Chapter 30: The Door Opener

Chapter 30: The Door Opener

The little convenience store’s door slammed shut with a Bang!, cutting off the scorching heat and sudden killing intent coming from that scorched planet. Yu Sheng stood quietly at the entrance, somewhat stunned.

Only after several seconds did he suddenly suck in a breath and turn to look around.

There were few pedestrians on the street. The occasional passerby seemed completely unaware of anything unusual here. Only Yu Sheng had faced that bizarre scene head-on a few seconds earlier, and now he still stood there in a daze.

After standing there bewildered for a while, Yu Sheng slowly turned back and looked at the storefront.

Over the past two months he had come here more than once. This small convenience store in the old district did not carry many goods, but it had all the basic daily necessities, rice, flour, grain, and cooking oil. The owners were a young married couple, and Yu Sheng was now somewhat familiar with them.

There was nothing special about the storefront. It was just an ordinary ground-floor shop facing the street, with a large glass display window. The window was almost completely crowded with promotional signs and shelves of small goods placed 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 taped to that half of the door. Through the entrance, he could see the somewhat cramped shelves inside and the owner moving merchandise beside them.

Everything looked perfectly normal. Nothing could have looked more normal than this.

But Yu Sheng absolutely refused to dismiss what he had just seen as some kind of “hallucination”. Even now he could still smell that scorching scent tinged with sulfur lingering in his nose.

He had almost stepped through. Fortunately, the aftereffects of previously falling into an Other Domain still remained. Not only was he nervous about the front door of his house, he had become sensitive toward every door. Whenever he opened one, he instinctively hesitated for a moment. Another reason he had paused at the threshold was the strange jolt he had felt deep inside himself the instant he opened the door.

Standing before the store, Yu Sheng steadied himself. After a moment of thought, he reached out and grasped the handle again. Applying a little force, he pushed the door open slightly and peered inside.

It was a completely ordinary convenience store. There were not many customers at this hour. The owner was still busy behind the shelves and seemed not to have noticed the movement at the entrance.

Yu Sheng stepped back, closed the door again, then gripped the handle tightly once more. Taking a deep breath, he gritted his teeth as though competing with himself and suddenly shoved the door wide open.

A tall woman with shoulder-length golden hair and a silver-white robe stood on a platform beyond the doorway. She turned her head and stared at Yu Sheng in surprise.

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

What caught Yu Sheng’s attention even more was the wheel-like structure extending from beneath the hem of her silver-white robes, as well as the mechanical limbs behind her that waved various tools through the air.

A voice came from somewhere beyond the doorway.

“...Boss! The customer wants to know whether the superluminal core delivered last week has been repaired yet.”

The golden-haired woman did not answer. She simply stared fixedly at Yu Sheng standing in the doorway. After holding it in for several seconds, she finally shouted:

“How the hell did you get in here?!”

Yu Sheng slammed the door shut with a Bang!

But in the next second he yanked it open again.

Because he had not seen clearly just now. Was that an elf on the other side? It was the first elf he had ever seen in his life! Was that really an elf? And wasn’t something seriously wrong with the entire aesthetic?!

The door opened.

A young Daoist acolyte in a coarse brown robe stood face-to-face with Yu Sheng. The area around the doorway was blackened with soot. The child held a fan halfway through a fanning motion, eyes bulging as if they might pop out.

Before Yu Sheng could even speak, the child reacted as though he had seen a ghost. Throwing away the fan, he jumped and ran while shouting at the top of his lungs:

“Master! Master! Senior Brother succeeded! A human head came out of Senior Brother’s pill furnace! It has eyes and a nose! It’s breathing!”

“What the hell...”

Yu Sheng cried out and slammed the door shut with all his strength. He stumbled backward several steps before finally stopping.

Looking back toward the street, he noticed several pedestrians staring at him in confusion.

Fortunately, they seemed to have noticed only his strange behavior. Because he had closed the door so quickly, no one appeared to have seen what was happening with the doorway itself.

Yu Sheng hurriedly adjusted his expression and pretended nothing had happened. He moved to the side and waited until people stopped paying attention to him. Only then did he take several deep breaths and stand at the corner of the street, blankly contemplating life.

Everything had become so chaotic and absurd that he did not even know whether he should feel shaken, have his worldview reconstructed, or feel like a survivor of disaster.

He only knew that his mind felt as though twelve hurricanes had erupted inside it.

Or perhaps two hundred Irenes were all talking at once.

Countless buzzing, chaotic thoughts rampaged through his head, and it took a full seven or eight minutes before he finally recovered.

But one thing quickly became certain.

Those places beyond the door were not Other Domains.

At least, the place where that beautiful elf-like woman who looked half machine and the fan-wielding Daoist acolyte lived definitely was not an Other Domain.

As for those two heavily armed soldiers in powered armor who had clearly been fighting each other at the beginning, their environment was certainly harsh. Whether that place was an Other Domain or not was harder to say.

After a long time, the chaos in Yu Sheng’s head finally settled.

He forcibly sorted through and suppressed the flood of wild speculation. Then he lowered his head and looked at his hands.

After hesitating for a long while, he slowly reached out toward the side.

He was standing in a corner of the street. Beside him was only a wall.

A bare concrete brick wall.

He rubbed the rough, naked surface and slowly closed his hand, imagining...

A door.

Just like the hidden handle he had discovered outside the room where he found Irene at the end of his hallway.

Just like in the Valley, when a monster had hurled him into the air and he had instinctively grabbed at empty space, pulling open a door back to reality.

He touched it.

A door.

He could not see it, but it had appeared.

He held its handle.

The door gradually materialized, gradually fixed itself into place. His expression stiffened as he slowly turned his head.

A faint glow flickered in his field of vision. The door seemed ready to be opened at any moment.

“Holy hell!”

Yu Sheng let out a low cry.

The moment he became nervous, his hand loosened unconsciously.

The door instantly vanished from the wall without a sound.

His heart pounded so hard it felt ready to leap out through his mouth.

Only after several deep breaths did he calm down.

Recalling the sensation of grasping that handle, he twitched the corner of his mouth.

“Irene.”

He called to her in his mind, carrying emotions so complicated and hesitant that even he could not explain them.

“Huh?” Irene’s voice immediately rang out, as cheerful as ever. “I was just about to contact you. You’ve been out for quite a while. Didn’t you say the convenience store was right at the intersection? Did you buy too much stuff?”

Yu Sheng said, “...I haven’t even gone into the store yet.”

Irene replied, “Did you get lost?”

“I just wanted to tell you that I probably won’t be considering moving anymore,” Yu Sheng said, ignoring her wildly inaccurate guess.

“Ah?! Really?” Irene sounded somewhat happy, but also curious. “Why? Didn’t you say there was something wrong with this house? Especially how opening a door might throw you somewhere random...”

“It’s nothing. I just suddenly realized that when it comes to the biggest problem, maybe the thing that’s wrong isn’t the house,” Yu Sheng sighed. “Maybe the thing that’s wrong is me.”

Irene: “...?”

She said nothing, but Yu Sheng could practically picture the question marks covering the doll’s face.

“It’s complicated to explain. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about moving anymore,” Yu Sheng said, leaning against the wall and rubbing his forehead. “If I get the chance later... I’ll tell you about it.”

Irene’s curiosity was exploding, but she sensed that Yu Sheng did not want to go into detail. In the end, she merely responded with an “Oh.”

After that, Yu Sheng ended the conversation.

He had not told her exactly what had happened while opening the door. It was not because he had concerns about telling her.

His own thoughts were simply still a mess.

There were many details about the process of opening the door that he had not yet had time to examine carefully. Everything had happened too quickly and chaotically. He had overlooked many details that now needed to be recalled and organized afterward.

Yu Sheng decided to rest a bit after returning home before discussing it with Irene.

Of course, he knew that even if he explained everything, she would probably be just as confused as he was.

Still, two people puzzling over something together was better than one person blindly guessing.

After all, that doll possessed at least some knowledge of the supernatural.

Not much, but some.

A few minutes later, Yu Sheng stepped out from the corner of the street.

The evening breeze had begun to cool, and it refreshed his spirits somewhat.

He looked again toward the convenience store in the distance.

After hesitating briefly, he started walking toward it.

He had decided to finish today’s shopping plan first.

The matter of the door was unsettling, but he could hardly stop opening doors for the rest of his life.

This time, however, he was more cautious than ever when he reached for the store’s entrance.

He focused intensely, trying to sense every detail involved in opening the door.

The feeling in his hand.

The thoughts in his mind.

The warnings from his intuition.

Even the sound of the wind and the reflection in the glass.

If anyone had been watching, they probably would have thought he was opening the door in slow motion.

Then the store door opened.

Among the somewhat crowded shelves, the young shop owner looked up.

Recognizing Yu Sheng, he smiled.

“Oh, what are you buying today?”