The voice that echoed in his mind startled Yu Sheng, who was already a bit dazed from the cold wind in the valley—then he became even more dazed.
He was so stunned that he only snapped back to reality when Irene shouted in his head for the second time.
"...Irene?" Yu Sheng blinked. He was currently cautiously observing the situation in the valley while carefully moving towards the dilapidated and collapsed old temple, trying to find a temporary shelter, and at the same time, trying to respond in his mind. "How did you… contact me? I mean, you're speaking directly in my head…"
"Is that hard?" Irene's tone was particularly self-righteous. "I am one of Alice's Dolls!"
Yu Sheng thought for a moment but couldn't connect the two things… Did that mean all of Alice's Dolls could do this? Could they all speak in other people's minds?
"Didn't I already get into your dream once? Once you've been there, you know the way," Irene, noticing Yu Sheng's lack of response, patiently explained again, but her tone quickly changed. "Hey, wait, where did you go? I can't sense you at all…"
Yu Sheng fell silent for two seconds, looking up at the gloomy valley and dense forest around him. He had a feeling that a seven or eight-meter-tall monster would spawn here in the next second, accompanied by a rousing BGM. This made his heart turn cold. "…I might have taken a long trip. I reckon it won't be easy to get back…"
Irene was obviously stunned on her end as well. Her voice came a few seconds later. "…Didn't you say you were just going out to throw out the garbage? Did you get shoveled away by the garbage truck?!"
Yu Sheng had no idea where this person got such a strong imagination from…
But he had to admit that after hearing Irene's voice, his heart, which had been panicking after being suddenly thrown into such a wilderness, had calmed down a little… just a little.
This voice at least proved that his connection with his original world had not been completely severed. Since Irene could contact him, he should still have a chance to go back—although he had no clue how, nor could he think of any reason to support this hypothesis, he had to believe it now.
As for the present, the first thing he needed to do was to ensure his own safety.
The valley was quiet. So far, he had only heard some hollow wind sounds from time to time, but Yu Sheng always had a strange and oppressive feeling in his heart. He always felt that something was staring at him here, some kind of… cold, nihilistic, and hungry gaze, scanning this place, scanning him, over and over again.
This made him more and more uneasy, and he desperately wanted to find a corner to hide in first, at least not to stand so blatantly in the open.
But the only place he could see to hide seemed to be that almost completely collapsed ruined temple—the forest in the distance was dense, but the atmosphere was even more eerie and gloomy. Plus, "entering a dense forest late at night" was a classic element of horror stories, and he was absolutely unwilling to get close.
But the bad thing was that drilling into a ruined temple late at night was also a standard element of horror stories. The only difference between the two options was that the forest was more likely to spawn beasts, and the ruined temple was more likely to spawn monsters…
Both were likely to trigger a rousing BGM.
Yu Sheng gritted his teeth and still walked towards the only relatively intact corner of the ruined temple.
At the same time, he was also contacting Irene in his mind, roughly explaining his situation—in fact, 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 him out, Irene was stunned for a long time before she spoke hesitantly, "It sounds like you've fallen into an 'Otherworld'?"
Yu Sheng, who was standing in the ruins of the temple, was stunned when he heard this, and suddenly reacted, "Otherworld? You call this place an Otherworld? You know where I am?"
Irene's voice sounded a little confused for some reason. "Huh? There are so many Otherworlds. How would I know which one you fell into…"
Listening to Irene's muttering, Yu Sheng frowned, suddenly realizing that he had gained some more knowledge about the "supernatural realm," and more importantly, he realized a crucial thing:
He might not have been thrown into "another world," but had encountered some kind of "natural phenomenon" that was not uncommon in Irene's view?
As Yu Sheng muttered in his heart, Irene had obviously thought of something and said in a somewhat incredulous tone in his mind, "…You've never heard of 'Otherworlds'?"
Yu Sheng had a strange expression on his face. "…Should I have heard of them? Is this some kind of common knowledge that ordinary people should know?"
"Oh, it's normal for ordinary people not to know about Otherworlds. After all, most people will never encounter such things in their entire lives," Irene said casually, but her next sentence made Yu Sheng stunned. "But you shouldn't not know."
"Me? Why should I know?" Yu Sheng's expression was a little dazed. "I'm just an ordinary person…"
"…But you live in an Otherworld every day."
…
Shadows shuttled through the night, hunters taking shape in the shadows. A ferocious wolf leaped out of the shadows, agilely jumping a few times along the high and low rooftops of the old district, landing silently in the empty street, standing in the middle of the road and looking left and right.
"Come back!" a somewhat annoyed female voice came from the shadow of the building at the corner of the street.
The wolf instantly flinched, let out a muffled whimper, and quickly trotted into the shadow of the building by the road.
The girl in the dark red jacket and black skirt stood in the corner between two old houses. She reached out and rubbed the head of the wolf that had just run back, then raised her eyes to look at the house at the end of this old street.
This was a very short street, with only a few dozen households on the entire street. The street was open at both ends, and the situation on the road was clear at a glance. Even without the wolf's eyes, she could tell the situation here at a glance.
The girl frowned, and her cell phone rang at the right time—it was still the classic opening theme of the '86 version of *Journey to the West*. This time, she answered the call just as the monkey was on his second somersault. "It's me. Yes, I'm in the old district, near Wutong Road."
The voice that came from the phone was that of a middle-aged man who was groggy from working overtime, rambling on and on.
Little Red Riding Hood listened patiently for a while, then twitched the corner of her mouth. "I'm here, but I didn't find anything—my wolves have searched this entire street back and forth three times, and they didn't find any signs of an Otherworld opening, nor did they find anything that came out of an Otherworld."
There was a two or three-second silence on the phone before the voice from the other side came, "But the monitoring personnel are certain that there was a reaction of an Otherworld opening on Wutong Road in the old district. A passage to an Otherworld must have appeared there briefly…"
"I believe you," Little Red Riding Hood said with some helplessness. "I still recognize the professionalism of your Special Operations Bureau's monitoring personnel, but I also believe in my wolves—perhaps a brief passage did appear here, but it must be completely gone now… Considering that under normal circumstances, an Otherworld couldn't disconnect from the real world in such a short time, maybe someone else dealt with it."
"There aren't many people who have the ability to cut off the connection to an Otherworld in such a short time, and the forces they belong to all have records and contact channels with the Special Operations Bureau," the voice from the phone sounded a little tired. "But I didn't receive any such communication tonight…"
"Then maybe it's the people from the Hermit Society. They're always so mysterious…"
The girl said casually, then, as expected, she heard a string of rambling from the phone again. She had to sigh and agree repeatedly, "Alright, alright, I know. They're all highly respected scholars, okay… I've always respected scholars. Let's not talk about it anymore. I'll take my pack of wolves and search from the shadows again. Anyway, this 'Wutong Road' isn't big. There are only sixty-five house numbers in total. It won't be much trouble to search it again…"
After hanging up the phone, her ears were finally quiet. Little Red Riding Hood sighed at the black screen of her phone, then looked down at the dog heads… wolf heads that were rising and falling in the shadows around her, and couldn't help but sigh again.
"I haven't even finished my homework yet… Sigh, the life of an outsourced worker is really hard…"
…
Yu Sheng sat under a corner of a seemingly sturdy wall in the corner of the ruined temple, letting the cold wind blowing through the large hole in the wall blow on him. He looked up at the dark and turbid night sky outside the hole in the roof, trying to empty his mind, but failed.
Just now, he had learned a truth.
His only stable foothold in Boundary City, the safest and most normal place in the entire city in his heart, was actually an abnormal… "place" called an "Otherworld."
In Irene's words, the so-called "Otherworld" was a realm outside the normal, a dimension at the edge of rationality—the orderly and normal world that ordinary people lived in seemed to be a solid and stable mountain, but in reality, the mountain was full of "holes" leading to the irrational and disorderly.
For the vast majority of people, they would never come into contact with these "holes" in their entire lives, and they would never see the grotesque and bizarre scenery on the other side of the holes.
But the faint light leaking from the holes would always enter the eyes of some people—for them, the moment they accidentally glimpsed those scenes, some things could never go back.
—However, even for a well-traveled doll in a painting, it was still somewhat absurd for a person to live in an Otherworld for a long time…