Chapter 226

Chapter 226: Descent

The emergency evacuation of the nearby blocks proceeded in an orderly fashion and was basically complete. Large quantities of node devices and protective equipment were transported to the scene. Engineering staff installed them near the orphanage wall. An invisible barrier rose over the entire area.

If someone with spiritual talent looked out over the district then, they would see the barrier glowing faintly in the night sky, covering huge stretches of shadow inside it—swelling and contracting, writhing like a strange cocoon.

The threat level of an angel’s descent outweighed everything. The Baseline Technology Limitation Act was temporarily suspended, and devices far beyond the usual authorized limits were hauled in. As the protective systems powered on one after another, the stability of the boundary finally began to recover.

At least, standing outside the wall now, you no longer saw those horrifying visions.

But inside the wall, the situation was still bleak.

More than a dozen black vehicles arrived one after another. More agents from the special operations bureau entered the lockdown zone. One vehicle drove straight to the orphanage gate. When the door opened, a figure with gray-white Rapunzel-like hair stepped out in a white dress and stared solemnly at the sky above the orphanage.

Li Lin felt his breathing tighten. The pale figure wasn’t even looking his way, and yet he still felt a gaze land directly on him.

“How long have they been in there?” Bai Li Qing asked.

“Thirty-two minutes,” Li Lin answered immediately. “After they went in, the contamination readings inside the wall haven’t changed noticeably. The overall environmental depth is still rising steadily. It’s at depth L-2 inside, and we can’t assess the danger.”

Halfway through his report, a monitor hurried over and handed him a tablet with the surveillance feed.

“It’s reached L-3,” the monitor said grimly. “And it’s still climbing.”

A bead of sweat formed on Li Lin’s forehead. He forced himself to face Bai Li Qing. “The standard monitors have gone offline. We can’t capture any video signal from inside the wall anymore.”

“Mm.” Bai Li Qing nodded calmly, saying nothing else. She kept staring at the sky above the orphanage.

Hidden, gigantic Big Eyes slowly opened behind her, sweeping across the situation inside the wall.

To ordinary human eyes, the orphanage looked normal from outside. But in Bai Li Qing’s mind, the real image appeared in sync—an orphanage being swallowed by nightmares.

Two towers tangled and growing like an umbilical cord. Ground covered in sludge that swelled, contracted, and writhed. Three tiny points of light moving inside the “cord.”

Bai Li Qing stared at those three points until a wave of dizziness she couldn’t resist forced her to look away.

[Can you lock on?] she asked silently.

“Too hard,” a slightly mechanical, stiff female voice replied. “They’re barely in the real world anymore. In another ten minutes or so, we probably won’t be able to track them. But one thing is certain: the erosion of the dark angels really does seem ineffective on the three of them. They’ve been active inside the wall for over thirty minutes, and the gaze mark I left on them is still clean and intact.”

Bai Li Qing gave a soft “Mm.” Then she took out her phone.

“It’s me,” she said. “Prepare for fracture. If we don’t receive a stop order within twenty-four hours, or if we observe an angel’s descent during that time, execute dome fracture. I’ll take responsibility. At minimum, find a way to expel that thing outside.”

She paused, voice lowering.

“Of course… the best outcome is for this night to pass safely.”

…

Inside the wall, the angel’s dream had already fused with reality—flesh sticking to flesh, mud soaking through mud.

Everything overlapped. The boundary of reality blurred and buckled, and thoughts thrown outward returned only hollow echoes amid the ongoing collapse. Those echoes, in perception, were slowly becoming a spreading forest.

It was the first story in a fairy tale book.

A cheap, old collection full of mistakes and blanks, and yet one that had once brought enormous happiness to countless children.

Yu Sheng entered a room.

It used to be the reading room at the end of the second floor. Now the original structure had overlapped with illusion from the black forest, making everything strange and chaotic. Great trees pierced through ceiling and floor. Light tubes and the skeleton of a dropped ceiling hung from the canopy. The walls had become broken clods of earth and stone, scattered and buried among dead leaves and shrubs between giant trunks.

Yu Sheng also saw bookshelves and tables—crookedly embedded in the tree trunks, fused into the wood. Books littered the ground.

He stepped carefully into this patch of dense forest. The scenery around him shifted and expanded as he walked. His eyes swept over the scattered books—

—and then he stopped.

A stack of books lay in weeds: unopened, bound with plastic straps, like they’d just been delivered and forgotten.

His gaze locked onto them so hard that even the scorching bullet in his hand seemed to tremble.

Yu Sheng hurried over, tore the straps apart, and shook out the brightly covered books meant for small children.

They were normal. Most were brand new, or printed within the last two years. The paper was decent. The print quality was fine. Not a single one had anything to do with Squirrel Knight.

And yet Yu Sheng still felt that strange connection. A sense of being watched—coming from the black forest, maybe even from Anka Aila—aimed straight at these books.

He frowned, then something clicked. He turned to the doll, who was scanning the surrounding forest like she expected it to bite.

“Irene!”

“Huh—what?!” Irene squeaked.

“Check these books,” Yu Sheng said sharply. “Are they hiding something? Like that letter we found at Old Zheng’s place—”

“Hold on, let me see!” Irene cut in before he could finish. She jumped down from his shoulder and wrestled with a book bigger than her torso. “This thing is heavy… wait!”

She flipped open a cover.

“There’s paper tucked in here!” she yelled. “You didn’t see it?!”

As she spoke, Irene pulled a yellowed sheet of paper—torn at the edges—right out from between the pages, as if someone had stuffed it there in plain sight.

Yu Sheng took it. The first line that met his eyes was the title: Little Red Riding Hood.

“Ah! There’s one here too!” Irene said. “This one’s got scraps tucked in it as well—lots!”

She flipped through several books at a frantic pace, yanking out scrap after scrap and handing them over.

Story after story. Yellowed old pages. And among them, that crude cover printed in harsh colors—forest, red-brown squirrel—

Squirrel Knight Reads Stories with You.

Yu Sheng finally understood why Princess Snow White hadn’t noticed anything wrong when she checked the donated books from the Sunshine Foundation.

The cultists had infiltrated the donation process, then used a technique like the one they’d used to exchange secret letters with Old Zheng: they broke apart the old book itself and stuffed it into ordinary donated books.

That was how they delivered an old item with strong symbolic ties to Anka Aila—an item with a clear directional meaning—straight into the orphanage.

And this might have been a key step in cultivating the entire orphanage into a qualified container.

So many clues snapped into place that Yu Sheng felt the tangled mess in his head go suddenly clear.

Irene, sitting amid the pile of books and weeds, lifted the last two and shook them. Then she tossed them aside with satisfaction. “That’s it! That’s all!”

Yu Sheng nodded slowly. He sorted the scraps into a rough stack, but his eyes drifted back to the cover.

The red-brown squirrel with the fluffy tail sat on the illustration, holding a pine needle in a goofy pose, pointing at the title.

It blinked.

Then it sat up.

It wobbled two steps, hopped onto Yu Sheng’s wrist, and looked around.

“Ah! It’s you!” the squirrel cried, delighted. She turned and hugged Yu Sheng’s finger like he was an old friend. “Great, you’re okay! Those wolves were so scary… and you brought friends this time too?!”

“…Wow,” Irene murmured, staring with huge eyes. “It really is… uh, it really is in a dream, huh?”

Foxy, on the other hand, didn’t look surprised at all. She greeted the squirrel as if this was the most normal thing in the world. “Hello.”

“Hello! Squirrel Knight is very happy to meet friends!” the squirrel chirped. Then she finally noticed what Yu Sheng was holding.

She saw the old cover—another squirrel still sitting stupidly on a stump beside a forest path, pine needle clutched in its paws.

“Y-you… you found it?!” The squirrel’s face twisted with shock so human it was unsettling. Even her pine needle fell from her paws. “Where did you find it?!”

“This isn’t the one you gave away back then,” Yu Sheng said. He set the squirrel on his arm and flipped through the torn fairy tale collection so she could see the pages. “This is another copy someone outside kept. Same batch. Same edition as the one you lost. For some… complicated reasons, it was recently sent into the orphanage.”

The squirrel gripped Yu Sheng’s sleeve, watching the pages turn. Her voice went small and thin. “Ah… it really isn’t that one. The one we had back then was filled in.”

Yu Sheng turned instantly. “Filled in?”

“Yeah.” The squirrel nodded, and it almost looked like she was smiling through the sadness. “So many places in the book didn’t get printed. Brother Sister would hold the pictures and tell us the stories. And the kids who could write would fill the blank spaces.”

Her paws fidgeted, like she was trying to hold something fragile.

“Some were what the book was supposed to have. Some were what we made up ourselves. And some… we heard from somewhere else.”

Her voice cracked.

“That book was everyone’s treasure. It was… it was everyone’s treasure…”

Then she started crying again.

“I’m sorry… I lost it… I’ll never find it again… wuwu…”

Yes. She had lost the treasure.

The stories written by every child in the orphanage.