Whether he found it easy to get along with him or not, Li Lin had to admit that Xu Jiali was truly the finest deep diver he had ever encountered. Having such a formidable fighter sent as backup at a time like this proved that the Bureau was still looking out for a rookie like him.
Provided, of course, that he could stomach the burly man's loose lips and habit of boasting, especially whenever he returned from a mission.
"Let me tell you, I ran into something downright spooky on this mission," the burly man on the couch said casually, grabbing a bottle of water off the coffee table and twisting it open. "I tracked down that Angel cultist who'd sneaked into Emein, managed to corner him in the no-man's-land after a hell of a chase, and right in the middle of our fight, I looked up. And guess what?"
Li Lin rolled his eyes. "You blabbermouth, are you even allowed to talk about that out here?"
"Sure I can. I already filed my report at the Bureau, and this intel was cleared for disclosure to you," Xu Jiali waved dismissively, plunging ahead regardless of whether Li Lin wanted to hear it. "I look up, and holy shit! There's a guy just standing right there! Do you have any idea what he looked like? Just a shirt and trousers, standing right in the toxic heat waves of Emein-IX! Oh, and there was a doorframe planted next to him! I was scared shitless—I was a second away from bashing that cultist's head in, but the shock gave the bastard room to breathe. Fortunately, my skills were superior in the end..."
Li Lin waved a hand in irritation as he walked over to his monitoring equipment by the window. "Alright, alright. Every single one of your stories ends with 'fortunately my skills were superior.' Can't you come up with a more original twist?"
"But my skills really were superior!" The burly man stared wide-eyed at Li Lin's back. "Wait, you're not even surprised? I saw an actual person standing in the toxic heat waves of Emein-IX! Not even wearing power armor! Even the captain isn't that hardcore!"
"Last time, you also saw someone pop up in the acid rain of Tata-V without protective gear—and it turned out to be a professor from the Academy gathering research material," Li Lin said without turning around. "The world is full of bizarre weirdos, not to mention that deep-diving too much causes all kinds of hallucinations. I've heard you tell spooky stories like this eight hundred times; I wouldn't believe a single punctuation mark coming out of your mouth now. Come back to me when you're taking off in a shuttle along a starport orbit and see a guy flying right beside your viewport. At least that'd sound a little fresh."
"I have seen that!" The burly man grinned, strolled over to Li Lin's bed, and plopped down. "A Daoist master from Thousand Peaks Spiritual Mountain. Dammit, just as I was about to accelerate, he started flashing a mirror at my monitor, yelling that he was going to overtake me... Overtake my ass! Let's see him jump into hyperspace in the flesh..."
Li Lin's hands finally froze. He turned his head and stared at Xu (the giant) Jiali sitting beside him. After a long silence, he sighed. "Your daily lives out on special field duty really are colorful."
"Why don't you get certified as a deep diver too? Maybe next time you can run special field missions with me," the burly man urged. "What's so great about the boundary zone? It's dangerous, troublesome, and every little thing comes with massive responsibility."
Li Lin gave it some thought before shaking his head. "The boundary zone is always short-handed. Someone has to guard this biggest 'hub.' And frankly, I don't see how donning power armor to risk your life against Angel cultists on some wasteland planet is any safer than staying in the boundary zone dealing with foreign domains. Besides... doesn't your special field work still mean dealing with foreign domains anyway?"
"That's different. Foreign domains aren't packed nearly as densely out there. Not like the boundary zone—damn it, a twenty-stop bus route here has seven stops in foreign domains..."
Li Lin looked back at Xu Jiali. He wanted to point out that under normal circumstances, 99.99 percent of people could only see the thirteen normal stops. But remembering the burly man's file—how he had wandered into a foreign domain "platform" at age twelve, survived entirely on his own on that "platform" for six whole years, and only became a deep diver after undergoing psychological rehabilitation because he couldn't shake off the foreign domains' pursuit—Li Lin swallowed the words back down.
There were two kinds of front-line combat personnel in the Special Affairs Bureau: those who came up through standard training and evaluation, and those who were fished out of foreign domains.
Never show off your knowledge in front of someone with trauma—even if they didn't care in the slightest.
Li Lin looked back down, focusing on checking the parameters recorded by the equipment.
Beside him, the burly man looked bored. He was a pure combatant, sent here primarily as muscle, and had little interest in surveillance work.
"The Bureau's in total chaos right now," he spoke up suddenly after a bout of boredom. "Several task force captains were dragged out of bed for overtime. Heard even the director went in."
"I know," Li Lin said without looking up. "This is the boundary zone, after all."
"Is this kind of thing common in the boundary zone?" The burly man scratched his head. "Have there been similar 'anomalies' before? I spend all year on special field duty, so I wouldn't know..."
"If you mean the spatial dislocations tonight, no, that hasn't happened before. But if you mean 'anomalies' in general, the boundary zone is never short of them. This is... the boundary zone, after all."
"Alright, charming boundary zone, I love this place to death," the burly man stretched his arms and shoulders and leaned back onto Li Lin's bed. His heavy frame made the poor single bed let out a loud creak. "Both the folks who want to destroy the world and the folks who want to protect it love this place to death. Thank goodness I don't have to pull shifts at the Bureau. I hear the captain and the others work overtime every single day."
Li Lin didn't answer, remaining wholly focused on monitoring and logging data.
Just then, a sudden ringtone shattered the silence in the room.
Li Lin glanced at the screen and immediately picked up. "Li Lin speaking... Mm, huh? Ah, understood."
The burly man sat up on the bed, looking curiously at Li Lin's odd expression. "What happened?"
Looking bewildered, Li Lin gazed out the window at the peaceful night.
"The Bureau just called. The rift phenomenon... has stopped."
The burly man blinked.
"Stopped?" His eyes widened. "Just like that? No follow-up attack, no Angel cultists, nothing? Not even a single foreign domain popped up?"
"Nope. Just stopped. All the monitoring nodes across the entire boundary zone have gone quiet."
"So I came in for night shift for nothing?"
"Not for nothing—and you'll have to keep at it. No one at the Bureau is sleeping either," Li Lin waved his phone. "Everyone is to maintain surveillance and see if whatever power caused the rifts makes any further moves. Go get some sleep next door for now; I'll wake you in six hours to relieve me."
"Got it." The burly man got up immediately, not wasting a single word now. "Wake me straight away if anything happens."
Li Lin nodded, his gaze drifting once more toward the night outside the window.
"Another sleepless night..." he muttered softly.
...
Yu Sheng, on the other hand, slept like a rock through the second half of the night.
After successfully reproducing a "door" to a distant time and space, he had firmly locked that sensation into memory. He now understood how to steer the so-called "spiritual guidance," how to imbue the door with a specific "frequency" upon opening it, and thereby reliably direct it to a designated destination.
He figured most things in life came down to "practice makes perfect."
After that, he kept practicing and reinforcing this process of opening doors, successfully replicating various passageways until he was utterly exhausted.
Sleep after sheer exhaustion was always remarkably deep; he felt as though he hadn't slept so soundly in years.
Yet he felt a twinge of regret. Throughout this night of deep slumber, he hadn't dreamed of the fox—in fact, he hadn't dreamed at all.
It seemed the dream featuring Hu Li didn't form reliably.
This left Yu Sheng with a faint unease, along with a touch of urgency.
When he woke up that morning, he told Irene about it.
"Don't worry, don't overthink it. That fox has survived in that foreign domain for all those years; she's not going to run into trouble in just a day or two," Irene said. This time, she didn't spew any trash talk, offering him genuine comfort instead. "Dreams are unstable by nature. Who's to say you won't see her again next time you dream?"
"Let's hope so," Yu Sheng replied casually, picking up a slice of meat from the table and placing it in his bowl.
This was still meat sliced from that "local specialty." He had eaten it for three meals in a row now, neither finishing it nor growing tired of it.
However, he could no longer feel any physical enhancement from eating it; it seemed the effect of this meat on him had reached its ceiling.
Still, it tasted quite good regardless.
"What's the plan after breakfast?" Irene's voice came from the side. "Keep practicing 'opening doors'? Or try to reproduce that passage to the 'valley'?"
"I need to go out and buy a few things first. When I get back, I'll start trying to construct a path to the valley. That might take quite a few attempts; I don't remember the 'feeling' from back then very clearly," Yu Sheng said. Then he noticed the hesitant look on Irene's face. "Hm? Do you have something on your mind?"
Irene stared directly at him. Miss Doll seemed hesitant, taking several seconds before speaking. "...Spare half a day for me first."
Yu Sheng froze. He had rarely seen such a solemn expression on the doll's face.
"Spare half a day for you... to do what?"
"Make me a body," Irene said, calm and resolute.
Chapter 36