Irene possessed the ability to slip into other people's dreams—and according to her, not only could she enter someone's dream, but she could also influence its course to a certain extent, such as ringing the exam-collection bell in the middle of a test or summoning a dump truck.
Frankly, used properly, it sounded like an impressive skill that might even allow for sophisticated operations like psychological suggestion, psychic parasitism, or memory alteration.
Yet Yu Sheng harbored serious doubts about how reliable this doll's boasts actually were. From what he could see, she was utterly useless even in dreams—she couldn't even hide properly in a patch of grass.
On top of that, even here in the dreamscape, she remained trapped inside that oil painting.
Irene's oil painting hovered in front of Yu Sheng. The doll girl inside the frame looked somewhat awkward, while Yu Sheng found her present state weirder the more he looked at it—hovering midair like this was even worse than hanging on a wall.
"Even in dreams, you can only stay inside the painting?" Yu Sheng twitched his lips, finally voicing the question on his mind. "I figured since we're in the spiritual realm, you'd at least be able to come out and run around..."
"Why else do you think it's called a curse?" Irene sighed helplessly. "Trapped in a painting in reality, trapped the same way in the mental realm. No matter where I go, I can't leave this painting unless I find a suitable vessel. Freedom? Not even in my dreams."
"Then that really is pretty miserable," Yu Sheng remarked with heartfelt sympathy.
"Hey, but there's still a bit of a difference between dreams and the real world!" Sensing her pride was on the line, Irene hurried to save face the moment she saw Yu Sheng's pitying expression. "I'm at least somewhat freer over here than in reality. Look, I can even float around... Don't laugh! Th-that's not all!"
Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow, genuinely curious. "That's not all?"
Irene pondered for a moment, struck a pose like someone powering up in The King of Fighters '98, and began straining with all her might inside the oil painting, looking for all the world as though she were about to unleash some grand technique. Even Yu Sheng was momentarily intimidated and instinctively watched with rapt attention for whatever transformation the painted doll would undergo. And in the very next second, a hallucinatory ripple of light and shadow genuinely washed across the painting's surface!
Just as Yu Sheng's eyes were widening, the oil painting popped with a soft bang—and turned into an eighties-style poster.
Bathed in the washed-out palette of an old movie, Irene stood inside the poster, staring wide-eyed back at Yu Sheng.
Irene: "I can switch art styles."
Yu Sheng: "..."
"You laughed out loud!!"
Yu Sheng forced a straight face. "No, I didn't."
"You did in your heart!"
Yu Sheng had no desire to keep bantering with this doll. The giant fox was still lying nearby, and he had yet to figure out her situation.
Stung, Irene drifted to the side and began muttering to herself when she saw Yu Sheng ignoring her. "I can turn into other things too, you know—woodblock prints, scrolls, whatever... I'm even studying how to turn into a relief sculpture! Once I have thickness, you won't be able to say my character is flat..."
Unable to endure her muttering any longer, Yu Sheng turned his head and cut in. "First, when did I ever say your character was flat? Second, that's not how the phrase works. By that logic, turning into marble wouldn't give you deep characterization either."
Irene opened her mouth to argue, but before she could utter a word, she popped right back into the oil painting with another soft bang—her transformation had expired, lasting less than three minutes in total.
Yu Sheng was left dumbfounded. He had known this doll was rather useless even in dreams, but he hadn't imagined she could be this useless...
This time, however, Irene didn't look discouraged. She had finally noticed the white fox lying on the nearby grass—or rather, she had finally sensed that something about the giant fox clashed with the surrounding dreamscape. Curiosity shifted her focus. "By the way, what's the deal with this fox? Why's her color different from everything else around here?"
Catching the puzzled look on Yu Sheng's face, she added, "In an ordinary person's dream, the elements usually tend toward a unified color palette. Even if the dreamer doesn't notice it, I can see it when observing from the outside. Take your dream, for example: the sky and the grass are all a hazy gray. That's the 'baseline palette' of this dream. But this fox... looks like she wandered onto the wrong set."
She paused, eyeing Yu Sheng with suspicion. "How could something so weird show up in your dream?"
Yu Sheng fell silent for a moment, then turned to face the slumbering white fox. "Her name is Hu Li."
"I know that. Anyone can see she's a fox..."
"I mean her name, Hu Li," Yu Sheng corrected her with a sigh, then reminded her, "Remember what I told you after I got trapped in that foreign domain? I met a fox—white fur, red eyes, a whole bunch of tails..."
Irene blinked blankly as her sluggish memory finally kicked into gear, recalling what Yu Sheng had told her earlier.
Her expression turned vivid. Staring wide-eyed at the colossal demonic fox, she opened her mouth several times before finally choking out the words. "What?! How did you capture her into your own dream... Wait, no, where'd you get the chops to lock someone up inside—"
"I didn't capture her, and I don't think she's truly 'locked up' here either. This is probably just something like a shadow? I can't say for sure," Yu Sheng explained. "I saw her not long after I fell asleep, but no matter how I try, I can't wake her up."
Irene looked at Yu Sheng, then at the demonic fox, her gaze flicking between the two several times as she tried to make sense of the situation. It clearly wasn't coming easily.
"I've never heard of anything like this..." she muttered in astonishment. Then, she suddenly swung her frame around to stare directly into Yu Sheng's eyes. "Are you really human?"
Yu Sheng immediately scowled. "What kind of question is that?! If I'm not human, are you?"
Irene kept staring at him, her expression more serious than ever before. "Fine. A human, an ordinary person, lives inside a foreign domain for years without realizing it, stumbles into another foreign domain, runs into a malicious entity, and manages to escape alive. Not only that, you slice off a 'local specialty' from that entity, bring it home, stir-fry it, eat it, and come out lively as ever. And now you can even house another mind inside your own dream—a mind whose actual body is still trapped somewhere else!
"With that many absurd things happening to you, you're telling me—you're human? An ordinary person?"
Cornered by Irene's crimson gaze, Yu Sheng began feeling a bit uncomfortable. He instinctively averted his eyes, thinking to himself that she was still missing 'coming back from the dead'—compared to that, the earlier absurdities were practically nothing.
"A lot of weird things really have happened... I'm a bit overwhelmed myself. But if we're being honest, even you count as one of the 'weird things' lately," Yu Sheng said with a sigh. "Stop staring at me. I don't know what's going on either. Hu Li won't wake up no matter what I do; if I could just wake her, we could ask her what happened."
Irene stared at him a little longer, seemingly confirming he wasn't joking, before slowly looking away and turning her attention back to the silver-white demonic fox.
She pondered for a long time.
"I have an idea," Irene said suddenly.
"An idea?" Yu Sheng asked, intrigued. "Let's hear it."
"I could try diving into this fox's dream, assuming she's having one right now," Irene said, pointing at the fox. "Her current state looks a lot like a mental lock. But no matter how tightly a mind is sealed, it's very hard to maintain defenses in a dream. Maybe I can 'see' something, and if I can use the chance to wake her up on this end, even better."
Yu Sheng was genuinely surprised. Just moments ago, he had been lamenting how unreliable this doll was, yet now she was proposing such an advanced plan. He couldn't hide his amazement. "You can do that?"
"It's not hard, as long as she's dreaming too... Even if she isn't, your minds are clearly linked right now, so I have ways to 'squeeze' through and take a look. It's just... there's some risk, and I'll need your help."
Yu Sheng's expression turned solemn at once. "No problem. Tell me what to do."
"Hopping between minds is like making a 'deep dive' into unstable waters. If the connection in between fails, I could end up trapped on the other side," Irene explained gravely, looking at Yu Sheng. "So I need a lifeline, and you're going to be that lifeline.
"You have to dive with me, sinking from your own dream down into the depths of this big fox's mind. You'll share some of the pressure so I can focus on finding the way. And if something goes wrong along the way... I'll use a somewhat aggressive method to wake you up.
"Your waking shock will have top priority in this chain of dreams, yanking my mind back along with it so both of us can return safely to the real world. Though I should warn you beforehand, my wake-up process might not be very pleasant."
"How unpleasant could it be?"
"...Roughly like dreaming you're taking the college entrance exam, and the collection bell rings before you even write your name. Before you can process what's happening, a dump truck plows into the exam hall, flattening you and your high school crush into paper cutouts—the especially flat kind..."
Yu Sheng couldn't make any sense of what this doll was talking about through her bizarre analogy.
Still, he figured it couldn't be that big of a deal. It was just waking up with a start; no matter how unpleasant, could it be worse than dying?
Compared to that mild hesitation, he wanted far more to figure out Hu Li's current condition and what was going on with his own dream.
"No problem. Let's do it," Yu Sheng said, taking a gentle breath and nodding resolutely at Irene. "What's the first step?"
"Go over there and get close to the big fox, as close as possible... Just lie down on her tail.
"Then, hold my frame, close your eyes, and we'll take the leap in the dream."
Chapter 26