Chapter 261: Distress Call

The news of the door’s opening quickly spread through the valley. The children were drawn to it and began passing in and out of the new teleport gate with great curiosity, but before long, the younger ones were dragged back to the “town” by their “parents,” who grabbed them by the ears—after all, the orphanage was still a pile of rubble, full of construction machinery, and playing around there was genuinely dangerous for kids who hadn’t yet mastered their abilities or hadn’t even awakened them yet.

Snow White and the others, along with a few older children, were moving through the ruins, rummaging around in areas that didn’t interfere with the cleanup crew.

Although the entire orphanage had been leveled, and the two main buildings had twisted grotesquely during their transformation into the “umbilical cord,” the rubble still occasionally yielded intact objects—not necessarily useful, but ones that carried memories for the members of “Fairy Tale.”

Dorothy shouted from a distance: “Rapunzel! I found some novels! See if any are yours! There are two smashed figurines lying next to them…”

Rapunzel let out a shriek and ran over.

Then Snow White directed the Thunder Titans to move aside the cement chunks that had melted and congealed together, revealing a section of the activity classroom beneath the rubble. They found a chalkboard and a wooden box that had stored indoor toys.

Yu Sheng stood not far away with Little Red Ridinghood, silently watching the scene in the ruins. After a moment, he spoke quietly: “Aren’t you going to look? Maybe there’s still something of yours.”

“I already took out the important things,” Little Red Ridinghood shook her head. But after a brief silence, she turned to Li Lin, who was standing nearby. “Could you keep an eye out? If you find anything relatively intact while clearing the rubble, could you collect it for us…”

“Of course,” Li Lin nodded immediately, but then added, “But I can only do my best, you know. We’re using heavy machinery, and most of the cleanup crew can’t be as thorough as you.”

“Just do your best.”

“No problem.”

Yu Sheng listened without interrupting, but just then, a phone ringtone came from his pocket, cutting off the exchange between Little Red Ridinghood and Li Lin.

Yu Sheng pulled out his phone and saw an unfamiliar number.

Hesitating for a moment, he answered and put it to his ear.

A somewhat familiar young man’s voice came through the receiver, tinged with nervous fear: “Hello? Hello! Can you hear me? Brother Yu? I’m %@#&*…”

The line crackled with intermittent noise. Yu Sheng paused, then finally remembered where he’d heard that voice before: “...Nephew?!”

Little Red Ridinghood shot him a puzzled look. “Who’s calling?”

“That nephew of Old Zheng’s,” Yu Sheng said quickly, turning his head. Sensing something wrong from the noise, he pressed on the phone: “It’s Yu Sheng. What’s your situation? Are you in danger?”

Another burst of static came through the receiver, but after two or three seconds, the voice returned: “I’m in a mall. Something’s weird here. A lot of things have changed places, people have changed too, and there are mirrors everywhere… This is my first time seeing something like this, and I don’t know any other experts… Can you come to &*#@…”

Yu Sheng put the call on speakerphone halfway through. Before he could speak as the noise flared up again, Little Red Ridinghood shouted into the phone: “Stop rambling! Just tell me which mall!”

The intermittent noise kept coming from the speaker, mixed with the young man’s increasingly panicked voice: “Héyáng District… @#$ Wànxiàng Market… But I came in through a weird door, and it doesn’t look like… &**&￥”

The noise completely drowned out the young man’s voice, and his next words turned into garbled murmurs mixed with static. Then the signal dropped.

Yu Sheng looked up and exchanged a glance with Little Red Ridinghood. But before he could say anything, Li Lin had already snatched up his phone, dialed expertly, and put it to his ear: “Second Brigade Li Lin, Anomaly Level III. Someone is possibly trapped in Wànxiàng Market, Héyáng District… Yes, we had a signal a minute ago, but it’s down now. Suspected submergence into a foreign realm… Good, the patrol team is already en route? Good.”

Yu Sheng looked at Li Lin’s reflexive response, a bit surprised. Li Lin noticed the gaze and shifted uncomfortably. “Uh, what?”

“You’re pretty reliable,” Yu Sheng said casually. “Do you handle this often?”

“Not often, but we trained for it—the Special Affairs Bureau is made for this kind of thing,” Li Lin replied quickly, his expression a little awkward. “To be honest, I’m a bit nervous. This is the first time I’ve reported a Level III anomaly on my own…”

“I’m going to check it out,” Little Red Ridinghood cut in, and as she spoke, shadows of wolves began to flicker around her. “Yu Sheng, are you coming?”

“Together,” Yu Sheng said without hesitation. “He called me directly.”

“I’ve got my mission, I have to stay here,” Li Lin shook his head reluctantly. “But my colleagues are over there. If you need help, you can find them.”

Yu Sheng nodded, then called out to Huli and Irene. He followed Little Red Ridinghood and her wolves into the shadows.

The wolves, formed from condensed shadows, rapidly crossed the dimensions between light and darkness, leaping and bounding across the abstract urban “blocks” of shadow, traversing several blocks in the blink of an eye.

Huli, imitating Yu Sheng, sat astride one of the shadow wolves, wide-eyed and curious at the surrounding city buildings rendered in monochrome projections, now vaguely distorted. Irene clung tightly to Yu Sheng’s shoulder, glancing around nervously as she muttered: “What’s going on? What happened… Is that ‘nephew’ okay?”

“That’s just how high-sensitivity, low-stability is,” Little Red Ridinghood’s voice came from nearby, tinged with annoyance. “I should have applied for Special Affairs Bureau protection for him earlier. But his ‘high-sensitivity, low-stability’ condition is way too absurd… He barely had any formal contact with supernatural elements during the Old Zheng incident—the only link was that he approached the scene. How did he get tangled up with ‘the other side’ again…”

“Who could have guessed?” Yu Sheng’s tone was complicated too, because this was the first time he’d directly witnessed an ordinary person, having once been exposed to information from “the other side,” get involved in a supernatural event again. “After we dealt with the Old Zheng matter, I sent him home and thought it was over…”

He paused, then looked up at Little Red Ridinghood: “Do you know the mall he mentioned? Is that place a foreign realm?”

“Wànxiàng Market? I know it—I’ve been there twice. It’s certainly not a foreign realm. But many foreign realm entrances move randomly, and sometimes they appear right in front of victims when conditions are right. It’s not strange to encounter one anywhere,” Little Red Ridinghood said seriously. “Remember when you ran into that sudden freezing rain?”

Yu Sheng paused, recalling the frog in the rain, and his expression turned odd. “Well, you remind me—I’d forgotten. Feels like a long time ago.”

He shook his head, momentarily setting aside that somewhat expansive memory. “You’re more experienced than me. What can you tell from that phone call? Do you think our ‘nephew’ is in trouble?”

“His voice was clear when the call connected, which means he hadn’t fully ‘submerged’ yet. Probably was sinking from L-0 to L-1. Hey, if he were an experienced Spirit Realm Detective or investigator, he could have gotten out on his own at that stage. The depth between Level Zero and Level One is almost directly connected to the real world—safe gaps visible to the naked eye.”

Little Red Ridinghood shook her head as she spoke.

“Then the noise started and the signal got disrupted, meaning he’d probably passed L-1 depth. At that point, a normal person would need luck to get out, but the environment shouldn’t be lethal yet. Level One depth is often just ‘something seems off’—almost never fatal, and there are safe channels back to reality… but again, it depends on luck.

“What’s bad is that the signal cut out quickly. The whole process lasted maybe a minute? Then the noise completely drowned out his voice, with some murmuring in between… That means he’s sinking fast, possibly skipping L-1 entirely. I hope he can stay in some foreign realm at L-2 at least… at least until the rescue team finds him…”

Yu Sheng listened carefully. Even though he’d experienced events at the level of the Dim Angel, this basic knowledge was still fresh to him. A lot of experiential information wasn’t found in any database—only Spirit Realm Detectives like Little Red Ridinghood, who’d been in the field for years, would know.

At that moment, Huli turned back and chimed in: “He also mentioned that people and things had changed, and there were a lot of mirrors…”

“That doesn’t tell us much. Distortions in the surroundings are the most common phenomenon when falling into a foreign realm. Often, it’s not the surroundings that change but the victim’s own ‘vision’ that’s shifting. As for mirrors… there are way too many foreign realms related to mirrors,” Little Red Ridinghood waved her hand. “I know over a dozen off the top of my head. We’ll have to judge the specifics on-site. The Special Affairs Bureau people should be there by now. They have a lot of detection equipment, plus high-power scanning stations around the city. They might have already captured the signal of our ‘nephew’ sinking.”

Irene looked up at Little Red Ridinghood, then at Yu Sheng, and finally couldn’t hold it in: “You keep calling him ‘nephew,’ ‘nephew’—but he must have a name, right? What is it?”

Little Red Ridinghood and Yu Sheng exchanged glances.

“…No idea!” they said in unison.

(End of this chapter)