Chapter 15: Trapped Here

When he heard the other party pronounce his name, Yu Sheng's first reaction was that this girl was really straightforward—she'd just taken "fox" as his name directly. It took several more rounds of questioning before he understood she was saying "Hu Li," not "fox."

Her name was Hu Li. Strange, but quite fitting for someone with that many tails.

"My name is Yu Sheng," Yu Sheng said, sitting with Hu Li among the ruins of the broken temple. He began explaining his background. "I came from... well, I don't know if you can understand this, but I came from 'outside.' Not outside the valley."

"You really came from 'outside'!" Hu Li's eyes went wide. She seemed to understand what he meant instantly, and the shock on her face carried another layer of meaning: she knew about "outside"!

She quickly and restrainedly took another small bite of the chocolate, staring at Yu Sheng's face. "How... how did you get in? Do you know... the way out? Is it... in the sky?"

As she spoke with Yu Sheng, her speech gradually became more fluent, as if she was rapidly rediscovering her ability to communicate with people.

Yu Sheng was taken aback by her question. "The sky? Why do you ask that?"

"Before the immortal died, he said we all came from the sky, but then the sky suddenly went dark, and we couldn't go back," Hu Li struggled to formulate her words. Although she was speaking more smoothly now, she still stumbled over longer sentences. "Then the land became more and more dangerous. It started being poisonous... and... the people who came together... many died. Couldn't go back..."

Yu Sheng listened, dazed, barely making sense of her jumbled description through sheer mental effort. He realized that this valley, which Elaine had simply categorized as an "alien realm," might contain a far more complicated story, and that the many-tailed girl in front of him had an origin that was truly mind-boggling.

She was also trapped here!

But when he tried to ask her where "the sky" was, who the "many people" she mentioned were, and how exactly they had gotten here, her answers became incoherent again.

"The sky... is the sky. I've been trying all these years to go back to the sky, but I can't," Hu Li explained, gesturing vaguely. "I try to jump, but I hit something. It hurts. Everyone else... doesn't remember anymore. There were fathers, mothers, immortals, and... and others. We came down on a boat. A big boat..."

At this point, Hu Li seemed to remember something more. She pointed toward a direction deep in the dark valley. "Over there. The boat... fell down, became part of the mountain. Dad always wanted to go back to get things, but later... something killed everyone, so no one knows how... to get into the boat anymore."

The things Hu Li was saying started to sound eerie and horrifying. Yu Sheng felt a chill run down his spine.

He did his best to understand what she was saying. Setting aside the specific concept of "immortals" and what "the sky" might be, from Hu Li's fragmented account, he pieced together some scattered truths:

Hu Li, her family, and people called "immortals" had landed in this valley many years ago aboard a large boat—very likely a large flying vehicle. But back then, this place probably wasn't a "dead zone." It was only later that "the sky went dark," some unknown environmental catastrophe occurred, sealing the area and trapping everyone who had come on the boat. After that, the trapped people suffered a major blow, attacked by some powerful enemy, nearly wiped out.

The process was brutal, and in the end, the sole survivor was Hu Li herself.

But Yu Sheng knew that this was just a story he had pieced together through sheer mental effort. Hu Li's words were disjointed, her memories had clear gaps, and her understanding was confused based on her own perspective. The true truth might be something even she couldn't comprehend or recall.

This girl's mind was seriously messed up.

"How long have you been trapped here?" he couldn't help asking.

"I don't know. A long time..." Hu Li shook her head slowly, carefully holding the half-eaten chocolate in her hands. "Nothing ever changes here. No way to count the days. When I'm hungry, I pass out, and when I wake up, it feels like a long time has passed..."

Yu Sheng frowned slightly. Looking at Hu Li's tattered clothes and recalling her jumbled stories, he realized the time she had been trapped here was probably far longer than he could imagine—measured at least in years.

"How did you survive all these years?" he asked, frowning unconsciously. "What did you eat? Just scavenging in the broken temple? But there doesn't seem to be anything edible here..."

"No food," Hu Li shook her head again. "Sometimes... there are fruits in the forest, but they're poisonous. Eat them, you pass out. Besides water, most things here are toxic. So most of the time, I just go hungry."

She smiled slowly as she said this, pointing at herself with a hint of pride. "Monsters are tough. Starvation won't kill me. It's just... unpleasant. The feeling of being hungry."

She seemed to recall some bad memories, her smile twisting. Then she quickly got up and ran a short distance, retrieving that bag of kitchen scraps from among the rubble. She hugged it like a treasure—that bag of leftover food and rotten vegetables.

"Still edible," she said seriously to Yu Sheng.

Yu Sheng opened his mouth but couldn't find the words. He wished he could pull out mountains of food right now, or even open a door back to the real world, but he was still struggling to survive himself.

"Benefactor..." Hu Li suddenly spoke again.

Yu Sheng was startled, not reacting immediately. "What did you call me?"

"Benefactor," Hu Li repeated, her expression earnest. "Mom said that someone who helps you a lot is a benefactor. You gave me food."

Yu Sheng waved his hand. "...That's kind of weird. Just call me Yu Sheng. I'm used to it."

"Oh, okay, Benef..." Hu Li mumbled, trailing off awkwardly. Then she pointed at Yu Sheng's finger and lowered her head. "I'm sorry."

"Huh?" Yu Sheng blinked, noticing the wound on his finger—the one Hu Li had bitten when she snatched the bread earlier. But somehow it had already healed completely, leaving only a few bloodstains on his skin. He waved dismissively. "No big deal, don't worry about it. Just a scratch."

But Hu Li looked worried. "Benefactor, are you really okay? A monster's bite... damages the root. It can't heal."

"But it already healed," Yu Sheng said doubtfully, rubbing off the bloodstains. "Look."

"It really did heal..." Hu Li stared at his finger in surprise. "Benefactor... are you also an immortal?"

"No, I don't even know what you mean by 'immortal.' Based on my understanding, it's someone who cultivates and becomes immortal?" Yu Sheng said casually. "But why would someone who cultivated to immortality be with... uh, 'monsters'? According to what you said, it sounds like you were all monsters on one boat, traveling with an immortal? But from the stories I've heard... that's not how immortals and monsters usually get along, is it?"

Yu Sheng finally voiced the question that had been bothering him.

Hu Li had mentioned many terms he had only heard in stories, and she herself had a huge number of tails that looked like they should belong to a thousand-year-old fox spirit. All this information boiled down to an immortal leading a bunch of monsters around, and after their "flying boat" crashed, the immortal and monsters even banded together to survive in the wilderness for a while (even though they ultimately failed). That didn't match his stereotypes about immortals and monsters.

In novels, weren't these two groups usually at each other's throats, ready to chop each other up like dumpling filling?

Hu Li clearly didn't understand Yu Sheng's reaction. Faced with his question, she tilted her head in confusion, thought hard for a moment, then spoke uncertainly. "Because... he was a tour guide immortal."

Yu Sheng stared.

He felt like he had just heard something seriously bizarre.

But he asked several times and eventually confirmed that Hu Li hadn't remembered wrong or misspoken.

It was a "tour guide immortal." Or rather, the immortal was a tour guide.

Countless years ago, the immortals and monsters who had crashed in this forbidden land aboard the "immortal boat" were a damn tour group.

And Yu Sheng had just spent all that mental effort conjuring up an eighty-thousand-word xianxia story! All for nothing!

Don't ask why there was a tour group of monsters led by an immortal. Ask, and the answer was: ninety-nine yuan for a four-day pure-play trip, no shopping—reasonable or not, it was perfectly reasonable. Cheap tours always had problems.

Yu Sheng sat in the night wind, letting the cold breeze blow through the ruins of the broken temple and across his face.

He felt that this world was seriously messed up.

More and more so.

Just then, he heard the fox girl calling him softly again.

"Benefactor..."

"Just call me Yu Sheng," Yu Sheng sighed helplessly. "What do you need?"

Hu Li clutched her stomach, looking pained. "Benefactor, my stomach hurts a little."

Yu Sheng stared blankly for a moment, then looked at the chocolate that the fox immortal had already gnawed halfway through.

So even fox immortals couldn't handle chocolate?!

"What the... Stop eating!" Yu Sheng broke out in a cold sweat, reaching out to grab the chocolate from her hand. "This stuff is bad for you—"

But as soon as his hand moved, a low growl rumbled from Hu Li's throat, like a Tibetan mastiff. Then she thrust her neck forward and bit down on Yu Sheng's hand. "Oww!"

The next second, Yu Sheng's yell was even louder than Hu Li's.