Trapped Here

When he heard the pronunciation of her name, Yu Sheng's first thought was that this girl was remarkably blunt—how could she just take "fox" as her name? It wasn't until he asked several times that he finally understood: she had said "Hu Li," not "huli," the word for fox. Her name was Hu Li—a slightly strange name, but quite fitting for that massive bundle of tails. "My name is Yu Sheng," he introduced himself as they sat together amidst the ruins of the temple. "I come from... well, I don't know if you'll understand, but I come from the 'outside.' Not just outside the valley." "You're really from the 'outside'?!" Hu Li's eyes widened instantly. She seemed to grasp the meaning of his words at once, and the astonishment on her face carried another layer of meaning: she knew the "outside" existed! Taking another quick, restrained nibble of the chocolate, Hu Li stared wide-eyed at his face. "How did you get in? Do you know... the way out? Is it... up in the sky?" As the conversation progressed, Hu Li's speech gradually grew more fluent, as though she was rapidly regaining the ability to communicate with others. Yu Sheng was taken aback by her question. "The sky? Why ask that?" "Before the immortal died, he said we all came from the sky, but then the sky suddenly went dark, and... we couldn't go back," Hu Li said, struggling to assemble her words. Though her speech had improved, she was still stumbling through such long passages. "Then the ground became more and more dangerous, turning poisonous, and... so many of the people who came with us died. We couldn't go back..." Yu Sheng listened in a daze, relying almost entirely on sheer imagination to make sense of the girl's jumbled description. He realized this valley—which Irene had simply categorized as a "foreign domain"—seemed to harbor a complex history, and the multi-tailed girl before him had an even more baffling background. She was trapped here too! Yet when he tried asking where "the sky" really was, who the "many people" were, and how exactly they had arrived, her answers turned topsy-turvy again. "The sky... is just the sky. All these years, I've been trying to go back to the sky, but I can't," Hu Li explained, gesturing with her hands. "I try jumping as high as I can, but I crash into something and it hurts a lot. Everyone... forgot too. There was Father, Mother, the immortal, and... and others. We came down on a ship, a very big ship..." At this point, Hu Li seemed to suddenly recall something and pointed toward the depths of the dark valley. "Right over there. The ship fell and became part of the mountain. Father kept wanting to go back to get things, but later... everyone was killed by a thing, so no one knew how to... get inside the ship anymore." Hu Li's account was taking an eerie, chilling turn, and Yu Sheng felt a sudden coldness prickle across his back. He did his best to comprehend what she was saying. Setting aside the specific concept of an "immortal" and whatever "the sky" might be, from the disjointed pieces Hu Li had offered, he managed to piece together a fragmented picture of the truth: Many years ago, Hu Li, her family, and someone called an "immortal" had landed in this valley aboard a massive ship—very likely a large vehicle capable of flight. Back then, this place probably wasn't a "dead land" yet. It was only later that the "sky went dark"—some unknown, catastrophic environmental change had sealed off the area, trapping the passengers. Sometime after that, the trapped survivors suffered a devastating blow, attacked by a formidable enemy that nearly wiped them out entirely. The process had been catastrophic, and the final result was that Hu Li was the sole survivor. Yet Yu Sheng knew this narrative was just something he had stitched together through his own vivid imagination. Hu Li's words were disordered, her memories riddled with obvious gaps and distorted by her own muddled perspective. As for the real truth, she probably couldn't understand or recall it herself. The girl's mental state was clearly far from normal. "How long have you been trapped here?" he couldn't help asking. "I don't know. Anyway... a very long time," Hu Li said, slowly shaking her head as she carefully cradled the remaining half of the chocolate bar. "Nothing ever changes here. I don't know how to count the days. When I get hungry, I faint, and when I wake up, it feels like a long time has passed..." Yu Sheng's brow gradually furrowed. He looked at her tattered dress and thought of the tangled experiences she had described, realizing that the length of time she had been trapped here likely far exceeded his imagination—it was measured in years at the very least. "All these years... how did you survive?" he asked, frowning instinctively. "What did you eat? Just scavenging through trash in the ruined temple? But it looks like there isn't anything edible here..." "No food," Hu Li said, shaking her head again. "In the woods... sometimes there are berries, but they're poisonous. Eating them makes me pass out. Except for the water, most things here are poisonous, so most of the time, I just starve." At this, Hu Li slowly smiled again and pointed to herself, seeming rather proud. "Yaoguai are very tough. Starving won't kill us. It just... doesn't feel good to be hungry." She seemed to recall some dreadful memory, and the smile on her face scrunched up. Immediately, she got up and scurried a short distance away, retrieving the bag of kitchen garbage from amidst the broken bricks and rubble—holding that sack of leftover food and rotting vegetables against her chest as if clutching a treasure. "It's still edible," she said to Yu Sheng in all seriousness. Yu Sheng parted his lips, completely at a loss for words. He wished he could conjure a mountain of food right now, or even open a door back to the real world, but he could barely look after himself at the moment. "Benefactor..." Hu Li suddenly spoke up again. Yu Sheng started, not catching on for a second. "What did you just call me?" "Benefactor," Hu Li repeated with a solemn expression. "Mother said that anyone who helps you a lot is a benefactor. You gave me food." Yu Sheng waved his hand. "...That sounds a bit strange. Just call me Yu Sheng. I'm used to it." "Oh, alright, bene—" Hu Li mumbled, blurring the title before pointing at Yu Sheng's finger, her head dipping low. "I'm sorry." "Huh?" Yu Sheng paused, only then noticing the wound on his finger. It was the bite she had given him in her desperation when he handed her the bread earlier, but at some point it had healed completely. Only a few traces of dried blood remained on his skin. Seeing this, he waved it off nonchalantly. "It's fine, don't worry about it. Just a scratch." Yet Hu Li looked deeply worried. "Benefactor, are you really alright? Being bitten by a yaoguai... it damages the origin essence. It can't heal." "But it already healed," Yu Sheng said, skeptical and somewhat bewildered. He casually rubbed away the speck of blood on his finger. "See?" "It really did heal..." Hu Li stared at Yu Sheng's finger in astonishment. "Is Benefactor... an immortal too?" "I'm not. I don't even know what you mean by immortal—by my understanding, it's someone who cultivates to attain immortality?" Yu Sheng remarked casually. "But why would an immortal hang around with... er, yaoguai? From what you said earlier, it sounded like a boatload of yaoguai traveling together with an immortal, right? But based on all the stories I've heard... that's not how immortals and yaoguai get along, is it?" Yu Sheng finally voiced the question that had been puzzling him all along. Hu Li had mentioned many terms he had only ever encountered in tales, and she herself possessed a great bundle of large tails that looked like the mark of a millennium of cultivation. Yet bringing all this information together, what emerged was an "immortal" leading a bunch of yaoguai around, and even after the "flying vessel" crashed, the immortal had banded together with the yaoguai to survive in the wild for a time (even if their survival effort ultimately failed). That clashed completely with his stereotypical image of immortals and yaoguai. In novels, wouldn't these two factions usually hack each other into dumpling filling on sight? Hu Li clearly didn't understand the reason for Yu Sheng's reaction. Faced with his question, she merely tilted her head in confusion. After wracking her memory, she answered with uncertainty, "Because... he was a tour guide immortal." Yu Sheng: "...?" He felt like he had just heard something utterly absurd. Yet after pressing her several times, he finally confirmed that Hu Li had neither remembered wrong nor misspoke. He was a "tour guide immortal"—or rather, that immortal was a "tour guide." An unknown number of ages ago, the yaoguai and immortal who crashed into this forbidden land aboard an "immortal vessel" were a damn tour group! And here Yu Sheng had just mentally drafted an eight-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-word xianxia epic! All that imagining, completely wasted! Don't ask why an immortal-led yaoguai tour group would exist. If you asked, the answer would be ninety-nine yuan for a four-day pure-leisure package with zero shopping stops. Reasonable? Completely reasonable—cheap tour packages were always prone to disaster. Yu Sheng sat in the night wind, letting the chilly breeze sweep across the ruined temple and blow against his face. He felt this world was downright uncanny. The feeling was only growing stronger. Right then, he heard the fox girl beside him calling him in a small voice again. "Benefactor..." "Just call me Yu Sheng," he sighed helplessly. "What is it?" Hu Li clutched her stomach, looking thoroughly miserable. "Benefactor, my tummy hurts a little." Yu Sheng gave a blank "Huh?"—and then his eyes fell upon the chocolate that this fox spirit had already eaten halfway through. What the hell, even a fox spirit can't handle chocolate?! "...Holy crap! Stop eating!" Yu Sheng broke out in a cold sweat and lunged to snatch the chocolate from Hu Li's hand. "That stuff is—" Before his hand could even reach it, a low growl rumbled from Hu Li's throat, sounding just like a Tibetan mastiff. Immediately, she craned her neck and sank her teeth right into his hand. "Aargh!" A split second later, Yu Sheng let out a howl far louder than hers.