Dream Fox

Eileen's reaction did not seem fake.

In fact, from the time Yu Sheng had started dealing with this doll until now, he had never caught her being insincere. Every word and action of hers revealed a kind of crystal-clear honesty, as if her head were solid all the way through. Either her acting skills were simply too good, or her head really was solid all the way through.

Yu Sheng cautiously held on to the first possibility, but he leaned more toward the second.

Afterward, he described to Eileen what the dead doll had looked like, as well as the appearance of the enormous "shadow monster" that seemed to have perished alongside the doll. The answer he received was still, "I don't know."

Yu Sheng frowned and fell into deep thought.

Eileen, meanwhile, could not help growing curious. "Hey, why did you suddenly come ask me about this? Didn't you go upstairs to sleep?"

Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment, but in the end decided to tell the doll before him about the changes in that room. It did not involve his secrets, and might even have something to do with Eileen herself. Telling her might actually help unravel the mystery.

"Something happened in the room upstairs..."

Yu Sheng described everything he had seen upstairs just now to Eileen in complete detail. For once, she did not chatter at all throughout the explanation. She merely listened, gradually widening her eyes. After he finished, she remained stunned for quite a while before finally coming back to herself and drawing out a long, "Wow—"

Yu Sheng immediately felt that even after telling her, there was no way he would solve the mystery.

"Looks like you don't know what's going on either." Yu Sheng sighed. "You've definitely never seen that mirror before, right?"

"Never seen it. Don't know." Eileen nodded with righteous confidence, then added, "But I think your house is getting stranger and stranger."

"You don't need to tell me that. I think so too." Yu Sheng sighed when he heard her. "Opening a door might send me who knows where, a room might suddenly change its furnishings, and a mirror might reflect scenery from some unknown time and place. And to think I used to believe this place was pretty livable. Sigh..."

Eileen stared unblinkingly at the expression on Yu Sheng's face with her scarlet eyes. After listening to his rambling, she hesitated before asking, "Then... are you planning to move? You won't live here anymore?"

Yu Sheng did not answer for a while, but he had to admit that he had indeed considered it.

After all, he could tolerate the occasional haunted mirror, unidentified furniture, suspicious appliances, or whatever blabbering doll girl sealed inside an oil painting. Since he was not even afraid of dying, he could just treat them as an extra bit of fun in life. But the possibility that opening the door might drop him into some Otherworld was genuinely troublesome. It was not something he could simply endure.

For Yu Sheng, the most fatal thing about entering an Otherworld was not death, but the possibility that he might not be able to return. That alone had truly made him consider finding somewhere else to live.

Seeing that Yu Sheng remained silent, Eileen waited quietly for a while before continuing on her own. "If you take a liking to a house somewhere, tell me first, okay? Find a way to get me into their residential compound, and I'll drive down their housing prices for you..."

Yu Sheng was taken aback. "I was only joking... Aren't you worried about insulting the Ancestor of Dolls and your sisters now?"

"I thought carefully about it just now, and I feel that the process you described makes a lot of sense." Eileen was perfectly serious. "Besides, I helped you lower the housing price. That should count for something toward the favor of letting me live in your house, right?"

Yu Sheng suddenly realized that she was probably only worried that if he moved away, he would leave her behind.

But he did not point it out. He merely shook his head. "Let's not talk about that for now. I'm only considering it; I'm not planning to move yet. Don't worry. If I really do move, I'll take you with me. A painting doesn't take up much space."

"Oh, all right!" Eileen immediately perked up.

However, a trace of worry soon appeared on her face. "Um... when you saw that dead doll in the mirror, were her eyes closed?"

"...I don't think so." Yu Sheng recalled it. "Why do you ask?"

Eileen opened her mouth, looking somewhat sad. "After a living doll is damaged, if her eyes close, it means her soul has returned to the garden of Alice's Cabin. We'll be reborn there. But if her eyes are still open... then she's still 'there.'"

Yu Sheng was stunned. He suddenly regretted answering so thoughtlessly just now. He should have asked first.

"We don't know exactly where the mirror reflected," he said softly after a moment of silence. "But since she appeared in the mirror, she might have formed some connection with this house. Perhaps one day we'll find her. For now, don't think about it too much. You're still trapped here yourself."

"All right. True enough." Eileen sighed. "Sometimes a sister loses contact after going out... We'll always run into them eventually. Yes, we will."

Yu Sheng suddenly felt that this doll was not as heartless as he had imagined.

After talking with Eileen for a while longer, he returned to the second floor.

He went to check the room at the end of the corridor again. After confirming that it was still exactly as he had seen it before, he stopped paying attention to it and turned into his own bedroom.

He drew the curtains and lay on the bed. Yu Sheng tossed and turned for a long time. He was tired and sleepy, but his mind was a mess, and he could not fall asleep no matter what. All kinds of thoughts and recent experiences darted through his mind like chaotic currents—Eileen, that valley beneath the night sky, his knowledge of the Otherworld, the Fox Girl who had struggled to remain rational until the very end and urged him to run, and... his own resurrection.

After tossing about for who knew how long, Yu Sheng gradually drifted into a hazy sleep.

He felt as if his consciousness were slowly sinking into a gentle, chaotic pool. Even after falling asleep, those disorderly "currents" still circled around him in the water. Through a layer of murky mist, he examined the fragments of memory and thought that belonged to him, hearing many indistinct voices by his ears. Then, when his consciousness touched bottom in the "pool," the surroundings gradually fell silent.

Yu Sheng wandered through a dream, wandering beneath dim skies. He saw himself walking across the wilderness, with what seemed to be a small hill in the distance.

He felt as if he had been wandering around that small hill for a very, very long time. He had no purpose and did not even know who he was.

But a flash of different color at the corner of his eye suddenly made him stop.

Between the dim, chaotic sky and earth, Yu Sheng saw a patch of brightness. He instinctively walked toward the silvery white, and in the next instant his vision blurred before he arrived directly in front of it.

He saw a silver-furred demon fox—two or three meters tall even when lying down—quietly sleeping on the wilderness.

Beautiful, elegant, tranquil.

A breeze blew in from afar, stirring the slender wild grass and the silver-white fur on the demon fox's body. She showed no sign of waking, merely curling up in silence. Several thick tails curled over from behind her; some were held in her arms, while others covered her body like blankets.

Yu Sheng stared in astonishment at the fox that had appeared in his dream. At some point, he had already become consciously aware that he was dreaming.

After hesitating for a while, he took two steps forward and tentatively touched the large fox's forepaw. "...Huli, is that you?"

But the white fox remained asleep, showing no reaction to Yu Sheng's touch or call.

Yu Sheng called out to her several more times. He even tried tugging on her tail, but still could not wake Huli.

It felt as though she was not merely asleep, but that something had blocked her senses.

Yu Sheng frowned and took two steps back.

Why had this fox appeared in his dream?

He admitted that before falling asleep, his thoughts had been a mess and he had indeed thought about this fox trapped in the Otherworld. But the situation before him clearly was not an ordinary case of "thinking about something by day and dreaming about it by night." He could sense that Huli was truly "here."

As Yu Sheng pondered, something suddenly stirred in his heart. He felt something and immediately looked down at his right hand.

A tiny bead of blood had welled from his finger. Around it, he could still see a faint ring of teeth marks.

It was the wound Huli had bitten into him earlier when her instinct to guard her food had kicked in as he snatched the chocolate back from her.

Yu Sheng stared fixedly at the scene, suddenly recalling how, back in the valley, he had unexpectedly "seen" fragments of Huli's memories and sensed some of her thoughts.

"Because of the blood?"

He understood something and guessed that her appearance here might also have something to do with accidentally "eating" his blood.

But then another question arose in his mind—the Frog in the rain and that abstract flesh monster had also eaten his blood, so why had they not appeared here? That flesh monster had even eaten several meals' worth, far more than Huli had...

Just as Yu Sheng's thoughts began heading in a bizarre direction, he suddenly sensed something. Then a low, mocking chuckle came from the grass behind him.

It sounded somewhat familiar.

Yu Sheng whipped around toward the source of the voice. The next second, he heard Eileen complaining furiously from within the grass. "I told you not to laugh! Don't laugh! Can't you hold it in? See, we've been found out..."

Yu Sheng stared expressionlessly at the oil-painting frame sticking out of the grass, and at Eileen inside it, hugging a teddy bear and grinning foolishly at him in an attempt to act cute and get away with it.

"Watching television was boring, so I came to see you dream..."