Chapter 66: Morning at Yu Sheng's Home

When Yu Sheng woke up, he saw Erin sprawled out on the foot of the bed. Her picture frame rested against the wall on the nightstand beside them.

Yu Sheng sighed. He’d ultimately failed to kick the doll out last night—mainly because every time he tried to drag her toward the door, she’d kick up a fuss that gave him a headache.

Heaving another deep sigh, he noticed Erin showed no sign of waking. He reached out with his foot and kicked her a couple of times.

“Get up. If you don’t, I’ll take your picture frame away and make you go sleep in the painting.”

Erin, still sprawled at the foot of the bed, finally stirred. She slowly sat up, her hair a messy bird’s nest, and looked at Yu Sheng with sleepy eyes. “Morning… hey…”

“Morning my ass! It’s almost noon!” Yu Sheng held back the urge to kick the miserable doll off the bed. “Do you even know how many times you rolled around last night?! You’re a doll—it’s weird enough that you need to sleep, but why do you have to toss and turn so badly?!”

“I dunno, yawn—” Erin rubbed her eyes, stretching as she mumbled, “Don’t be so grumpy, okay? I’m this pretty, and I’m sharing a room with you—you should be happy…”

Cold sweat broke out on Yu Sheng’s forehead as he stared at the sixty-six-point-six-centimeter-tall little thing. He felt a vein throb in his temple. “You’re tiny but you’ve got a big mouth. Do you even know what you’re saying?”

Erin didn’t care at all. With her hair a tangled mess, she crawled over in front of Yu Sheng, lowered her head, and said with total confidence, “Comb my hair.”

A vein bulged on Yu Sheng’s forehead. He rolled off the bed, ran to the bathroom, grabbed a comb, and threw it onto the bed. “No way. Comb it yourself.”

Erin grabbed the comb—as big as her head—with both hands and rolled her eyes dramatically. “Do you think I can comb it myself? I can’t even hold this thing with one hand. Maybe you should make me a special doll-sized comb…”

Then came a string of complaints like “normally when my hair gets messy I can only use my hands,” “I had to sleep on a chair the first day,” and “nobody cares about a doll’s feelings at all,” all delivered without a pause. It felt like Yu Sheng’s ears were about to catch fire.

“…I must have owed you in a past life,” Yu Sheng finally couldn’t take it anymore. He came over, snatched the comb from Erin’s hands, and placed her on the nightstand. “Sit here and don’t move.”

Erin immediately grinned victoriously, sitting on the nightstand and chattering away. “You made this body, so it’s only natural you handle the after-sales service…”

Yu Sheng combed the doll’s hair irritably as he spoke. “Is that how ‘after-sales service’ works?”

“Close enough—hey, go easy, don’t pull it out. A doll’s hair is precious.”

Yu Sheng let out another long sigh. At least he managed to smooth out the hair Erin had tangled up from sleeping poorly, then hung the picture frame leaning against the wall onto the doll, turned around, and went to wash up.

“Hey, Yu Sheng! What’s for breakfast?” Erin’s voice came from outside the bathroom a moment later.

Yu Sheng, his mouth full of toothpaste foam, answered vaguely, “I’ll cook some noodles in a bit. We’ll just make do. Then we’re going out.”

An “oh” came from outside the bathroom door, and then the doll finally quieted down.

But Yu Sheng had a feeling that Erin’s temporary silence meant she was planning something even bigger—he could feel his spiritual intuition twitching wildly.

Though it did seem a bit odd for his spiritual intuition to be twitching wildly in a situation like this.

After finishing his wash, Yu Sheng dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink.

He looked well-rested, in good spirits, with even a hint of an unconscious smile.

He realized it had been a long time since he’d seen himself this energetic in the mirror. For a moment, he was a little dazed.

He remembered that not long ago, he’d been living in this vast, terrifying city, day after day in anxiety. Those two-plus months, he’d fallen asleep tense and oppressed every night, spent restless nights full of dreams, and woken up exhausted. He’d washed his face maybe once every few days, and every time he looked in the mirror, he saw a listless, tired person.

But now, all he saw was a vibrant young man with a glimmer of anticipation for the future in his eyes—not at all like someone whose sleep had been interrupted all night by a doll with bad sleeping posture.

“…Guess my mindset really has changed.” Yu Sheng couldn’t help laughing quietly to himself.

Then he heard Erin wailing from outside the door, “Yu—Sheng! Did—you—fall—in—or—what! I’ll ask Hu Li to fish you out—”

The smile on Yu Sheng’s face instantly froze. He turned and yanked the door open, and saw Erin standing on the floor outside, picture frame on her back, grinning at him with bright eyes.

“You’ve been in there over half an hour!” the doll announced, craning her neck.

Yu Sheng walked right past her, opened the bedroom door, and prepared to see if the fox had woken up.

But the moment he opened the door, he got a shock: Hu Li was standing right there, leaning forward as if she’d been hesitating about whether to come in.

Hu Li was also startled by the door suddenly opening—really startled. Her huge tail behind her burst open with a “whump,” spreading out like a screen in the hallway, and even the big ears on top of her head shot straight up.

After two or three seconds, the bristling fox spirit slowly relaxed, looking at Yu Sheng a bit helplessly. “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 if you were awake, so… I didn’t dare knock.” Hu Li immediately began explaining nervously, then looked at Yu Sheng with concern. “Benefactor, are you okay? Did you fall somewhere?”

“I didn’t fall anywhere! Don’t listen to Erin’s nonsense,” Yu Sheng said, glaring at her. Then he frowned and gave Hu Li a once-over. “Have you been waiting out here this whole time?”

“Mm.”

“…From now on, this is your home. No need to be so nervous. If you’re bored, you can watch TV or something… Oh, I’ll teach you how to use the appliances when I have time.” Yu Sheng said casually, turning toward the stairs. “Let’s go downstairs and eat. I’ll cook some noodles for now. Today I’ll take you shopping.”

The moment she heard “eat,” Hu Li’s eyes visibly lit up. She practically bounced as she followed Yu Sheng downstairs.

But Yu Sheng had only taken two steps when he stopped again. He turned to look at the fox spirit, something clearly on his mind.

Hu Li tilted her head. “Benefactor?”

“Something just occurred to me…” Yu Sheng’s gaze settled on Hu Li’s head. “You can put away your tail, but what about your ears? If you go outside looking like this… you might attract too much attention.”

Hu Li looked a little confused when he said that. Since arriving here, she had never set foot outside the house, so she had no idea what the outside world was like, much less imagined that her appearance could be a problem.

But since her benefactor said so, she believed him.

The fox-spirit girl rubbed her hands together, raised one hand, removed the ears from her head, stuffed them into her tail, and then concealed the tail as well.

The scene fell silent.

Yu Sheng remained frozen in place, still in the middle of speaking, like a statue in the hallway.

Then Erin’s shriek shattered the stillness. “Aaaah—F-F-Fox! What did you just take off your head?! Aaaah!”

Hu Li pulled out the tail she normally used to stash things and fished out a pair of fuzzy ears to show Erin. “Ears.”

Yu Sheng’s eyes almost popped out. “They’re removable?! Are they fake?!”

“They’re real,” Hu Li said matter-of-factly as she put the ears away. “Fox spirit. Good at shapeshifting.”

Yu Sheng: “The fox spirits I know of don’t ‘shift’ like that…”

Hu Li looked astonished. “Benefactor, you’ve seen other fox spirits?”

Yu Sheng froze, then instantly calmed down. “…No.”

“Fox spirits have to learn the method of refining. The first step is to start by refining your own body. Once you master that, you can shapeshift,” Hu Li explained seriously, sharing what she considered common knowledge with Yu Sheng and Erin. “But my parents didn’t have time to teach me much. I only learned… basic transformation. I heard from the immortal that powerful fox spirits can even transform into stories from books or shadows in history, relying only on oral tradition to instantly travel through time and space, crossing the stars. But I can’t!”

Yu Sheng listened, stunned, using every ounce of his imagination just to keep up with the fox girl’s description. His ears understood, but his brain refused to believe it. He felt like she had to be making it up.

But Hu Li’s innocent face didn’t seem like the kind that could tell a lie.

“I feel like there’s something wrong here,” Erin muttered, chin in hand. “My memory’s not great right now, so don’t you try to fool me… Where did you get this ‘common knowledge’? Are you sure that immortal wasn’t messing with you? I’m telling you, tour guides will say anything…”

Hu Li shook her head vigorously. “I don’t know. But my transformation method really was taught by my parents, and it really is like this—”

As she spoke, she took another careful look at Yu Sheng. Then, in an instant, the color of her hair and eyes changed as well, mimicking Yu Sheng’s black hair and black eyes.

Now she looked like an ordinary pretty girl, clearly a local of Barrier City.

“Like this, is it okay?” The fox-spirit girl looked at Yu Sheng expectantly.

Yu Sheng was taken aback, then nodded, albeit a little dazedly.

At the very least, the transformation process looked much more normal this time…

(End of chapter)