Chapter 54: Yu Sheng’s Return

Chapter 54: Yu Sheng’s Return

The chewing sounds filling the entire valley gradually swelled like waves. The whole Other Domain had now become a grand feast, and before long, everyone hiding in the cave realized what those sounds meant.

Summoning his courage, Li Lin moved closer to the cave entrance and nervously glanced outside.

The fanged mountains were biting and tearing at one another. Trench-like chasms resembling enormous mouths collapsed inward, then split into even more cracks that devoured and dissolved each other. The feeding tentacles spread across the ground had begun digesting themselves, while colossal flesh beasts continuously emerged from certain shadows, only to be swallowed by an invisible force in the blink of an eye.

Against the backdrop of this horrifying banquet, he saw a figure.

Yu Sheng stood in the open space outside the cave, staring somewhat absentmindedly at the scene of mutual devouring unfolding throughout the valley.

For a moment, Li Lin felt dazed, but the slight sense of incongruity vanished in an instant.

He had already forgotten the scene of Yu Sheng’s death, and merely felt that the other man had temporarily become separated from the group.

Hu Li and Irene, who had been guarding the cave entrance, also spotted Yu Sheng immediately.

“Benefactor! You’re really not dead after all!” Hu Li cried out first, but then immediately became nervous. “Benefactor, hurry inside! It’s dangerous out there!”

Only then did Yu Sheng turn around. He quickly walked into the cave while muttering, “I feel like that thing in the sky is pretty weird, but it doesn’t seem particularly hostile...”

Irene paid no attention to what he was muttering. Instead, she anxiously examined him from head to toe.

“You’re really okay, right? Your mental state is still normal, isn’t it?”

“Can’t you wish me a little better luck?!” Yu Sheng immediately glared at the doll. “Do you know how hard it was for me to come back?”

As he spoke, he glanced outside the cave entrance again.

“Hunger should be finished soon, but I have no idea where that giant eyeball in the sky came from. It’s not the same thing as Entity-Hunger. In fact, it doesn’t even seem like something that originally belonged to this valley.”

Irene had been preparing plenty of trash talk to lighten the mood, but she froze when she heard that.

“Huh? It isn’t from this valley?”

“No.” Yu Sheng shook his head.

Even now, he still maintained a subtle connection with this Other Domain. Because of that, he could clearly distinguish the gaze descending from the sky and perceive the “boundary” between that eye and the valley.

“All the Hunger entities are currently within my perception. I can clearly feel that the eye is something foreign. It’s just that for many years, it has been ‘lying’ above this Other Domain, replacing the original sky here.”

Irene stood there with her mouth open, seemingly stunned by the revelation.

At that moment, a deep voice emerged from the depths of the cave, breaking the brief silence.

“That is an angel.”

Surprised, Yu Sheng looked up and saw the nearly two-meter-tall burly man walking out from deeper within the cave. The faint blue foxfire cast sharply defined shadows across the man’s face.

The burly man looked Yu Sheng up and down, his expression carrying an unusual degree of gravity and caution.

“Were you separated from the group earlier?”

Perhaps it was just his imagination, but Yu Sheng felt that the man’s gaze toward him was somewhat strange.

There was tremendous vigilance and wariness in it.

It wasn’t exactly hostility, but neither was it the concern or confusion one would normally show toward a temporary companion who had returned after becoming separated.

However, Yu Sheng did not dwell on it.

He was far more interested in the strange name the man had just mentioned.

“I fell behind for a bit. Don’t worry, nothing serious happened,” Yu Sheng said with a wave of his hand. Then he asked, “What do you mean by ‘angel’?”

“A more accurate term would be Dim Angel,” the burly man replied after some consideration. “A kind of dangerous thing of unknown origin. Sometimes the term also refers to the special phenomena caused by those dangerous individuals.”

“Every Dim Angel is different. Their appearances, abilities, and methods of manifestation vary greatly. The one occupying the sky right now likely parasitized this Other Domain many years ago. It is precisely because of its influence that the entities here underwent mutation.”

Yu Sheng listened in surprise.

Before long, he realized that the big man clearly knew much more than he was saying.

There had to be far more detailed information regarding these so-called Dim Angels.

But the man was holding back.

Whether due to confidentiality requirements or some other concern, Yu Sheng did not know.

Still, that was perfectly normal.

After all, none of them actually knew one another. Although they had fought side by side, they had not even properly introduced themselves yet. Under such circumstances, being willing to share intelligence at all was already a gesture of goodwill.

“My name is Yu Sheng.” Yu Sheng proactively extended his hand. “These two are Hu Li and Irene. They’re both my friends.”

The two-meter-tall man hesitated briefly before shaking his hand.

“Hello. My name is Xu Jiali.”

Yu Sheng froze.

A moment later, he opened his mouth.

“Uh... I didn’t catch that. Your name is...?”

“He said his name is Xu Jiali, the Jiali that means a beautiful young woman,” the red-clothed girl sitting on a stone stool broke the silence. She glanced up at Yu Sheng. “You can just call me Little Red Riding Hood.”

Yu Sheng blinked, then suddenly understood.

“Oh, I get it. You’re obviously professionals in this line of work. You use code names when you’re out in the field, right?”

The two-meter-tall man spoke in a muffled voice.

“That’s her code name. Mine is my real name.”

Yu Sheng: “...”

What could he even say?

All he could do was awkwardly remark that it was actually a very nice name, one that sounded cultured and refined.

Then his gaze landed on the last young man who still had not spoken.

He kept feeling that the face looked familiar, as though he had seen it somewhere before, yet he couldn’t remember where.

Li Lin did not hesitate.

When he noticed everyone’s attention on him, he walked over openly.

“My name is Li Lin.”

Before Yu Sheng could respond, Irene suddenly shouted from the side.

“Hey! That’s a normal name!”

Li Lin instantly fell silent.

He looked at Yu Sheng’s group.

A fox spirit with a whole bunch of tails.

A doll barely over half a meter tall from head to toe.

The three of them together could barely assemble the equivalent of one normal human, yet they still had the nerve to comment on whether someone else’s name was normal...

However, his attention was soon drawn elsewhere.

The chewing sounds coming from outside the cave were gradually becoming quieter.

The vibrations that had filled the entire Other Domain also seemed to be rapidly weakening.

Xu Jiali rushed to the cave entrance in just a few strides and peered outside.

The appearance of the entire valley had changed beyond recognition.

It looked as though everything, from the distant mountains to the nearby valley floor, had been forcibly chewed away by an entire layer.

Only countless jagged rocks and barren soil remained on the mountains.

The distant forest had vanished.

The land below the slopes was crisscrossed with ravines.

He abruptly turned around and looked at Yu Sheng, who was standing beside Hu Li.

“Did... you do this?”

There was obvious hesitation in Xu Jiali’s voice.

He knew the question sounded absurd.

After all, no matter how one looked at the horrifying scene in the valley, it did not seem like something a human could accomplish.

Yet his instincts told him that everything was connected to Yu Sheng’s brief disappearance.

“I suppose so,” Yu Sheng answered readily.

He was in an excellent mood right now. A sense of satisfaction, the fulfillment of finally having eaten his fill, filled his heart.

Grinning, he nodded.

“Though it took quite a bit of effort.”

Li Lin had also seen the state of the valley by now.

When he looked back at Yu Sheng, the astonishment on his face was beyond description.

“...How is that possible...?”

Yu Sheng thought about it and concluded that there was no easy way to explain what had happened.

He had been eaten by Hunger, only for his appetite to exceed Hunger’s own?

A human had mentally contaminated an entity, and after consuming something “unclean,” the Hunger entity had become so ravenous that it devoured itself?

The problem wasn’t whether it could be explained.

The problem was that after explaining it, nobody would know who the real villain was.

Besides, he had no intention of revealing too much about himself to these people, who were still essentially strangers.

“I got lucky and found the entity’s weakness,” Yu Sheng said casually. “I don’t really know the details myself, but it seems to have triggered a chain reaction of self-devouring among the entities in the valley...”

The excuse was obviously perfunctory.

Deliberately, obviously perfunctory.

Li Lin immediately understood.

Some things were other people’s secrets.

Just then, Irene’s noisy exclamation interrupted the questions lingering in Li Lin’s and Xu Jiali’s minds.

“Hey! Isn’t that thing in the sky slowly floating upward?!”

The moment he heard that, Yu Sheng hurried over and craned his neck toward the sky above the valley.

He saw the enormous eye covering the entire valley slowly rising.

It made no sound.

It resembled a projection displayed across the heavens that was gradually shrinking.

In just over ten seconds, the giant eye had already shrunk to one-third of its original size.

It was rapidly moving away from this place.

A brighter, more natural daylight began spreading from the distant mountains.

The disturbed cloud layers reappeared in the sky.

The eye quickly became a palm-sized disc floating at the center of the heavens.

After only a few more breaths, even that disc vanished completely from everyone’s sight.

“It... it ran away?” Irene stared upward with all her might, seemingly at a loss for what to do. Then she turned toward the two-meter-tall strongman Xu Jiali nearby. “That angel you mentioned ran away! What are we supposed to do now?”

Xu Jiali merely let out a light sigh of relief.

After hearing the doll’s question, he forced a smile onto his face.

“What else can we do? Celebrate, of course. After the celebration, I’ll go back and write the report.”