Gate Opener

The small supermarket door slammed shut, cutting off the scorching heat from that scorched-earth planet and the sudden killing intent erupting from the two black-armored soldiers. Yu Sheng stood quietly at the entrance, somewhat dazed.

It took him several seconds to suddenly draw a breath, then he turned to look around.

There were few pedestrians on the street. The occasional passerby seemed completely unaware of anything unusual happening here. Only Yu Sheng had directly faced that bizarre scene moments ago, and he was still standing in the wind in a daze.

After standing there blankly for a while, Yu Sheng slowly turned back and looked at the supermarket entrance.

He had come here more than once over the past two months. This small supermarket in the old city did not carry much, but it had all the basic daily necessities, rice, flour, grain, and oil. The owners were a young couple, and Yu Sheng had grown fairly familiar with them by now.

The storefront was nothing special, just an ordinary street-level shop. Its street-facing side had a large glass display window, almost completely crammed with promotional notices and shelves of small goods stacked behind the glass. One side of the glass door's hinge did not work properly, and an A4 sheet reading "This Door Is Broken" was stuck to the corresponding half. Through the door, he could see somewhat cramped shelves and the owner moving things around beside them.

It looked perfectly normal. Nothing could have looked more normal.

But Yu Sheng would never mistake what he had just seen for some kind of "hallucination"—he could still feel that scorching air, carrying a faint sulfurous smell, lingering in his nostrils.

He had almost stepped through. Fortunately, the aftereffects of falling into the Otherworld still remained. They had made him sensitive not only to the front door of his home, but to every door. After opening one, he would always instinctively hesitate for a moment. The other reason he had paused at the entrance was that, at the instant he opened the door, he had felt something in the depths of his heart... a sudden jolt.

Yu Sheng steadied himself at the supermarket entrance. After thinking deeply for a moment, he reached out and grasped the handle again. Then he applied a little force, pushed the door open slightly, and peered inside.

It was an entirely ordinary supermarket. There were few customers at this hour, and the owner was still busy behind the shelves, apparently unaware of the disturbance at the entrance.

Yu Sheng stepped back and closed the door again. Immediately afterward, he gripped the handle tightly once more and took a deep breath. As though competing with himself, he gritted his teeth and suddenly shoved the door open.

A tall, fair-haired woman with hair falling to her shoulders stood on a platform opposite the door. Dressed in a silver-white robe and skirt, she turned her head in surprise and looked at Yu Sheng.

She was beautiful, but beneath her golden hair, her ears were not human. They were elegant, slender, pointed ears. Several faintly glowing tubes and data cables extended from behind them and connected to something behind her.

What drew Yu Sheng's attention even more was the wheel-like structure extending from beneath the hem of her silver-white dress, as well as the mechanical limbs behind her, waving various tools around in midair.

A voice came from somewhere opposite the door. "...Boss! The customer is asking whether the superlight core delivered last week has been repaired."

The fair-haired woman did not answer. She only stared fixedly at Yu Sheng standing in the doorway. After holding it in for a long while, she finally let out a scream—

"How the hell did you get in here?!"

Yu Sheng slammed the door shut.

But the next second, he abruptly shoved it open again—he had not gotten a clear look just now. Was that thing opposite the door an elf? This was the first time in his life he had ever seen an elf! Was it really an elf?! Why did the style look so damn wrong?!

As soon as the door opened, a child wearing a brown coarse-cloth Daoist robe stared at Yu Sheng face-to-face. The area around the doorframe was blackened by smoke and fire. The child held a fan, caught halfway through fanning, and his eyes were so wide they looked ready to pop out.

Before Yu Sheng could speak, the child threw down the fan as if he had seen a ghost and hopped and bounced all the way outside, shouting, "Master! Master! Senior Brother has succeeded! A human head has been refined in Senior Brother's Alchemy Furnace! It has a nose and eyes! It can even breathe!"

"What the hell..."

Yu Sheng cried out, hurriedly slammed the door shut, and stumbled several steps backward before finally coming to a stop.

He turned to look at the street again and saw several pedestrians staring over suspiciously. But they seemed to have noticed only Yu Sheng's strange behavior. Since he had closed the door so quickly, no one had noticed anything unusual about the door itself.

Yu Sheng quickly adjusted his expression and pretended nothing had happened. He moved aside for the time being, and only after no one was watching did he take several deep breaths. Somewhat dazed, he stood at the street corner and began contemplating life.

The situation was so chaotic and bizarre that he did not even know whether he should consider himself shaken, have his worldview remade, or have narrowly escaped death. He only knew that it felt as though twelve storms had erupted in his mind—or as though two hundred Eileens were chattering at once. All kinds of wild thoughts crashed around inside him, and he remained unable to recover for a full seven or eight minutes.

But there was one thing he determined very quickly.

Those places on the other side of the doors... were not the Otherworld.

At least, the elf beauty who looked like a mechanical monster and the child Daoist holding a fan were definitely not in the Otherworld. As for the two imposing soldiers in Power Armor who had clearly been fighting at the beginning... their surroundings were certainly harsh, but he could not say whether they were in the Otherworld.

After a long while, Yu Sheng's chaotic mind finally calmed. He forcibly sorted through and suppressed the surging, frantic speculations. Then he lowered his head and looked at his hands.

After hesitating again and again, he slowly extended a hand to the side—

He was standing in the corner of a street alley. Beside him was only a wall, a bare cement-brick wall.

He rubbed the smooth, rough surface, slowly closed his hand, and imagined... that there was a door there.

Just as he had found a hidden door handle outside the room where he discovered Eileen at the end of the hallway in his home, and just as he had instinctively grabbed at the air when a monster flung him into the sky in that valley beneath the night, pulling open a door back to the real world—

He touched it: a door.

He could not see it, but the door appeared. He grasped the handle, and the door gradually materialized and locked into position. His expression stiffened as he slowly turned his head—the door shimmered faintly in his field of vision, as though it could be opened with ease the next second.

"What the hell?!"

Yu Sheng let out a hushed exclamation. As he tensed, his hand instinctively loosened, and that "door" instantly vanished from the wall without a sound.

Yu Sheng's heart pounded wildly, as if it would leap straight out of his mouth the next second.

He took several deep breaths before calming down. Then he recalled the sensation of grasping the door handle and tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"Eileen." He called out to her inwardly, carrying... a complicated emotion and hesitation he could not explain even to himself.

"Hm?" Eileen's voice immediately rang out, as lighthearted as ever. "I was just about to contact you. You've been out for quite a while. Didn't you say the supermarket was right at the corner...? Did you buy too much?"

Yu Sheng said, "...I haven't even gone into the supermarket yet."

Eileen said, "Did you get lost?"

"I'm just letting you know that I probably won't consider moving anymore." Yu Sheng spoke without paying attention to Eileen's far-fetched guess.

"Really?!" Eileen sounded a little happy, but also somewhat curious. "Why? Didn't you say there was something wrong with this house? Especially since opening the door could send you 'thrown' somewhere or other..."

"It's nothing. I just suddenly realized that when it comes to the biggest problem, the thing that might be wrong isn't the house." Yu Sheng sighed. "It seems to be me."

Eileen said, "...?"

She did not say anything, but Yu Sheng could easily imagine the puppet wearing an expression full of question marks.

"It's a little complicated to explain. Anyway, you don't need to worry about me moving anymore." Yu Sheng leaned against the wall and rubbed his forehead. "If I get the chance... I'll tell you later."

Eileen's curiosity was overflowing, but she sensed that Yu Sheng did not want to explain in detail, so she only replied, "Oh."

Afterward, Yu Sheng ended his conversation with Eileen.

He had not told her the specific details of what had happened when he "opened the door." It was not because he had any other concerns. Mainly, his own thoughts were still a mess, and he had not had time to carefully consider many of the details surrounding the "door opening." The situation had been too chaotic, and he had overlooked too much. He would need to slowly recall and organize everything afterward.

Yu Sheng decided to wait until he had gone back and calmed down before discussing it with Eileen.

Of course, he also knew that even if he told Eileen, she would probably be just as confused as he was, then become muddled along with him. Still, having one more person to discuss it with was better than puzzling over it alone.

That puppet at least had some knowledge of the supernatural field—although not much.

A few minutes later, Yu Sheng stepped out of the street corner. He lifted his spirits in the gradually cooling night breeze, then looked toward the small supermarket in the distance.

After hesitating for a moment, he still set off toward the supermarket.

He decided to finish his shopping first. The matter of the "door" was unsettling, but he could not possibly stop opening every door from that day onward.

This time, however, he was more cautious than ever when pushing open the supermarket door.

He concentrated as hard as he could and sensed every detail of opening the door—from the touch transmitted through his hand to the thoughts in his heart, the warnings of his intuition, even the wind around him and the reflection in the glass door...

If anyone else had been present, they would probably have felt as though Yu Sheng's door-opening process was happening in slow motion.

Then the supermarket door opened.

Between the somewhat cramped shelves, the young shop owner raised his head. Seeing that it was Yu Sheng, he smiled. "Oh, what are you looking for?"