Chapter 15: Trapped Here

Chapter 15: Trapped Here

When he heard the pronunciation of the other’s name, Yu Sheng’s first reaction was that this girl was incredibly straightforward. How could she directly use “fox” as her own name? Only after asking several times did he finally understand that she was saying “Hu Li,” not “fox.”

Her name was Hu Li, a somewhat strange name, yet one that suited that huge pile of tails remarkably well.

“My name is Yu Sheng,” Yu Sheng said as he sat together with Hu Li amid the ruins of the broken temple, explaining where he came from. “I’m from... uh, I don’t know if you’ll understand. I’m from ‘outside,’ not outside the Valley.”

“You really are from ‘outside’!” Hu Li’s eyes immediately widened. She seemed to instantly understand what Yu Sheng meant, and the shock on her face carried another implication: she knew of the existence of the “outside”!

Hu Li quickly and carefully took another small bite of chocolate and stared at Yu Sheng’s face with wide eyes. “How did you get in? Do you know... the way out? Is it... in the sky?”

As she continued talking with Yu Sheng, Hu Li’s speech gradually became more fluent, as though she were rapidly recovering her ability to communicate with people.

Yu Sheng, however, was stunned by her words. “In the sky? Why would you ask that?”

“Before the immortal died, he said we all came from the sky, but then the sky suddenly turned dark, so... we couldn’t go back,” Hu Li said, struggling to organize her words. Although she spoke more smoothly now, she still stumbled when trying to say long passages. “Then the land became more and more dangerous. It became poisonous. Then... many of the people who came together died. We couldn’t go back...”

Yu Sheng listened in a daze, relying almost entirely on his imagination to make sense of the girl’s chaotic descriptions. He realized that this valley, which Irene had simply classified as an Other Domain, seemed to conceal a complicated story, and the girl with many tails before him appeared to have an astonishing background.

She was trapped here too!

Yet when he tried asking where exactly “the sky” was, who the “many people” she mentioned were, and how they had come here in the first place, her answers became confused and disordered again.

“The sky... is the sky. All these years, I’ve been trying to get back to the sky, but I can’t,” Hu Li explained while gesturing. “I jump as high as I can, but I hit something. It hurts. Everyone... doesn’t remember anymore. There was Father, Mother, the immortal, and... and other people. We came down on a ship, a very big ship...”

At this point, Hu Li suddenly seemed to remember something else and raised a hand to point toward a direction deep within the dark valley.

“Over there. The ship fell down and became part of the mountain. Father always wanted to go back and get something, but later... everyone was killed by something. Then nobody knew how to... get back inside the ship.”

The story Hu Li was telling was beginning to sound eerie and horrifying, and Yu Sheng suddenly felt a chill run down his back.

He tried his best to interpret what she was saying. Setting aside the exact meaning of “immortal” and ignoring what “the sky” actually referred to, he pieced together fragments of truth from her confused account:

Hu Li, her family, and a group of people called immortals had arrived in this valley many years ago aboard a great ship, most likely a large vehicle capable of flight. At that time, however, this place had apparently not yet been a dead land. Later, “the sky turned dark” and some unknown environmental catastrophe occurred, sealing off the area and trapping everyone who had arrived on the ship. After that, the trapped people suffered a devastating attack from some powerful enemy and were nearly wiped out.

The process had been unimaginably tragic.

And in the end, the only survivor seemed to be Hu Li herself.

But Yu Sheng knew that this was merely a story he had stitched together through sheer imagination. Hu Li’s account was fragmented and confused, full of gaps in memory and misunderstandings shaped by her own perspective. As for the actual truth, she probably could not fully understand or remember it herself.

There was already something very wrong with her mind.

“How long have you been trapped here?” he could not help asking.

“I don’t know. Anyway... a very long time,” Hu Li slowly shook her head while carefully holding the half-eaten chocolate. “This place always... stays the same. There’s no way to count the days. When I get hungry, I pass out. Then when I wake up, it feels like a very long time has passed...”

Yu Sheng gradually frowned.

Looking at Hu Li’s tattered clothing and recalling the chaotic experiences she had described, he realized that the time she had spent trapped here was probably far beyond anything he had imagined.

At the very least, it had to be measured in years.

“How did you survive all these years?” he asked with a frown. “What did you eat? Did you really survive by searching through garbage in this ruined temple? There doesn’t seem to be anything edible here.”

“There isn’t... any food,” Hu Li shook her head again. “Sometimes there are fruits in the forest, but they’re poisonous. If you eat them, you’ll pass out. Other than water, most things here are poisonous. So most of the time, I just stay hungry.”

At that point, Hu Li slowly smiled again and pointed at herself, sounding slightly proud.

“Monsters are very tough. Starvation can’t kill us. It just... feels bad. Being hungry.”

She seemed to recall some terrible memories. The smile on her face twisted awkwardly, and then she suddenly got up and ran a short distance away. Moments later, she returned carrying the bag of kitchen garbage from among the broken bricks and rubble.

Like a precious treasure, she hugged the bag of leftovers and rotten vegetables tightly to her chest.

“It can still be eaten,” she said very seriously to Yu Sheng.

Yu Sheng opened his mouth but did not know what to say.

He certainly wished he could produce mountains of food right now, or even open a door leading back to the real world.

But at the moment, he could barely save himself.

“Benefactor...” Hu Li suddenly spoke again.

Yu Sheng froze. For a moment, he did not react.

“What did you call me?”

“Benefactor,” Hu Li repeated seriously. “Mother said that someone who helps you greatly is your benefactor. You gave me food.”

Yu Sheng waved a hand.

“...That title feels a little strange. Just call me Yu Sheng. I’m used to that.”

“Oh, okay, Bene...” Hu Li mumbled something and swallowed the rest of the title, then pointed at Yu Sheng’s finger and lowered her head.

“Sorry.”

“Huh?” Yu Sheng paused before noticing the wound on his finger again.

This was the bite mark Hu Li had accidentally left when he gave her the bread earlier. Yet somehow it had already healed completely, leaving only traces of blood on the skin.

Seeing this, he waved it off indifferently.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Just a scratch.”

Yet Hu Li still looked concerned.

“Benefactor, are you really okay? If a monster bites you... the injury affects your origin. It can’t heal.”

“But it already healed,” Yu Sheng replied skeptically after hearing her explanation. He casually rubbed away the dried blood on his finger. “See?”

“It really healed...” Hu Li stared at his finger in surprise. “Benefactor... are you an immortal too?”

“I’m not. I don’t even know what you mean by immortal. By my understanding, that’s just someone who cultivated and became immortal.” Yu Sheng spoke casually. “But why would immortals be together with... uh, monsters? From what you’ve said, it sounds like a whole ship of monsters traveling around with an immortal. But based on all the stories I’ve heard... immortals and monsters don’t usually have that kind of relationship, do they?”

Yu Sheng had finally asked the question that had been bothering him all this time.

Hu Li had mentioned many terms that he had previously encountered only in stories. She herself possessed a huge collection of tails that made her look like a fox immortal who had cultivated for thousands of years. Yet after putting all that information together, the picture that emerged was of an immortal leading a group of monsters around. After the crash of the immortal vessel, the immortal and the monsters had apparently even worked together to survive in the wilderness for a while, though they had ultimately failed.

That did not fit his stereotype of immortals and monsters at all.

In novels, weren’t these two groups usually the kind that turned each other into dumpling filling the moment they met?

Hu Li clearly did not understand why Yu Sheng found this strange. Faced with his question, she merely tilted her head in confusion. After thinking hard for a moment, she finally answered uncertainly:

“Because... he was a tour guide immortal.”

Yu Sheng: “...?”

He felt as though he had just heard something profoundly cursed.

Yet after asking repeatedly, he finally confirmed that Hu Li had neither remembered incorrectly nor misspoken.

The man had truly been a “tour guide immortal.”

Or rather, that immortal had been a tour guide.

Long ago, the monsters and immortals who had crashed here aboard the immortal vessel had been part of a tour group.

Yu Sheng had just imagined eight hundred and fifty thousand words’ worth of xianxia plot for nothing.

Don’t ask why there would be a monster tour group led by an immortal.

The answer was simple: ninety-nine yuan for four days of sightseeing with no shopping stops.

Reasonable or not?

Totally reasonable.

Cheap tours were always more likely to run into problems.

Yu Sheng sat in the night wind, letting the cold air blow through the ruins of the broken temple and across his face.

He felt that this world was unbelievably bizarre.

The more he experienced it, the more convinced he became.

Just then, he heard the fox girl calling to him softly again.

“Benefactor...”

“You can just call me Yu Sheng,” Yu Sheng sighed helplessly. “What is it?”

Hu Li held her stomach, her face full of discomfort.

“Benefactor, my stomach hurts a little.”

Yu Sheng blankly let out an “Huh?” and then looked at the chocolate that this fox immortal had already eaten halfway through.

What the hell, fox immortals can’t handle chocolate either?!

“...Holy crap! Stop eating that!” Yu Sheng immediately broke out in a cold sweat and reached for the chocolate in Hu Li’s hand. “That stuff is...”

But before his hand could reach it, a low growl emerged from Hu Li’s throat, sounding like a Tibetan Mastiff. Then she stretched out her neck and bit down hard on Yu Sheng’s hand.

Awooo!!!

In the next second, Yu Sheng’s howl was even louder than Hu Li’s.