Don't Open Doors Carelessly

Yu Sheng stepped into the kitchen, shut the door, and turned on the range hood. Amid the machine's noisy whirring, he felt his heart gradually calm down.

It was as if the kitchen's thin wooden door and the racket of the range hood had temporarily shut out that chaotic, bizarre world. At last, he had returned to a place entirely his own. For the moment, he could even pretend he was not in that enormous, eerie Boundary City, but back in the real "home" he knew so well.

Every part of this large house differed from his original "home," except for this tiny kitchen, whose layout closely resembled what he remembered. So after settling into this world somewhat, he had arranged it as much as possible in a way familiar to him.

Whenever he cooked here, he pretended he was still in his real home. He pretended that he had never opened his front door that morning, never stepped into a strange city filled with eerie shadows. Sometimes, while bustling about here, he even felt that if he just looked up, he would see the familiar streetscape through the window—the old street outside the kitchen bathed in orange-red clouds, reddish sunlight flowing across the outer walls of the apartment buildings from his memories...

But the view outside always shattered those brief fantasies. Looking out now, all he could see was a bare patch of open ground and low, old single-story houses in the distance. There were no apartment buildings here, though there were plenty of messy utility poles. And he had not seen the warm, comforting sky from his memories in a very long time.

The light over this city was always either blindingly white or dim enough to weigh on his chest.

Yu Sheng sighed and casually pulled down the blinds outside the glass, refusing to look at the night beyond, which always seemed shrouded in shadows.

He picked and washed the vegetables, heated the wok and added cool oil, then swiftly tossed in the ingredients after stir-frying the scallions until fragrant. As the food sizzled in the pan, Yu Sheng heard the television outside. This strange city did have a range of ways to access information, including television and mobile phones. During his first days here, nearly everything he learned about Boundary City had come from television programs and news on his phone. Even now, those remained one of his important ways of understanding this "world."

"Yu Sheng! The TV's too quiet! Turn it up for me! Please!"

A girl's boisterous voice suddenly came from outside, startling Yu Sheng so badly that his hand jerked and nearly flipped the food out of the wok.

He had nearly forgotten that Eileen was outside.

Back when he cooked in the kitchen, nobody had been out there talking!

"Wait!" Yu Sheng shouted back rather rudely, then muttered under his breath, "...She's certainly making herself at home..."

Yet he soon tugged at the corner of his mouth, revealing a somewhat helpless smile.

Fine. It was good, too. At least she added a little "human presence" to the house. At least there was some noise.

After a while, Yu Sheng came out carrying steaming dishes. He set the bowls and plates on the dining table, casually raised the television volume by two notches, then sat across from Eileen's frame with his back to the TV. He did not usually watch television while eating, but he liked having it on as background noise. At least that would not compete with Eileen, who could only watch from a fixed angle.

Eileen hugged a teddy bear in the oil painting and craned her neck to look at the food on the table. Her gaze darted from the program to the dining table, and she muttered, "Pretty lavish..."

"They're just home-cooked dishes," Yu Sheng said casually. "I like cooking."

"Oh." Eileen answered, then obediently went back to watching TV. But after Yu Sheng started eating, she kept peeking at the dining table. After holding it in for quite a while, she finally could not help asking, "So you're just eating while I watch?"

Yu Sheng lifted his eyelids and waved his chopsticks in front of Eileen's frame. "Want a bite?"

Eileen glared at him, but then lowered her head and began sulking to herself.

"...Fine, fine. We'll go through the motions." Yu Sheng felt helpless when he saw her like that. With a sigh, he went into the kitchen and brought back an empty bowl, transferred some food and rice from his own bowl into it, and placed it before Eileen's frame. "I've set out a bowl and chopsticks for you—just pretend you're smelling it. I'll be eating it in the end anyway."

Eileen frowned at the bowl in front of the frame. After thinking it over, she decided that was acceptable. She jumped down from her chair and moved up to the edge of the frame, her face taking up nearly half the painting as she looked earnestly at Yu Sheng. "All right, that works—thanks. You're actually pretty considerate..."

Yu Sheng lowered his head and shoveled in a mouthful of rice, replying indistinctly. Then he looked up and saw Eileen's head alone in the frame. His gaze shifted to the bowl of food before the painting, and suddenly, something felt off...

Eileen did not notice anything wrong at all. She only found Yu Sheng's sudden daze strange. "What are you spacing out for?"

Yu Sheng quickly lowered his head and took two more mouthfuls of rice, then looked up at Eileen again—

A pitch-black frame, a pitch-black background, the doll maiden's head, and a bowl of food before the portrait.

It looked exactly like a memorial portrait with offerings laid out before it.jpg.

The muscles in his face twitched twice, but after holding back for a long time, he still did not dare say what the scene reminded him of. Not for any other reason—Eileen's insults were vicious.

At this point, all he could do was eat. He pretended nothing had happened and buried his head in his food under Eileen's puzzled gaze, doing his best not to look at the one across the table who looked so vividly remembered...

The meal felt like a gathering at a funeral parlor.

After finally finishing, Yu Sheng wiped his mouth and hurriedly cleared away all the cups, plates, and bowls in front of Eileen's frame, tossing them into the kitchen sink to soak until tomorrow morning. Mainly because his back still hurt badly; bending over the sink to wash dishes was a bit much for him right now.

But while the dishes could wait, the trash could not. In this season, he could not leave a kitchen garbage bag indoors overnight. Enduring the pain in his back, he gathered the garbage and carried the bag toward the door.

Eileen, who was watching TV, looked up curiously. "Hey, where are you going so late?"

"Do I have to report to you in my own house?" Yu Sheng snapped at the overly familiar person in the painting, though he still raised the garbage bag for her to see. "I'm going out to take out the trash."

"Oh, then come back early." Eileen had already turned her attention back to the television. "This house is so big. I'm scared here by myself. What if a thief comes in..."

Yu Sheng rolled his eyes. He thought that in such a creepy old house, if anyone came in and saw a ghostly figure wandering around inside a painting, the first one scared to death definitely would not be the one in the painting. With Eileen like this, any thief who broke in would have to call the police first...

But he did not have the nerve to say that to Eileen's face.

Yu Sheng shook his head, grumbled inwardly, and went to the entrance. After changing into his outdoor shoes, he reached for the front door handle.

He applied a little pressure, turned it, and pushed the door open.

For some reason, he suddenly remembered that ordinary morning two months ago, one that had seemed like every other ordinary day in his ordinary life.

Back then, just as he did now, he had opened his front door and stepped outside—only to enter a vast, suffocatingly bizarre city, one he still had not been able to return from—

The strange association flashed through his mind. Yu Sheng shook his head with a self-mocking smile and stepped through the door.

The crisp snap of a dead branch beneath his foot broke the silence of the valley. The cold night wind carried a disturbing stench of decay and blood. The chill in the air made Yu Sheng, who had gone out wearing only a thin shirt, shudder instinctively. Then it took him several seconds to restart the brain that had instantly stopped functioning.

He found himself standing amid a stretch of desolate, crumbling rubble. In the distant night, there seemed to be a sinister, grotesque forest, while mountains rose on both sides beneath the night sky like silent, ferocious giants looking down upon the valley floor, bringing an unbearable sense of crushing oppression.

Yu Sheng stood frozen in the cold night before slowly turning around to look where he had come from.

A field of collapsed bricks and broken tiles met his eyes. It looked like a ruined temple that had been abandoned and fallen apart a century ago. A battered door—or perhaps it was more accurate to say half a door plank resting crookedly on a slanted frame—stood alone amid the ruins. Whenever the night wind blew, hollow whimpers echoed through the gaps between the broken plank and scattered stones.

Yu Sheng stared wide-eyed. "Where the hell did this send me..."

He was finally beginning to understand.

As he had "opened the door," what had happened two months ago had happened again.

He had been thrown into an unfamiliar place once more.

And this was even worse than two months ago. Though that huge, bizarre Boundary City differed in many ways from the Boundary City where he had grown up, it had at least still been a modern metropolis where people could survive. But this time, things did not look good.

He had been thrown into the wilderness.

A dense forest lay ahead, perilous mountains stood to either side, and behind him was only a ruined temple that had collapsed who knew how many years ago. Yu Sheng took one look and felt that if this terrain did not immediately spawn thirty or fifty bandits, or perhaps a few wolf demons and fox immortals, it would be doing the landscape an injustice...

And the only thing he had in his hand was a bag of kitchen trash he had just carried out from home...

Yu Sheng thought about it, and the curses in his heart became extremely foul.

And in the very next second, just as the fragrant, elegant language in Yu Sheng's heart was about to burst forth, an abrupt voice suddenly rang in his mind—

"Yu Sheng! The TV has no signal! When are you coming back?"