Chapter 87

Chapter 87: Snow in the Room

At Wu Tong Road 66, the biggest commotion was usually made up of Yu Sheng’s stress-induced rage and Little Doll’s screaming and scratching—and now there was also the fox girl nearby, watching the show while crunching chips.

A little over ten minutes later, Yu Sheng successfully subdued and punished the doll, who had been bouncing around and even tried to bite him. He hung her on the drying rack on the living room balcony.

“Yu Sheng, you bastard! Put me down!” Irene flailed her arms and kicked hard in midair. The clothes rod ran through both her sleeves and pinned her from behind, leaving her swaying like a salted fish being dried in the wind. “It’s just a temporary ban! Twelve hours! The account can still be saved! You’re not really going to hang me for twelve hours, are you? Doesn’t your conscience hurt? At least hang me in a more comfortable pose!”

“If I used clips, you’d break free right away,” Yu Sheng said, sitting on the sofa and glancing at the doll hanging from the rod. “This is to teach you a lesson. Don’t mess with my stuff. Relax—I’ll let you down before dinner. But if there’s a next time, I’ll hang you in the basement.”

At that, Irene immediately started shouting and making a scene, putting on a dramatic display of “unyielding spirit” and “resistance under violent coercion.”

Her main resistance was that she didn’t actually resist. Don’t be fooled by how foul-mouthed, hot-tempered, and forgetful she was. She surrendered fast.

Yu Sheng treated her noise like background sound and ignored her.

Foxy cautiously came over, still holding a bag of chips. She looked up at the doll hanging on the rack, then at Yu Sheng. After hesitating for a few seconds, she spoke softly. “Benefactor, Irene really seems to know she was wrong. Can you let her down?”

As she spoke, she offered him the chips. “Eat something, and you won’t be mad.”

Yu Sheng grabbed a few chips and tossed them into his mouth. He glanced at Irene, then turned on the TV.

Little Doll went quiet instantly and started staring at the screen as if her life depended on it.

“See?” Yu Sheng sighed, speaking to Foxy with the tone of someone experienced. “She just makes a lot of noise. If nobody reacts, she settles down. That’s how those thick-skinned types are.”

“Oh.” Foxy nodded as if she understood, though she probably didn’t really get what “thick-skinned” meant.

Just then, a sudden bang came from upstairs, snapping everyone’s attention away.

Irene, still hanging from the rack, lifted her head at once and looked upward through the floorboards. “Hey, Yu Sheng, did something fall upstairs? Did that ladder in the attic corner tip over?”

Yu Sheng stood up from the sofa, frowning as he looked toward the second floor.

“…No. The sound came from the far end of the second-floor hallway,” he said in a low voice. “We should go check.”

Foxy sprang up immediately. With a buzzing sound, her tail slid out. “I’ll go with you!”

“Hey, let me down too! I’m coming!” Irene shouted right away. “That sound isn’t right. If something happens, I have to protect you!”

“Who’s protecting who is still up for debate,” Yu Sheng muttered. Still, he walked over and lifted the clothes rod off the rack, tipping one end down so Little Doll could slide to the ground. “This time doesn’t count. Next time, I really will hang you in the basement.”

Irene stumbled a couple of steps before steadying herself. She pouted as she adjusted her clothes, then made a face at Yu Sheng.

It was the kind of face that said, I surrender fast, but I’ll do it again—and I can start right now.

Yu Sheng didn’t bother reacting. He loosened up his limbs, exchanged a look with Foxy, and led the way to the stairs.

On the second floor, he headed straight for the end of the hallway, stopping in front of the room that had once held Irene’s painting on the wall.

The door was shut tight. Inside, it was quiet, with no obvious signs of anything unusual.

But Yu Sheng was increasingly certain the thump had come from this direction.

He remembered that after the last time he’d opened this room, it had changed from an empty space into an ordinary room with simple furnishings. The only thing in there that could’ve made a heavy impact sound was the mirror hanging on the wall—but that mirror had been fixed firmly. Back then, he’d tried hard and still couldn’t pull it down.

Besides, if the mirror had fallen, there should’ve been glass shattering too.

Yu Sheng stepped forward and grasped the strange handle on the hinge side of the door, turning it quietly.

“Wait, don’t open it yet,” Irene muttered. Thin strands of black spider silk extended from her fingertips. They slipped through the crack under the door and slowly spread into the room. “Let me check first.”

Beside her, Foxy went “pop” and removed one of her ears. She pressed the fluffy fox ear to the door like a stethoscope and moved it slowly, looking extremely serious.

Seeing that, Yu Sheng couldn’t help muttering, “Can you two be normal for once?”

“I’m perfectly normal,” Irene’s voice said in his head. “That silly fox isn’t.”

“Benefactor,” Foxy said softly as she pressed her ear back onto her head, “there’s no sound inside.”

“I don’t sense any abnormal aura either,” Irene added as she reeled her black silk threads back in. “Open the door and take a look.”

Yu Sheng nodded and carefully pushed the door open.

Honestly, he also felt like they were overdoing it. They were at home, and just because they’d heard a noise upstairs, the three of them were acting like they were facing a deadly threat—scouting, guarding, checking. It was ridiculous.

But he also knew their caution was unavoidable.

After all, Wu Tong Road 66 was an otherworld, and this room at the far end of the hallway had been wrong from the very beginning.

As the door opened, a lingering chill blew into their faces.

Yu Sheng shivered. Why was there a cold draft in the room? It felt like a freezing wind from a snowy mountain, carrying the bite of ice and snow.

Yet when the door fully opened, the room looked… ordinary.

A simple bed. A table and chairs. A mirror hanging on the wall. Old floorboards. Wallpaper that had faded and cracked at the corners. Plain curtains.

Everything looked the same. There was no intruder crawling out of another world, and no gaping hole torn open into some foreign realm.

Yu Sheng still didn’t relax. He watched his surroundings as he slowly stepped inside.

Irene followed him in too, looking around curiously at the room that was supposedly “hers.”

Then the doll suddenly spotted something. “Hey! Yu Sheng, look at the floor by the wall! On this side, near the door!”

Yu Sheng immediately turned to where she pointed.

Near the base of the walls on both sides of the door, he saw small piles of white stuff on the floor, along with a few tiny wet patches that were slowly fading.

“…Snow?” Yu Sheng leaned in, stunned to find the white piles were actually snow. And because of the room’s warmth, it was rapidly melting into water stains.

Irene looked dazed. “…It snowed inside the room? That’s messed up.”

“From the way it’s piled, it looks like strong wind blew it against the wall over time,” Yu Sheng said, frowning as he studied the traces that hadn’t fully melted yet.

Foxy crouched nearby, nose close to the wall, sniffing carefully.

“The smell of living things,” the demon fox girl said seriously. “This snow came from a place where living things exist.”

Irene stared. “You can smell that?!”

Foxy looked proud. “A fox’s nose is very useful.”

“That’s better than a dog’s nose…,” Irene muttered, genuinely impressed.

Just then, something caught Yu Sheng’s eye.

He walked to the table, bent down, and picked up a black, palm-sized metal object from the floor beneath it.

It was a metal component of unknown purpose. It looked like some kind of diverter used to connect multiple pipes and valves. It had several threaded openings, hollow inside. It wasn’t heavy in his hand, but it felt solid.

Irene stepped closer. When she saw the strange device in Yu Sheng’s hand, she froze. “Uh… I’m guessing this wasn’t already in the room?”

“Of course not,” Yu Sheng said, shaking his head. “Just like snow doesn’t fall in a room, this place also wouldn’t normally have something like this—a weird part that looks like it was torn off a machine.”

As he spoke, he carefully approached the mirror facing the door.

The mirror reflected the room.

But Yu Sheng frowned.

Deep within the otherwise normal reflection, he could faintly see another image layered over it. It looked like a cave. The cave wasn’t large, and outside the entrance, snow was falling heavily.