When Yu Sheng woke up, he found Irene sprawled in one corner at the foot of the bed, while her picture frame sat on the nightstand beside her, leaning against the wall.
Yu Sheng sighed. Last night, in the end, he had failed to throw this doll out—the main reason being that every time he tried to carry her toward the door, she would kick up an enormous racket, enough to make his head ache.
Heaving another deep sigh, he noticed that Irene showed not the slightest sign of waking, stuck out a foot, and gave her a couple of kicks.
“Get up. If you don’t get up soon, I’ll take your picture frame away and make you go back to sleep in the painting.”
The doll at the foot of the bed finally stirred. She slowly clambered upright and, with a head full of messy hair, looked at Yu Sheng through bleary eyes. “Morning... heh...”
“Morning, nothing! It’s almost noon!” Yu Sheng fought down the urge to kick the wretched doll right off the bed. “Do you have any idea how many times you rolled around in this bed last night?! You’re a doll—it’s strange enough that you need to sleep at all, so how do you manage to sleep so restlessly?”
“How would I know? Yaaawn—” Irene rubbed her eyes, stretching and muttering. “Don’t be so mad about it. I’m this pretty, and you’re not even happy about sharing a room with me...”
Breaking out in a cold sweat, Yu Sheng stared at this tiny thing who was only 66.6 centimeters tall, feeling his temples twitch. “For such a little person, you sure have a big face. Do you even know what you’re saying?”
Irene didn’t care in the least. Hair everywhere, she crawled up in front of Yu Sheng, lowered her head, and announced with perfect self-assurance, “Comb my hair.”
A vein jumped at Yu Sheng’s temple. He rolled off the bed, ran to the bathroom, grabbed a comb, and threw it onto the bed. “Not doing it. Do it yourself.”
Irene gripped the comb with both hands—it was as big as her head—and rolled her eyes hard. “Do I look like I can do it myself? I can’t even hold this thing in one hand. How about you get me a comb made just for dolls...”
Then came an unbroken string of complaints: “usually when my hair gets messy I can only rake at it with my fingers,” “on my first day I could only sleep in a chair,” “nobody cares in the least how a doll feels”—not a single pause between them, until the listener felt sparks practically shooting out of his ears.
“...I must have owed you something in a past life.” Unable to stand it any longer, Yu Sheng came over, snatched the comb out of Irene’s hands, then picked her up and set her on the nightstand. “Sit here and don’t move.”
Irene beamed in triumph at once and, sitting on the nightstand, kept chattering away. “You made this body, so handling a little after-sales service is only normal...”
Combing the doll’s hair in irritation, Yu Sheng spoke up. “Is that how you use ‘after-sales service’?”
“Not a big deal—ah, easy, don’t yank them out. A doll’s hair is very precious.”
Yu Sheng heaved another long sigh, somehow muddled his way through combing out the mess Irene had made by burrowing around in her sleep, then hung the picture frame that leaned against the wall onto the doll, turned, and went off to wash up.
“Hey, Yu Sheng! What’s for breakfast?” Irene’s voice came from outside the bathroom before long.
By then Yu Sheng’s mouth was full of toothpaste foam, and he answered thickly, “I’ll boil some dried noodles in a bit, we’ll make do with a quick bite—then we head out.”
An “oh” came from outside the bathroom door, and then the doll finally quieted down.
But Yu Sheng couldn’t shake the feeling that Irene’s temporary quiet meant she was planning some bigger commotion—he could feel his spiritual intuition going thump-thump like crazy.
Though hearing his spiritual intuition go thump-thump in a situation like this did sound a little strange.
After washing up and wiping his face, Yu Sheng stood at the sink and looked up at himself in the mirror.
His spirits were good, he looked well, and there was even a hint of a smile he wasn’t aware of.
It seemed a long time since he’d seen himself in the mirror looking this full of life, and for a moment he felt oddly dazed.
He still remembered that not long ago, in this city so vast it made his heart quail, he had been living an uneasy life. Through those two-odd months he had fallen asleep every night tense and oppressed, spent each night full of dreams and unrest, then woken exhausted; he only washed his face every few days, and the face he saw in the mirror was always listless.
But now he saw only a young man full of energy, with a bit of expectation for the future in his eyes—not at all like someone who had spent the whole night being kicked by a doll with restless sleeping habits.
“...My whole state of mind really has changed...” Yu Sheng couldn’t help laughing, murmuring to himself.
Then came Irene’s wailing from outside the door, like a ghost howling and a wolf baying: “Yu—Sheng! Did-you-fall-in?! I’ll go get Hu Li to fish you out—”
The smile on Yu Sheng’s face froze instantly. He whipped around and yanked the door open, and there stood Irene on the hallway floor, picture frame on her back, bright-eyed and grinning foolishly up at him.
“You’ve been in there for more than half an hour!” the doll said, tilting her head back.
Yu Sheng simply walked past her and opened the bedroom door, going to see whether the fox was awake.
The moment he opened it, he got a fright: Hu Li was standing right there in the doorway, leaning forward like a thief, looking very much as though she was hesitating over whether to come in.
Hu Li was startled too by the door suddenly opening—genuinely startled. The great bushy tail behind her burst open with a bang, planted in the hallway like a folding screen, and even the two big ears on her head snapped rigid in an instant.
Two or three seconds later, the puffed-up fox spirit slowly relaxed and looked at Yu Sheng, rather at a loss. “Benefactor...”
Yu Sheng was curious. “What are you doing?”
“I woke up, but I didn’t know what to do, so I... came to wait. But I didn’t know whether you were awake, so, I didn’t dare knock,” Hu Li explained nervously at once, then looked at Yu Sheng with great concern. “Benefactor, are you all right? Where did you fall in?”
“I didn’t fall in anywhere! Don’t listen to Irene’s nonsense,” Yu Sheng said, eyes going wide, then frowned and looked Hu Li up and down. “You’ve just been standing out here waiting this whole time?”
“Mm.”
“...From now on this is your home, so there’s no need to be so on edge all the time. When you’ve got nothing to do, you can watch television or whatever... Oh, and when I have time I’ll teach you how to use the appliances around here,” Yu Sheng said casually, turning toward the stairs. “Let’s go down and eat first. I’ll boil some noodles and we’ll make do—today I’m taking you out shopping.”
The moment she heard the word “eat,” Hu Li’s eyes visibly lit up, and she all but skipped along after Yu Sheng.
But Yu Sheng had taken only two steps before he stopped again, turning to look at the fox spirit, hesitating as if he wanted to say something.
Hu Li tilted her head. “Benefactor?”
“I just remembered something...” Yu Sheng’s gaze fell on the top of Hu Li’s head. “You can put your tail away—what about your ears? Walking around outside like that... you might draw a fair bit of attention.”
Hearing this, Hu Li looked a little lost. Since arriving here she had never once set foot outside, so she had no idea what the world out there was like, and could not imagine what was wrong with going around looking like this.
But since her benefactor said so, she believed it.
The fox spirit girl rubbed her hands together, reached up, took the ears off her head, stuffed them into her tail, and afterward hid the tail as well.
The scene went dead silent.
Yu Sheng stood frozen in the corridor, holding the exact posture he’d had a second before, when he was still speaking, like a man turned to stone.
Until Irene’s shriek abruptly shattered the quiet: “Aaaah—f-f-fox, what was that thing you just took off your head?!”
Hu Li summoned out the tail she usually used to hide things, pulled out the pair of fluffy ears, and showed them to Irene. “My ears.”
Yu Sheng’s eyes were practically bulging out of his head. “Those things come off?! They’re fake?!”
“They’re real,” Hu Li said matter-of-factly as she put the ears away. “Fox spirits are skilled at shape-shifting.”
Yu Sheng said, “That doesn’t look like the kind of ‘shifting’ I know about...”
Hu Li’s face filled with astonishment at once. “Benefactor, you’ve seen other fox spirits?”
Yu Sheng blanked for a moment, then instantly composed himself. “...No.”
“A fox spirit who wants to study the refinement arts must begin, as the first step, with refining herself; once that’s done well, it becomes shape-shifting,” Hu Li explained solemnly to Yu Sheng and Irene, laying out what to her was obvious “common knowledge.” “But Mom and Dad didn’t have time to teach me much, so I only learned... the basic transformations. I heard from an immortal that a truly powerful fox spirit can even transform herself into a tale out of a book, a shadow out of the histories, and, relying on nothing but what people pass along by word of mouth, cross the ages in an instant and sail the seas of stars. But I can’t!”
Yu Sheng listened open-mouthed, his imagination running at full throttle just to keep up with the fox girl’s description; yet while his ears understood, his brain refused to believe it, and he kept feeling the girl was pulling his leg.
But Hu Li’s utterly harmless face really didn’t look like the face of someone who made things up.
“I keep feeling something’s off about this,” Irene muttered beside him, rubbing her chin. “My memory isn’t working too well right now, so don’t you go fooling me... Where exactly did all this common knowledge of yours come from? Are you sure that immortal didn’t just pull the wool over your eyes? Let me tell you, people who work as tour guides will say anything...”
Hu Li shook her head vigorously. “I don’t know. But my transformation arts really were taught to me by Mom and Dad, and it really is like this—”
As she spoke, she took another careful look at Yu Sheng, and immediately her hair and eyes changed color too, turning black in imitation of him.
Now she looked entirely like an ordinary pretty girl, the kind anyone would take for a Jiecheng local.
“Like this—is it all right?” the fox spirit girl asked, looking at Yu Sheng expectantly.
Yu Sheng blanked for a moment, then finally nodded, still looking somewhat dazed.
Never mind anything else—at least this time her transformation had looked a lot more normal...
Chapter 66