Chapter 621 The Nephew's Way of Scouting
The night was deep, the streetlights were dim, and the streets of the old town seemed much quieter than the city center. A night wind blew through the buildings, howling and moaning, as if an invisible giant beast was crouching in the night sky, breathing heavily.
The snow that had not yet melted on the roadside gleamed coldly under the lamplight. Yu Sheng led his family members along the street near where his nephew had lost his roasted sweet potato earlier that day. Zheng Zhi was right next to Yu Sheng, wrapped up in a down jacket like a dumpling, sniffling in the wind.
Yu Sheng was wearing a large coat, and Eileen (blonde) nestled in his arms, only her small head peeking out. Hearing the sniffling sound beside her, the little doll muttered, "Your constitution is a bit weak, nephew. Young people aren't resistant to the cold at all..."
"How can I compare to you guys?" Zheng Zhi almost laughed in anger, rolling his eyes at the monsters next to him—a three-thousand-year-old puppet, a nine-tailed fox demon, an artificial saintess with a body of steel, and Yu Sheng, who was only roughly humanoid. These guys could probably swim back in the subspace if thrown into it. "I'm just an ordinary person, how can I compare my physical abilities to yours?"
Before Zheng Zhi could finish speaking, a gust of cold wind blew across the street, causing him to sneeze several times.
"Achoo..." The eldest nephew rubbed his nose, looked up at Yu Sheng, "Brother Yu, you still haven't told us where we're going to find someone? Do you have a plan? Did you get some inside information from the bureau chief...?"
Yu Sheng and Eileen said in unison, "There's no plan."
Zheng Zhi was stunned for a moment: "...Huh?"
"Oh, I forgot to tell you before we left," Yu Sheng slapped his forehead and explained seriously to the super trainee agent in front of him, "Our idea is this: we'll take you to see as many places as possible where the artificial saintess has appeared. If you see anything suspicious, dangerous, or dark, just head over there. The rest of us will be there to protect you. Our main role is to pull you back before anything happens to you..."
Zheng Zhi was stunned and suddenly took half a step back: "This plan is not scientific!"
“But it’s mysterious,” Yu Sheng patted his nephew on the shoulder. “You have enough mystery about you. Leave the rest to us professionals. To put it positively, we don’t have any leads anyway. The Secret Service has been searching all day and hasn’t found a single clue. We can just treat it as a walk in the evening and not lose anything.”
Zheng Zhi nodded blankly, unsure whether he was intimidated by Yu Sheng or patted on the back, and then suddenly shivered in the night.
The raccoon next to her immediately perked up its ears (mainly because there was no one around at night, and she hadn't even tucked her tail in): "What did you sense?"
Zheng Zhi wrapped his down jacket tighter around himself: "...I'm cold."
Yu Sheng: "..."
In any case, Zheng Zhi eventually accepted the situation smoothly—mainly because he was used to it. He had done similar work in Qianfeng Lingshan before, and he had a wealth of experience as a victim of "human map exploration" and a very high level of psychological resilience.
Yu Sheng and his group found nothing in the vicinity of the street where the incident occurred during the day.
They only encountered a Secret Service action team patrolling nearby—the team was nearly scared to death when they saw Yu Sheng appear, probably thinking something had happened. Later, they learned that the people from the hostel just couldn't stay at home and decided to go out and have some fun. The team looked so relaxed, as if the world had returned to peace...
Then Yu Sheng decided to avoid the Secret Service patrols.
After checking several locations in the old town, Zheng Zhi hadn't triggered any special map events. With the night already drawing to a close, Yu Sheng pulled out his phone to check the time and muttered, "This is practically like being a headless fly..."
There was a pupa in its arms, and the little doll poked its head out again, its expression serious: "Do we need to add some kind of trigger condition?"
"What trigger conditions?" Yu Sheng asked casually while looking around. This was near a commercial street on the edge of the old city. The surrounding shops and malls were already pitch black, with only the streetlights casting a dim and warm yellow light in the silence. A flashing indicator light was on next to the entrance of an underground parking lot. There was nothing else around.
Eileen thought about it seriously for a moment, then turned to look at Zheng Zhi with a serious expression: "Nephew, why don't you send a text message to your family? Just say you love them, and then send a message to Li Lin saying you're happy to be his colleague. If you have a crush on a girl, you can confess your feelings at this time—if that doesn't work, then you'll have to start writing in your diary. After you're done, tear it out and hide it in a trash can, a green belt, a security booth, or somewhere like that. It would be best to write a mysterious number or letter on each page..."
Zheng Zhi listened, stunned. The more he listened, the more ominous it seemed. He looked up at Yu Sheng and said, "Brother Yu, why do I feel like I've heard this terrible idea before?"
Yu Sheng nodded in agreement: "It also sounds familiar... but her suggestion last time wasn't this detailed."
As he spoke, he suddenly opened a small door from the side, took out a pen and some paper from inside, and handed them to Zheng Zhi: "Just give it a try first."
Zheng Zhi was completely stunned. He never expected that this terrible idea was actually serious. He looked up at Yu Sheng blankly and asked, "Are you really going to write it, Brother Yu?"
"We'll try anything, it's all just a last resort. Who can say for sure about things that are superstitious? Besides, it's already past midnight, and if we don't make any progress soon, we'll have to go home," Yu Sheng waved his hand. "Don't worry, I've got your back."
Zheng Zhi took the papers with a worried look on his face, pondering whether he should write a diary or a letter to someone. After hesitating for a long time, he finally started writing, muttering to himself, "Okay, I do have a younger sister in junior high school. I'll write her a letter—but I can't actually send it, or I'll scare the girl... By the way, what kind of opening is most likely to cause trouble?"
Yu Sheng stroked his chin: "Oh, so you started by writing 'Our family has declined'—that's a big deal."
Zheng Zhi looked up blankly: "...There are only four of us in total..."
"Then you should write it like that too."
"oh."
Zheng Zhi sighed, wrote a heading on the paper, and then said, "Little sister, I have something to tell you. Our family has declined..."
Yu Sheng watched this scene from the sidelines, not really taking the method seriously. He was exhausted after a night of fruitless efforts, and his only motivation was to have some fun. The Special Operations Bureau had no idea how to solve the problem of spiritual vision, which was something that was uncontrollable and unpredictable. How could it be solved with such a bad idea as Eileen's?
A thin wisp of mist appeared at the edge of the field of vision, with a crooked, distorted light coming from the streetlights.
Snowflakes were falling from the sky—large flakes of snow, like tattered letters, falling from the darkness, swirling and merging with the sudden appearance of the thin mist, gradually covering the ground.
Zheng Zhi was writing. The cold made his fingers tremble slightly, but the trembling gradually turned into a kind of rapid vibration. He wrote faster and faster, until the pen tip even left afterimages on the paper. A large number of intersecting lines completely lost the outline of the characters and were "smeared" on the paper layer by layer, more like complex symbols that were randomly scribbled.
"Holy crap!"
Eileen gasped softly.
Yu Sheng reacted even faster—he stepped forward abruptly, grabbed Zheng Zhi's hand that was writing rapidly, and at the same time snatched the paper from the other's other hand.
Hu Li raised her hand and waved, sending a beam of dark blue spiritual light directly into Zheng Zhi's face, which then transformed into protective spiritual energy that quickly seeped into his body.
Zheng Zhi jolted awake, seemingly still a little dazed and unaware of what had happened, but he quickly regained his senses and pointed to the entrance of the underground parking lot not far away: "Brother Yu, there's something over there!"
“I know,” Yu Sheng said, opening a door to the valley out of thin air before the other person could finish speaking. “You’ve completed your mission. Leave the rest to us—you can stay at Grandpa Yun’s place tonight.”
Without lingering, Zheng Zhi walked straight into the door after hearing this: "Okay—Brother Yu, please be careful!"
The next second, Zheng Zhi's figure had already passed through the gate, and the illusory gate disappeared into the air.
The surrounding fog was rapidly thickening, and more and more snowflakes were falling from the sky.
Ai Lin was still a little stunned, staring in the direction Zheng Zhi had left, muttering to herself, "Wait, what's the principle behind this? How does it actually work...?"
“I now have ample reason to suspect that my nephew is some kind of rule-based anomaly. The Secret Service’s claim that he only has higher spiritual vision than ordinary people is definitely a cover-up,” Yu Sheng said quickly. “But now is not the time to delve into those details—don’t you feel it? The surrounding environment…the atmosphere is a bit familiar.”
“It’s like when that ‘dark alley’ suddenly widened,” Hu Li, who was most sensitive to changes in atmosphere, immediately said, “that another space has been superimposed on it.”
The nine fox tails behind her slowly unfurled, and the eerie blue foxfire pierced through the gathering mist. Eileen also crawled out of Yu Sheng's arms, climbing onto his shoulder as she quickly said, "Yu Sheng, open the door and get my pot..."
Luna remained silent, only raising her hand to brush against the slit of her nun's skirt, revealing blades that emerged from hidden compartments on either side of her thighs, ready for battle.
Yu Sheng's gaze fell on the entrance to the underground parking lot not far away.
The environment was changing. The entrance was widening at a visible speed, gradually turning into a strange cave made of reinforced concrete, rocks, and soil. The indicator lights and road signs at the entrance became crooked, and the lights on them had all turned a blood-red color. A viscous substance flowed from a few of the lights, falling onto the snow and making a corrosive hissing sound.
The group walked toward the increasingly twisted and bizarre entrance.
(End of this chapter)
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