Chapter 277

Chapter 277: Attack

After hanging up, Yu Sheng took a deep breath and turned to Irene. “I feel like Bai Li Qing took this pretty well.”

“Of course. That’s what happens when you’re the director,” Little Doll said, as carefree as ever. The moment she saw Yu Sheng finish the call, she hopped down from the coffee table and headed for the door. “So we’re going out now, right?”

Yu Sheng didn’t waste words. He opened the side closet, pulled out his tetanus staff, and slung it over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

The three of them stepped out of Wu Tong Road 66, looked at the thick fog slowly surging just a few meters away from the house, and walked straight into it.

The instant they crossed that invisible boundary, a cold, oppressive atmosphere closed in from all sides. The detached, alien Otherworld vibe inside the fog even made Yu Sheng shiver. After walking a little farther, he looked back.

Wu Tong Road 66 had turned into a hazy shadow in the mist. The mansion’s outline stood silently at the edge of his vision, like a wordless, lurking behemoth.

He frowned. “…Did we lock the door before we left?”

“We did,” Foxy said, nodding. “I watched you lock it, Benefactor.”

Irene sat on Yu Sheng’s shoulder and poked his head. “You looked serious for ages just to ask that? Are you worried some ‘person’ is going to sneak into our house and steal stuff in this fog or something?!”

“I’m just asking,” Yu Sheng said, brushing away her paw. His gaze stayed on every movement around them. “Stay alert. Something could jump out in this fog.”

In the real world, Boundary City was already deep into the night, and on the foggy side, the entire Otherworld was also covered in darkness. Tall streetlight poles were blurry in the mist, and the bright orbs at their tops floated in midair with nothing to support them—like rows of eerie glowing eyes. Farther away, between the slightly busier buildings, neon colors flickered, hazy and smeared by the night.

It was quiet. Sometimes Yu Sheng thought he heard a faint car horn or distant music, like a bit of illusion leaking from the real world. But when he listened closely, the sound vanished again, as if it had only been hollow wind.

A faint, deep-blue glow appeared beside them. Foxy’s tails slowly spread, and one fox fire after another rose and drifted around behind her.

“A little nervous?” Yu Sheng asked, smiling faintly.

Foxy kept a straight face and shook her head. Then, without meaning to, a dozen more fox fire drifted out beside her.

Irene kept carefully observing the buildings around them.

“Are we really in the same Otherworld as that neighborhood where my big nephew was trapped?” she muttered.

“Probably,” Yu Sheng said, nodding. “The blood connection is linked. Why ask all of a sudden?”

“I’m just thinking—if it’s the same space, then this thick-fog Otherworld is huge. Wu Tong Road is nowhere near Wan Xiang Collection Mall,” Irene said casually. “It also proves Little Red Riding Hood’s earlier judgment was right. Back then, if you left the fog around Wan Xiang Collection, there was an even wider space. You could even reach the Old Quarter by crossing the fog-sealed areas… I just don’t know how big this place really is.”

Yu Sheng frowned. Irene’s words made him think. Yeah. How big was it?

This fog already spanned the Old Quarter and the busy shopping district near downtown, and its range clearly didn’t stop there. What about farther out? What about places where the fog was even thicker?

“Could it be as big as all of Boundary City…” Irene muttered, quieter now. “Or even as big as the Borderland?”

“Then wouldn’t that be like another Borderland?” Foxy’s ears perked up. “A Borderland in an Otherworld version?”

That made Yu Sheng’s heart twitch. He frowned unconsciously. “I remember Bai Li Qing saying there’s no second Borderland in this world—even if the universe is infinite, it won’t produce a second place identical or similar to the Borderland. It’s like a hard rule of cosmic order. She said something similar about a planet called Terra…”

“When she told you that, did she mention anything about the Otherworld?” Irene asked. “The Otherworld doesn’t follow reason.”

“No,” Yu Sheng said, thinking. “Back then we didn’t even know there was a Mistbound City.”

As he spoke, he pulled out his mobile phone and checked.

No signal.

Seeing that, Irene curled her lip. “Looks like there’s only signal within Wu Tong Road 66’s range. That really is a feature of your house.”

Just then, Foxy suddenly stopped.

She frowned and sniffed hard at the air several times.

Irene lowered her voice instantly. “Silly Fox, what did you find?”

“Human scent,” Foxy said, her ears twitching sharply in the wind as she adjusted her direction. “A stranger’s scent. They passed through here not long ago.”

Someone in the fog?

Yu Sheng’s gaze sharpened at once.

For some reason, Irene on his shoulder looked a little excited. “Another one trapped in here?! Is the ride-share rescue service order just slapping us in the face?!”

“Hard to say,” Foxy said, unusually grave. “Doesn’t feel like someone trapped… There’s a very strange aura lingering around here. I don’t recognize it, but it’s definitely not an ordinary person. It smells weird.”

Yu Sheng couldn’t understand what the world looked like through a fox’s senses, but his caution snapped into place. “Then be careful. Foxy, put the fire away first. It’s too noticeable.”

“Mm.” Foxy nodded. The fox fire slowly dissipated into the air. Then she raised a hand and pointed, silently leading Yu Sheng deeper into the fog.

She tracked the traces of that strange scent. Along the way, she stopped from time to time, crouched to sniff the ground and corners, then adjusted her direction and continued. She looked serious and professional.

Irene secretly poked Yu Sheng’s head and whispered, “Hey, hey—our Hotel has its own police dog…”

Yu Sheng didn’t even glance at her. “If she smacks you later, I’m not stopping her.”

“Tch.”

Irene clicked her tongue, but it lasted all of two seconds. She frowned again and muttered, tension creeping in. “The fog is thicker here than it was just now… Silly Fox didn’t lead us wrong, did she? What kind of good person crawls straight into the thickest fog…”

“Then whoever crawled in here isn’t a good person,” Yu Sheng muttered. He didn’t show it, but he lowered the tetanus staff from his shoulder and held it ready, moving closer to Foxy as she searched. “Are we close?”

“The scent is getting messy,” Foxy said, stopping. She lifted her head, annoyed. “They circled around here a lot. I can’t tell if it was to erase their tracks on purpose or because they were doing something here. I can’t judge which way they went in the end.”

Yu Sheng gave a low hum. His eyes swept the area.

The fog had grown thick to an unsettling degree. A few meters out was already just a blur, and between the barely visible outlines of buildings and the dim yellow streetlights, everything looked… wrong.

Many houses seemed taller, twisted out of shape. The lights stretched and trembled with the flow of fog like living things. Farther away, the ground looked like it was rippling and curling, and the neon colors floating in stairwells had somehow turned into large swaths of hostile dark red.

It seemed that as the fog thickened, the environment of this Otherworld changed with it. This area was deeper.

And as if to prove that feeling, a suspicious shadow suddenly flashed at the edge of Yu Sheng’s vision.

A tall, thin figure.

Yu Sheng didn’t even have time to see what it was. The next instant, malice surged behind him.

Warning exploded through his nerves. He lunged forward without hesitation, took two quick steps, and swung his tetanus staff in a twisting horizontal sweep. He didn’t even care if it hit—he immediately darted aside.

A sharp metallic crash rang out in the night fog. Sparks burst with a loud clang. Yu Sheng saw he’d struck a strange, long, thin blade, and in the instant it was knocked away, several other streaks of chilling light cut through the spot where he’d been standing.

A fox fire exploded between Yu Sheng and the blade, the shock scattering the fog around them. Yu Sheng finally steadied himself and got a clear look at the attacker.

A figure nearly a head taller than Yu Sheng stepped out of the fog, walking with elegant yet eerie steps.

It had the slim outline of a woman, but only an outline. Its entire body was covered in a black, metallic-textured shell—skin and armor at once. Its joints had an obvious doll-latch structure, and between the joints and the seams of the shell, dark red glimmers flowed.

Its face was like a noble lady’s, yet it was an iron mask cast from white metal, frozen into a perfect smile that made your skin crawl, utterly without warmth.

Even stranger, the iron doll wore a black head veil with a priestly air draped over its head. The veil didn’t look protective at all, yet it made the almost-human thing feel even more eerie.

It stepped forward, iron heels tapping the ground, and slowly raised a hand at Yu Sheng.

Every finger was a sharp blade over half a meter long, shining with chilling light in the night.