Irene's reaction didn't seem fake.
In fact, in all the time Yu Sheng had interacted with this doll so far, he had never caught her being dishonest. Every word and action of hers radiated a crystal-clear sincerity, as though her head were made of solid wood—either her acting skills were impossibly sublime, or she truly was solid between the ears.
Yu Sheng prudently kept the first hypothesis in reserve, but he strongly leaned toward the second.
He went on to describe the appearance of the dead doll to Irene, as well as the posture of the colossal shadow monster that had seemingly perished alongside her, but the answer he received was still "no idea."
Yu Sheng frowned, sinking into deep thought.
Irene, on the other hand, couldn't help growing curious. "Hey, why'd you suddenly come down here asking me all this? Didn't you go upstairs to sleep?"
Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment, but ultimately decided to tell the doll about the changes in that room. It didn't involve any of his personal secrets, and it might even be connected to Irene herself. Sharing it might actually help unravel the mystery.
"Something's happened with the room upstairs..."
Yu Sheng gave Irene a blow-by-blow account of what he had witnessed upon heading upstairs. For once, she miraculously didn't yap throughout the entire story, only widening her eyes as she listened. When he finished, she sat stunned for a long while before finally snapping back to reality with a drawn-out, "Whoaaa—"
Yu Sheng immediately felt that even confiding in her wouldn't solve the mystery.
"Looks like you don't know what's going on either," Yu Sheng sighed. "You've definitely never seen that mirror, right?"
"Never seen it, no idea," Irene nodded with utter confidence, then promptly added, "Though I really think this house of yours is getting weirder and weirder."
"You don't need to tell me that, I feel it too," Yu Sheng sighed at her words. "Open a door and there's no telling where you'll end up. Some random room suddenly changes all its furniture, and a mirror reflects scenery from god-knows-when and god-knows-where. To think I used to believe this place was pretty livable. Sigh..."
Irene stared unblinkingly at Yu Sheng's expression with her crimson eyes. After hearing his muttering, she hesitated. "Then... are you planning to move? You're not going to live here anymore?"
Yu Sheng didn't answer right away, but to be fair, he genuinely had considered it.
After all, he could tolerate the occasional haunted mirror, furniture of unknown origin, suspicious appliances, or even a chatterbox sealed inside an oil painting. Given that he wasn't even afraid of dying, he could treat all of that as a bit of added spice to life. But the property where opening a door might drop him into some foreign domain was a massive nuisance. That wasn't something he could simply put up with.
To Yu Sheng, the deadliest thing about stepping into a foreign domain wasn't losing his life, but the uncertainty of ever returning. That alone had indeed sparked the thought of finding somewhere else to live.
Seeing that Yu Sheng remained silent, Irene was quiet for a moment before chiming in on her own: "Well, if you take a liking to a place, let me know first! Figure out a way to sneak me into their community, and I'll knock down their property values for you..."
Yu Sheng was taken aback. "I was only joking back then... You're not worried about insulting the Ancestor of the Dolls and your sisters now?"
"I gave it some careful thought just now, and I feel like the process you described makes a lot of sense," Irene said with deadpan seriousness. "Besides, if I help you crash the housing prices, that can count toward repaying the favor of staying under your roof, can't it?"
Yu Sheng suddenly caught on: this girl was just worried that if he abruptly moved away, he would leave her behind.
However, he didn't call her out on it. He merely shook his head. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. It was just a thought, and I don't plan on moving anytime soon. Relax—if I ever do move, I'll take you with me. A single painting doesn't take up any room anyway."
"Oh, then that works!" Irene instantly beamed.
Soon, however, a hint of melancholy crept across her face once more. "Um... that dead doll you saw in the mirror, were her eyes closed?"
"...I don't think so," Yu Sheng recalled. "Why do you ask?"
Irene parted her lips, looking a little sad. "When a living doll is broken, if her eyes are closed, that means her soul has returned to the Garden of Alice's Cottage. We'll be reborn there. But if her eyes are still open... then she's still 'there.'"
Yu Sheng froze, suddenly regretting that he had answered so casually without thinking. He should have asked first.
"We don't know where that mirror is actually reflecting," he said softly after a pause. "Still, since she appeared in the mirror, maybe she's connected to this house now. Who knows, perhaps we'll find her one day in the future. As for right now, don't overthink it—you're still trapped here yourself, after all."
"Well, that's true," Irene sighed. "Every once in a while, sisters do lose contact after heading out... We'll meet again eventually. Yeah, we will."
Yu Sheng suddenly felt that this doll wasn't quite as heartless as he had imagined.
After chatting with Irene a bit longer, he headed back upstairs to the second floor.
He went to check on the room at the end of the corridor once more. Finding that the inside remained just as he had left it, he paid it no further mind and turned into his own bedroom.
Drawing the curtains, he lay down on the bed. Yu Sheng tossed and turned for a long time. He was exhausted and sleepy, yet with his mind in complete turmoil, sleep eluded him. All manner of thoughts and recent events swirled through his head like chaotic undercurrents—the business with Irene, the valley draped in night, the lore of the foreign domains, that fox girl who had desperately clung to her sanity until the very end just to tell him to run, and... his own return from the dead.
After tossing about for who knew how long, Yu Sheng finally drifted into a groggy slumber.
He felt as though his consciousness were slowly submerging into a pool of gentle, murky water. Even in sleep, those chaotic undercurrents continued to circle him beyond the water's edge. Through a hazy layer of mist, he gazed at fragments of his own memories and thoughts, hearing countless indistinct murmurs brushing past his ears, until his awareness settled against the bottom of the pool and silence gradually claimed his surroundings.
Yu Sheng wandered through a dream, meandering beneath a dim, twilight sky. He saw himself walking across a barren wilderness, with what appeared to be a low hill in the far distance.
He felt as if he had been wandering around this small hill for an eternity, aimless, unaware of who he even was.
Then, a sudden gleam at the edge of his vision brought his footsteps to a halt.
Between the gloomy, chaotic heaven and earth, Yu Sheng caught sight of a bright patch of color. Subconsciously, he walked toward that silvery white, and in the next instant, his vision blurred, placing him directly before it.
He saw a demon fox with silver-white fur—even lying down, she stood a good two to three meters tall—slumbering peacefully upon the wilderness.
Beautiful, elegant, serene.
A gentle breeze swept in from afar, rustling the slender wild grass and the silver-white down upon the demon fox. Showing no signs of waking, she merely remained curled up in silence, several thick, bushy tails sweeping forward from behind her. Some were cradled in her embrace, while others draped over her body like blankets.
Yu Sheng stared in astonishment at the fox that had appeared in his dream—at some point, he had already become lucidly aware that he was dreaming.
Hesitating for a moment, he took two steps forward and tentatively touched the great fox's forepaw. "...Hu Li, is that you?"
The white fox remained fast asleep, completely unresponsive to Yu Sheng's touch and call.
Yu Sheng called out a few more times, and even tried tugging on her tail, but none of it could rouse Hu Li.
It felt as though she weren't merely sleeping, but as if her senses were shielded by something.
Frowning, Yu Sheng took a couple of steps back.
Why had this fox appeared in his dream?
He admitted that before falling asleep, his mind had been wandering all over the place, and he had indeed thought of the fox trapped in the foreign domain. But the current situation was clearly no ordinary case of dreaming by night what one thought by day. He could sense that Hu Li was truly "right here."
As he pondered, Yu Sheng's heart suddenly stirred. Sensing something, he immediately looked down at his right hand.
A tiny bead of blood was welling up from his finger, surrounded by a faint ring of bite marks.
That was from earlier, when he had snatched the chocolate back from Hu Li and her food-guarding instincts had made her snap at him.
Yu Sheng stared fixedly at the wound, suddenly recalling how, back in the valley, he had abruptly "seen" Hu Li's memory fragments and sensed portions of her thoughts.
*Because of the blood?*
Realization dawned upon him. He suspected that her appearance here might also have something to do with her accidentally ingesting his blood.
Immediately after, however, another doubt sprang into his mind—the frog in the rain and that abstract flesh monster had also consumed his blood, so why hadn't they appeared here? That flesh monster had even eaten several meals of it, far more than Hu Li ever had...
Just as Yu Sheng's thoughts began drifting in a bizarre direction, he abruptly sensed something. Right after, a low, snickering chuckle drifted from the grass behind him.
It sounded somewhat familiar.
Yu Sheng whirled around toward the source of the noise. In the next second, Irene's exasperated complaint rang out from the brush: "I told you not to laugh, not to laugh! Couldn't you just hold it in?! Look, we've been caught..."
Yu Sheng stared deadpan at the oil painting frame planted in the tall grass, and at Irene inside the frame, clutching her teddy bear and grinning foolishly at him in an attempt to play cute and pass it off.
"The TV got boring, so I came to watch you dream..."
Chapter 25