He and It Chapter 89: Dark Sky Sanctuary (24)

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Addis note: This book ends with chapter 104.

Chapter 89: Dark Sky Sanctuary (24)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: GaeaTiamat

 

“Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding…”

The noise of the alarm woke Yu Mengzhou up with a start. He struggled to turn over, sleepily reached to the bedside table, touched it a few times, and then pressed his cell phone’s screen to turn off the alarm clock.

Never again would he stay up late. He sat up half-asleep and slumped against the bed. The disruption of his biological clock was killing him, and he still had a big day ahead of him…

He squinted sleepily for a while until the second alarm went off five minutes later, then Yu Mengzhou lifted the blankets and straightened his body with an electric shock.

No, I have to go wash my face first, otherwise I’ll be stuck in bed and won’t be able to get up.

In the summer, the sky was bright early. He walked through the rental house, where he hadn’t time to unpack the luggage, then turned into the bathroom to wash up. He had just settled down in the city and had some furniture waiting to be put in place.

After he brushed his teeth and washed his face, Yu Mengzhou went downstairs to the breakfast place and ordered soy milk and two fried dough sticks.

“I’ll have a big portion of tofu, no cilantro, and add more vinegar and chili!”

“Got it!”

His kitchen hadn’t been organized yet. The store’s fried dough sticks were made very glutenous, steaming hot out of the pot, and were a mouthful of crispy and fragrant flavor. Together with the mellow and sweet soymilk, and hot and sour smooth tofu, it was really a morning meal to make people’s moods happy.

Just after eating, Yu Mengzhou received a call from Master Hu.

“Yu, ah!” Master Hu said with a thick accent. “Are you up yet?”

Yu Mengzhou smiled as he pulled out his key and opened the door. “I just finished breakfast, and I’m going back to get my toolbox.”

“I was going to ask you to come over and eat with us, then we’d go there together,” Master Hu gently complained to him. “Well, let’s meet at the animal husbandry station, so get on that motorcycle of yours. It’s going to be a tricky job for the next two days!”

Yu Mengzhou held his cell phone between his shoulder and ear and started to put on his jacket. “I know! However, I only heard that a big horse farm is willing to take over the horses there, as to what the specific situation is, it’s better to see.”

After a few more pleasantries, Yu Mengzhou hung up the phone, crouched down, and pulled his neat, new toolbox out from under the couch. Before he left, he had to open it again and check the hoof trimming tools inside.

Single and double-edged hoof trimmers, loop knives, hoof clippers, hoof files…Spare bandages and medicines were in there, too. Hoof oil, hoof brushes? Yeah, that’s in there as well.

As he prepared to close the case, his thumb brushed over the intact lock, and Yu Mengzhou felt a strange and subtle sense of disorientation for some reason.

It felt like…Like when you look around your familiar living environment, your bed, your table and chairs, and suddenly you are in a trance. You see the sunlight in the morning is brilliant, but you are like an outsider and for a moment you lose your way forward.

” Why do I remember…?” Yu Mengzhou frowned in confusion. “Was the box broken once? An illusion or…?”

In his memory, there was a fuzzy corner that turned slightly, and told him that on some unknown day, his toolbox had really broken once. Its corners shouldn’t be as straight as they were, and its surface shouldn’t be as flat and smooth as it was; it should have had so many scratches and dents, and switches that worked and didn’t work, that would take a little bit of effort to make sure that the box was really closed and able to follow him around on his far-flung treks.

No.

Yu Mengzhou dismissed the whimsical idea in confusion. As with the hoof repair tools, the toolbox in which they were loaded was imported from Germany, and was so sturdy that even if he threw it down from a ten-story building, the lock wouldn’t be broken, and what’s more, he had never let his precious box be a falling object…

–Wait a minute.

Falling objects.

It’s like…It did act as a falling object?

Yu Mengzhou stared blankly at the toolbox. His fingers began to tremble slightly and his heart beat faster and faster, but he really didn’t understand where the strange sense of panic and urgency came from.

He swallowed hard. Just then, the cell phone alarm in his pocket rang for the third time, jolting him out of his deeper and deeper thoughts.

It was time for him to go out.

“Go out first. Can’t keep Master Hu waiting for me…” As soon as Yu Mengzhou said that, he closed his toolbox, almost in a panic. Then he put on his jacket, stomped on his shoes, and got ready to reach out to turn the door handle.

However, as he was about to pull the door open, his body stopped again.

His subconscious told him that he couldn’t just walk out the door, he had unfinished business. Like a bed with an unplugged electric blanket, a lamp he forgot to turn off, a pot of boiling water that had been boiled but not turned off…A promise firmly made, but not yet fulfilled.

Yu Mengzhou slowly lowered his hand.

The world was far away at that moment. The shadows of the trees outside the window, the cars and pedestrians on the street, the white fog rising up from the breakfast place, the crying baby downstairs…Everything was silent, left in place, there was nothing but him and a rented room.

“I…I promise you–” Yu Mengzhou stood in front of the door in a daze, his lips and teeth so raw that every word he said was like a rusty gear that had been turning since ancient times.

“–When you’ve done what you want to do, we’ll go back together…Back to the human world.”

The memory space collapsed, and everything was reduced to nothing in a great release of white light. Yu Mengzhou stood alone in the center of an empty void as pure as snow.

“I…” He looked at his hands, his breath trembled, his chest heaved uncontrollably.

He remembered, he finally remembered! How he fell into that secret pit on his way home then met the herd of Demonic Warhorses in hell. He unshackled them and was noticed by the Demon Prince, then in the end, he died with that half-human, half-horse monster…

Yu Mengzhou’s breath hitched.

…Died with it.

“Am I finished?” he asked hoarsely. “But…I’m still conscious and able to talk, so I’m still alive?”

“You certainly can’t be considered alive.”

From behind him came a hissing voice, a voice that, to Yu Mengzhou, even sounded slightly familiar.

“After being pierced through the heart by Angola’s poisonous stinger, even if you are really lucid, there is no guarantee that you are still alive.”

Yu Mengzhou turned his head violently. In an instant, that pure white piece of emptiness developed shape and color. The Demon Realm’s crimson sandstone spread out infinitely. The sky hung low, and the black clouds were entangled with bright red and purple lightning.

A stooped old man in a hood was leaning against the side of a materialized hill. Several points of green light and some vaguely movable sharp muzzles peeked out from underneath the hood.

“It’s you!” Yu Mengzhou was startled. “The one called…Weaver, uh, what’s your name again?”

“Weaver.” The Demon Lord replied rather impatiently. However, he replied without seething. “Nobleman, eh?”

“You’re in my…I don’t know where this is anyway. It’s my territory. What are you doing in my territory?” Yu Mengzhou stared at him warily, not particularly frightened. He was, after all, the human who had single-handedly killed the Demon Prince. When facing him, it should be the demon that should be afraid.

The Weaver sighed tiredly as he straightened his body, his green eyes dull. “This is your dream. It can also be counted as the Realm of Memories. It’s the only place in the Demon Realm that can be called safe. It’s not wrong for me, a windswept old man, to come here to take refuge, is it?”

Yu Mengzhou said bluntly, “I don’t understand. What is the Realm of Memories? And what kind of old man are you? An old man with a spider’s head, or an old man who peeps?”

The Weaver was silent for a while. Now the situation was different from before. As a survivor who squeezed in under the fence, he was naturally not in a position to counter Yu Mengzhou’s pressure to answer.

“Forget it. Let’s just start from the beginning,” The Weaver said. “The Demon Realm will cease to exist soon, so there’s no need to hide all that stale shit.”

Yu Mengzhou was very surprised. He wanted to ask what “the Demon Realm will cease to exist” meant, and even more so, he wanted to ask how Falchion and the group were doing. However, he had been a good listener since he started school, so he didn’t hurry and interrupt The Weaver.

“I see that Angola has bragged about a lot of things to you,” The Weaver whispered. “The Demon Horse…Perhaps it’s time to call him the Emperor of the Demon Realm, also told you a few things, but they weren’t comprehensive enough. The short version is that in the old days, Angola, as one of the five Lords of the Demon Realm, discovered that the Demon Realm actually had a will of its own, and that this will wasn’t ready to allow us foreign sinners to assume the role of rulers. It wanted to cultivate a nucleus and then hand over the power to the Emperor who, once born, would be the Emperor of all beings.”

“Angola was erudite, cruel and cunning. He wasn’t the strongest, but had the most luck. When he found out about it, he mentioned it to no one. Instead he coaxed a token from the remaining four Lords in the form of a bet. You must know that before the Demon Horse was born, we were the true masters of the Demon Realm, and our tokens actually symbolize the concept of dominance.”

“But we were willing to lose, and we had a lot of fun in that long and exciting gamble. Despite losing the tokens, however, we were still the Archdemons, and all four Lords, including myself, before we handed over our tokens, used the most vicious means possible to place a curse that if Angola activated the tokens and attempted to overstep his bounds, he would only end up worse than a broken body.”

The Weaver sighed. “With malice in our hearts, we waited with a cheeky grin to enjoy Angola’s end. In the end, he did activate the tokens, we just didn’t realize that he did it on the first Demon Horse to be born.”

“When he did, he gathered the power of the five Lords, and Angola bound the Demon Horse, usurping the power and authority of the Original One, and was elevated to the rank of Demon Prince, above all demons.” The Weaver sighed. “And then later, as you know, his ambition grew, his appetite grew, and, as he said, because of understanding the collection of concepts born of the Demon Realm, even the will of this world could not annihilate him.”

“So…” Yu Mengzhou said tentatively.

“So, you are the Chosen Son chosen by the Demon Realm,” The Weaver said with an expressionless face. “You were a being beyond Angola’s comprehension. A sinless man would be one in a million. You are naturally close to horses, soft-hearted, and in that line of work…Every condition fits together in an undeniable way. I guess the Demon Realm thought they had a treasure when they found you.”

Yu Mengzhou didn’t know what to say to that. He asked, “So…What exactly is my situation now? What happened to Falchion and the others?”

The Weaver looked at him oddly, then gazed at him for a moment.

“You’re long gone,” he said. “Long gone, in fact. Long enough that your soul, all of it, wanders back and forth in memory, always repeating the scenes of your fall into the Demon Realm to your fight with Angola.”

“What!” Yu Mengzhou was shocked. “I’m actually not dead?!”

“I’ve been hiding here and looking at your memories…it’s probably been over thirty times.” The Weaver looked down at the ground and said vaguely. “Congratulations on jumping out of the loop.”

“What!” Yu Mengzhou was even more surprised. “Why did the loop go around so many times?!”

“Because in the reality you went to,” The Weaver wearily explained. “You never promised the Demon Horses that you were going to ‘return to earth when it’s all over’ with them. You only said ‘We’ll talk about this when it’s all over.’ It’s the first time you’ve broken out of your fixed memory line and freed yourself with a promise. Well, congratulations.”

Yu Mengzhou breathed deeply and spun in place a few times. The amount of information was too much, and he was still trying to digest it.

“…Wait.” He suddenly turned to The Weaver. “You still haven’t told me how Falchion and the others are doing. You keep saying ‘hide’ and ‘take refuge,’ ah…What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

“Hmm.” The Weaver was silent for a moment, then let out an indifferent breath.

“You see, the Demon Realm dragged you down to free it, and you really did. Then your lover – of course, I can’t figure out how many lovers you actually have, but the Anti-Emperor is the craziest one – became pretty much the same again as when the Demon Realm was really one. The regret almost overwhelmed him, thus he used a random draw style of killing, which emptied the realm of living creatures in a few days…like he was going to sacrifice himself for you with that method. Later on, he felt that method was too slow, so he planned to sacrifice the entire population of hell all at once.”

Yu Mengzhou’s eyes slowly widened.

“Then some of the Princes…You know, the Demon Realm has one Emperor and twelve Princes now,” The Weaver muttered hopelessly. “Some of the Princes thought he was doing it the wrong way, that there was no way, so they started to fight the Emperor. Now it’s time for a civil war. Millions and millions of demons are being born, and millions and millions of demons are dying every moment. Heaven and earth, it’s a mess.”

Yu Mengzhou’s eyes widened until they couldn’t get any wider.

“As for the other Lords…Haha, I’m afraid I’m the only one still alive?” The Weaver laughed twice. “Thanks to my discovering the rift between reality and dreams, I burrowed in and found your dream. That’s why I say, as far as demons are concerned, this is the safest ground.”

Yu Mengzhou’s pupils began to quake.

“…What?” he whispered. “How long have I been here?”

The Weaver shrugged. “Not sure exactly anymore. Time flows differently here than in reality. But I’d estimate that you cycled through the dream once, and then moved to the Demon Realm, that’s…Twenty years? Or thirty?”

 

“Ai, it’s too late for you to be a savior!” As he looked at Yu Mengzhou, whose face was frozen, the aged demon laughed. “Just like our Emperor, who has been obsessively trying to turn back time. I didn’t understand in the past, because demons are all creatures of timely happiness, but now, I finally understand! What you call love…What you call love is such a terrible thing.”