Chapter 70

Chapter 70: Contact

Within the Special Operations Bureau, deep divers were combat elites—people who only rose above ordinary agents after ruthless selection, brutal training, and trial after trial.

They were always sent to the most dangerous places. They endured challenges so harsh they pushed past the limits of sanity. They knew how to survive lethal alien environments, how to hunt crazed angel cultists through lawless zones. They could even storm into Otherworld to fight the most dangerous entities, or plunge into nightmares to haul back souls that had fallen.

Deep dive: descending from the calm, rational world into the dark dimension beneath it. That was their job.

And yet there were always things no human mind could truly understand, much less resist. Even the best deep divers failed. Often.

But what happened now went beyond anything Song Cheng had ever seen—and it seemed to be beyond what the director had expected, too.

The six deep divers were pulled from the dive tank at once. The moment they returned to the real dimension, their powered armor kicked into emergency treatment: the injection system pumped a heavy dose of sanity-blocking agent and protective drugs into their bodies, forcing them into calm as fast as chemistry could manage.

Support staff rushed in, checking contamination levels while confirming whether each diver’s consciousness had returned with their body—and whether anything else had come back with them.

Song Cheng and Bai Li Qing stood off to the side, watching with tightly furrowed brows.

“A math problem?”

After a long, heavy pause, Song Cheng finally broke the silence. “…A math problem could hit them this hard just by getting into their heads?”

Bai Li Qing shook her head slightly.

“Professors from Terra’s ‘the Academy’ really can attack by flooding an ordinary person’s brain with too much knowledge all at once. But it wouldn’t look like this. And our deep divers are trained for it—they’re adapted to ‘knowledge-type’ attacks. Besides having strong learning ability, their brains can also shut down on their own when the ‘knowledge injection’ exceeds what they can process.”

Song Cheng frowned. “So you mean…”

“The ‘math problem’ that diver mentioned before passing out might only be a concrete image they saw during the descent. The thing that caused the contamination… should be something else,” Bai Li Qing said grimly. “The end of the passage. No Nightfall Valley. But why would it appear as a math problem?”

Song Cheng didn’t dare to speak. He didn’t want to interrupt her train of thought.

After a brief silence, Bai Li Qing suddenly turned to him. “Little Song, you haven’t contacted that ‘Yu Sheng’ yet, have you?”

“Not yet. I was going to reach out today, but I didn’t expect all these accidents…”

“Don’t go,” Bai Li Qing said flatly.

…

Yu Sheng heard a faint noise. He looked up and glanced around, but couldn’t tell where it had come from.

Business was slow. There weren’t many people in the cafe—only a few guests at distant tables, while two clerks leaned behind the counter, idly scrolling their phones. The place felt dead.

Every so often someone glanced over in curiosity, probably wondering why a guy in his twenties was sitting here at this hour, hunched over a table and copying an entire thick workbook of high school homework.

Yu Sheng sighed. Looking at the half-finished stack, he could already feel his hand aching.

He’d tried to fake it as much as possible. Under many of the longer problems, his “work” was basically scribbles. But his hands were used to a keyboard. He hadn’t held a pen in years, let alone written this much. This job was way more exhausting than he’d imagined.

And it was hard to say which was worse: doing homework for a high schooler, or dragging a fox who understood nothing through a mall to buy clothes.

Yu Sheng thought it over and decided copying papers was still better. He truly didn’t have the courage to walk into a lingerie store with Foxy. It would make him feel like a pervert.

Especially when Foxy had that clear, innocent ignorance. A clerk would absolutely think he was a creep and call the cops.

Just then, Irene’s voice popped into his head. “Hey, hey~ Yu Sheng, how much have you written over there?”

Yu Sheng didn’t pause his pen. “Halfway. High schoolers really have it rough. Why is there so much homework?”

“Hang in there. I just heard Little Red Riding Hood muttering—she has a physics workbook too, but she forgot to bring it…”

“Tell her to go home and do it herself. I’m not doing that,” Yu Sheng snapped. Then he asked, “How’s it going on your side? Smooth?”

“It’s fine. Foxy doesn’t really know how to use a zipper. Little Red Riding Hood’s been teaching her forever. They went into the changing room together…” Irene sounded downright cheerful. “I got left on a bench outside. Little Red Riding Hood even bought me a hair clip! From a doll shop. Red—”

Yu Sheng paused, then realized. “That was bought with my money!”

“I know, I know,” Irene said quickly. “Just treat it like a gift from you… I didn’t ask for anything else, just a hair clip. It wasn’t expensive…”

“All right, all right. I didn’t say you couldn’t buy it,” Yu Sheng said, half amused and half helpless. “I’m just reminding you—don’t get carried away. And don’t forget to buy Foxy toiletries and stuff, and bedsheets and a duvet cover. You didn’t forget the size, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember. Don’t worry. My brain…” Irene cut herself off, and her tone shifted. “Foxy’s brain…”

Yu Sheng’s mind fell into a weird, awkward silence.

This was what it was like when your team simply could not be carried.

“Uh… how big was her bed again?” Irene asked, suddenly uncertain.

“One point five by two meters,” Yu Sheng sighed. “Tell that number to Little Red Riding Hood. Let her remember for both of you. And whatever else you need to buy, tell her too. She’s a high schooler—her brain works better than yours.”

“R-right… yeah…”

With a tired sigh, Yu Sheng ended the conversation and lowered his eyes, forcing himself back to copying.

But then he felt it.

Something was off.

Quiet. Too quiet. He couldn’t even hear the low chatter from the few tables of guests.

Yu Sheng snapped his head up and scanned the room.

He was still in the cafe.

Yet countless tables and chairs were lined up in neat rows, stretching endlessly forward and endlessly backward.

In the boundless cafe, there was no one at all. As far as he could see, only endless tables and chairs.

To his left were the street-facing windows—and those windows stretched infinitely, too. Outside, there was no street, only a sheet of white fog.

Something huge moved through that fog. A massive shadow drifted closer to a nearby window now and then, as if peering into the cafe. But no matter how hard Yu Sheng stared, it stayed a vague, blurry outline.

He rose slowly, shock tightening his chest.

But as he was about to bolt for the door, a voice came from across the table.

“Hello.”

It sounded like a young woman, slightly hoarse.

Yu Sheng looked in surprise. Someone was sitting opposite him—though he hadn’t seen her appear.

She looked under thirty, wearing a fitted white skirt suit. Her gray-white hair—long as a fairy-tale Rapunzel’s—was tied into a ponytail. She was beautiful, but there was a chill to her presence, a distance that was hard to name.

Yu Sheng’s gaze fixed on her eyes. Her pupils were a pale gray, as if all color had drained from them. Even the boundary between iris and white was strangely blurred, so that at a glance she didn’t look quite… human.

Then he saw something even stranger.

Everything around the woman began losing its color at speed. The nearest coffee table and chairs, then the floor, then the tables beyond—washing into faint gray-white as if the world were being bleached. The fading spread over ten meters before it weakened.

In the end, only two things kept their original color: the woman herself, and Yu Sheng.

Yu Sheng steadied his breathing. He remembered what Irene had told him: in Otherworld there could be entities with reason, but no matter how human they looked, they always showed something unmistakably inhuman.

This woman looked strange, but not strange enough.

Which meant she was human.

And if she was human—and she’d greeted him first—then she could be talked to.

Yu Sheng abandoned the idea of running. He sat back down and studied her. “You are…?”

“Bai Li Qing, director of the Special Operations Bureau under the Borderland Council,” the woman said with a small nod. “I’m sorry to meet you this way. It’s to keep things as confidential as possible—and for certain security concerns.”

Yu Sheng froze.

So they really had come for him. But at this level?

The director came in person?

While Yu Sheng was still reeling, Bai Li Qing’s gaze drifted to the tabletop.

She saw the stack of papers spread out in front of him, and her expression stalled for a fraction of a second.

Math problems. All of them—full sets of past gaokao exam questions.