Entering the kitchen and closing the door behind him, Yu Sheng switched on the ventilation fan. Amidst the noisy tumult of the machine's operations, he felt his heart gradually calming down.
It was as if the thin wooden door of the kitchen and the clattering of the exhaust fan helped him temporarily isolate the chaotic and strange world outside—he had finally returned to a place that was entirely his own, where he could even pretend for a moment that he was not in the vast and eerie Boundary City, but back in his familiar, real "home."
Every corner of this big house was different from his original "home," but only this small kitchen closely resembled what he remembered; thus, after settling into this world a little, he tried his best to arrange it in the way he was accustomed to.
Cooking here every day, he would pretend that he was still in his real home, pretend that he had never pushed open the door that morning, never stepped into the strange city filled with eerie shadows—sometimes, busy bustling around, he would even feel that just by looking up, he would see through the window the familiar streetscapes of the past, see the old street outside the kitchen bathed in orange-red clouds, with the reddening sunlight trickling down the outer walls of the residential buildings in his memory...
But the view outside the window always shattered these fleeting imaginations. Now, looking out, all he could see was a bare patch of land and some low, old bungalows not far off. There were no apartment buildings here, but an abundance of chaotic telephone poles, and that warm, comfortable sky he remembered, he had not seen it for a long time.
The sky over this city was always either bright white and blinding or somber and oppressive to the heart.
Yu Sheng sighed, casually pulled down the blinds over the glass, and ceased to pay attention to the night sky outside, which seemed forever to be dim and indistinct.
Selecting vegetables, washing them, heating the pan and adding oil, he skillfully tossed in the ingredients after the fragrance of scallions burst forth. Listening to the sizzling sounds from the pot, Yu Sheng also heard the commotion of a television program from outside—the peculiar city, it turned out, had a range of channels for accessing information, including television and cell phones. In the beginning, he had come to an almost complete understanding of Boundary City by watching TV shows and scrolling through news on his phone. Even now, this remained one of the important ways he learned about this "world."
"Yu Sheng! The TV volume is too low! Turn it up a bit for me! Please!" Suddenly, the rambunctious voice of a girl came from outside, startling Yu Sheng so much that he almost spilled the food out of the wok.
He had almost forgotten about Erin being outside.
Nobody used to talk outside when he was cooking in the kitchen before!
"Wait a minute!" Yu Sheng replied quite rudely, yet he couldn't help muttering under his breath, "... She's quite familiar..."
But soon he tugged at the corner of his mouth, revealing a somewhat helpless smile.
Fine, that's okay, it does add a bit of "liveliness" to the house, at least there's some noise.
After a while, Yu Sheng came out with steaming plates of food, laid out the dishes on the dining table, and casually turned up the TV volume by two notches before sitting down across from Erin's painting frame—with his back to the TV. He himself had no habit of watching TV while eating, but would keep it on as background noise, a practice which would not vie for position with Erin, who could only watch TV from a fixed angle.
Erin in the oil painting hugged a teddy bear, craning her neck to glance at the table full of food, her gaze flitting between the program and the dining table, muttering, "Quite a feast..."
"Just some home-cooked dishes," Yu Sheng said off-handedly, "I quite enjoy cooking."
"Oh." Erin uttered, then continued to dutifully watch television, but as Yu Sheng began to eat, she leaned in closer to peer at the dining table, holding back for a while before finally unable to resist speaking, "So you're eating and I'm just watching?"
Yu Sheng lifted his eyelids and shook his chopsticks in front of Erin's painting frame: "Want a bite?"
Erin glared, but then drooped her head, seemingly sulking to herself.
"... Alright, let's go through the motions." Seeing her like this, Yu Sheng also felt helpless. He sighed, fetched an empty bowl from the kitchen, and served some food from his own bowl into it, extending it in front of Erin's painting frame, "I've got a bowl and chopsticks for you—just consider it smelling the aroma, since I'll be the one eating in the end."
Erin frowned at the bowl of food in front of the painting frame, thought it over, deemed it acceptable, then hopped down from the chair and approached the edge of the painting frame. Nearly half her face occupied the frame as she gazed earnestly at Yu Sheng, "Alright, that works—thank you, you're quite considerate..."
Yu Sheng bowed his head to shovel a mouthful of rice, mumbling a response. Then he looked up and saw Erin's portrait cropped to just the head in the painting frame, and his gaze fell on the bowl of food in front of the painting frame. Suddenly, he felt there was something not quite right...
Erin didn't notice the discrepancy, but she found Yu Sheng's sudden daze somewhat strange: "What are you zoning out for?"
Yu Sheng quickly lowered his head to take another few bites of rice and looked up again at Erin—
The dark painting frame, the dark background, the doll-like girl's portrait, and a bowl of food in front of the painting.
It was as if the sound of her laughing and the sight of her smiling still lingered in a jpeg.
Suddenly, his facial muscles twitched, but after holding back for a long time, he still didn't dare to voice the thoughts that crossed his mind—it wasn't for any particular reason, mainly because Erin could swear something fierce.
At this point, the only thing left to do was to eat, so he could only pretend nothing happened, burying his head in his food under the puzzled gaze of Erin, trying his best not to look at that opposite presence at the table whose voice and appearance were all too clear...
It felt like a gathering in a memorial hall during a meal.
After enduring through the meal, Yu Sheng wiped his mouth and quickly cleared Erin's painting frame of all the cups, plates, and bowls, tossing them into the kitchen sink, intending to soak them overnight to wash in the morning—the main reason being his back still hurt a lot and bending over in front of the sink to do dishes was quite a burden at the moment.
But while he could leave the dishes unwashed, he couldn't neglect the trash—it was the kind of season when you can't leave a trash bag in the kitchen overnight—he gritted his teeth through the back pain, tidied up the trash, and carried the bag out the door.
Erin, who was watching TV, looked up curiously and asked, "Hey, where are you going this late?"
"Do I have to report to you every time I do something in my own home?" Yu Sheng retorted without much patience to this overly familiar person from a painting, but still lifted the trash bag to show her, "I'm going out to take out the garbage."
"Oh, then come back early," Erin's gaze was already back on the television, "such a big house, I'm scared to be alone, what if a thief gets in..."
Yu Sheng rolled his eyes, thinking that in such a gloomy and giant house, if anyone did come in, the first thing they would see would be a ghostly figure shifting in and out of a painting—likely to scare anyone to death before it could scare the one in the painting. With Erin's current state, a thief would probably be the one to call the police first...
But he didn't have the nerve to say that right in front of Erin.
Shaking his head and murmuring a few complaints, Yu Sheng came to the entrance, changed into his outdoor shoes, and reached for the doorknob.
Gently squeezing, he turned it, and pushed the door open.
For some reason, he suddenly remembered that morning two months ago, an utterly ordinary one which seemed like any other in his commoner life.
Back then, just like now, he opened the front door of his home, stepped outside, and found himself in a massive, suffocatingly strange city—an experience he hadn't been able to reclaim to this day—
A fleeting bizarre association passed through his mind, and Yu Sheng self-deprecatingly chuckled and shook his head, pushing the door open and walking out.
The crisp snap of dry twigs breaking underfoot shattered the silence of the valley. The cool night breeze carried with it an unsettling scent of decay and fishiness, and the chill in the air made Yu Sheng, who only wore a thin layer, shiver involuntarily. Then it took him several seconds to get his momentarily stalled brain up and running again.
He saw himself standing amid a desolate field of rubble, and in the far-off night, there seemed to be a dim, spooky, and bizarre primeval forest, with towering mountains on each side rising into the night sky like silent, menacing giants, looking down on the valley floor, bringing on an unbearable oppressive heaviness.
Yu Sheng was frozen in the cold night, then slowly turned back to look at where he came from.
What met his eyes was a pile of crumbling bricks and shattered tiles, resembling a ruined temple that had been abandoned and decayed a century ago, with a ragged door—or what could only be said to be a crooked door frame with half a door panel—standing alone amidst the ruins. When the night wind blew, the gaps between the broken door panel and the rubble moaned eerily.
Yu Sheng's eyes widened: "Where am I now..."
He finally began to comprehend.
With the action of "opening the door," the incident that occurred two months ago repeated itself.
He was once again thrown into an unfamiliar place.
And this time it was worse than two months ago—that huge and strange "Boundary City", although very different from the "Boundary City" he had grown up in from childhood, was at least a modern urban city where people could survive. But this time, things didn't look good.
He was thrown into a wilderness.
Ahead was the Primeval Forest, with perilous mountains on both sides, and behind him, only a ruined temple that had collapsed who knew how many years ago—Yu Sheng glanced at it and felt that the terrain and landscape owed it to not spawn fifty mountain bandits or a few Wolf Demons and Fox Deities on the spot...
And the only thing he had in his hands was a bag of kitchen trash he had just carried out from home...
Yu Sheng thought about it and swore to himself with particularly foul language.
And in the next second, just as the fragrant eloquence in Yu Sheng's heart was about to erupt, an abrupt voice suddenly came through his mind—
"Yu Sheng! There's no signal on the TV! When are you coming back?"