Chapter 757 - 756: Message from Beyond

Chapter 757: Chapter 756: Message from Beyond

This rain fluctuated greatly, sometimes heavy and sometimes light, and continued for several hours before it turned into a drizzly rain that lasted until dawn.

Yu Sheng had something on his mind and didn’t sleep well in the first half of the night. He kept feeling like Erin was tossing around on the bed. It wasn’t until the latter half of the night when he listened to the faint sound of rain outside the window that he finally slept soundly, waking up only at nine the next day.

As soon as he opened his eyes, he saw two sharp fox ears dangling at the edge of his bed. As soon as he moved, a silver-haired head lifted up, and the fox girl looked at him with a grievance: "Savior, the pancake stall at the intersection hasn’t opened yet."

Yu Sheng jolted awake suddenly, got up to find that it was already broad daylight outside, and discovered that the four puppet boxes in the corner of the wall were all open, with no sign of where Erin had gone.

He got out of bed, washed up, and made breakfast.

Hu Li sat at the dining table, quickly slurped up a bowl of noodles, and happily served herself a second bowl, her big tail wagging behind her.

Yu Sheng keenly noticed that one of the tails behind her now sported several colorful clips—it wasn’t there before.

"You’ve even dressed up your tail?" Yu Sheng found it amusing, pointing at her big tail, "It looks pretty nice."

"I marked the tail I use to store things," Hu Li said cheerfully, "the hair clips were bought online a couple of days ago, 5 yuan each..."

As she spoke, she laid the tail adorned with clips on Yu Sheng’s lap. Like usual, he stroked the soft fur with a good texture and then pulled out a few small white plastic balls from the fox fur...

"Seriously, did this thing even fall into your storage space?"

"I don’t know, oww~"

The fox girl said, gulped down the noodle soup, and as usual, used one of her tails to wipe her mouth, then suddenly shook her ears.

"Erin is so quiet today," she listened curiously with her ears tilted, "Usually at this time, she’s either yelling in the living room watching TV, or frantically running up and down the stairs, or sliding on the banister like a slide, how come there’s no noise today?"

Yu Sheng also felt something was off, instinctively perceived Erin’s location, and asked, "Did you see her today?"

"Saw her, yeah, she was running up and down the second-floor hallway early in the morning."

Second floor.

Yu Sheng suddenly felt something, looked up towards the second floor, frowned, and walked towards the stairs.

Hu Li immediately put down the bowl and followed closely behind Yu Sheng.

The two of them arrived at the second floor, then Yu Sheng directly headed to the door at the end of the hallway.

Through the thin room door, he vaguely heard some wind noises and voices on the other side.

He immediately stopped the motion to push the door, while Hu Li casually pulled out an ear and placed it against the door.

Yu Sheng watched, his expression unchanged.

"Erin is speaking," Hu Li whispered, "but I can’t comprehend, each syllable sounds like human speech, but when combined, it’s all jumbled—and it’s unclear whom she’s talking to."

Yu Sheng lightly nodded, he also heard some of the noises from the other side of the door, though not as distinctly as Hu Li did.

After a brief pause, Yu Sheng placed his hand on the door handle and very carefully twisted it, slowly pushing the door open.

The scene in the room came into view, and Yu Sheng and Hu Li both widened their eyes in surprise.

Erin was right there, the five little puppets sitting neatly on the floor in the center of the room.

Their backs were to the door, facing the wall with the strange mirror—which now had crooked cracks surrounding that mirror!

The cracks extended from the mirror’s edge, spreading throughout the wall, with the longest ones even stretching to the ceiling and floor, the narrowest being just a fine line, and the widest even was as wide as a palm.

However, within those cracks, the structure of the wall was unseen, no cement, no steel bars, nor bricks, only an undefined darkness with seemingly something continually transforming hidden within it.

Yu Sheng tensed up completely, and then his vision blurred—Hu Li instantly flashed from behind him, her Nine-tailed fanning out protectively in front of him.

A shadow quickly slipped into the room as well, perhaps sensing something, Luna, who was cleaning downstairs, directly performed a shadow teleportation and rushed in.

"What’s happening?" Luna quietly asked.

"I don’t know," Yu Sheng whispered, moving closer to Erin, "Hu Li and I found Erin missing earlier, came up here, and saw this scene; it looks like a horror movie..."

Just as he spoke halfway, he suddenly felt a strange gaze fall upon him.

Yu Sheng felt a tightness in his heart and immediately looked in the direction of the gaze, but found that this feeling came from the mirror.

In the mirror, a hallucination-like image flashed by. In that extremely brief visual residue, he felt he saw a figure—a stately beauty sitting on some kind of luxurious throne. But the figure was pale and had a strange texture, as if it were just a statue carved from jade, extremely peculiar to behold.

Immediately after, Yu Sheng realized that he hadn’t actually remembered the appearance of the figure. The impression of the words "stately beauty" seemed to have been directly imprinted into his consciousness.

The illusion in the mirror disappeared, and in that moment of distraction, one of the Erins sitting on the ground suddenly moved and raised her head.

"Hey, Yu Sheng!"

In an instant, the few Erins who had been in a daze all woke up, and that familiar noise and liveliness returned to them. The little dolls jumped up; some climbed onto Yu Sheng, some onto Hu Li, and some jumped in front of Luna trying to knock on Luna’s knee only to be instantly counterattacked, amid a bunch of Erin’s chattering noise:

"Hey, why did you guys come over!"

"Why am I here?"

"What time is it, is it sunny outside? Do you want to go to the mall? I want to sit in the shopping cart..."

"C-type buckle, put me down!"

"Silly fox, why are there little balls in your tail..."

"Stop! Stop! Stop!" Yu Sheng grabbed a black-haired Erin climbing onto his shoulder and saw the Omen Wandering Star circling around the little thing’s head, "Stop the noise, what’s going on? There was someone in the mirror just now..."

Just as he was halfway through speaking, Erin suddenly seemed stunned, as if the little doll had suddenly remembered something. But then a sense of bewilderment floated into her eyes, and the just-risen memory seemed to disappear in the next moment into her fragmented thinking threads.

But at this moment, Erin suddenly shook her head (luckily this wasn’t the blonde main body, otherwise her head would have shaken off), then reached out with two little hands to grab Yu Sheng’s face and started a rapid-fire bean string:

"Yu Sheng, don’t talk and listen to me: this world has a hole, and quite a few guys outside have lost control, they’re trying to drill in through the hole, and the old tree is blocking them. The ones who helped build the bridge originally are trying to find me to give intel... They don’t know why there’s a passage that can communicate here... No, no, not the hole near the Black Star, not the one the Captain has already discovered, there’s another hole, earlier than that one... They can’t explain it, it’s something about the zeroth or first one..."

The little doll babbled a lot, and at first there was some order, but the more she spoke, the more fragmented it became. Still, she managed to quickly convey everything she could understand before the memory faded completely.

The usual yelling honed her quick tongue. This time it actually played a positive role.

A few minutes later, she stopped, glaring at Yu Sheng, seemingly unsure of what she had said, but then she laughed again, clapped her hands: "Hey! I’m awesome."

Next to her, Luna nodded, for the first time acknowledging the little thing’s words: "Mm, right."

Yu Sheng placed the little doll on his shoulder and silently turned to look at the "mirror" on the wall.

The cracks around the mirror were quickly retreating, and in the blink of an eye, only a few black lines were left on the wall, which then "shrunk" back into the mirror.

"...Whoa."

...

At the same time, a fully armed Special Service Bureau officer team cautiously emerged from an underground passage.

Under the dim sky, dense fog spread, revealing a large open area filled with mist. Dilapidated amusement facilities stood quietly in the fog, with faulty colored light bulbs intermittently flashing between the rides.

Rusty carousel, a shake car with a damaged shell, a pirate ship polluted by paint, an empty ticket booth standing on the vacant lot, the booth empty inside, but occasionally shadows of people working appeared on the glass windows.

Exotic Realm - Amusement Park.

Depth Level 3, Danger Level 2; among the dangerous Exotic Realms of Level 3 depth, this one is relatively stable and its rules have already been explored, although there are many traps and periodically spawning entities named "balloons," which have safe avoidance routes or solutions.

There have been two consecutive sightings of the suspected "Knight" here.

The "Knight," who should be randomly active in various Exotic Realms, appearing twice in the same location is an unusual situation, making the "Amusement Park" a key area of defense for the Special Service Bureau.

"Current depth Level 3, correction value +0.1135, status stable," a Special Service Bureau officer whispered, holding a portable observation device, a thin tube extending from the device directly connected to his eyeball, "No entities have spawned in the area, maintain continuous observation."

"No trace of ’Knight’ activity detected," another officer whispered, then glanced down at his feet, "...Puppet showed no anomalies."

Three mass-produced puppets accompanied the Special Service Bureau officer team, each puppet carrying special small equipment—a small two-way radio, a position indicator, a flashlight and such.

The 60-plus centimeters tall Gothic Doll hung with a bunch of tactical pieces, trotting alongside the fully armed combatant team, creating a somewhat comedic image.

However, none of the Special Service Bureau officers on site dared to voice this.

...Because these puppets are extremely sharp-mouthed when insulting, and though they look small, their strength is astonishingly great; if one of them jumped up and kicked your knee, you might not get out of bed the next day...