Chapter 211: 207 Encounter

"Ptooey, ptooey, ptooey... huff..." A man just crawled out of the water, soaked through. While shivering uncontrollably, he spat out mouthfuls of salty, fishy seawater.

It is now late autumn, and the sea breeze is exceptionally strong. The man stands on the shore, his teeth chattering. He turns his head to look back with some irritation, only to see that the surging waves have already destroyed the whirlpool that brought him to the shore without a trace, leaving only the white foam created by the waves crashing against the reefs, like white funeral flowers surrounding this entire island.

There is one thing Wei Chengye's secretary guessed wrong from the very beginning: He Jia'an is truly not in Shenzhou, but has gone abroad, arriving at Sakura Island, which faces Shenzhou across the sea.

Sakura Island and most of the islands in the Pacific Ocean form a region of their own, but since most of this region is ocean, it is called the Archipelago Region, or the Circum-Sea Region. Sakura Island is a place in this region where civilization is relatively more developed and relatively more livable.

"I wasted my cigarettes." He Jia'an pulls a pack of cigarettes soaked through by seawater from his pocket. Upon opening it, he sees that even the filters are ruined. He is speechless and wants to throw the cigarettes away, but after thinking about it, he is currently penniless and certainly cannot afford to buy even a pack of cigarettes.

If these cigarettes are ruined, so be it; he didn't smoke them anyway. It's just that when his nicotine craving hits, he always wants to hold something in his mouth, and nothing is better to hold in the mouth than a cigarette filter. Once dried, they can still be used in a pinch.

A smoker's mouth is already shaped like a cigarette filter.

He Jia'an looks back at the sea again, thinking of the half-breed merman who pushed him all the way here from Shenzhou, and feels a bit indignant. "This half-breed sent me to this place without even leaving me some travel fare? Sigh."

With a long sigh, He Jia'an takes off his top and walks barefoot toward the beach. Having shivered for a while just now, he is not feeling very cold anymore.

Although it is autumn and there are far fewer people coming to the beach, this does not mean no one goes swimming. Some "rough" men even leave their clothes and valuables on the shore, which gives He Jia'an an opportunity.

Quietly swiping a set of floral shirt and floral pants that don't match his style, paired with his kind, bald head, He Jia'an is an extremely conspicuous presence as he walks down the road.

During the period he stayed in the mental sanitarium, suffering day and night through various chaotic, frantic hallucinations, his physical state inevitably declined. His poor complexion dragged down even his once-praiseworthy appearance. Although he tried hard to put on a harmless look, like the ugly woman imitating the beauty, the harder he tried, the more wrong he seemed to others, and passersby all vigilantly detoured around him.

At this, He Jia'an sighs inwardly again. He reaches into his pocket, which contains some loose change that jingles, and a flat, red square. If he were to take it out, people from Shenzhou would immediately smile knowingly, because this is a Red Envelope.

The Red Envelope is something he brought from Shenzhou. He keeps it on his person at all times, just as precious as his water-soaked cigarettes.

Whether there is money in the Red Envelope, he does not know, and even if there were, he would absolutely never use a single cent, simply because he knows that if the Red Envelope were gone, he would be harassed by those ghostly Abnormalities again.

At its inception, the Red Envelope was originally a type of amulet, also called "New Year money," "fright-suppressing money," or "evil-suppressing money." In the Guangfu region, they even call it "Lucky Money." The implication is always to suppress evil spirits, and only secondarily to bring good fortune and joy.

According to folklore, because children have sufficient spirituality and are ignorant of worldly affairs, they are prone to attracting evil spirits, and the end of the year is the time when evil spirits are most numerous and violent. Therefore, elders give Red Envelopes to the younger generation every Chinese New Year to help protect children from the harm of evil spirits.

In the beginning, the Red Envelope didn't even contain real money; it was just a plaything not in circulation on the market. It was only later that people began using real currency as New Year money.

Thinking of the origin of his own Red Envelope, He Jia'an also feels conflicted.

Red Envelopes are things elders pack for the younger generation, but his Red Envelope was obtained from a shop owner in the Forest Cabin who seemed like a "younger generation," and it wasn't free—he had to pay for it.

A Red Envelope you have to pay for to get... no matter how you think about it, it's absurd...

On the night when news of Yu Lianyun's accident broke, He Jia'an, who had been suffering from the side effects of being forced to read the Book of Sand, suddenly felt much lighter. Among the hallucinations he had suffered over these years, the eyes that were suspected to come from the Peering Shadow of All Things undoubtedly caused him the greatest harm, and those eyes all disappeared on that very night, leaving only some hallucinations that were far less threatening by comparison.

He Jia'an is also extremely puzzled by this, but in the hallucinations at that time, he suddenly heard a few calls for him. Those voices made him feel incredibly nostalgic; even though the tone was ghostly, it stirred up a thousand emotions in him, and he felt no fear at all.

"Team Leader He..."

He Jia'an follows the sound and looks over, only to see two beautiful figures appearing in the hazy mist—one with long, flowing hair, the other with neat, short hair. His heart jumps, and his eyes grow hot. "You... you all... have you all come to see me?"

The two figures in the mist do not say another word. One figure rapidly deforms in the mist, hands turning into wings, feet into claws; with a flap of wings, wind rises, but it vanishes in an instant. The other figure retreats, her form seemingly dissolving, becoming shorter and shorter. Behind her appear the figures of a man and a woman, emitting a low, strange "Uh—" sound, grabbing the shrinking figure and dragging her forcibly into the ground.

Seeing this, He Jia'an wants to grab them, but when he runs forward and reaches out, he finds himself touching a wall. Looking closely, it is actually a wooden cabin.

He Jia'an always remembers that Yu Lianyun often mentioned this place in the team. When she was first harmed by an Other-dimensional Creature, it was here that she obtained a supernatural power called a Blessing, which was even more powerful than the harm of the Other-dimensional Creature, and later, she herself almost died because of the power of the Blessing.

Moreover, on the land of Shenzhou, legends about the Forest Cabin and the Dream Grocery Store have been spreading more and more widely, to the point where some people know them well. However, apart from a very small number of people in the world, almost no one has truly seen that Forest Cabin, and it seems no one in the world can accurately describe the appearance of the Forest Cabin.

Yu Lianyun had also provided the specific location of the Forest Cabin, and he had once searched for it with his former team members. But for some reason, although they did indeed discover a lake, a few willow trees, and even a cabin on a mountain in Litaishi, there was no one inside, and it was so clean that there wasn't even a trace of an Abnormal magnetic field disturbance reaction.

Because they had once exhausted a great deal of manpower and resources with no results, the Xuanmi Group Group Leader Wei Chengye finally chose to give up the search. It was just that everyone in the Xuanmi Group knew that a Forest Cabin truly existed in this world, filled with various Forbidden Items capable of turning the world upside down thousands of times over.

He Jia'an never expected that he would one day be able to come here. He feels a bit emotional, walks inside, and then... he meets Wei Jiang, who has returned to work after death.