Chapter 55: The "Professional" Is Right Before Our Eyes

The massive eye departed, leaving in absolute silence without revealing a single secret.

The people inside the cavern stared at each other, seemingly at a loss for what to do next. The oppressive weight emanating from that bizarre eyeball had been so staggering that, even now that it had vanished, a lingering trace of terror and disbelief still gripped every heart.

"Did it really just leave?" Irene murmured, looking profoundly uneasy. "Could it just be hiding behind the clouds?"

Yu Sheng, however, shook his head. "It really is 'gone,' or at least, it is no longer in this anomalous domain."

He was certain of this because he could clearly sense that the "gaze" which had constantly enveloped the valley had truly dissipated.

"Why, though?" Irene continued to mutter. "What on earth was that thing even doing here? Hiding for so long, suddenly waking up to scare people, messing with the physical entities here, and now just vanishing... What was the point of it all?"

Yu Sheng thought for a moment. "Maybe it was just resting here, and now that it's had enough rest, it left."

Irene listened, blinking in utter bewilderment, and looked at Yu Sheng suspiciously. "Is, is that so?"

This time it was Yu Sheng's turn to be utterly shocked—she actually believed that?!

"Nobody knows the motives of the Dusk Angels," Xu Jiali's voice suddenly cut in from the side, interrupting the pointless discussion between Yu Sheng and Irene. "In fact, we can't even be sure if they possess the concept of 'motives' at all. The appearance of these things is always random; sometimes it takes a tremendous price to banish them, and other times... they simply leave on their own accord shortly after. Analyzing the actions of a Dusk Angel is meaningless. We should just feel fortunate that that eye wasn't the kind of individual with a strong inclination for active destruction."

Yu Sheng let out an "oh," rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Li Lin, who was observing the situation outside near the cave entrance.

That inexplicable sense of familiarity welled up in his heart once more. Yu Sheng could not help but slowly furrow his brow as memories stirred within. Suddenly, a scene flashed across his mind—

"Wait a minute! Have we met before?" Yu Sheng snapped back to reality, staring wide-eyed at Li Lin. "Just recently, we definitely met! Where was it... a small supermarket, right, a small supermarket!"

He took two steps forward, carefully scanning up and down Li Lin's utterly nondescript face—a face that blended right into a crowd and would be impossible to recall without straining one's memory. This time, it finally aligned perfectly with the memory in his mind. "You bought a box of instant noodles back then, didn't you?"

The corners of Li Lin's mouth twitched. The moment Yu Sheng spoke earlier, he had known he was recognized, yet he felt not a shred of panic or surprise—because way back when they first crossed paths in the ruins of the dilapidated temple, he had already recognized Yu Sheng's face.

Although they had merely brushed past each other once in that small supermarket, as a specially trained agent of the Borderland Special Operations Bureau, his memory and observation skills far surpassed those of an ordinary person.

Recognizing each other was merely a matter of time.

Seeing the other's reaction, Yu Sheng instantly connected many dots. He gradually began to understand, his gaze shifting past Li Lin to Xu Jiali standing nearby, and further off to Little Red Riding Hood resting in the distance.

"Where on earth are you people from?" Yu Sheng asked, his brows slightly knitted.

"Let me reintroduce myself," Li Lin sighed, straightening up and pointing at himself. "Li Lin, agent of the Second Action Team under the Borderland Council's Special Operations Bureau."

Xu Jiali also walked over, adjusted her posture, and spoke in a deep voice. "Senior deep-diver of the Special Operations Group attached to the Second Action Team, Xu Jiali—and this is actually my real name."

Yu Sheng's jaw dropped. He stood stunned for a long moment before turning his head to look at "Little Red Riding Hood," who looked nothing more than a high school student. "So you're also part of that special ops..."

"I'm not," Little Red Riding Hood crossed her arms, lifted her chin, and gestured toward Xu Jiali. "I'm just child labor they hired."

Yu Sheng froze, looking at Xu Jiali in sheer astonishment. "Your organization even hires child labor?!"

"What child labor!" Xu Jiali immediately glared at Little Red Riding Hood. "Holiday temp! The least you could do is call it a work-study program?!"

Yu Sheng felt his brain turning to mush. His first reaction was whether high school students in the Borderlands were all this hardcore, with holiday work-study programs apparently involving running into anomalous domains to engage in firefights with monsters. His second reaction was that he had finally met the "professionals" Irene had mentioned, though the style of these professionals was vastly different from what he had imagined. As for his third reaction...

"So you guys came here looking for me?" Yu Sheng looked at the three "professionals" before him, feeling as though he finally understood many things. "Just to find me, you followed me all the way into this anomalous domain?"

He hadn't expected that the moment those words left his mouth, Xu Jiali and Li Lin would let out a simultaneous, long-drawn-out sigh. Even Little Red Riding Hood lowered her head with a sigh, dropping her crossed arms to cover her face instead.

Xu Jiali fished a cigarette out of her pocket, lit it with a look of profound sorrow, and inhaled a third of it in a single breath.

"If we had a choice, we wouldn't have wanted to either—our initial plan wasn't supposed to be like this..."

Yu Sheng: "?"

He felt that this robust warrior before him didn't look very happy, and after thinking it over, he didn't dare to ask any further.

Fortunately, the crisis here was finally resolved—there were still plenty of lingering questions, but they could all wait until everyone had safely returned to the waking world to be sorted out.

Irene crawled back onto Yu Sheng from Hu Li's embrace, and Yu Sheng carefully cradled the pitiful little doll as he became the first to step out of the hiding cave.

"It's completely quiet now," Irene sat on Yu Sheng's shoulder, wrapping her broken arms around his head, gazing toward the depths of the valley with a mix of awe and disbelief. "...It's a complete mess."

"Yeah, a mess, but at least the hunger entity is gone," Yu Sheng nodded, looking at the valley where an entire layer of the ground terrain had been "bitten away." "...So, is that thing going to show up again later?"

"Yes, as long as the anomalous domain exists, the entity will reappear. And anomalous domains never truly disappear; even if you bomb it ten thousand times with explosives, it will just restore itself to its original state," Irene said softly, hugging Yu Sheng's head. "Only... it will probably take a very long time for that to happen this time."

"It's time to leave this place," Yu Sheng let out a long breath. Now that the hunger entity had temporarily vanished, the air in the valley seemed to have grown considerably fresher. A crisp wind blew from afar, and bright daylight pierced through the eternal night sky of this realm. Despite the shattered devastation before him, a sense of relief washed over his heart. "Hu Li, how are you feeling now?"

The vixen girl, who had been following closely behind Yu Sheng the entire time, immediately lifted her head. "I'm, I'm good! Not cold, not hungry anymore. I ate my fill just now!"

As Hu Li spoke, she smiled happily—the first time she had ever smiled so unburdened, bright as the sunlight.

Yu Sheng smiled back and reached out toward his side. "Then let's go home."

However, just as he was about to tear open a doorway back home, Hu Li stepped forward without warning and gently tugged at his sleeve.

Yu Sheng paused in bewilderment, looking down at the vixen girl.

"Are you worried about the food we left behind in the ruins of the temple? It was probably all ruined by the hunger entity anyway. Do you still want to go back and get it?"

Hu Li nodded lightly, but immediately followed it by shaking her head.

"Benefactor, I want to go to a place. I..."

She spoke hesitantly, seeming to worry that she was asking for too much, or that what she wanted to do was overly willful. She looked utterly conflicted.

Watching the hesitant vixen girl, Yu Sheng didn't understand what she wanted to do at first, but suddenly, he recalled a scene he had once witnessed deep within Hu Li's dreamscape.

After a moment of silence and consideration, Yu Sheng nodded. "I understand. Is it in that grove of trees?"

Hu Li looked up in slight surprise, staring into Yu Sheng's eyes.

Then, she gave a small nod.

Li Lin and the other two had no idea what was going on and cast questioning glances at Yu Sheng. Yu Sheng didn't explain in detail, merely waving a hand at them. "Don't rush. I'll find a way to send everyone back in a moment, but wait first—I need to accompany Hu Li to a place. If you're worried, you can come along."

"Let's all go then," Xu Jiali was the first to nod. "This girl seems to have stayed here for a long time. There must be some loose ends she needs to tie up before leaving. I understand."

The group thus left the back mountain, bypassed the even more dilapidated ruins of the old temple—which was now reduced to little more than a few broken walls—traversed the ravine-and-fissure-ridden gravel bed of the valley floor, and finally arrived at the patch of small woods from before.

The woods had long since vanished; those dark, mutated plants had been thoroughly devoured during the previous feast. The area was now nothing more than a blackened wasteland, dotted with impact craters of various sizes and suspicious black debris.

"Is it here?" Yu Sheng glanced at Hu Li walking beside him and asked in a low voice.

"Mmm," Hu Li slowly nodded. "Mom and Dad are right here."

It wasn't until this moment that Irene finally understood why Yu Sheng had followed Hu Li here.

The little doll's eyes widened. She recalled the sights from deep within Hu Li's dreamscape, remembered the bewilderment, the memories where truth and falsehood intertwined, and those phantom echoes of cold and hunger. For some reason, a wave of unease welled up inside her, and the omnipresent craters scattered all around only served to make that unease grow rapidly.

"C-could it be that we won't find them anymore?!" she blurted out, deliberately raising her voice. "A whole layer of ground got bitten away, you know! They probably got—"

Hu Li merely shook her head, cutting Irene off.

"No, I buried them very deep," she said with absolute conviction. "Mom and Dad told me to bury them deep, and I buried them very deep."