Upon hearing the other party pronounce her name, Yu Sheng's first reaction was that this girl was quite straightforward, directly calling herself "Fox."
After asking a few more times, he finally understood that she was saying "Hu Li," not "fox."
Her name was Hu Li, a bit odd but quite fitting for someone with a multitude of tails.
"My name is Yu Sheng," he said, sitting beside Hu Li in the ruins of a dilapidated temple, and began introducing himself, "I'm from... well, I don't know if you can understand, but I'm from 'the outside,' not from outside the valley."
"You really are from 'the outside'!" Hu Li's eyes widened in astonishment.
It seemed she immediately grasped the meaning of Yu Sheng's words, and the shock on her face hinted at another layer of meaning: she knew about the existence of "the outside!"
Quickly, and with a measure of restraint, Hu Li took a bite of chocolate and fixed her wide eyes on Yu Sheng's face: "How did you get in? Do you know... the way out? Is it... in the sky?"
As their conversation progressed, Hu Li began to express herself more fluently, as if she were rapidly regaining her ability to communicate with others.
Yu Sheng paused in surprise at her words: "The sky? Why do you ask that?"
"The immortal said before dying that we all came from the sky, but then the sky suddenly darkened, and we couldn't go back," Hu Li stammered, trying to organize her thoughts.
Although she was speaking more smoothly, she still stumbled over these longer passages.
"Then, the ground became more dangerous and started to become poisonous, and... many of those who came with me died, and cannot return..."
Yu Sheng listened, stunned.
He struggled to piece together her chaotic descriptions with his imagination, realizing that within this valley, which Ai Lin had simply classified as "an exotic location," there seemed to be a complex story.
And the girl before him, with her many tails, had a backstory that was utterly bewildering.
She was also trapped here!
However, when he attempted to ask her where exactly this "sky" was and who the "many people" she mentioned were, and how they had ended up here, her answers became equally incoherent.
"The sky... is just the sky. For years, I have been trying to go back to the sky, but I can't," Hu Li explained, gesturing.
"I try to jump up, but I hit something and it hurts. Everyone... has forgotten. There were a father, a mother, an immortal, and... others. We came down on a big ship...”
As Hu Li mentioned this, her expression suddenly shifted, and she pointed to a direction deep within the dark valley: "Over there, the ship crashed and became part of the mountain. My father always wanted to go back to get something, but later... everyone was killed by something, and no one knew how... to get back on the ship."
The things Hu Li described began to feel eerie and terrifying, sending a chill down Yu Sheng's spine.
Trying his best to understand her words—without delving into the specific notions of the "immortal" she spoke of, or what she meant by "the sky"—he pieced together a jumbled truth:
Many years ago, Hu Li and her family, along with the person referred to as an "immortal," had flown down to this valley on a large ship—most likely a vehicle capable of flight.
At the time, it seemed this was not a "dead zone," but suddenly "the sky darkened," and some mysterious environmental catastrophe occurred, sealing off the area and trapping everyone who came with the ship.
Afterward, these trapped individuals suffered greatly, being attacked by some powerful enemy, leaving only Hu Li as the last survivor.
The process was brutal, and the conclusion was that she was now left all alone.
But Yu Sheng understood that he was merely piecing together a narrative from Hu Li's contradictory words and scattered memories, filled with significant gaps and confusion based on her own perspective.
The true truth was likely something even she could not understand or recall.
The girl’s thoughts were clearly not quite right.
"How long have you been trapped here?" he couldn't help but ask.
"I don’t know, but it’s... a long time," Hu Li slowly shook her head, carefully cradling a half-piece of chocolate in her hands.
"There’s always... no change here, I don’t know how to count the days. When I get hungry, I faint, and when I wake up, it feels like a long time has passed..."
Yu Sheng couldn't help but furrow his brow as he looked at Hu Li's already tattered clothes, recalling the chaotic experiences she had shared.
He realized that the time she had spent trapped here was likely far beyond his imagination—at least measured in "years."
"These years... how have you survived?" he frowned, instinctively asking.
"What do you eat? Just rummaging through rubbish in this broken temple? But it looks like there’s nothing to eat here..."
"There isn’t anything to eat," Hu Li shook her head again.
"In the forest... there are occasional fruits, but they are poisonous. If you eat them, you will faint. Aside from water, most things here are poisonous, so most of the time, I'm just hungry."
Hu Li then slowly smiled, pointing at herself, seeming a bit proud: "I'm a monster, quite strong, hunger can't kill me, just... it feels uncomfortable being hungry."
It seemed that she recalled some terrible memories, and her smile faded.
Suddenly, she jumped up and ran a short distance away, returning with a bag of kitchen scraps she had picked up from the broken bricks and tiles—holding it like a treasure, she clutched the bag of leftover rice and rotten vegetables to her chest.
"It can still be eaten," she said to Yu Sheng very seriously.
Yu Sheng opened his mouth but didn't know what to say—he wished he could produce a mountain of food right now, or even open a door back to the present world, but he was barely keeping himself afloat.
"Benefactor..."
Hu Li spoke up suddenly.
Yu Sheng froze for a moment, unsure of how to respond: "What did you call me?"
"Benefactor," Hu Li repeated with a serious expression.
"My mother said that someone who helps you a lot is a benefactor. You gave me food."
Yu Sheng waved his hand: "...that title sounds a bit strange; just call me Yu Sheng, I'm used to it."
"Oh, okay, um..."
Hu Li mumbled, mixing up the title, then pointed at Yu Sheng’s finger and lowered her head.
"I'm sorry."
"Ah?" Yu Sheng was startled for a moment, then noticed the wound on his finger—it was from when Hu Li had bitten it in her urgency while he was giving her bread, and somehow, it had completely healed by now, leaving only a bit of bloodstain on his skin.
Seeing this, he waved his hand dismissively, "It's fine, don't worry about it. It’s just a superficial injury."
However, Hu Li looked very concerned: "Benefactor, are you really okay? Being bitten by a monster... The injury to the original source can't be healed."
"But it has healed," Yu Sheng replied, confused.
He rubbed the bloodstain off his finger casually.
"Look."
"It really healed..."
Hu Li looked at Yu Sheng's finger with some surprise.
"Benefactor... are you also an immortal?"
"I'm not; I don't even know what you mean by an immortal—what I understand is someone who has cultivated to become one?" Yu Sheng said casually.
"But why would a cultivated immortal be with... uhm, a 'monster'? From what you said, it sounds like you guys were all in the same boat, working with an immortal, right? Yet from various stories I've heard, aren't the relationships between immortals and monsters usually quite hostile?"
Finally, Yu Sheng asked this question that had been bothering him—Hu Li had mentioned many terms he had only heard of in stories, and she herself had many tails that looked as if they were thousands of years old.
In the end, he learned that an immortal led a group of monsters around.
Even after the "flying boat" met its calamity, the immortal and the monsters apparently stuck together to survive in the wilderness for some time (though ultimately, they did not succeed), which did not fit his preconceived notions of immortals and monsters.
In novels, aren't these two groups usually depicted as being at odds with each other?
However, Hu Li clearly didn’t understand Yu Sheng’s confusion.
After tilting her head in puzzlement and giving it some thought, she hesitatingly replied: "Because it was a touring immortal."
Yu Sheng: "…?"
He felt as if he had heard something utterly bizarre.
But he confirmed repeatedly that Hu Li had neither misremembered nor made a mistake.
It turned out there was a "touring immortal," or in other words, that immortal was a "tour guide."
How many years ago, monsters and immortals who fell from the "immortal boat" and landed in this forbidden place were part of a travel group!
How tragic that Yu Sheng had just filled in eighty-five thousand words of an immortal story! What a waste of imagination!
Don’t ask why there would be a traveling group of monsters led by an immortal; just know that it was a forty-dollar tour for four days with pure entertainment and no shopping involved—whether it made sense or not, it was quite reasonable; cheap tours are prone to problems.
Yu Sheng sat in the night wind, letting the cold breeze sweep across the broken temple's ruins and brush against his face.
He felt that this world was utterly peculiar.
And he was beginning to feel more and more so.
Just then, he heard the fox girl softly calling him again.
"Benefactor..."
"Just call me Yu Sheng," he sighed helplessly, "What is it?"
Hu Li clutched her stomach, looking uncomfortable.
"Benefactor, my stomach hurts a bit."
Yu Sheng blankly replied, "Ah?" and looked at the half piece of chocolate that the fox fairy had bitten into.
Even the fox fairy couldn’t handle chocolate?!
"Don’t eat that!" Yu Sheng suddenly broke into a cold sweat, reaching for the chocolate in Hu Li's hands.
"This stuff is…”
Before he could finish, a low growl came from Hu Li's throat, sounding like a Tibetan mastiff.
Then, she extended her neck and took a bite of Yu Sheng's hand: "Ow!!!"
In the next instant, Yu Sheng’s shout was louder than Hu Li’s.
(End of Chapter)