What Irene wanted him to do was quite simple.
Basically, just find a place out of the way to lie down and not cause trouble.
Yu Sheng came to the side of the still-sleeping silver-white fox demon, circled her huge body and a bunch of tails, and found a place that looked relatively comfortable—a depression where two big tails overlapped.
He bent down, pulled the fur on Hu Li's tail to adjust its position, and then patted the fur on another tail to make it more fluffy. Irene looked on in a daze. "Are you making a bed?"
"Isn't this for comfort?" Yu Sheng said naturally as he leaned against the silver-white fluffy tail. "Who knows how long you'll need, and I'm a person with high requirements for sleep quality…"
Irene immediately "tsk"-ed. After Yu Sheng lay down, she floated over, and then the whole frame fell straight onto his chest. "Catch."
Yu Sheng hurriedly caught the frame that fell from mid-air, and for a moment even thought that this person was getting revenge for his silent laughter in his heart and wanted to smash him to death. "Damn! Can't you say something before you fall!"
He managed to catch Irene without being killed by her frame. Then he adjusted his posture, half-lying against one of Hu Li's big tails, holding Irene's frame with both hands. He let out a light breath and waited for the moment to sink into the dream.
Sinking into another dream from within his own dream, this was truly an unprecedented experience.
Irene's low humming came from the oil painting. It was some kind of ancient ballad, as if accompanied by a distant and nostalgic atmosphere. He couldn't understand the lyrics, but he could feel a gradually calming power seeping into his heart. Yu Sheng felt his eyelids getting heavy, and in his half-awake, half-asleep state, he looked down at the oil painting he was holding in front of him.
It was as if he were holding someone's memorial portrait.jpg.
Yu Sheng: "…"
How could this doll always create such a memorial-like situation!
The next second, his thoughts were suddenly interrupted in this somewhat unrestrained thought, and then he suddenly sank in a void, falling straight into the deepest part of this dream.
He felt that he had suddenly lost control of his body, or rather… he couldn't feel the existence of his body. He seemed to have become a nihilistic perspective, rapidly passing through a series of memories, thoughts, and sensory information that did not belong to him. The surroundings were shadowy, as if many overlapping fragments of images had intertwined to form a continuous curtain, and the curtain had converged into a tunnel with no end in sight.
The sound was buzzing and rumbling, and information poured into his mind. He couldn't even tell if it was a sound he had really heard, or a memory that had directly appeared in his mind—
Someone was exclaiming in surprise, something was exploding, a whistling sound came from the power structure of the immortal shuttle, they were falling, the immortal shuttle had gone off course, and had fallen into a world that was not on the path, a world that seemed to have suddenly appeared.
A huge impact. The immortal shuttle crashed into a dark mountain. The artifact spirit ran out of the balance instrument and fought with the immortal who was driving the immortal shuttle, arguing about things like "deducting spirit stones," "reckless driving," and "reporting to the immortal sect." Then, with an explosion, the artifact spirit died, and many people died.
The survivors also died one after another.
All the deaths and partings turned into a series of fragments that flowed rapidly before Yu Sheng's eyes. He saw those yellowed and blurry figures die of hunger, of poison in the mountains and forests, of fighting out of despair, of… the ubiquitous malice that filled this valley.
The valley itself wanted to kill them, by driving the power of hunger.
The "tunnel" that seemed to have no end suddenly disappeared. Yu Sheng found himself in a faded scene—after passing through many chaotic memory fragments, he had finally truly arrived in Hu Li's current dream.
Just as Irene had said, the color tone in the dream tended to be consistent. Everything here had an old, lifeless, and dark texture. The dark sky, the dark woods, the turbid and gray soil and stones. Just one look was enough to feel extremely depressing.
"Irene?" Yu Sheng tried to call out in his mind, because he didn't see her.
"I'm here."
"Where are you?" Yu Sheng looked around. "Why can't I see you?"
"With you," Irene's voice seemed to come directly from his mind. This feeling was very… strange. "You can't see me, and you can't see your own body either. We are now two 'external consciousnesses' that have snuck in. It's already good to have a perspective."
"Oh, so that's how it is," Yu Sheng understood. Then he began to look for Hu Li's figure in the small woods.
He didn't look for long. In fact, almost at the moment he had the thought of looking for her, he heard a sound from not far away.
It was the sound of digging soil.
Yu Sheng immediately followed the sound. His perspective floated through the shadowy woods. Not long after, he saw the white figure.
The silver-haired girl in the tattered dress was kneeling at the edge of a clearing in the woods. Her originally fluffy and beautiful fox tails were dirty and disheveled from being covered in mud. She lowered her head and dug hard in the soil, muttering as she dug. And around the girl, there were deep pits of various sizes that she had dug with her hands.
Yu Sheng "floated" over and came to Hu Li's side.
Hu Li couldn't see him and was still digging hard, her hands digging into the soil again and again.
Irene's voice suddenly entered Yu Sheng's mind, "Talk to her, talk to her."
"She can't even see us."
"It's fine, just talk to her. This is a dream. She will respond—for a dreamer, there are no unreasonable things in a dream."
Yu Sheng thought for a moment and looked at the fox demon girl. "What are you digging for?"
"Mom and Dad…" Hu Li surprisingly didn't question the sudden voice she heard, but answered naturally, "I remember I buried them here… I clearly buried them here…"
For some reason, Yu Sheng's heart sank. He subconsciously asked again, "You… why do you want to dig them out?"
"I… I miss them," Hu Li gradually stopped, her eyes a little dazed and empty, but she still answered subconsciously, "I'm so hungry. I want to tell them, I'm so hungry… but I held on. They said not to listen to that monster. I've been holding on, but… I'm so hungry…"
Hu Li lowered her head, looked at her mud-covered hands, and continued to dig. As she dug, she muttered as if to herself, "They should be here. They must be here, safe and sound under here… I listen to them, I always listen to them. I didn't listen to that monster…"
"Her mental state is not right," Irene's voice entered Yu Sheng's mind. "It's very wrong…"
"I know. I felt that her mental state was not right when I first met her," Yu Sheng also replied in his heart.
"I'm not talking about that. I mean… there seems to be something else mixed in her mind. Something is trying to intervene and interfere with her thoughts," Irene explained, trying to explain a complex situation to Yu Sheng, who was a layman. "There's someone else's voice in her voice—her own will has been holding on, but the external thoughts are about to make her unable to hold on anymore."
Irene suddenly stopped here.
Hu Li stopped digging, stood up with a dazed expression, walked a few steps to the side, and then stood blankly in the clearing.
Yu Sheng immediately followed. The next second, he seemed to hear a faint, blurry voice.
The voice seemed to come directly from the bottom of his heart, and even seemed to be him saying it softly—
"Dig, dig them out…
"You just want to see them, you just want to confirm that you've been listening to them. You haven't seen them for a long time, right…
"'I' miss them very much…"
Hu Li turned her head in a daze, looking at the deep pits she had dug.
"I miss them very much…" she said softly.
Yu Sheng suddenly realized that the voice he had just heard from the bottom of his heart was the "external intervention" that Irene had mentioned!
He was connected to Hu Li's dream and spirit, so what he had just heard was not his own "bottom of his heart," but the voice from the bottom of Hu Li's heart!
Hu Li slowly turned towards another direction in the clearing, seeming to want to continue digging.
Every handful of soil was gradually digging through her own mental defense line.
Yu Sheng finally understood what that voice was tempting her to do. A chill suddenly welled up from the bottom of his heart, making him subconsciously shout, "Hu Li!"
The fox demon girl stopped in a daze and looked back at the empty edge of the woods.
After a long while, a little clarity returned to her eyes, and she recalled where she had heard that familiar voice.
"…Benefactor?"
However, the woods were empty, and Yu Sheng's voice was no longer heard. The call just now seemed to be just an illusion.
Hu Li stood blankly in the clearing. After a while, she noticed the large pits she had dug around her.
Fear finally gradually appeared on the fox demon girl's face.
She had woken up, suddenly awakened just before her defense line collapsed.