A Little Truth

The voice in his head startled Yu Sheng, who had been standing dazed in the cold wind blowing through the valley—then left him even more stunned.

It took Eileen shouting in his head a second time before he jolted awake.

"...Eileen?" Yu Sheng blinked. He was cautiously observing the valley while carefully making his way toward the dilapidated, collapsed old temple, hoping to find a corner where he could temporarily shelter. At the same time, he tried to respond inwardly. "How did you... get in touch with me? I mean, you're talking directly in my head..."

"Is that difficult?" Eileen sounded especially self-righteous. "I'm Alice's Doll!"

Yu Sheng thought about it, yet somehow failed to connect those two things... Did that mean all of Alice's Dolls could do this? Talk inside other people's heads?

"Didn't I enter your dream once? Once you've gone in, you know the way," Eileen explained patiently when she realized Yu Sheng was not responding. Then her tone abruptly changed. "Wait, no—where the hell did you go? I can't sense you at all..."

Yu Sheng fell silent for two seconds. Looking up at the secluded valley and dense forest around him, he felt as if some seven- or eight-meter-tall Yokai would spawn at any moment, accompanied by a stirring BGM. His heart went cold. "...I might have gone somewhere far away. I don't think it'll be easy to get back..."

Eileen was apparently stunned too. Her voice did not reach him until several seconds later. "...Didn't you say you were just going out to throw away the trash? Did the garbage truck scoop you up?!"

Yu Sheng had no idea where she got such a powerful ability to make wild connections...

Still, he had to admit that hearing Eileen's voice did calm his panic somewhat after being suddenly thrown into this godforsaken wilderness... Just a little.

At least that voice proved his connection with his original world had not been completely severed. Since Eileen could contact him, he should still have a chance of going back—though he had no clue how, nor could he think of any reason supporting that assumption. But he had to believe it now.

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

The valley was quiet. So far, the only sounds reaching his ears were occasional hollow gusts of wind. Yet Yu Sheng kept feeling something uncomfortable and oppressive. He felt as though something was watching him—some... cold, empty, hungry gaze, sweeping over this place again and again, sweeping over him.

That made him increasingly uneasy. He desperately wanted to find a corner to hide in first. At the very least, he could not keep standing so openly in the clearing.

Yet the only place in sight that seemed suitable for hiding was the nearly completely collapsed ruined temple. The forest in the distance was dense, but its atmosphere was even stranger and more sinister. Besides, "entering a wild forest at midnight" was practically a classic horror-story death flag, and he absolutely did not want to go near it.

Unfortunately, ducking into a ruined temple late at night was also a standard death flag. The difference between the two choices was simply that wild beasts were likely to spawn in the forest, while Yokai were likely to spawn in the ruined temple...

Both were likely to trigger a stirring BGM.

Gritting his teeth, Yu Sheng still headed for the one corner of the ruined temple that was relatively intact.

At the same time, he contacted Eileen in his mind and roughly explained his situation. In truth, there was not much he could explain, because even he had no idea how all this had happened. From start to finish, he had only opened a door...

After listening, Eileen was stunned for a long time before speaking hesitantly. "It sounds like you fell into an 'Otherworld'?"

Standing amid the ruins of the temple, Yu Sheng froze when he heard that, then suddenly realized something. "Otherworld? You call this place an Otherworld? You know where I am?"

For some reason, Eileen's voice sounded a little muddled. "Huh? There are tons of Otherworlds. How would I know which one you fell into..."

Listening to Eileen mutter, Yu Sheng frowned. He suddenly realized he had gained more knowledge about the "supernatural realm," and, more importantly, realized something crucial:

Perhaps he had not been thrown into "another world," but had instead encountered some kind of "natural phenomenon" that was not unusual in Eileen's eyes?

While Yu Sheng was muttering to himself inwardly, Eileen apparently thought of something. In a disbelieving tone, she said in his head, "...Don't tell me you've never even heard of an 'Otherworld'?"

Yu Sheng wore a strange expression. "...Should I have? Is this supposed to be common knowledge that ordinary people know?"

"Oh, it's normal for ordinary people not to know about Otherworlds. After all, most people will never encounter anything related to them in their entire lives," Eileen said casually. But her next sentence stunned Yu Sheng. "But you shouldn't not know."

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

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

Shadows darted through the night. Hunters took shape within them. A ferocious wolf leaped from the darkness, agilely bounding across the uneven rooftops of the old district before landing lightly and soundlessly on an empty street. It stood in the middle of the road, looking left and right.

"Come back!" An irritated female voice called from the shadow of a building in the corner of the street.

The wolf instantly tucked its neck in, let out a muffled whimper, and hurriedly trotted into the shadow of a building by the roadside.

A girl in a dark red jacket and black skirt stood in the corner between two old houses. She reached out and rubbed the head of the wolf that had just returned, then lifted her eyes toward the houses at the end of the old street.

It was a very short street, with only a few dozen households along its entire length. The street was open at both ends, and everything on the road was visible at a glance. Even without using the wolf's eyes, she could immediately assess the situation here.

The girl frowned. At that moment, her phone rang right on cue—the classic opening theme of the 1986 Journey to the West. This time, she answered while the monkey was only halfway through his second somersault. "It's me. Yes, I'm in the old district, over on Wutong Road."

The voice coming from the phone belonged to a middle-aged man who had worked so much overtime that his mind was fuzzy. He rambled on and on.

Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while, then curled her lips. "I'm here, but I haven't found anything. My wolves have searched this entire street from end to end three times. There are no signs of an Otherworld opening, and nothing that escaped from one."

The phone went silent for two or three seconds before the voice on the other end said, "But the monitoring personnel are certain that there was an Otherworld-opening reaction on Wutong Road in the old district. A passage leading to an Otherworld must have briefly appeared there..."

"I believe you," Little Red Riding Hood said helplessly. "I do recognize the professionalism of your Special Operations Bureau's monitoring personnel, but I also believe my wolves. Maybe a temporary passage did appear here, but it must have vanished completely by now... Considering that an Otherworld normally can't sever its connection to the real world so quickly, perhaps someone else dealt with it."

"Not many people are capable of severing an Otherworld connection in such a short time, and all the organizations they belong to are registered with and have contact channels with the Special Operations Bureau," the voice on the phone sounded tired. "But I haven't received any communication about this tonight..."

"Then maybe it was someone from the Hermit Society. They're always acting all mysterious..."

The girl spoke casually, and, as expected, was met with another string of rambling from the phone. She could only sigh and agree repeatedly. "Fine, fine, I get it. They're all highly respected scholars, okay? I've always respected scholars. Enough, enough. I'll take my wolf pack through the shadows and search once more. This Wutong Road isn't big anyway—sixty-five addresses in total. Searching it again won't take much effort..."

After hanging up, the noise finally stopped. Little Red Riding Hood looked at the darkened phone screen and sighed, then lowered her head to glance at the dog heads... wolf heads rising and falling in the shadows around her, and could not help sighing again.

"I haven't even done my homework yet... Sigh, being a contractor is rough..."

Yu Sheng sat beneath a corner of wall that looked relatively sturdy in the ruined temple, the cold wind blowing through a large hole in the wall. He looked up at the dark, murky night sky beyond the hole in the Rooftop, trying to empty his mind, but failed.

Just moments ago, he had learned a truth.

His only secure place to stay in Boundary City, the safest and most normal place in the entire city in his mind, was actually an abnormal... "place" known as an Otherworld.

In Eileen's words, an "Otherworld" was a realm beyond the normal, a dimension at the edge of reason. The orderly world where ordinary people lived seemed like a mountain with a solid foundation and stable structure, but in truth, every tiny part of that mountain was filled with "holes" leading to irrationality and disorder.

For the vast majority of people, they would never come into contact with those "holes" in their entire lives, nor would they ever see the bizarre sights on the other side.

But the faint light leaking from those holes would always fall into the eyes of others. For them, once they accidentally caught a glimpse of those scenes, some things could never go back to how they were.

—Yet even for a person in the painting who had seen much of the world, someone living in an Otherworld for a long time was still rather absurd...