Chapter 176

Chapter 176: Wu Tong Road 66: A Place That Draws the Extraordinary

Yu Sheng suddenly regretted making so many Irenes.

Especially when all three of them swarmed him at once, shrieking and clawing. With one or two dolls, he could still hold them back with a single hand.

With three, he discovered a painful truth: he couldn’t block everything.

And one of them was made with rebar and stone. When she rammed into him, it was like a bag of cement slamming into his head. Thank goodness he’d been eating well lately and was still fairly sturdy. If he’d had the physical fitness of an ordinary person, one pounce from Irene would have dropped him without a sound.

A moment later, Yu Sheng had bite marks on his forehead, and three dolls were clinging to him—one hanging off his leg, one perched on his shoulder, one yanking his collar while dangling from his chest. He felt dead inside.

“Get off me,” he sighed. Then he looked at the one wrapped in a towel like sleepwear. “Especially you. Your towel’s about to fall off.”

With a yelp, all three Irenes scrambled down. The towel-wrapped one stood on the bed, craning her head up indignantly. “Yeah! Where are my clothes?!”

Yu Sheng pulled the repaired dress from the nightstand and tossed it over. “Here. I took some time to fix it for you. I cut off the burned parts, then took the decorative pleats from the hem and used them to patch the obvious spots. My handiwork isn’t great, but it’ll do for now. I’ll buy you a new one in the next couple of days.”

“Oh, okay!” The towel-wrapped doll brightened instantly, catching the dress. She jumped off the bed and dashed toward the bathroom. “I’m going to change! Don’t peek!”

“…Why would I peek at you?” Yu Sheng shouted after her, his eyelid twitching. “I built all three of your bodies myself!”

He turned back and stared down the remaining two Irenes on the floor. They stared right back, like a pair of small, judgmental statues.

Then Yu Sheng slapped his forehead. “Ah—I forgot to tell Little Red Riding Hood about Xiao Xiao. No wonder I felt like I’d forgotten something.”

“Xiao Xiao?” One Irene paused, then remembered. “That kid from the orphanage? What about her?”

“She also entered my weird dream,” Yu Sheng said. “The one that’s just a wasteland. It looks like when she got dragged into the forest by a nightmare, she accidentally ‘fell’ into it while trying to escape the wolves chasing her…”

He told them what he’d just experienced, and he mentioned seeing the hunter’s illusion arts—carefully skipping the part about how he’d almost “put on” the hunter’s garb.

Irene listened in a daze. When he finished, she stared at him like he was a natural disaster. “How is it that even your dreams are this insane?”

“I have no idea,” Yu Sheng said honestly, spreading his hands. “It’s not like I can control it.”

The two Irenes tilted their heads, studying him with open suspicion. After a moment, one finally looked away and propped her chin on her hand, pretending to think.

“But your guess has some basis,” she said. “From what we’ve seen, that ‘weird dream’ might really be an independent, special consciousness space. It wasn’t created by your dream. You just happen to connect to it when you fall asleep.”

She continued, more seriously, “As for Little Red Riding Hood, Xiao Xiao, and that silly fox… it’s probably because they were affected by your blood and borrowed some kind of permission from your side. That’s why they can connect to it, too.”

“So what is that wasteland, exactly?” Yu Sheng frowned. “Could it be an otherworld?”

The two Irenes answered in perfect sync, “If you ask me, who am I supposed to ask? You’re the one who doesn’t know!”

One of them—the one with a painting frame on her back—waved at him. “Forget it. You won’t solve it by thinking in circles. Next time you sleep, I’ll do a little guidance. We’ll go in again and actually observe that place properly. Maybe we’ll find clues.”

“Fine,” Yu Sheng said. He glanced out the window; the sky was already starting to dim. “Little Red Riding Hood will be here soon. For now, we should focus on that suspicious museum commission.”

Irene’s expression turned visibly serious.

“I wanted to say it earlier,” she murmured. “This whole thing… reeks of conspiracy.”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He just raised an eyebrow.

“You felt it too.” Irene nodded slowly. “If nobody had died and it was just a fake commission, it would be easy to blame it on a greedy association member using a loophole to keep museum items privately. But now the person who issued the commission is dead—and that’s not even the biggest red flag.”

Her gaze sharpened. “What feels most wrong is the sacrifice inside the museum.”

Yu Sheng’s mouth tightened. He still remembered that day with sick clarity.

The corpse bound by iron thorns into the posture of “the weeper.” The white exhibition hall stained red with blood. The eerie, terrifying “security guard” entity.

And Little Red Riding Hood, teetering on the edge of losing control.

It had happened right when she was about to “come of age,” when the forest’s swallowing was near, when her state was at its most unstable.

…

Wolf silhouettes leapt and wove through the city’s shadows, slipping from a bustling main road into the quiet streets of the old quarter. They carried Little Red Riding Hood deeper and deeper, until they reached the far end of Wu Tong Road 66—an open patch of ground so secluded it could almost be called forgotten.

Little Red Riding Hood emerged from among the wolves and lifted her head.

When she saw the manor standing silently ahead, her expression went blank for a moment.

She’d prepared herself. She knew she’d been affected by Yu Sheng’s blood. But seeing a fortress-type otherworld—something even the Special Operations Bureau couldn’t detect—sitting plainly in front of her still felt unreal.

In her memory, this place had always been empty. At the end of the open ground, there had only been a low wall covered in graffiti.

The wolf pack melted back into the shadows without a sound. Little Red Riding Hood took a quiet breath and walked toward the old house.

Before she could raise her hand to knock, the plain door swung open from within.

Yu Sheng stood in the doorway, smiling. “I saw you from the second-floor window. Come in.”

Little Red Riding Hood reacted a beat too late. “Oh.” Then she stepped inside.

This was her third time here. The first time she’d been completely lost. The second, nervous. Now—

Now she found herself almost familiar with the ordinary-looking manor.

Then three Irenes came down the stairs in a neat line, greeting her one after another as they descended.

Little Red Riding Hood froze. She rubbed her eyes hard, lowered her hand, and still saw three dolls. Two of them immediately ran off toward the TV. The last one walked up and looked up at her.

“You’re spacing out!” the little doll said.

“…How did there get to be another one?!” Little Red Riding Hood turned to Yu Sheng, shocked.

“Yeah, there’s another one.” Yu Sheng nodded like it was the simplest thing in the world. “The one who went with you to the forest last time was the new one. Looks like you didn’t notice. Combat-specialized. I made her specifically to deal with vicious entities like hunger and Big Bad Wolf. I call her Irene MK-II.”

Beside Little Red Riding Hood, Irene immediately protested, baring her teeth. “Don’t give me random model numbers! If you have to name me, pick something cooler—like Valkyrie type or something!”

Yu Sheng kept a straight face, but his thoughts went sharp and dry. [A 66.6-centimeter doll calling herself a Valkyrie… she really had nerve. If a Valkyrie’s shield came to life, it would probably be taller than her.]

He didn’t dare say it out loud.

It wasn’t because Irene’s insults were too harsh. It was because there were now three Irenes at home—and when they lined up and jumped him together, he really couldn’t win.

Still a little dazed, Little Red Riding Hood got led into the living room.

Foxy trotted over with a plate of washed fruit and set it on the coffee table.

Yu Sheng automatically checked the fruit for bite marks. You couldn’t serve guests something Foxy had nibbled.

A second later, he realized that if Foxy had stolen a bite, she would never bring out the bitten leftovers. The more likely scenario was that she’d washed a whole bowl in the kitchen and only carried out one plate.

Little Red Riding Hood didn’t know what was going through Yu Sheng’s head. She thanked Foxy, then noticed something odd in the huge bunch of tails. The other tails were lively and perky, but one drooped along the floor, dragging behind her like it had snapped.

Yu Sheng noticed too. “What’s wrong with your tail? Are you hurt?”

Foxy’s face lit up. She hurried over and laid her tails across Yu Sheng’s legs like a blanket. “Benefactor, look! Isn’t there no static electricity anymore?”

Yu Sheng blinked, confused. He reached out and touched the tail, and only then did he understand.

He turned and nodded at the still-stunned Little Red Riding Hood. “It’s fine. It’s a ground wire.”

Little Red Riding Hood stared at him, completely blank. “…?”

In that moment, she realized the tiny sense of familiarity she’d started to feel toward Wu Tong Road 66 had come far too early.

Everything here was wrong in that special, terrifying way.

But then she thought again—and no, this was exactly what matched her impression of the place. It really was a place that drew the extraordinary.

This manor radiated a wildly unhinged energy. An extra Irene appeared every so often. A nine-tailed demon fox dragged one tail across the floor all winter as a ground wire to deal with static.

And right then, Yu Sheng blurted out, “Little Red Riding Hood, have you ever pissed someone off?”