The chewing sounds filling the entire valley gradually swelled like tidal waves. The whole foreign domain had turned into a grand feast, and before long, everyone hiding in the cave realized what the noise meant.
Plucking up his courage, Li Lin crept toward the cave entrance and peered out, his scalp tingling with dread.
Fangs jutting from the mountains were tearing into one another; trench-like chasms collapsed inward, continuously branching into more fissures that devoured and melted each other down. The foraging tentacles carpeting the ground had begun digesting themselves, while giant beasts of flesh and blood spawned endlessly from dark shadows, only to be swallowed in the blink of an eye by invisible forces.
Against the backdrop of this gruesome banquet, he spotted a figure—Yu Sheng stood in the open ground outside the cave, staring somewhat absentmindedly at the self-cannibalizing scene in the valley.
Li Lin felt a momentary daze, but in the next breath, that faint sense of incongruity vanished from his mind. He had already forgotten the scene of Yu Sheng's death, simply believing the man had merely fallen behind somewhere along the way.
Keeping watch at the entrance, Hu Li and Irene caught sight of Yu Sheng at the same moment.
"Benefactor! You really didn't pass away!" Hu Li was the first to cry out, though her voice quickly turned anxious. "Benefactor, hurry inside! It's dangerous out there!"
Only then did Yu Sheng turn around. He hurried a few steps into the cave, muttering as he walked, "I get the feeling that thing in the sky might be eerie, but it doesn't seem to have much desire to attack..."
Irene paid no heed to his muttering. Instead, she anxiously inspected him from head to toe. "Are you really okay? Is your mental state still normal?"
"Can't you wish something good for me for once?!" Yu Sheng glared at the doll. "Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to make it back?"
As he spoke, he glanced out the cave entrance once more. "'Hunger' should be done for soon, but I have no idea where that giant eyeball in the sky came from. It isn't part of 'Entity-Hunger'—it doesn't even look like something native to this valley."
Irene had prepared plenty of trash talk to lighten the mood, but hearing this, she froze. "Huh? It's not native to this valley?"
"No," Yu Sheng said, shaking his head. Even now, he retained a subtle connection to this foreign domain, allowing him to clearly distinguish the gaze descending from the sky and perceive the "boundary" between the eye and the valley. "All the hunger entities are currently within my perception. I can clearly sense that the eye is an outsider—it has simply spent many years 'crouching' above this foreign domain, taking the place of the sky that originally belonged here."
Irene's mouth fell open, stunned into silence. Then, a low voice drifted from the depths of the cave, shattering the momentary quiet.
"That is an 'Angel.'"
Yu Sheng looked up in surprise and saw the nearly two-meter-tall burly man striding over from deeper inside the cave, the faint blue foxfire casting sharp, chiseled shadows across his cheeks.
The large man appraised Yu Sheng from head to toe, an unusual gravity and caution in his expression. "Did you fall behind earlier?"
Yu Sheng wasn't sure if it was just his imagination, but the way the man looked at him felt somewhat strange—full of immense vigilance and guard. It wasn't hostility, but it certainly lacked the concern or curiosity one would normally show toward a temporary companion who had just "fallen behind and returned."
Yet Yu Sheng did not dwell on it for now. He cared more about the bizarre name the man had just mentioned.
"I couldn't keep up earlier, but don't worry, nothing serious happened," Yu Sheng said with a dismissive wave of his hand, immediately following up with a question: "What did you mean by 'Angel'?"
"More precisely, a 'Murky Angel.' A kind of... dangerous thing of unknown origin. Sometimes the term also refers to the special phenomena caused by these dangerous individuals," the burly man explained slowly, weighing his words. "Every Murky Angel is different, varying greatly in form, abilities, and manner of appearance. The one occupying the sky right now likely parasitized this foreign domain many years ago—it was precisely its influence that triggered the mutation in the entities here."
Yu Sheng listened in astonishment, soon gathering that the big fellow before him knew far more, and that there had to be more extensive, detailed intelligence regarding these so-called "Murky Angels."
Yet the man hadn't revealed everything, whether due to confidentiality protocols or other concerns.
That was only natural. After all, they were strangers. Even though they had fought side by side, they hadn't even introduced themselves yet. Offering to share intelligence under such circumstances was already an active show of good faith.
"I'm Yu Sheng," he said, extending a hand. "These two here are Hu Li and Irene—both friends of mine."
The two-meter-tall giant hesitated for a second before reaching out to clasp Yu Sheng's hand. "Hello. I'm Xu Jiali."
Yu Sheng froze.
A moment later, he parted his lips. "Uh... sorry, I didn't catch that. Your name is...?"
"He said his name is Xu Jiali—Jiali, as in 'fair maiden,'" the girl in red seated on a stone bench interjected, looking up at Yu Sheng. "You can just call me Little Red Riding Hood."
Yu Sheng blinked, then had a sudden flash of realization. "Oh, I get it! You folks are clearly in this line of work, so you use code names when out in the field, right?"
The burly man replied in a muffled drone, "Hers is a code name. Mine is my real name."
Yu Sheng: "..."
What could he even say to that? All he could do was offer an awkward compliment, remarking that it was actually a rather lovely name with real cultural depth. Then his gaze fell upon the last young man who had yet to speak.
He felt the man's face looked vaguely familiar, as though he had seen it somewhere before, though he couldn't place it at the moment.
Li Lin did not hesitate. Seeing eyes turn to him, he walked over openly. "I'm Li Lin."
Before Yu Sheng could speak, Irene piped up beside him, "Hey! Now that's a normal name!"
Li Lin was instantly rendered speechless. He looked at the composition of Yu Sheng's group—a fox demon sprouting a bunch of tails, and a doll barely half a meter tall from head to toe. The three of them pooled together could hardly scrape together a single human being, yet they had the nerve to pass judgment on whether someone else's name was normal...
However, his attention was soon diverted elsewhere.
The chewing sounds coming from outside the cave were gradually dying down, and the tremors reverberating through the entire foreign domain seemed to be subsiding rapidly.
Xu Jiali rushed over to the cave entrance in a few strides and poked his head out to look. The entire valley had changed almost beyond recognition.
It was as if an entire layer had been forcibly gnawed away, from the distant mountains to the nearby hollows. Nothing remained on the slopes except countless jagged rocks and bare soil; the distant forest had vanished, and the earth below the hillside was crisscrossed with ravines.
He whipped his head around to stare at Yu Sheng, who stood beside Hu Li.
"Did... did you do this?"
Xu Jiali sounded hesitant when he asked. He knew it seemed absurd—no matter how one looked at it, that eerie, horrifying spectacle in the valley was not something a "human" could pull off. Yet his instincts told him that all of this was connected to Yu Sheng's brief absence from the group.
"More or less," Yu Sheng replied quite cheerfully. He was in high spirits right now, a deep sense of sated satisfaction welling up from the bottom of his heart. Beaming, he nodded. "Though it took quite a bit of effort."
By this point, Li Lin had also caught sight of the scenery across the valley. When he turned back to look at Yu Sheng, the shock on his face was beyond measure. "...How is that even possible..."
Yu Sheng gave it some thought and realized it would be nearly impossible to explain what had actually happened to outsiders. That he had been eaten by "Hunger," only for his own appetite to far eclipse "Hunger's"? That a human (?) had mentally contaminated an entity, and after ingesting that filth, the "hunger entity" had devoured itself in a frenzy of heightened appetite?
It wasn't merely a matter of being hard to explain—once explained, nobody would be able to tell who the real villain was.
Besides, he had no desire to let these strangers learn too much about his secrets.
"Just got lucky and found the entity's weakness," Yu Sheng said casually. "I'm not entirely sure of the specifics either, but it looks like it triggered a chain reaction that caused the entities in this valley to devour themselves..."
This sounded like a brush-off, and an intentionally obvious one at that. Li Lin understood immediately—some things were private secrets.
Right after that, Irene's shrill, excited squawk cut through the lingering doubts in Li Lin and Xu Jiali's hearts: "Hey! Is that thing in the sky slowly floating upward?"
Hearing that, Yu Sheng hurried over and leaned out to peer up at the sky above the valley.
He watched as the massive eye spanning the entire valley ascended slowly without making a single sound, like a celestial projection shrinking in scale. In a matter of a dozen seconds, the gigantic eye had already diminished to a third of its original size.
It was rapidly pulling away from this place.
A brighter, more normal daylight flooded in from across the distant mountains, and scattered clouds reappeared in the sky. The eye soon shrank into a palm-sized disc floating in the center of the heavens, and after a few more breaths, that disc vanished completely from everyone's sight.
"It... it ran away?" Irene craned her neck to stare hard at the sky, momentarily at a loss. She then swung her head toward the two-meter-tall burly (fair) man nearby. "That 'Angel' you mentioned—it ran away! What are we supposed to do now?"
Xu Jiali merely breathed a soft sigh of relief. Hearing the doll's question, a wry smile squeezed onto his face.
"What else can we do? Celebrate—and after we celebrate, I'll go back and write my report."
Chapter 54