The voice in his mind made Yu Sheng—already dazed by the cold wind in the valley—startle all at once, and then he was even more stunned.
He remained stunned until Irene shouted in his head a second time, snapping him back to awareness.
“…Irene?” Yu Sheng blinked. He was cautiously observing the valley while carefully approaching the dilapidated, collapsed old temple, trying to find a temporary corner for shelter, while attempting to respond in his mind, “How did you… get in contact with me? I mean you speaking directly inside my head…”
“Is that hard?” Irene said confidently. “I am Alice's Doll!”
Yu Sheng thought about it, but simply couldn't connect the two things… Meaning, could all of Alice's Dolls do this? Could they speak inside other people's heads?
“Haven't I already been in your dreams once? You only have to go in once to know the way,” Irene said. Noticing Yu Sheng still hadn't answered, she patiently explained once more, but her tone quickly changed: “Hey, wait—where exactly did you go? I can't sense you at all…”
Yu Sheng fell silent for two seconds, looking up at the gloomy valley forest, feeling as if a seven- or eight-meter-tall monster would spawn at any moment, accompanied by stirring BGM, making his heart turn cold: “…I might have gone on a long trip, probably not easy to get back…”
On Irene's side she was clearly stunned for a moment; her voice came a few seconds later: “…Didn't you say you were just going out to throw out the trash? You got scooped up by a garbage truck?!”
Yu Sheng didn't know where she got such strong associative ability…
However, it had to be admitted that after hearing Irene's voice, his heart, which had been panicked from suddenly being thrown into such a remote place, stabilized a little… just a little.
This voice at least proved his connection with the original world hadn't been completely severed. Since Irene could contact him, he should still have a chance to go back—despite having no ideas or reasons to support this hypothesis, he had to firmly believe it now.
As for the present, the first thing he had to do was ensure his own safety.
The valley was very quiet; so far only hollow wind sounds occasionally reached his ears, but Yu Sheng always felt an awkward and oppressive feeling in his heart, as if something was staring at him—a cold, empty, hungry gaze, scanning here again and again, scanning him.
This made him increasingly uneasy, urgently wanting to find a corner to hide in first, at least not stand so openly in the open space anymore.
But the only place that seemed to offer cover was that ruined temple, almost completely collapsed. The forest in the distance was dense, but the atmosphere was even more eerie and gloomy, and besides, “entering the dense forest at night” was a classic way to get yourself killed in a horror story; he absolutely did not want to approach it.
But unfortunately, sneaking into a ruined temple late at night was also a classic way to get yourself killed. The difference between the two options was just that wild beasts were easy to spawn in the forest, and monsters were easy to spawn in the ruined temple…
Both easily triggered stirring BGM.
Yu Sheng gritted his teeth and still walked toward the only relatively intact side corner of the ruined temple.
At the same time, he contacted Irene in his mind and roughly explained the situation on his side—actually there wasn't much to explain, because even he didn't know how all this had happened; from beginning to end he had just opened a door…
After hearing this on Irene's side, she was stunned for a long time before hesitantly opening her mouth: “Sounds like you fell into a ‘foreign domain’?”
Yu Sheng, standing in the ruined temple, was stunned upon hearing this, then suddenly reacted: “Foreign domain? You call this place a foreign domain? Do you know where I am?”
For some reason Irene's voice sounded a bit confused: “Ah? There are tons of foreign domains; how would I know which one you fell into…”
Listening to Irene's muttering, Yu Sheng instead frowned, suddenly realizing he had gained some knowledge about the “supernatural domain,” and even more importantly realizing a crucial thing:
That he might not have been thrown into “another world,” but rather encountered some “natural phenomenon” that wasn't strange in Irene's view?
While Yu Sheng muttered in his heart, Irene apparently thought of something, saying in a somewhat unbelievable tone in his mind: “…You couldn't have never heard of ‘foreign domains,’ right?”
Yu Sheng's expression was strange: “…Should I have heard of it? Is this thing common knowledge ordinary people should know?”
“Oh, it's normal for ordinary people not to know about foreign domains; after all, the vast majority of people won't encounter this in their lifetime,” Irene said casually, but her next sentence stunned Yu Sheng: “But you shouldn't not know.”
“Me? Why should I know?” Yu Sheng's expression was a bit bewildered. “I'm just an ordinary person…”
“…But you live in a foreign domain every day.”
…
Shadows moved through the night curtain, hunters took shape in the shadows, a ferocious wolf leaped out from the shadows, nimbly jumping along the uneven rooftops of Old Town a few times, lightly and silently landing in the deserted street, standing in the middle of the road looking left and right.
“Come back!” A somewhat annoyed female voice came from the shadows of buildings at the street corner.
The wolf instantly shrank its neck, made a muffled whine, and hurriedly trotted into the shadows of buildings beside the road.
A girl wearing a dark red coat and black short skirt stood at the corner between two old houses; she reached out and rubbed the head of the wolf that had just run back, lifting her eyes to look at the house at the end of the old street.
This was a very short street, with only dozens of households on the whole street; the street was open front and back, the situation on the road was clear at a glance, even without using the wolf's eyes, she could judge the situation here at once.
The girl frowned, and at that moment the phone ringtone rang just in time—still the classic opening theme of the 1986 Journey to the West; this time she answered when the monkey had just flipped to the second somersault: “It's me, yes, I'm in Old Town, on Wutong Road.”
Coming through the phone was the voice of a middle-aged man, his senses blurred from overtime work, chattering on.
Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while, twitched the corners of her mouth: “I arrived, but found nothing—my wolf has searched this entire street back and forth three times, and found no traces of a foreign domain opening, nor found anything that escaped from a foreign domain.”
The phone was silent for two or three seconds, then came the voice from the other side: “But the monitoring personnel can be sure that there were signs of a foreign domain opening on Wutong Road in Old Town; there must have briefly appeared a passage to a foreign domain…”
“I believe,” Little Red Riding Hood said somewhat helplessly, “I still recognize the professionalism of your Special Affairs Bureau's monitoring personnel, but I also believe in my wolf—perhaps a brief passage really appeared here, but now it's definitely gone without a trace… Considering that under normal circumstances a foreign domain couldn't sever its connection with the mortal world in such a short time, maybe someone else handled it.”
“There aren't many people with the ability to sever a foreign domain connection in such a short time, and their affiliated forces all have records and contact channels with the Special Affairs Bureau,” the voice from the phone sounded somewhat tired, “but tonight I haven't received any communication about this…”
“Then maybe it's people from the Hermit Society; they're always mysterious…”
The girl said casually, and then unsurprisingly heard more chatter from the phone, so she sighed and repeatedly agreed: “Fine fine fine, I know, they're all respected scholars, right… I've always respected scholars. No more, no more, I'll take my wolf pack to search once more from the shadows; anyway this ‘Wutong Road’ isn't big, a total of sixty-five addresses, searching once more isn't troublesome…”
Hanging up the phone, her ears finally quieted down; Little Red Riding Hood looked at the dark-screened phone and sighed, then looked down at the dog heads… wolf heads rising and falling in the shadows around her, and couldn't help but sigh again.
“I haven't finished my homework yet… sigh, the lot of an outsourced worker is truly bitter…”
Yu Sheng sat under a corner of the ruined temple wall that looked relatively sturdy, blowing in the cold wind coming through the large hole in the wall, looking up at the dark, murky night sky outside the broken hole in the roof, trying to empty his mind, but failing.
Just now, he had learned a truth.
His only stable foothold in Jiecheng, in his heart the safest, most normal place in the whole city, was actually an abnormality called a “foreign domain”… “place.”
In Irene's words, the so-called “foreign domain” was a domain beyond normal, a dimension at the edge of reason—the world where ordinary people live, with normal order, seemed like a mountain with solid foundation and stable structure, but actually, the minute details of this mountain were all “holes” leading to the irrational, the disordered.
For the vast majority of people, they would never touch these “holes” in their entire lives, nor ever see the wondrous scenes on the other side of the holes.
But the faint light leaking from the holes would always shine into other people's eyes—for them, the moment they accidentally glimpsed those scenes, some things could never go back.
—However, even for a worldly doll in the painting, a person being able to live long-term in a foreign domain was still somewhat outrageous…
Chapter 9