Chapter 81

Chapter 81: Peach Blossom Spring

Outside was still mountains—mountains repeating endlessly, layered like ripples formed when space crumpled on a tiny scale.

Once Yu Sheng recovered from the heart-stopping rush, the sudden braking, and the lingering dizziness, he finally understood what Foxy meant.

The range spread out like waves, rolling without end. Between the peaks, thin mist hung low, hazy and pale. In that swirling fog, there was no outline of anything except more mountains.

Yu Sheng frowned, staring at those endlessly copied ridges. For some reason, he remembered the cafe where he’d first met Bai Li Qing—the one that repeated and stretched forever, as far as he could see.

But this was different. That cafe only repeated forward and backward. Beyond the windows, the street-facing display still looked like a clear boundary. These mountains, though… no matter which way he looked, he couldn’t find an obvious end.

“This… we can’t reach the outside, can we?” Irene clung to Yu Sheng’s head, nervous as she peered over the ridge. “Are we still going forward?”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He focused, recalling the viewpoints he’d seen when he first formed a connection with the valley, and at the same time he listened to the world around them.

After a while, he bent down, picked up a rock, and threw it hard into the distance.

The rock arced through the air—and vanished before it could even hit the ground.

“Huh?” Irene blurted.

Yu Sheng walked forward, slow and careful, until he reached the place where it disappeared.

There was nothing visible ahead, and yet it felt like something was there—an invisible wall. He crouched again, picked up a pebble, and tossed it gently.

This time he saw it clearly. The pebble crossed a line and, in the same instant, disappeared. At the moment it vanished, a faint ripple shivered through the air, like a breeze brushing across water.

Yu Sheng raised his head and looked along the ridge, left and right.

He could feel it.

The slopes rose and fell, then somehow folded together at a far end. That invisible boundary covered the entire valley, from the sky above to the depths below.

He hesitated, took a quiet breath, and walked forward.

“Hey, hey, hey! You’re really going in?!” Irene shouted, voice rising. “This feels creepy! If we cross, won’t we—”

Yu Sheng stepped across.

The air trembled. Ripples spread, and a brief weightless sensation flashed through him and vanished. The world blurred.

And then—just like that—they were standing near the center of the valley again.

“…We won’t be able to come back!” Irene finished out of momentum, then froze, staring around in disbelief. “Huh? We’re back?”

A larger ripple appeared beside them. The huge silver-white demon fox slipped through the air and reappeared next to Yu Sheng and Irene.

“Benefactor!” Foxy looked around anxiously. Only after she saw them standing safe did she relax. She brushed Yu Sheng’s side with the tip of her tail, careful and light. “You disappeared all of a sudden and scared me!”

“Space closes at the boundary and points one-way back to the region’s center,” Yu Sheng said at last. He spoke slowly, as if choosing each word. “I just don’t know if other otherworlds are built the same way.”

Irene stared at him, blank for several long seconds. Then she finally reacted. “So that means… no matter what, we can’t reach the outside?”

“There is no outside,” Yu Sheng said, shaking his head. “This valley is the only effective area in the whole space. Those endless mountains are just the boundary folding space back in on itself. When space bends like that, reflections stack again and again, creating shadowspawn. If you look closely, they’re just infinite copies of the mountains around the valley.”

Irene’s eyes went round. After a long moment, she managed, “…Whoa.”

No one could say whether she truly understood or was just impressed by how confident he sounded.

She poked Yu Sheng’s head. “So what do we do next?”

Yu Sheng turned to Foxy. The silver-white demon fox lay beside him, watching quietly.

“Since this place won’t generate Entity-Hunger anymore, and it’s become stable… maybe we can properly bury your parents again,” Yu Sheng said. “At least build a real grave. What do you think?”

Foxy tilted her head. After a moment, she nodded gently.

It didn’t take long to find the spot where her parents had been buried. For Yu Sheng now, building a grave mound wasn’t difficult.

The two sets of remains that had been hastily buried back then were carefully gathered and cleaned again. Yu Sheng sank the ground into a neat grave pit, then fused stone into a sturdy coffin. Compared to healing huge stretches of land and forcing vegetation to grow, this was almost simple.

They laid the remains inside. The coffin went into the grave pit. Soil wriggled and settled, covering everything layer by layer until a mound took shape.

“We still need a tombstone,” Yu Sheng said, looking at the fresh earth. When he noticed Foxy’s eyes had gone distant, he added, softer, “Something to set in front, as a memorial.”

“I’ll go get one,” Foxy said at once.

She turned and ran. Air tore with a chain of sharp booms, and she vanished from sight in a blink.

Not long after, she came rushing back with a rumbling roar, a strange silver-white metal plate clamped in her mouth. It was about half a person tall.

“This was a gift Dad and Mother bought for me,” Foxy said, setting it down gently. “It was… an instrument. I kept begging to join an interest class, so they bought it for me. But I never got the chance to learn. Now it’s already broken.”

She lifted the plate with her tail, rolled it upright, and planted it into the soil in front of the grave. Then she pressed the earth around it with her paw until it hardened like stone.

“Actually, a tombstone isn’t really—” Yu Sheng started, then swallowed the rest. He exhaled. “Never mind. If you think it fits, then it’s fine.”

“Where I’m from, we don’t have those rules,” Foxy said. She lay down beside the grave and brushed Yu Sheng’s arm with her nose—truly gentle this time. “After a demon dies, we keep a small part of the bones as a memorial, like a tooth or a finger bone. After an immortal dies, we keep the hair. Other than that, the body returns to nature, or it’s refined into an object for descendants to remember. Either way, there’s no need for an extra burial.

“Some people even separate their intelligence while they’re still alive, returning to the Great Dao. Their intelligence becomes immortal, and the body can be left to heaven and earth.”

She shifted her head on the ground and looked at the new grave.

“But I heard the immortal say that a very, very long time ago—before the skyfolk arrived—there were rules for burying the dead. People would solemnly bury their ancestors’ bones, or keep them in bone halls. But that was ancient. According to what they taught in school, that was before the interstellar era, when civilization still lived and multiplied inside a gravity well.”

Her tail swept the ground in a slow, thoughtful arc.

“After leaving the gravity well, people’s thinking and survival stop being tied so strongly to the surface. Ideas about life and death get reshaped, so funerals change too.”

Irene listened, stunned. “Why do I feel like you’re saying something really profound…?”

“It’s just what they taught in school,” Foxy said, embarrassed. “And I don’t remember much of it.”

Her eyes fell back to the grave mound. After a brief silence, she spoke softly.

“Still… this is good. In the future, I can come here and talk to Dad and Mother. Benefactor’s suggestions always have a reason.”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He walked over and sat beside Foxy, leaning against one of her big tails.

He found himself imagining her hometown—an immortal demon civilization that had already left the surface, traveling among the stars. He wondered what it looked like, and how he could ever find it in a universe this vast.

Then the thoughts drifted away. The quiet comfort of that fluffy tail slowly unknotted the tension in his mind, and he stared into the distance, empty and calm.

This otherworld would no longer spawn Entities. It would no longer produce poison or corruption. And now it was tightly connected to him.

Could this place… be a base?

But what did you even do with a base this big? House people? Even counting himself, his team was only three. Besides, he still had Wu Tong Road 66. No matter how old that house was, it was still more livable than the wilderness.

Farming? He didn’t even know if vegetables could grow in an otherworld. But there was plenty of light, and grass was already thriving. If grass could grow, then grains and vegetables probably could, too… and if he really got bold, maybe raising cattle and sheep wasn’t impossible…

Yu Sheng felt himself drifting, as if his thoughts were floating in cotton. The longer he leaned there, the more ridiculous his ideas became, until he quietly laughed at himself.

The doll on his shoulder leaned in. “What are you thinking?”

Yu Sheng said solemnly, “I’m thinking about what this place can be used for. First plan: level the wasteland around that broken temple and plant some radishes, beans, and cabbage.”

Irene stared at him.