Chapter 13: Encounter
Yu Sheng awoke to a familiar sensation—the weight of darkness all around him, pressing in from every side. It felt as if his consciousness was sinking deeper and deeper, like being submerged in a thick, inky sea.
His thoughts floated aimlessly in the dark, swirling like leaves caught in a storm. The pressure made him feel small and powerless, leaving behind nothing but a deep exhaustion.
He had expected the road out of the “Otherworld” to be treacherous. Maybe even dangerous enough to cost him his life more than once. He had predicted a lot, but not this. As he drifted in the suffocating blackness, memories began to surface—fragments of the last thing he saw before everything went dark: a pair of golden-red eyes locking onto his, the sight of those magnificent fox tails flaring like fireworks in the sky.
And then that headbutt. That supersonic headbutt.
Who was that girl, anyway? Where did she come from? And why was she in that strange place? He replayed the scene over and over in his head as if he could untangle the mystery by sheer will.
But that wasn’t the only thing nagging at him. During the fight with that monster, something had changed inside him. His strength had surged, his movements had sharpened, and… there was that overwhelming hunger.
What was happening to him?
Yu Sheng’s thoughts spun like a whirlpool. With no body to ground him, his mind conjured strange, shifting images that danced before his eyes. Among them were snippets of memory: the creature made of countless limbs, the fox-eared girl crashing into him with that final blow. Then suddenly, something different appeared—a painting, where Irene lay shattered across a chair, her puppet-like limbs connected by delicate threads. In the background, a shadow lurked, faint but unmistakable.