Chapter 105

Chapter 105: Unit Two

The sun was already up, and the morning light had chased the last of the attic’s dimness away. Outside the window, the street noise grew—engines, footsteps, distant voices. Somewhere on the nearby rooftops, birds shouted and argued, their chirps spilling in with the breeze.

None of it touched Yu Sheng’s focus.

He held a doll’s head that was nearly finished. For now, it was still nothing more than a hardened lump of clay, but he worked it with a knitting needle anyway, pressing in the outlines of the eyes and the bridge of the nose. He took his time on this step, scraping it back and starting over more than once, until the clay finally set too much to keep shaping.

It still wasn’t anywhere close to perfect. It wouldn’t hold a candle to anything a real professional could make. But at least, Yu Sheng thought with a quiet, stubborn pride, Irene wouldn’t be able to scold it as hideously ugly anymore.

At the very least… Little Doll probably wouldn’t burst into tears the moment she crawled into it, right?

He glanced up at the candles on the table and found they’d already burned past halfway.

At this rate, there was no chance he’d finish the “face makeup” stage before they went out. Managing to complete the basic body parts was already a win for today.

Yu Sheng wasn’t too disappointed. Aside from experiments, this was practice. It was better to run through the whole process a few more times before he made Irene’s next official body.

Makeup or no makeup, the doll itself wouldn’t care.

Besides, Irene could make her face “grow” into something pretty on her own.

He exhaled softly, pulled the newly made torso closer, and set it at the focal point of the alchemy array in the center of the table. Even if Irene wasn’t here, he wanted to do it properly. Practice or not, the ritual mattered.

The moment he placed it down, his brows knit.

He couldn’t tell if it was his imagination, but the clay seemed to have a faint, eerie springiness—almost like it resisted his fingers—and there was a thread of warmth beneath the surface.

When he leaned closer and touched it again, the sensation vanished. It was just clay. Slightly dried already.

Maybe he hadn’t slept enough last night. Maybe his brain was making things up.

Still, he didn’t let it go. As he attached the head, arms, and legs to the torso with a little clay mixed with softener and water, he kept watching the body out of the corner of his eye, waiting for anything—anything—to change.

In the end, he finished the assembly without incident. A rough doll body lay in the center of the alchemy array—concentric circles linked by neat lines—while the candles burned in a quiet ring around it. Aside from the absence of Irene’s painting as the “source of the soul,” everything else was in place.

Yu Sheng stared at the blank shell.

For a heartbeat, his vision seemed to flicker.

Then the doll’s chest rose.

It was faint—so faint he might’ve missed it if he’d blinked—but it rose and fell again, steady and unmistakable, as if a tiny life were sleeping inside the clay. Not awake yet, but already there.

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened. He froze for a second, then snapped out of it and leaned in, fingertips brushing the “breathing” doll.

“Wake up,” he whispered. “Wake up… Are you really alive?”

The body didn’t respond the way he expected. The rise and fall became clearer and more even, but the awakening stopped there, as if it had hit an invisible wall. It was a shell waiting for something to fill it.

Yu Sheng drew a careful breath, then turned toward the staircase leading downstairs.

“Irene!” he shouted. “Irene, are you awake? Come up and look at what I made—”

He cut himself off mid-sentence.

Something moved on the table.

The instant he called the name “Irene,” the doll body changed violently, like the final gear in the ritual had finally clicked into place. The clay tensed. Limbs flushed into a living skin tone. Hair burst forth in a wild spill. Facial features sharpened, colors blooming into vivid life, and a familiar black dress formed as if it had always been there.

In only a few seconds, an “Irene” lay in front of him, blinking sleepily as she opened her eyes.

Yu Sheng gaped.

The doll—who’d been clay a moment ago—sat up with a jerk and snapped, “Why are you yelling? I was sleeping, and then you—”

She stopped.

Her head turned with an eerie stiffness as she looked around the attic.

“Hey, wait. Where did you bring me?” Her voice wavered, confusion sliding into panic. “I was in the bedroom… No, wait. This body. This body doesn’t feel right. I—I’m dizzy…”

Little Doll tried to stand, instinctively turning toward Yu Sheng, but the world seemed to flip on her the second she moved. She wobbled twice, then tipped toward the edge of the table.

“Hey—! I can’t keep my balance!” she yelped. “I’m seeing double! I have two views right now—grab me, grab m—”

Yu Sheng lunged and caught her before she could hit the floor.

He barely had time to inhale when a loud bang sounded downstairs.

Two cries hit him at once.

“Aaah—!”

One was sharp and near, coming from the Irene in his arms. The other was distant and muffled, coming from below.

“Yu Sheng, Yu Sheng, what’s going on? Why do I have two views?” the doll babbled, clinging to him as if she might fall out of reality. “I’m in two places! No, that’s not right, why… Why do I have two bodies?!”

It was far beyond anything Yu Sheng had imagined. But in that instant, he understood exactly what had happened.

He forced down the disbelief twisting in his chest, tightened his hold on the “new Irene,” and sprinted for the stairs.

The doll clutched his sleeve like a lifeline.

He thundered down to the second floor, burst into his bedroom, and threw the door open.

Irene—his Irene—was braced against the bedside cabinet, white-knuckled and unsteady. The moment she saw him, she looked up.

The doll in his arms and the doll on the floor stared at each other.

“…Wow!” they said in perfect unison.

Then, again in unison, “I have two bodies!”

Yu Sheng’s head went hollow. He looked from one identical face to the other, torn between awe and panic.

“Irene?” he managed at last. “Are you… are you really both you?”

“Yeah,” they answered together, nodding in sync.

“No, I mean—” Yu Sheng swallowed. “Is it one consciousness? One mind in two bodies? Or did we end up with two Irenes?”

“One,” they said at the same time.

This time, Irene caught on. The one in Yu Sheng’s arms clamped her mouth shut while the one by the cabinet raised a hand and pointed at herself.

“It’s just me,” she said quickly. “It’s just… I suddenly have another body.”

As she spoke, she let go of the cabinet. She wobbled for a few seconds, then pressed a hand to her head with a groan.

“Oh man, I’m finally steady… I was so dizzy I almost threw up, you know? At first I didn’t get it. I thought I’d woken up in the attic—then the one on the bed opened her eyes, too. Two views, two sets of sensations slammed into me at once. The moment I stood up, I fell off both the table and the bed at the same time.” She shot Yu Sheng a look. “Good thing you caught one of me…”

Her words sped up as soon as she found her footing, like a dam bursting. Then she seemed to remember she was supposed to be angry.

“Wait.” Irene’s eyes narrowed. “Yu Sheng, why did two bodies show up? And… I’m inside both at the same time?”

Heat rushed up Yu Sheng’s neck. He hadn’t even had time to think about how to explain this miracle on his sprint downstairs. Now the embarrassment hit him full force.

After a long, agonizing pause, he blurted, “…If I say the attic got damp and started growing dolls, would you believe me?”

Irene blinked at him, stunned.

Then she nodded, completely serious. “…Y-Yeah?”

Yu Sheng stared back.

How did this young lady actually believe him?!

The shame hit so hard he couldn’t even keep lying. He walked to the bed, carefully set “Irene No. 2” down, and forced his face into something resembling dignity.

“Here’s the truth,” he said slowly. “I couldn’t sleep last night, and I got… inspired. So I went upstairs and ran a small experiment.”

He told the victim everything—how he’d kneaded a spare body for her, why he’d done it, and every step of the ritual he’d followed, right down to the part where he’d called her name and the clay had suddenly come alive.

Irene’s expression went from confused, to shocked, back to confused… and finally, to absolute meltdown.

“Yu Sheng, your uncle!”