Chapter 9: A Bit of the Truth

Chapter 9: A Bit of the Truth

The voice that suddenly echoed in his mind startled Yu Sheng, who had been standing dazed in the valley’s cold wind. Then he became even more stunned.

It was not until Irene shouted inside his head a second time that he finally jolted back to his senses.

“...Irene?” Yu Sheng blinked. At the moment, he was cautiously observing the valley while carefully moving toward the ruined, collapsed old temple, trying to find a temporary sheltering corner. At the same time, he attempted to respond in his thoughts. “How did you... get in touch with me? I mean, you’re literally talking inside my head...”

“Is that difficult?” Irene sounded completely justified. “I’m one of Alice’s Dolls!”

Yu Sheng thought about it for a moment and still failed to connect those two facts together...

Was she saying that all of Alice’s Dolls could do this? Talk directly inside other people’s heads?

“Didn’t I already crawl into your dream once? After doing it once, I learned the route,” Irene explained patiently when she noticed he had not responded. Then her tone abruptly changed. “Wait, no. Where exactly did you run off to? 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 could not shake the feeling that an eight-meter-tall monster was about to spawn at any second while heroic background music started blaring. The thought chilled him to the bone.

“...I may have gone on a rather long trip. I’m guessing it won’t be easy to get back...”

Irene seemed to freeze up on the other end as well. Several seconds passed before her voice returned.

“...Didn’t you say you were just taking out the trash? Did the garbage truck scoop you up with the rubbish?!”

Yu Sheng had no idea where she got such powerful associative thinking.

Still, he had to admit that hearing Irene’s voice did make him feel slightly calmer after suddenly being dumped into this wilderness.

Only slightly.

At the very least, the voice proved that his connection to his original world had not been completely severed. Since Irene could still contact him, there should still be a way back.

Even though he had no clue how, and could think of no evidence whatsoever to support that assumption, he had to believe it.

As for the present moment, his first priority was ensuring his own safety.

The valley was very quiet. So far, only occasional hollow gusts of wind reached his ears. Yet an uncomfortable, oppressive feeling lingered in his heart.

He constantly felt as though something was watching him.

A gaze without warmth, empty and hungry, seemed to sweep repeatedly across the valley, across him.

The sensation made him increasingly uneasy. More than anything, he wanted to find a concealed corner and hide himself away. At the very least, he could not continue standing out in the open so casually.

Yet the only apparent hiding place was the nearly collapsed temple.

The forest in the distance was dense enough, but its atmosphere was even more sinister and eerie. Besides, “entering a wild forest at midnight” was one of the classic ways people got themselves killed in horror stories, and he had absolutely no intention of approaching it.

The problem was that entering a ruined temple at midnight was also a standard death flag.

The difference was merely that forests tended to spawn wild beasts, while ruined temples tended to spawn monsters.

Both options were highly likely to trigger heroic background music.

Gritting his teeth, Yu Sheng headed toward the only relatively intact corner of the ruined temple.

At the same time, he continued speaking with Irene in his mind, giving her a rough explanation of his situation.

There was not actually much he could explain.

After all, even he did not know how any of this had happened.

From beginning to end, all he had done was open a door.

After listening, Irene remained silent for quite some time before speaking hesitantly.

“It sounds like you’ve fallen into an Other Domain?”

Standing among the temple ruins, Yu Sheng froze.

“Other Domain? You call this place an Other Domain? Do you know where I am?”

For some reason, Irene sounded confused.

“Huh? There are tons of Other Domains. How would I know which one you fell into...”

As he listened to her muttering, Yu Sheng frowned.

He suddenly realized that he had just learned a little more about the supernatural world.

More importantly, he realized something critical.

Perhaps he had not been thrown into “another world” at all.

Perhaps he had merely encountered some sort of “natural phenomenon” that Irene considered entirely unremarkable.

While Yu Sheng was pondering this, Irene apparently thought of something.

“...Wait. Don’t tell me you’ve never even heard of an Other Domain?”

Yu Sheng wore an odd expression.

“...Should I have? Is this supposed to be common knowledge that ordinary people know?”

“Oh, it’s perfectly normal for ordinary people not to know about Other Domains. After all, the overwhelming majority of people will never encounter anything related to them in their entire lives,” Irene said casually.

Then her next sentence left Yu Sheng stunned.

“But you shouldn’t be unaware of them.”

“Me? Why would I have to know?” Yu Sheng looked bewildered. “I’m just an ordinary person...”

“...But you live inside an Other Domain every single day.”

Shadows moved through the night.

Hunters took shape within those shadows.

A ferocious Wolf leapt from the darkness, nimbly bounding across the uneven rooftops of the old district before landing soundlessly on an empty street. Standing in the middle of the road, it looked around alertly.

“Get back here!”

An annoyed female voice rang out from the shadow of a building at the corner of the street.

The Wolf immediately shrank its neck and let out a muffled whine before hastily trotting into the shadow beside the road.

A young girl wearing a dark red jacket and a black skirt stood in the narrow space between two old houses.

She reached out and rubbed the head of the Wolf that had just returned, then lifted her eyes toward a house at the end of the old street.

This was a very short street.

There were only a few dozen households on the entire road, and the street remained open and unobstructed from one end to the other. A single glance was enough to take in everything.

Even without borrowing the Wolf’s eyes, she could easily judge the situation.

The girl frowned.

At that moment, her phone rang.

As always, it was the iconic opening theme from the 1986 television adaptation of Journey to the West.

This time she answered before the Monkey King had even completed 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 whose mind had apparently been numbed by overtime work.

He rambled on endlessly.

Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while before twitching the corner of her mouth.

“I’ve arrived, but I haven’t found anything. My Wolves have searched this entire street three times from end to end. There are no signs that an Other Domain opened here, and nothing appears to have come out of one.”

The phone fell silent for two or three seconds before the man spoke again.

“But the monitoring team is certain there was a reaction indicating an Other Domain opening on Wutong Road in the old district. A passage leading to an Other Domain definitely appeared there for a short time...”

“I believe them,” Little Red Riding Hood replied helplessly. “I trust the professionalism of your Special Operations Bureau monitors. But I also trust my Wolves. Maybe there really was a temporary passage here, but it’s definitely disappeared without a trace by now. Considering that an Other Domain normally couldn’t disconnect from reality so quickly, perhaps somebody else already dealt with it.”

“There aren’t many people capable of severing an Other Domain’s connection that quickly. All of their organizations are registered with the Special Operations Bureau and maintain communication channels with us,” the tired voice replied. “But I haven’t received any reports tonight.”

“Maybe it was someone from the Hermits’ Society. They’re always acting mysterious...”

The girl spoke casually.

As expected, another stream of rambling immediately came from the phone.

She sighed and responded repeatedly.

“Fine, fine, I get it. They’re all highly respected scholars, okay? I’ve always respected scholars. Anyway, enough about that. I’ll take my wolf pack and search through the shadows one more time. Wutong Road isn’t that big. There are only sixty-five addresses in total. Another sweep won’t take much effort...”

After hanging up, the incessant chatter finally disappeared.

Little Red Riding Hood looked at the darkened phone screen and sighed. Then she lowered her head and looked at the dog heads... wolf heads... rising and falling among the shadows around her, and could not help sighing again.

“I haven’t even finished my homework yet... Sigh. The life of a subcontractor is miserable...”

Yu Sheng sat beneath a section of wall in the corner of the ruined temple that looked relatively sturdy.

Cold wind blew through a large hole in the wall.

He looked up through a gap in the roof at the dark and murky night sky, trying to empty his mind.

He failed.

Just moments ago, he had learned a truth.

The one stable place he possessed in Boundary City, the place he considered the safest and most normal location in the entire city, was actually an anomalous... place known as an Other Domain.

According to Irene, an Other Domain was a realm beyond normality, a dimension at the edge of reason.

The orderly world inhabited by ordinary people appeared to be a mountain with a solid foundation and stable structure, but in reality every subtle corner of that mountain was riddled with openings leading toward irrationality and disorder.

For the vast majority of people, they would never come into contact with those openings throughout their entire lives, nor would they ever witness the bizarre scenery on the other side.

Yet the faint light leaking from those openings would inevitably fall into the eyes of certain others.

For them, the moment they accidentally glimpsed those sights, some things could never return to how they had been before.

Yet even for a well-traveled doll trapped within a painting, the idea of someone living inside an Other Domain for an extended period of time was, to some extent, absurd.