

Irene didn’t answer right away. She stepped out of the house two careful paces, looked around, then glanced back. She frowned at Yu Sheng and asked: “You’re telling me you just opened The Door? Why does the vibe feel wrong? The whole house is standing here! And things around us look off. That power pole should be a little more to the left.”

Yu Sheng finally took a hard look around and seemed to sense something. After a long moment, he scratched his chin and said, not very confidently: “Maybe I opened it crooked.”

Irene blinked, then blurted: “What did you open crooked?!”

“The house.”

“What?!”

“If the theory is right, I managed to ‘land’ the whole of Wutong Road 66 on the foggy side. The process was under control,” Yu Sheng said as he rubbed his hair and explained to the little Doll what he had done. “Since the house can sink into the Otherworld like a person, that means it really moves, same as you said: people have a soul, machines have a Machine Spirit, maybe houses have a house soul. So I tried to see if I could guide and control the process. During the Door Opening, I treated the entire Wutong Road 66 as part of The Door frame.”

Irene’s eyes almost popped out: “This actually works?!”

She scanned the area again, then hopped back in two quick steps: “You’re not messing with me, right? It’s not ‘a shadow of Wutong Road 66 that already exists on the foggy side,’ it’s the real house and you really moved it over?”

Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow: “Do you think Wutong Road 66 would cast a projection like ordinary buildings inside this fog?”

“Well, that’s true. Wutong Road 66 is an Otherworld after all, and a very special one,” Irene muttered as she scratched her head, “and you even opened it crooked.”

“You don’t have to stress that part.”

“Benefactor, what do we do next?” Foxy asked as her big tails swayed behind her, eyes shining with eager curiosity. “Are we going out The Door?”

“Hold up, let’s go back first,” Yu Sheng said as he closed The Door. “We need to confirm the situation in the Valley.”

“The Valley? Oh, right!” Irene clapped her hands. “You moved the whole house. The Valley link might be affected!”

They hurried to the basement, and Yu Sheng pushed open the Fixed Portal that led to the Valley.

The quiet Valley lay under a “night curtain.”

Yu Sheng stepped onto the Portal Platform and looked up. Thick clouds formed an artificial night sky over the valley. That, of course, was his doing.

By now he was used to it. Every evening when the real world went dark, he “pulled the curtains” for the Valley too. Then he “let the sky out” again in the morning. With this simple method, he kept a normal day and night cycle in the Valley. It also fixed two big problems: vegetables that wouldn’t grow well and Dollheads that wouldn’t sleep at night. He didn’t even need a greenhouse anymore.

Next, he felt for the state of the Portal inside the “town.”

“Not bad. Seems like moving Wutong Road 66 doesn’t affect the Portals we already set up,” he said, nodding with clear satisfaction. “The Valley’s environment hasn’t changed either.”

They returned to the living room.

Yu Sheng checked his phone: “Signal is normal.”

“The whole house dropped onto the other side, and the phone still has signal?” Irene leaned over with wide eyes, full of disbelief. “What is with this house?”

“How would I know,” Yu Sheng shrugged. “It was already a mystery from day one that we had signal here. You want to solve it now?”

“I don’t care about solving it. I just suddenly thought of something,” Irene said, then blinked. “Since you moved the whole house into the ‘other side,’ maybe we should tell the Special Affairs Bureau…”

Yu Sheng froze: “Oh, right! That’s a thing…”

Before he finished, his phone rang hard and fast.

It was Bai Li Qing, who topped his recent call list.

Irene glanced at the screen: “You should get a family plan with her. Might save on the phone bill.”

Yu Sheng waved for the chatterbox to hush, then answered carefully, wearing a sheepish, guilty smile even though the Director couldn’t see him: “Uh, good evening, Director Bai Li.”

Maybe it was his imagination, but as soon as he said “Director Bai Li,” he heard the faintest exhale on the other end, like Bai Li Qing had relaxed a little.

Her cool, calm voice followed: “I got a report. The Wutong Road station says… hm, it says the entire ‘lot’ where your house sits has vanished.”

Yu Sheng fell silent.

He honestly hadn’t expected that. [The entire lot vanished? That’s a bit much.] He thought the Bureau would just get a routine alert. His Door Opening was unusual this time, and the new auto filter system might not recognize it.

While he searched for words, Bai Li Qing asked again: “What happened?”

Yu Sheng looked out at the fog-choked street and worked hard to line up his words so they made logical sense. After weighing them a few times, he finally said: “I saw fog outside, the abnormal kind, so I came out to check.”

“And then?”

“I brought the house along.”

“…?”

Irene almost sprang off the coffee table: “You held it in that long just to say that?!”

“I know it’s hard to get. I only just figured out this new feature,” Yu Sheng said with a wry tug at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t worry. Nothing went wrong. I’m fine-and my house is fine.”

Bai Li Qing’s silence was deafening.

Sitting cross-legged on the coffee table, Irene nodded as if she understood and “translated” the silence: “She’s cussing, loudly, and it covers at least three generations.”

Yu Sheng ignored the Doll.

He heard the madam Director let out a slow breath.

“Can you come back?” Bai Li Qing asked, unusually even, then added with a slightly awkward note, “I mean, can you and your… house come back?”

Yu Sheng answered with the same awkward tone: “Uh, yes.”

“About when?”

“Maybe… before tomorrow morning?” Yu Sheng thought it over and said, not fully sure, “I mainly want to go out The Door and look around. You have no idea, the fog out there is thick. I don’t know if it’ll go smoothly.”

“Do you need support? I can send a Deep Diving Unit.”

“No need. It’s just me, Irene, and Foxy. Fewer people is easier.”

“Alright. Turn on the environment logging in Border communications. And message me when you get back.”

“Got it.”