Chapter 9

Chapter 9: A Bit of Truth

The voice in his head made Yu Sheng jerk in place. Then he froze even harder.

He stayed locked up until Irene yelled again, and only then did he snap out of it.

“…Irene?” Yu Sheng blinked. He kept his eyes on the valley while cautiously moving toward the collapsed temple, searching for a corner that might serve as temporary shelter. At the same time, he answered in his mind, careful and slow. “How did you connect to me? You’re literally talking in my head.”

“Is that hard?” Irene sounded completely self-righteous. “I’m one of Alice’s dolls!”

Yu Sheng still couldn’t connect those two ideas.

“If I can dive into your dream once, I can find the route,” Irene added, as if explaining something obvious. Then her tone shifted. “Hey—no. Where did you run off to? I can’t sense you at all…”

Yu Sheng went quiet for two seconds. He looked up at the dark forest surrounding the valley and felt like an eight-meter monster could leap out at any moment, with dramatic music blasting out of nowhere.

His stomach dropped.

“…I might have gone on a long trip,” he admitted. “It doesn’t feel easy to get back.”

Irene seemed to freeze too. Her voice came a few seconds later, horrified. “…Didn’t you say you were just going out to throw away the trash? Did the garbage truck scoop you up?!”

Yu Sheng had no idea how her brain worked.

But he had to admit—hearing Irene’s voice calmed him a little. Just a little. At least it proved his connection to home hadn’t been cut clean. If Irene could contact him, then maybe there was still a way back.

He didn’t know how.

He didn’t even have a reason to believe it.

But right now, he needed something to hold on to.

And in the present, he needed to stay alive.

The valley was quiet. Even now, all he heard was the occasional hollow wind. But Yu Sheng felt an oppressive discomfort, like the air itself was wrong. He kept feeling watched—by a gaze with no warmth, empty and hungry, sweeping over the place again and again.

It made him more uneasy with every breath. He had to find shelter. At the very least, he couldn’t keep standing out in the open like an idiot.

In his line of sight, the only place that looked remotely usable was the half-collapsed temple. The forest in the distance was dense, but the atmosphere there felt even more sinister. And “entering a wild forest at midnight” was a classic death flag, so he refused to go near it.

The problem was, “sneaking into a ruined temple at midnight” was also a classic death flag.

The only difference was that the forest usually spawned beasts, while the temple usually spawned monsters.

Either way, it was begging for dramatic music.

Yu Sheng gritted his teeth and still headed for the one corner of the temple that looked somewhat intact.

At the same time, he kept talking to Irene in his mind, roughly explaining what had happened—though there wasn’t much to explain, because even he didn’t understand it. From start to finish, he’d only opened a door.

After Irene heard everything, she went quiet for a long time before she said, uncertain, “It sounds like you fell into an Otherworld?”

Yu Sheng froze in the rubble. “Otherworld? You call this place an Otherworld? You know where I am?”

“Huh? There are tons of otherworlds,” Irene said, voice oddly muddled. “How would I know which one you fell into…”

Yu Sheng frowned. A thought clicked into place.

Maybe he hadn’t been thrown into “another world” at all. Maybe he’d triggered some kind of phenomenon that Irene didn’t even consider rare.

As he was thinking, Irene seemed to realize what his confusion meant.

“…Don’t tell me you’ve never even heard of ‘Otherworld’?” she asked, disbelief creeping into her voice.

Yu Sheng’s expression twisted. “Am I supposed to have heard of it? Is this common sense every ordinary person knows?”

“Oh, it’s normal that an ordinary person doesn’t know Otherworld,” Irene said casually. Then her next sentence made Yu Sheng go cold. “But you shouldn’t not know.”

“Me?” Yu Sheng stared at the dark valley, confused. “Why should I know? I’m just an ordinary person…”

“…But you live in Otherworld every day.”

Shadows slipped through the night.

A wolf leaped out of darkness, sprang across staggered rooftops with agile speed, and landed soundlessly on an empty street. It stood in the middle of the road, head turning left and right.

“Come back,” an annoyed female voice called from the shadow of a building at the corner.

The wolf instantly shrank, let out a muffled whine, and hurried into the shade beside the road.

A girl in a dark red coat and black skirt stood in the gap between two old houses. She rubbed the wolf’s head as it returned, then lifted her eyes toward the houses at the end of the street.

It was a short street, only a few dozen households. Open at both ends. Easy to take in at a glance. Even without using the wolf’s eyes, she could judge the situation right away.

Her phone rang at that moment—the classic opening theme from the 1986 Journey to the West. She picked up when the Monkey King had just finished his second somersault.

“It’s me,” she said. “Yeah. I’m in Old Quarter, over on Wu Tong Road.”

A middle-aged man’s voice came through the speaker, so exhausted it sounded half-unhinged. He rambled nonstop.

Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while, then tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“I’m here,” she said. “But I didn’t find anything. My wolf searched this street three times, end to end. There’s no sign of an Otherworld opening, and nothing came out of an Otherworld.”

The line went silent for a few seconds. Then the man said, “But the monitors can confirm Wu Tong Road had a response indicating an Otherworld opening. There must have been a brief passage…”

“I believe it,” Little Red Riding Hood replied, rubbing her temple. “I trust the Special Operations Bureau’s monitors. But I also trust my wolf. Maybe there was a brief passage here, but now it’s vanished without a trace. Considering an Otherworld usually can’t cut its connection to the real world that fast, it’s possible someone else stepped in and handled it.”

“There aren’t many people who can cut an Otherworld connection so quickly,” the man said, weary. “And the forces they belong to all have records and contact channels with the Bureau. But tonight I received no communications.”

“Then maybe it was the Hermit Society,” she said lightly. “They’re always acting mysterious…”

As expected, she immediately got another long lecture. She sighed and agreed over and over.

“Fine, fine, I know,” she said. “They’re all highly respected scholars. Sure. I respect scholars. I’m done, I’m done. I’ll take my wolf pack and search through the shadows one more time. Wu Tong Road isn’t big. Sixty-five house numbers total. Searching again won’t kill me…”

When she hung up, the night finally felt quiet again.

Little Red Riding Hood stared at the dark phone screen, sighed, then looked down at the wolf heads rising and falling in the shadows around her, and sighed again.

“My homework isn’t even done,” she muttered. “Being outsourced is such a miserable life…”

Yu Sheng sat in a corner of the ruined temple under a wall that still looked solid enough to trust. Cold wind poured in through a hole in the structure and scraped against his skin. He stared up at the dark, muddy night sky beyond the broken roof, trying to empty his mind.

He failed.

Just now, he’d learned a truth.

The only stable place he had in Boundary City—the safest, most normal place in the entire city, in his mind—was actually an abnormal place called Otherworld.

In Irene’s words, an Otherworld was a realm beyond the ordinary, a dimension at the edge of reason. The orderly world most people lived in looked like a mountain with a solid base and a stable structure, but in truth, that mountain was riddled with holes—tiny openings that led into disorder.

Most people would never touch those holes in their entire lives. They’d never glimpse the bizarre landscape on the other side.

But some people couldn’t avoid the light leaking through those cracks. And once they saw what was there, some things could never go back to how they were.

Even for Irene—someone who sounded like she’d seen far more than he had—the idea that a person could live in an Otherworld for a long time was… beyond absurd.