When he heard her say her name, Yu Sheng's first reaction was that this girl was really straightforward, to just use "fox" as her name—later, after asking several more times, he finally understood that she was saying "Hu Li," not "fox."
Her name was Hu Li, a… somewhat strange, but very fitting name for that bunch of tails.
"My name is Yu Sheng," Yu Sheng sat with Hu Li in the ruins of the temple, introducing himself. "I'm from… uh, I don't know if you can understand, I'm from 'outside,' not outside the valley."
"You really, are from 'outside'!" Hu Li's eyes widened at once. She seemed to understand Yu Sheng's words immediately, and her astonishment revealed another layer of meaning: she knew of the existence of the "outside"!
Hu Li quickly and restrainedly took another small bite of chocolate, her eyes wide as she looked at Yu Sheng's face. "You, how did you get in? Do you know… the way out? Is it… in the sky?"
As she talked with Yu Sheng, Hu Li's speech gradually became more fluent, as if she was quickly regaining her ability to communicate with people.
Yu Sheng, on the other hand, was stunned when he heard her words. "The sky? Why do you ask?"
"The immortal said before he died that we, all came from the sky, but the sky suddenly turned dark, so, we couldn't go back," Hu Li tried to organize her words. Although her speech was a little more fluent now, she still stumbled when speaking in long paragraphs. "Then, the ground became more and more dangerous, and began to be poisonous, so… the people who came together, many of them died, and couldn't go back…"
Yu Sheng listened in a daze, relying almost entirely on his powerful imagination to barely understand the girl's chaotic description. He realized that this valley, which Irene had simply classified as an "Otherworld," seemed to have a complex story hidden within it, and the girl with many tails in front of him had an unbelievably strange origin.
She was also trapped here!
However, when he tried to ask her where "the sky" was, and who the "many people" she mentioned were, and how they had come here, her answers became confusing again.
"The sky… is just the sky. I've been trying to, go back to the sky all these years, but I can't," Hu Li explained with gestures. "I try to jump, but I'll hit something, it hurts a lot. Everyone… doesn't remember either. There was a father, a mother, an immortal, and… and others. We came down in a boat, a very big boat…"
Speaking of this, Hu Li seemed to suddenly remember something else. She pointed to a certain direction deep in the dark valley. "It's over there. The boat, fell down, became part of the mountain. Father always wanted to go back and get something, but later… everyone was killed by something, so no one knows how to… get into the boat."
What Hu Li was talking about began to sound strange and terrifying. Yu Sheng suddenly felt a little cold on his back.
He did his best to understand what she was saying—putting aside the specific concept of the "immortal" she mentioned, and not considering what the "sky" was, just from the parts Hu Li had said in a jumbled manner, he pieced together some messy truths:
Hu Li and her family, as well as the person called the "immortal," had landed in this valley in a large boat—very likely a large vehicle with flight capabilities—many years ago. But at that time, this place should not have been a "dead place." It was later that the "sky suddenly turned dark," and some unknown environmental catastrophe occurred, causing this place to be sealed off, and the people who came with the boat were trapped here ever since. And after that, the trapped people were severely attacked by some powerful enemy and were almost completely wiped out.
The process was extremely tragic, and the result was that the only survivor was "Hu Li" herself.
But Yu Sheng knew that these were just stories he had pieced together through his powerful imagination. Hu Li's words were jumbled, and many of her memories had obvious gaps and chaotic cognitions based on her own perspective. What the real truth was, probably even she herself couldn't understand and recall.
This girl's mind was already very wrong.
"How long have you been trapped here?" he couldn't help but ask.
"I don't know, anyway… a very long time," Hu Li slowly shook her head, carefully holding the half-eaten piece of chocolate in her hand. "This place is always… not changing much. I don't know how to count the days. When I'm hungry, I'll faint, and then when I wake up, it seems like a long time has passed…"
Yu Sheng couldn't help but frown slowly. He looked at the tattered dress on Hu Li's body, and then thought of the messy experiences she had described. He realized that the time she had been trapped here was probably far beyond his imagination, at least in terms of "years."
"How did you survive all these years?" he frowned, asking subconsciously. "What do you eat? Just rummaging through garbage in the ruined temple? But there doesn't seem to be anything edible here…"
"There's no, food," Hu Li shook her head again. "In the forest… there are occasional fruits, but they're poisonous. You'll faint if you eat them. Except for water, most things here are poisonous. So most of the time, I'm just hungry."
Speaking of this, Hu Li slowly smiled again, pointing at herself, seemingly a little proud. "Monsters, are very powerful. They won't starve to death. It's just, not a good feeling, the feeling of being hungry."
She seemed to recall a very bad memory, and the smile on her face crumpled. Then she got up and quickly ran not far away, picking up the bag of kitchen waste from between the broken bricks and tiles—like holding a treasure, she held the bag of leftover rice and rotten vegetables in her arms.
"It's still edible," she said to Yu Sheng very seriously.
Yu Sheng opened his mouth, but didn't know what to say—he wished he could pull out a mountain of food right now, or even open a door back to the real world, but he couldn't even protect himself now.
"Benefactor…" Hu Li suddenly spoke again.
Yu Sheng was stunned for a moment, not reacting in time. "What did you call me?"
"Benefactor," Hu Li said again, her expression very serious. "Mother said that anyone who has helped you a lot is your benefactor. You gave me food."
Yu Sheng waved his hand. "…This form of address is a bit strange. You can just call me Yu Sheng. I'm used to it."
"Oh, okay, Bene…," Hu Li muttered, slurring the form of address. Then she pointed at Yu Sheng's finger, her face also lowering. "I'm sorry."
"Huh?" Yu Sheng was stunned for a moment, then he noticed the wound on his finger again—this was from when he gave Hu Li the bread, and she had bitten him in a hurry. But it had completely healed at some point, and now only some bloodstains remained on the skin. He waved his hand indifferently. "It's fine, don't worry about it. It's just a flesh wound."
However, Hu Li looked very worried. "Benefactor, are you really okay? Being bitten by a monster… the wound is to the origin, it can't be healed."
"But it's already healed," hearing her words, Yu Sheng was a little disbelieving. He casually rubbed off the bloodstains on his finger. "See."
"It's really healed…" Hu Li looked at Yu Sheng's finger with some surprise. "Benefactor… is also an immortal?"
"I'm not, I don't even know what you mean by immortal—by my understanding, it's someone who has cultivated into an immortal?" Yu Sheng said casually. "But why would someone who has cultivated into an immortal be with… uh, 'monsters'? According to what you just said, you seem to be a boatload of monsters, and you were all following an immortal, right? But from the impressions I've gotten from various stories… the relationship between immortals and monsters isn't like that, right?"
Yu Sheng finally asked the question that had been puzzling him since just now—
Hu Li had mentioned many terms that he had only heard in stories before, and she herself had a bunch of big tails that looked like they had been cultivated for thousands of years. But when all this information was put together, it turned out that an "immortal" was leading a group of monsters around, and even after their "flying ship" crashed, the immortal and the monsters had been united in their wilderness survival for a while (although their survival was ultimately unsuccessful). This didn't match his stereotype of immortals and monsters.
Aren't these two groups usually the kind that would chop each other into dumpling fillings upon meeting in novels?
But Hu Li obviously didn't understand Yu Sheng's reaction. Faced with his question, she just tilted her head in confusion, tried to recall for a moment, and then said uncertainly, "Because, it's a tour guide immortal."
Yu Sheng: "…?"
He felt like he had heard something very strange.
But he asked several more times, and finally confirmed that Hu Li had not misremembered or misspoken.
It was a "tour guide immortal," or rather, that immortal was a "tour guide."
An unknown number of years ago, the monsters and immortals who had crashed in this forbidden land on an "immortal ship" were a damn tour group.
And Yu Sheng had just imagined an 850,000-word immortal cultivation story! All for nothing!
Don't ask why there would be a monster tour group led by an immortal. Just ask if it was a 99 yuan four-day pure-play no-shopping tour—reasonable or not, this was very reasonable. Cheap tours are prone to problems.
Yu Sheng sat in the night wind, letting the cold wind blow through the ruins of the temple and on his face.
He felt that this world was very strange.
More and more so.
And just then, he heard the fox girl next to him calling him in a low voice.
"Benefactor…"
"You can just call me Yu Sheng," Yu Sheng sighed helplessly. "What is it?"
Hu Li clutched her stomach, looking uncomfortable. "Benefactor, my stomach hurts a little."
Yu Sheng was a little dazed and "huh?"-ed, then looked at the piece of chocolate that this fox immortal had already eaten half of.
So a damn fox immortal can't handle chocolate either?!
"…Damn it! Stop eating!" Yu Sheng broke out in a cold sweat and reached out to snatch the chocolate from Hu Li's hand. "This thing is… for you…"
But as soon as his hand reached over, Hu Li let out a low growl from her throat, like a Tibetan mastiff. Then she stretched out her neck and bit down on Yu Sheng's hand. "Aow!!!"
The next second, Yu Sheng's "aow" was even louder than Hu Li's.