Chapter 9: A Glimpse of Truth

The voice echoing in his mind startled Yu Sheng, who had been dazed by the cold wind blowing through the valley, and then left him even more bewildered.

He only snapped out of his daze when Irene shouted loudly in his head for the second time.

"... Irene?" Yu Sheng blinked. While cautiously observing the situation in the valley, he was slowly approaching the dilapidated, collapsed old temple to find a temporary shelter, and at the same time tried to respond in his heart, "How did you... contact me? I mean, you're speaking directly in my head..."

"Is that hard?" Irene's tone was particularly self-righteous. "I am Alice's puppet!"

Yu Sheng thought for a moment and simply couldn't connect these two things... So, does that mean all of Alice's puppets can do this? Can they all speak inside someone's head?

"Didn't I already dive into your dreams once? Once you dive in, you know the way," Irene noticed Yu Sheng wasn't responding and patiently explained again, but immediately changed her tone, "Hey wait, where exactly did you run off to? I can't sense you at all..."

Yu Sheng fell silent for two seconds, looking up at the surrounding deep valley and dense forest. He felt that a seven or eight-meter-tall monster would spawn in this place the next second, accompanied by an impassioned BGM, which made his heart turn cold: "... I might have taken a long trip out, and I guess it's not easy to get back..."

Irene on the other end clearly froze for a moment, and her voice arrived a few seconds late: "... Didn't you say you were just going out to take out the trash? Did the garbage truck scoop you up?!"

Yu Sheng didn't know where this guy got such strong associative abilities...

But he had to admit that after hearing Irene's voice, the panic-stricken heart he had from being suddenly thrown into such a desolate wilderness stabilized a little... just a little.

This voice at least proved that his connection to the original world hadn't been completely severed. Since Irene could contact him, there should still be a possibility for him to return—even though he had no ideas and couldn't think of any reason to support this hypothesis, he had to firmly believe this now.

As for the present, the first thing he had to do was ensure his own safety.

The valley was very quiet; up to now, only hollow sounds of wind occasionally reached his ears, but Yu Sheng always felt a strange and oppressive sensation in his heart. He felt something was staring at him here, some kind of... temperatureless, void-like, and hungry gaze, scanning this place over and over, scanning him.

This made him increasingly uneasy, urgently wanting to find a corner to hide in first, at least he couldn't stand so carelessly in the open anymore.

But the only place visible that could hide him seemed to be that almost completely collapsed broken temple—the Lin Zi further away was indeed dense, but the atmosphere was even more eerie and sinister. Plus, "entering the deep forest at night" was a classic death-flag element in horror stories, and he absolutely did not want to get close.

But the bad thing was that sneaking into a broken temple at night was also a standard death-flag element; the difference between the two options was just that fierce beasts were likely to spawn in the Lin Zi, while monsters were likely to spawn in the broken temple...

Both were likely to trigger an impassioned BGM.

Yu Sheng gritted his teeth and still walked towards the only relatively intact corner of the broken temple.

At the same time, he contacted Irene in his mind and roughly explained his situation—actually, there wasn't much to explain, because even he didn't know how all this happened; from start to finish, he had just opened a door...

After listening, Irene froze for a long time before hesitantly speaking: "It sounds like you fell into a 'Otherworld'?"

Yu Sheng, standing in the ruins of the broken temple, was stunned by these words and suddenly reacted: "Otherworld? You call this place an Otherworld? Do you know where I am?"

For some reason, Irene's voice sounded a bit confused: "Huh? There are plenty of Otherworlds; how would I know which one you fell into..."

Hearing Irene mutter, Yu Sheng frowned, suddenly realizing he had gained some more knowledge about the "supernatural realm," and more importantly, he realized a crucial matter:

He might not have been thrown into "another world," but encountered some kind of "natural phenomenon" that didn't seem rare to Irene?

While Yu Sheng was muttering to himself, Irene clearly thought of something and said in his mind with a somewhat incredulous tone: "... You don't tell me you've never heard of 'Otherworld'?"

Yu Sheng had a strange expression: "... Should I have heard of it? Is this thing common knowledge that everyone knows?"

"Oh, it's normal for ordinary people not to know about Otherworlds; after all, the vast majority of people will never encounter such things in their lives," Irene said casually, but her next sentence made Yu Sheng freeze, "But you shouldn't not know."

"Me? Why should I know?" Yu Sheng looked a bit confused. "I'm just an ordinary person..."

"... But you live inside an Otherworld every day."...

Shadows moved through the night, hunters taking shape within the shadows. A ferocious wolf leaped out from a shadow, agilely jumped a few times across the high and low rooftops of the old district, and landed silently and lightly in the empty street, standing in the middle of the road looking left and right.

"Come back!" A somewhat angry female voice came from the shadow of a building in a street corner.

The wolf instantly shrank its neck, made a muffled whimper, and quickly trotted to hide in the shadow of a building by the roadside.

A girl wearing a dark red coat and a black skirt stood in the corner between two old houses. She reached out and rubbed the head of the wolf that had just run back, then raised her eyes to look at the houses at the end of this old street.

This was a very short street with only a few dozen households. The street was open from front to back, and the situation on the road was clear at a glance; even without the wolf's eyes, she could judge the situation here at a single glance.

The girl frowned, and just then, a phone ringtone sounded at the right time—it was still that classic opening theme from the 1986 version of Journey to the West. She answered when the monkey had just flipped his second somersault: "It's me, yes, I'm in the old district, over here on Wutong Road."

The voice coming from the phone belonged to a middle-aged person whose mind was blurred from overtime work, rambling on and on.

Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while, then tugged at the corners of her mouth: "I've arrived, but I found nothing—my wolf has already searched the entire street front and back three times. There are no signs of an Otherworld opening, nor anything that ran out from an Otherworld."

There was silence for two or three seconds on the phone, then the voice from the other side came: "But the monitoring personnel are certain that there was a reaction of an Otherworld opening on Wutong Road in the old district. A passage to an Otherworld must have appeared there briefly..."

!.

"I believe," Little Red Riding Hood said somewhat helplessly, "I still recognize the professionalism of your Special Bureau's monitoring personnel, but I also trust my wolf—perhaps a brief passage did appear here, but now it must have disappeared completely clean... Considering that under normal circumstances an Otherworld cannot disconnect from the present world in such a short time, perhaps 'someone else' intervened and handled it."

"There aren't many people capable of cutting off an Otherworld connection in such a short time, and their affiliated factions all have filed records and contact channels with the Special Bureau," the voice from the phone sounded somewhat tired, "but I haven't received any communication regarding this tonight..."

"Then maybe it was someone from the Hermit Society; they are always so mystical..."

The girl said casually, then unsurprisingly heard another string of rambling from the phone, so she sighed and kept agreeing: "Fine, fine, fine, I know, they are all highly respected scholars, okay? I have always respected scholars. No more talking, no more talking. I'll take my wolf pack and search the shadows one more time anyway. This 'Wutong Road' isn't big, with a total of sixty-five house numbers; searching it again won't be troublesome..."

After hanging up the phone, her ears finally became quiet. Little Red Riding Hood looked at her phone with the screen off and sighed, then looked down at the dog heads... wolf heads rising and falling in the shadows around her, and couldn't help but sigh again.

"I haven't finished my homework yet... Sigh, the life of an outsourcer is truly bitter..."

Yu Sheng sat under a corner of the wall in the broken temple that looked relatively sturdy, blowing in the cold wind coming through a large Kong Dong in the wall, looking up at the dark and turbid night sky outside the hole in the roof, trying to empty his mind, but failed.

Just now, he learned a truth.

His only stable foothold in the Border City, the safest and most normal place in his mind for the entire city, was actually an anomaly called an "Otherworld"... a "location."

In Irene's words, the so-called "Otherworld" is a realm outside the normal, a dimension on the edge of reason—the world where ordinary people live, a world of normal order, seems like a mountain with a solid foundation and stable structure, but in reality, the tiny details of this mountain are all "Kong Dong" leading to the irrational and the disordered.

For the vast majority of people, they will never encounter these "Kong Dong" in their entire lives and will never see the bizarre and colorful scenery on the other side of the Kong Dong.

But the faint light leaking from the Kong Dong will always fall into the eyes of others—for them, the moment they accidentally glimpse those scenes, some things can never go back.

—However, even for a Puppet of the Painting who has seen much, the fact that a person can live in an Otherworld for a long time is still somewhat outrageous...

(End of Chapter)