Chapter 370
Chapter 370: Everyone Had Their Own Things to Do in the Hotel
The next day was unusually calm on Yu Sheng’s side. There was no further movement from that strange Otherworld. On Immortal Yuan Ling’s side, he focused on contacting every faction and coordinating investigations across different regions into “suspicious spatial rifts” and “demonic-path cultivators.” As an outsider, Yu Sheng couldn’t help with any of that, so he simply relaxed and enjoyed his “vacation.”
After all, the Otherworld was always around, always somewhere. Life still had to go on.
With time to spare, Yu Sheng made a trip back to Boundary City. Besides restocking daily necessities, he brought Foxy to the Special Operations Bureau cafeteria to mooch two meals. Bai Li Qing was a little surprised Yu Sheng could run back for food even while staying on Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain, and he couldn’t help asking about Zheng Zhi’s situation.
Logically, someone as low-ranking as a probationary Special Operations Bureau agent like Zheng Zhi wasn’t worth a director’s personal attention. But Yu Sheng had accidentally dragged the big nephew to Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain, and the guy had promptly fallen into a high-risk Otherworld. That was the kind of ridiculous experience that turned into legend the moment people heard about it, so Bai Li Qing asked for every detail.
Irene’s daily routine barely changed. When she first came to Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain, she kept saying she wanted to enjoy the freedom of going out whenever she pleased. But once she was actually here, she still spent most of her time curled up at home. If she wasn’t watching TV or gaming, she was arguing with an online friend, happily doing laps in the Mutual Networking X pit every day, looking like she was about to rot in place—though she’d always been pretty useless.
Luna, meanwhile, had already started her farming career. She loved the plot of land Yu Sheng gave her, and the moment she got a set of tools, she went to work. The valley’s climate was pleasant but barely changed with the seasons. With the temperature hovering around 25 to 26 degrees year-round, it wasn’t great for wheat, so she made the same choice as Yu Sheng and planted vegetables instead.
Foxy’s days were even better than Luna’s and Irene’s. Not only could she mooch meals at the Special Operations Bureau whenever she wanted, she now also had a “cafeteria” at the Parted Clouds Palace, where she could eat and drink for free. And beyond that, she’d found an excellent new feeding ground: the pill-refining rooms used by ordinary disciples.
Spirit Infusion Peak was the place on Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain that specialized in pill and talisman arts. Under the direct authority of the Parted Clouds Palace alone, there were thousands of pill cultivators refining all kinds of elixirs day after day. Naturally, batches went wrong, or the quality fell short of Immortal Yuan Ling’s strict standards, becoming “waste pills.” These were usually stored temporarily in a recycling vault the same day, guarded by a perfectly impartial pill-room artifact spirit while they waited to be destroyed.
No one knew how Foxy got in. By the time anyone discovered her, she was sprawled in the middle of the vault and had basically cleared out every waste pill on the surrounding shelves.
The scene was spectacular. When the guard disciples noticed the artifact spirit had fallen into an abnormal dormant state and rushed into the vault, the first thing they saw was a nine-tailed fox about the size of a small celestial ship lying on the floor, gripping a medicine jar with her front paws and guzzling it down noisily. She ate while burping.
Several guard disciples went pale—not because the waste pills had been stolen, but because they were terrified the “distinguished guest” on the ground was about to eat herself to death.
But Foxy was completely fine. After she ate and drank her fill, she was not only lively as ever, she even tossed out a lump of Spirit Fox Black Iron on the spot to “pay the bill.”
Now this fox, stuffed full of “immortal pills,” was lying beside Yu Sheng. A heap of tails draped over him like a blanket. She still held a gourd, shaking it now and then, pouring out one mysterious elixir at a time and popping it into her mouth like candy, crunching loudly.
The worst part was that every pill was different. She made it look like she was opening blind boxes.
“I asked the gatekeeping artifact spirit,” Foxy mumbled around a mouthful. “It said everything in that building was useless and would be destroyed later, so I went in. It didn’t even stop me.”
Yu Sheng glanced at the lazy fox and deadpanned, “Have you considered the possibility that it did try to stop you, but the demon-suppressing mirror it activated couldn’t identify you and crashed itself instead?”
“Oh, is that what happened?” Foxy blinked, then happily squinted and scooted closer, rubbing his arm with her tail. “Well, anyway, we explained it in the end. Immortal Yuan Ling even said I can go eat whenever I want.”
“Of course. You traded them Spirit Fox Black Iron for scraps they were going to throw into a furnace.” Yu Sheng’s eyelid twitched. “If it were me, I’d let you eat as much as you wanted too.”
He hesitated, then looked more uneasy than annoyed. “But seriously, do you really feel fine eating like this? This stuff isn’t food.”
“No.” Foxy opened her eyes in confusion, stared at him, then tossed another unknown pill into her mouth. “Ah, benefactor, this one’s crunchy!”
Yu Sheng: “…”
He decided not to ask anymore. This cyber Foxy, with what felt like a heavy fusion reactor stuffed in her belly, clearly couldn’t be judged by normal living-creature standards. Who knew what her “digestion” even looked like?
The only thing he couldn’t figure out was how a nine-tailed fox who could treat immortal pills like candy still got a stomachache from chocolate. Was that some core rule baked into the universe?
Shaking his head, Yu Sheng returned his attention to the driving manual in front of him.
He’d barely read two lines when a voice from across the coffee table interrupted again.
“Ah—bro, I can’t write my essay! Can you help me…?”
Yu Sheng looked up. Princess Rapunzel was sitting cross-legged on a cushion across the table. Her unfinished holiday homework lay scattered in front of her, covered in wild scribbles. Next to it was another pile—Mermaid’s.
“Write it yourself.” Yu Sheng’s expression didn’t change.
“I’m only missing the last hundred words!” Princess Rapunzel clawed at her head until her hair became a messy bird’s nest. “Bro, you’re a big writer. A hundred words is nothing to you. It’d take you like a minute…”
“Look at Little Fish.” Yu Sheng pointed at Mermaid, who was bent over her paper, writing carefully stroke by stroke. “She’s been working all morning and she’s not whining. If you were even half as serious as her, you’d be done already.”
Rapunzel scratched her head again, leaned over to peek at Mermaid’s nearly finished paper, and could only sigh and accept reality. But after writing a few words, she looked up again and pointed at Little Red Riding Hood, who was on the other sofa with her head down over a phone.
“Bro, look at her! She’s been playing on her phone forever!”
“I finished ages ago.” Little Red Riding Hood lifted her eyes and gave Rapunzel a sideways look. “And I’m not playing. I’m grinding Subject One.”
Rapunzel froze for a few seconds, sighed again, and finally lowered her head to write properly.
Hearing that, Yu Sheng leaned forward, curious. “You finally started?”
“Yeah.” Little Red Riding Hood nodded. “I’ve already started practicing driving.”
“Going smoothly?”
Little Red Riding Hood blushed. “…I drove into a ditch.”
Yu Sheng paused. He really hadn’t expected that. In his impression, Little Red Riding Hood was always mature and steady, sharp and quick to react. Those traits didn’t necessarily help with a driver’s license, but it still shouldn’t have been possible for her to drive a training car—with a locked throttle—into a ditch.
The next second, the girl sighed.
“I’m used to riding a wolf. When I saw a ditch ahead, I thought I’d just have the shadowspawn jump over it,” she said quietly. “My idea jumped over. The car didn’t.”
Yu Sheng: “…”
“But I carried the car out right away,” Little Red Riding Hood added. “The instructor looked angry at first, but he didn’t scold me. He just told me to be careful next time.”
Yu Sheng caught the faintest, sly amusement at the corner of her eye and felt his eyelid twitch again.
“Take it easy,” he said. “Don’t scare ordinary people.”
“I know, I know.” Little Red Riding Hood grinned, then her gaze fell on the manual in Yu Sheng’s hands. “What’s that? I’ve seen you reading it a lot lately.”
Yu Sheng chuckled and showed her the cover. “The Interstellar Driving Theory Manual. Want to trade?”
Little Red Riding Hood’s expression froze. She immediately lowered her head and went back to her phone like she’d never heard him.
Yu Sheng laughed, leaned back, and looked over the top of the manual at the scene around him.
Foxy was already dozing off, clutching her gourd of “candy beans.”
Rapunzel and Mermaid, dragged out of bed early by Little Red Riding Hood to catch up on homework, were writing furiously at the coffee table.
Little Red Riding Hood was seriously grinding practice questions for Subject One. She’d finally started the first step of the driver’s license she’d dreamed about for so long.
Irene was watching TV in the dining room, and for once Little Doll was considerate enough to keep the volume turned down.
The other three Irenes, however, were anything but quiet. One was in the corner of the living room, holding a phone she’d sweet-talked out of Foxy and scrolling short videos, laughing like a goose. The other two were upstairs gaming so loudly you’d think the game was beating her.
Luna wasn’t home. She was probably still tending the new vegetable plot in the valley, and she might not come back until afternoon.
Zheng Zhi had gone out early, too. Even though he’d only just returned from a dangerous Otherworld, his mindset was absurdly good. With the spirit of “even if the sky falls, you still have to live” and “better to learn skills than wait to die,” he went to the Enlightenment Hall halfway up the mountain, saying he wanted to learn a few self-defense techniques from the immortals.
It wasn’t really proper. He didn’t have local residency, and he hadn’t handled any enrollment procedures. But apparently Immortal Yuan Ling approved it specially, and the elder in charge of the Enlightenment Hall had taken an immediate liking to Zheng Zhi.
Fine. It was all pretty good like this.
Yu Sheng thought hazily, and under the strong hypnotic effect of the Interstellar Driving Theory Manual, his eyelids grew heavy. He slowly closed his eyes.
At that moment, a voice suddenly barged into his ears—
“All cultivators… activate the Star-Guardian Grand Array… may the realm remain whole!”