Chapter 9: A Bit of Truth

The voice echoing in his mind startled Yu Sheng, who had been standing in a daze while the cold wind of the valley whipped around him—and then, he was even more dazed.

He was so stunned that it took Irene shouting in his head a second time for him to snap back to reality with a jolt.

“...Irene?” Yu Sheng blinked. He was currently observing the situation in the valley with vigilance while cautiously edging toward a dilapidated, collapsed old temple, trying to find a temporary corner for shelter. At the same time, he tried to respond in his heart, “How did you... connect with me? I mean, you’re speaking directly inside my head...”

“Is that hard?” Irene’s tone was exceptionally righteous. “I am Alice’s doll, after all!”

Yu Sheng thought about it, but he simply couldn’t connect the two... Does that mean all of Alice’s dolls can do this? Can they all talk inside other people’s heads?

“Didn’t I already sneak into your dream once? Once I’ve been in once, I know the way,” Irene added patiently when she realized Yu Sheng hadn’t responded, but her tone shifted immediately after. “Wait, no, where exactly did you run off to? I can’t sense you at all...”

Yu Sheng was silent for two seconds. He looked up at the gloomy valley and dense forest surrounding him, feeling as if a seven- or eight-meter-tall monster would spawn at any second, accompanied by an epic, stirring BGM. It made his heart go cold. “...I might have gone on a long trip. I reckon it’s going to be hard to go back...”

Irene was clearly stunned on her end as well; her voice came through after a delay of several seconds. “...Didn’t you say you were just going out to take out the trash? Did you get scooped up by the garbage truck?!”

Yu Sheng didn’t know where she got such a wild imagination...

However, he had to admit that after hearing Irene’s voice, his heart—which had been panicking like crazy after being suddenly dumped in this wilderness—settled down just a little bit... just a tiny bit.

At the very least, this voice proved that his connection to his original world hadn’t been completely severed. Since Irene could reach him, there should still be a possibility of returning—even if he had no leads and couldn’t think of any reason to support that assumption, he had to believe it firmly for now.

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

The valley was very quiet. Even now, all he could hear was the occasional hollow sound of the wind, but Yu Sheng always had an awkward and oppressive feeling in his heart. He felt as if something was staring at him, some kind of... cold, nihilistic, and hungry gaze that was scanning the area, scanning him, over and over again.

This made him increasingly uneasy, and he desperately wanted to find a corner to hide in. At the very least, he couldn’t just stand out in the open like this.

The only place in sight that could offer cover seemed to be that almost completely collapsed old temple—the forest in the distance was dense, but the atmosphere was even more eerie and sinister. Plus, "entering a deep forest in the dead of night" was a classic "death flag" in horror stories, so he was absolutely unwilling to go near it.

But the trouble was that sneaking into a ruined temple in the dead of night was also a standard death flag. The only difference between the two options was that the forest was prone to spawning beasts, while the temple was prone to spawning monsters...

Both were easy to trigger an epic, stirring BGM.

Yu Sheng gritted his teeth and walked toward the only corner of the temple that was still relatively intact.

At the same time, he contacted Irene in his heart, explaining his situation roughly—though there wasn’t much to explain, as even he didn’t know how all this had happened. From start to finish, he had just opened a door...

After listening, Irene was silent for a long time before she spoke hesitantly: “It sounds like you’ve fallen into an ‘Exotic Realm’?”

Yu Sheng, standing in the ruins of the temple, was taken aback. He suddenly realized: “Exotic Realm? You call this place an Exotic Realm? Do you know where I am?”

For some reason, Irene’s voice sounded a bit confused. “Huh? There are tons of Exotic Realms; how would I know which one you fell into...”

Listening to Irene’s muttering, Yu Sheng frowned. He suddenly realized that he had gained some more knowledge about the “supernatural field,” and more importantly, he realized something crucial

Perhaps he hadn’t been thrown into “another world,” but had encountered some kind of “natural phenomenon” that wasn’t rare in Irene’s eyes?

While Yu Sheng was pondering this, Irene clearly thought of something and said in his mind with a tone of disbelief: “...You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never even heard of an ‘Exotic Realm’?”

Yu Sheng’s expression was strange. “...Should I have heard of it? Is this some kind of common knowledge that every ordinary person knows?”

“Oh, it’s normal for ordinary people not to know about Exotic Realms; after all, the vast majority of people will never encounter anything like this in their entire lives,” Irene said casually, but her next sentence made Yu Sheng freeze. “But you shouldn’t be unaware of it.”

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

“...But you live in an Exotic Realm every single day.”

...

Shadows wove through the night, and predators took shape within them. A ferocious wolf leaped out from the shadows, nimbly jumping along the uneven rooftops of the old city district, landing silently and lightly in the deserted street, standing in the middle of the road and looking left and right.

“Come back!” A somewhat annoyed female voice came from the shadows of a building in the corner of the alley.

The wolf instantly shrank its neck, let out a muffled whimper, and hurriedly trotted into the shadows of the building by the road.

A young girl wearing a dark red coat and a black skirt stood in the corner between two old houses. She reached out and rubbed the head of the wolf that had just run back, then raised her eyes to look at the houses at the end of the old street.

It was a very short street with only a few dozen households. The street was open from end to end, and the situation on the road was clear at a glance. Even without the wolf’s eyes, she could judge the situation here at a single look.

The girl frowned, and her phone rang right on cue—it was the classic 86 version of the *Journey to the West* opening theme. This time, she answered it just as the Monkey King finished his second somersault: “It’s me. Yes, I’m in the old city district, on Wutong Road.”

The voice of a middle-aged man, blurred by overtime work, came through the phone, rambling on and on.

Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while, then twitched the corner of her mouth: “I’m here, but I didn’t find anything—my wolf has already searched this entire street three times, front to back. There are no traces of an Exotic Realm opening, and nothing has run out of one.”

There was a silence of two or three seconds on the phone before the voice on the other end replied: “But the monitoring personnel are certain that there was a reaction of an Exotic Realm opening on Wutong Road in the old city district. A passage to an Exotic Realm must have appeared there briefly...”

“I believe you,” Little Red Riding Hood said somewhat helplessly. “I acknowledge the professionalism of your Special Investigation Bureau’s monitoring staff, but I also trust my wolf—perhaps a brief passage did appear here, but it has certainly vanished completely by now... Considering that under normal circumstances, an Exotic Realm cannot disconnect from the present world in such a short time, perhaps ‘someone else’ stepped in to handle it.”

“There aren’t many people capable of severing an Exotic Realm connection in such a short time, and their affiliated organizations all have registration and communication channels with the Special Investigation Bureau,” the voice on the phone sounded a bit weary. “But I haven’t received any such communications tonight...”

“Then maybe it was someone from the Hermit Society; they’re always acting all mysterious...”

The girl said casually, and then, unsurprisingly, heard another string of rambling from the phone. She had to sigh and agree repeatedly: “Fine, fine, I know, they are all highly respected scholars, okay... I’ve always respected scholars. Enough, enough, I’ll take my wolf pack and search the shadows one more time. Anyway, this ‘Wutong Road’ isn’t big, only sixty-five house numbers in total; it won’t take much effort to search it again...”

Hanging up the phone, her ears finally quieted down. Little Red Riding Hood looked at the dark screen of her phone and sighed, then looked down at the dog heads... wolf heads... bobbing up and down in the shadows around her, and couldn’t help but sigh again.

“I haven’t even finished my homework yet... Sigh, the life of a contractor is so bitter...”

...

Yu Sheng sat under a corner of the temple that looked relatively sturdy, blowing in the cold wind that came through a large hole in the wall. He looked up at the dark, turbid night sky outside the hole in the roof, trying to empty his mind, but failed.

Just a moment ago, he had learned a truth.

The only stable place he had in Boundary City, the place he considered the safest and most normal spot in the entire city, was actually an anomaly... a “place” known as an “Exotic Realm.”

In Irene’s words, an “Exotic Realm” is a domain outside of the normal, a dimension on the edge of rationality—the world where ordinary people live, with its normal order, seems like a mountain with a solid foundation and stable structure, but in reality, every tiny detail of this mountain is a “hole” leading to the irrational and the non-ordered.

For the vast majority of people, they will never come into contact with these “holes” in their entire lives, and they will never see the bizarre and grotesque sights on the other side of those holes.

But the faint light leaking from those holes always catches the eyes of others—for them, the moment they accidentally glimpse those sights, some things can never go back to the way they were.

—Though, even for a well-traveled doll in a painting, it was still more or less absurd for a person to live in an Exotic Realm for a long time...

(End of chapter)