Chapter 75#
The People in the Story (Part 12)#
After attracting all the danger once again, Ye Sheng turned around cleanly, leaving only a simple and crisp command, “Don’t follow me.”
Ning Weichen stood where he was, the beautiful and brilliant smile on his lips not fading in the slightest, but the thin hostility in his peach-blossom eyes seemed to be covered with a layer of frost.
…His ex-boyfriend’s habit of giving orders and expecting them to be followed really hasn’t changed.
The surrounding environment was in chaos. Pain, wailing, cursing, and weeping were incessant.
Ning Weichen’s expression was obscure. After a long time, the tip of his tongue pressed against his teeth, and he chuckled lowly with a hint of sarcasm. He lifted his foot and walked in the completely opposite direction to Ye Sheng and his group.
The entire underground space was shrouded in a powerful pressure belonging to an S-grade Heresy. In this world full of blood red, bones and muscles were walls, and fat and skin were barriers.
No matter how romantic and dreamy the fairy tale characters appearing here were, the cruel reality of the world remained unchanged from beginning to end.
There was no severe winter here, no transparent ice and snow. Drops of blood flowed continuously from the human flesh ceiling, pattering like a light rain.
Ning Weichen looked cold as he walked through it.
Tiny raindrops solidified by his side.
Every S-grade Heresy has its own “field.” For example, the Story King. Before even getting close, one would first smell the scent of burnt books, with both the residual warmth of ashes and the ink smell of scrolls. At the end of the world piled with flesh and blood was pitch blackness. Any space-type ability user would have such a place similar to an “operation room.”
—The moment the postscript was written, a person was already sitting on the “Human Wall.”
Ning Weichen’s expression was indifferent, his eyes full of disdainful frost.
Before finding a way to completely kill the Story King and getting the answers he wanted, he had no intention of communicating with any Sector Lord and wasting time.
However, he broke his rules for Ye Sheng again and again, overturning his plans for Ye Sheng.
Outsiders knew very little about the forum. In fact, within the forum, there was also a layer of fog between sections.
In the empire of Heresies, slaughter is the eternal law.
On the “Human Wall” was a shadow shrouded in black mist. Tall, thin, pale, with a spine curved forward.
Seeing him, you would feel particularly familiar. He was like anyone among the masses around you. A withdrawn, thin, reticent classmate or colleague living in his own world.
The Story King held a pen in his hand, a pencil often used in elementary school. He held the pen, head down, as if deep in thought, or perhaps in a daze. From a distance, he looked like an autistic genius, but when you got close and smelled the strong scent of blood around him, you understood that this was not a genius, but a madman.
Hearing footsteps, the Story King suddenly looked up.
A pair of twisted, cold eyes hidden in the mist widened abruptly upon seeing the visitor.
The hand holding the pen suddenly tightened.
The Seventh Sector Lord was on guard all over, and the fear from his soul made the smell of blood on him stronger and stronger. He spoke, his voice hoarse and strange, hiding fear through gritted teeth.
“It’s… you?”
Ning Weichen smiled lightly: “Long time no see.” He knew the Story King couldn’t see him. His tone was indifferent and cool, calmly saying: “Won’t you invite me to appreciate the story you wrote?”
*
The puppet’s tears melted the eternal smile on its face, and the little bird sang endlessly to the candlelight.
The firelight dyed the walls with a layer of gentle orange. The bird’s feathers were as verdant as the blue sky, its shadow cast on the wall. The scene before them was as dreamy as an illustration in an elementary school textbook. The only abrupt thing was that the background shouldn’t be this hell on earth, but a forest or valley in spring.
“Stay back!” Luo Xingyan said in a deep voice to Su Wanluo.
The mixer rumbled downwards, about to churn this pool of cement into a pool of blood—
As the eleventh-ranked Executor on the leaderboard, codenamed Shackle, one of Luo Xingyan’s abilities was the explosion of metal.
He looked up, narrowing his eyes dangerously.
Just as the blades were spinning rapidly and about to enter the cement pool, he raised his arms and grabbed the blades with his bare hands.
“Luo—!” Su Wanluo’s exclamation was stuck in her throat, looking at the scene before her in disbelief, unable to speak.
Veins popped on Luo Xingyan’s arms. Like crushing bubble wrap, he easily snapped the blades of the mixer. He casually threw away the blades in his hand and said, “Get out first.”
The series of shocks Su Wanluo received tonight had already put her brain in a state of shutdown.
“Oh, okay…”
Her face was pale as she helped Xia Wenshi up and struggled out of the cement.
Ye Sheng had just confronted the puppet, and his limbs were almost numb. Swallowing the blood in his throat, wiping the stains off his face, looking at the ice prisms growing in the distance and the howling wind and snow outside, he panted slightly.
He knew who that voice belonged to just now.
It belonged to the “Giant.” It belonged to the “Owner of the Garden.”
Because of the Giant’s anger, the entire underground world was now in turmoil with wind and snow.
The already cold winter became even colder.
“Where to?”
Luo Xingyan asked.
Ye Sheng said: “To the right, that’s Su Jiande’s office, and also the center of this underground world.”
Luo Xingyan nodded. He turned his head and extended his hand to Su Wanluo, saying coolly: “I’ll take him.”
“…Mm, okay.” Su Wanluo didn’t decline. Her arm had been bitten by the bird, she was exhausted, and blood stained her entire sleeve.
Relying on his memory, Ye Sheng returned to the place where they started.
In the center of the Human Wall world, a lonely office stood abruptly there. Wind and snow raged in front, preventing outsiders from approaching. After Luo Xingyan threw Xia Wenshi into a safe place, he asked: “We walk over?” He raised his eyebrows, looking at the sharp ice prisms on the ground like a sea of knives.
Ye Sheng nodded: “Walk over, straight ahead.”
These sharp ice prisms were the fence built by the Giant.
Only by crossing the fence can one reach the destination.
“Oh.” For Luo Xingyan, walking on blades was like walking on flat ground, he didn’t care at all.
Ye Sheng didn’t dare to approach before because he was worried that entering would be a dead end, but the reaction of the puppet and the little bird just now confirmed to him again that in this world, as long as one follows the story itself, there will be no mistake.
In the story of “The Giant’s Garden,” the children still sneaked in.
Once Luo Xingyan was in a bad mood, he liked to stuff something into his mouth. He casually broke off a piece of ice and chewed it like a popsicle, making crunching sounds. Finally, he asked about his doubt just now: “You recognize these things.”
Ye Sheng didn’t intend to hide it from him: “I do.” After speaking, Ye Sheng looked at Luo Xingyan with a strange look in his eyes: “You don’t recognize them? Since a hundred years ago was the first year of the Catastrophe, and you are from the Bureau of Unnatural Affairs, haven’t you studied the education of that time?”
Luo Xingyan: “…”
The history of the first year of the Catastrophe was a key course in the First Military Academy. It involved various climates, geography, and coups of that year, and of course, education. It’s just that Luo Xingyan barely passed his history classes with low scores when he was in the military academy. A trace of awkwardness flashed across his wheat-colored face, and he bluffed: “How do you know about the first year of the Catastrophe?!”
Ye Sheng looked at him like he was looking at an idiot and said: “Is there water in your brain? Who else could tell me besides Ning Weichen.”
Luo Xingyan: “…”
Luo Xingyan: “…………” He admitted that his mind was a bit unclear just now. Damn, to actually ask such a stupid question and let Ye Sheng mock him for nothing.
Ye Sheng had given up on communicating normally with Luo Xingyan and said concisely: “Here, all the characters we encountered are characters from fairy tales in textbooks from a hundred years ago.”
Luo Xingyan was stunned: “Textbooks?”
Ye Sheng said: “Yes, perhaps to be more precise, primary school textbooks in Huai City. Stories that the Story King once learned.”
Luo Xingyan held back for a long time before uttering a “Damn.”
Ye Sheng said: “The three texts in the textbook are ‘What is Happiness,’ ‘The Story of the Little Puppet,’ and ‘Last Year’s Tree’.”
The three brothers made a ten-year agreement with the Daughter of Wisdom by the well to find out what happiness is.
Because of the old carpenter’s mistake, the puppet had no other expression except smiling from then on.
The bird and the tree were good friends, agreeing to sing for it again in the coming spring after winter.
“Ning Weichen told me a sentence, and I think it’s the best summary of this world.”
Ye Sheng’s eyes held ice and snow, calm and clear: “Childhood is the background color of a person’s life.”
The background color of the Story King’s life is this bizarre, magical realism underground world.
Hidden in the bloodiest body is the most innocent dream.
Luo Xingyan realized belatedly: “So you lit the match just now…”
Ye Sheng nodded: “Yes, at the end of ‘Last Year’s Tree,’ the bird found the tree that had turned into a burning match and finished singing to the firelight. And at the end of ‘The Story of the Little Puppet,’ the witch taught it to cry.”
Actually, Ning Weichen also mentioned a psychological term, “repetition compulsion.”
[A person’s behavior in adulthood is basically a repetition compulsion of childhood experiences.]
Ye Sheng said.
“When we were at the Luo Lake Mansion, I felt that everyone misunderstood the story. The Story King is the Lord of Strange Tales, but the initial definition of a story is far more than just urban strange tales.”
“Stories are the medium through which a child first knows the world.”
“…And textbooks are the first storybooks humans come into contact with.”
Ye Sheng stopped there and said bluntly: “Luo Xingyan, after getting out, your Bureau of Unnatural Affairs can try to find out the identity of the Story King when he was alive.”
“A hundred years ago, in a certain primary school in Huai City, a thin and withdrawn little boy.”
“???”
Luo Xingyan was completely dumbfounded. Why did he monitor Ye Sheng in the haunted house every day and see no clues—yet tonight, Ye Sheng had analyzed the Story King, an S-grade Sector Lord, to this extent?!
As early as the beginning of “Night Navigation,” Ye Sheng had framed the Story King as a “human.” Everything he encountered later was to polish the image in his mind. He didn’t know the Story King after he grew up, but in this colorful and chaotic bloody fairy tale, he seemed to see a dusty shadow of the Story King in his childhood.
“…”
Luo Xingyan didn’t want to appear ignorant, swallowed his surprise, and re-examined the current situation: “But according to the rules, the people in the story cannot be killed. How do we get out?”
“When the story comes to an end, with no regrets, we naturally get out.” Ye Sheng said: “This is the last fairy tale in the textbook, ‘The Giant’s Garden’.”
“The Giant hated children playing in his garden, drove them out, and put up a ‘No Entry’ sign at the garden gate. The children stopped coming, but from then on, there was no spring in the Giant’s garden.”
“At the end of the text, a group of children sneaked in. A child kissed the angry Giant on the cheek, and instantly spring was bright and beautiful. Making the Giant understand that…”
Where there are no children, there is no spring.
—It was my willful, cold heart that brought the winter.
Luo Xingyan looked horrified: “Damn, you don’t want me to kiss the Giant, do you?”
Ye Sheng: “…”
Luo Xingyan was stung by Ye Sheng’s expression of holding back but clearly calling him an “idiot,” feeling humiliated. But thinking about it, Ye Sheng’s current identity was the Crown Princess of the Ning family. If he let Ye Sheng kiss someone… forget it, thinking of Ning Weichen’s subsequent revenge, he might as well do it himself.
Ye Sheng knew what he was thinking by looking at his forbearing and tangled expression, and said indifferently: “Neither you nor I can do it.”
Luo Xingyan: “What?”
“The Giant is the subject of this world. He is not only a person in the story, but also… the owner of the space.”
If he guessed correctly, the Giant in the fourth fairy tale was Su Jiande.
Ye Sheng ignored him, turned around, and looked at Su Wanluo, who was standing weakly in the wind and snow with a pale face.
He always remembered.
This is “Father’s World.”