Chapter 226

Chapter 226: Descent

The emergency evacuation in the nearby blocks moved in order and was almost done. Many node devices and protective machines had been brought to the site. Engineers were installing them near the orphanage walls. An invisible barrier was rising over the whole zone. If someone with spiritual sight looked out over the streets right now, they would see the barrier give off a faint glow in the night, covering wide, swelling shadows inside that kept pulsing and writhing like a strange cocoon.

Because the threat of an Angel Descent outweighed everything, the Baseline Technology Restriction Act was temporarily frozen. A lot of gear beyond normal permits was rushed here. As more and more shields powered on, the edge of the zone finally began to steady.

At least, people standing outside the orphanage walls no longer saw those horrible sights.

But things inside the walls were still grim.

A dozen black vehicles rolled in. More Special Affairs Bureau agents took positions inside the cordon. One car drove straight to the orphanage door. When the door opened, a figure with long gray white hair stepped out, dressed in a white suit, eyes heavy as she looked at the sky over the orphanage.

Li Lin felt even his breath go tight. The pale figure wasn’t looking their way, yet he could clearly feel a gaze land on him.

Bai Li Qing asked: “How long have they been inside?”

Li Lin answered at once: “Thirty two minutes. After they went in, the contamination readings inside the wall didn’t change much. The overall environmental depth is still rising. Right now the inside is at L-2. The danger level can’t be assessed.”

He had barely said that when a tech ran over and handed him a monitoring tablet.

Li Lin looked down and reported: “Depth just hit L-3 and it’s still climbing. The regular monitors are offline. We can’t pick up any video signal from inside the walls now.”

“Mm,” Bai Li Qing nodded, saying nothing more as she kept staring at the sky over the orphanage.

Behind her, a pair of hidden giant eyes slowly opened and swept across the grounds within the wall.

To a human eye outside the wall, the orphanage now looked “perfectly normal.” But in Bai Li Qing’s mind, the true shape of a place being eaten by a nightmare appeared at the same time.

Two towers were twining and growing like umbilical cords. The ground, covered in sludge, swelled and crawled. And inside those “umbilical cords,” three tiny points of light were moving.

She watched the three lights until a wave of dizziness forced her to look away.

She asked within: [Can you lock onto them?]

A flat, mechanical female voice answered: [Too hard. They’re almost no longer in the real world. In another ten or so minutes, we probably won’t be able to track them. But I can confirm this: the Dark Angels’ erosion doesn’t seem to work on those three. They’ve been inside for more than thirty minutes, and the gaze mark I left on them is still clean and intact.]

Bai Li Qing gave a soft “Mm,” drew her eyes back from the orphanage, and took out her phone.

She spoke in a low voice: “It’s me. Prepare for Fracture. If there’s no abort order within twenty four hours, or if an Angel Descent is observed during that time, then shatter the dome. I’ll take responsibility. At least try to drive that thing outside. Of course… the best case is that we get through this night safely.”

Inside the orphanage walls, an angel’s dream had already fused with reality, like flesh glued to flesh and mud soaking into mud.

Everything mixed together. Inside this wall, the edge of reality blurred and shook. Thoughts echoed hollowly as the material world kept breaking down. In the mind’s eye, that echo slowly took the shape of a spreading forest.

It was the first story from a certain fairy tale book.

A cheap, old book, full of errors and blanks, yet it once brought great joy to many cursed children.

Yu Sheng stepped into a room.

It had been the reading room on the orphanage’s second floor, the one called The End Web. Now the old room structure had overlapped with the Illusion Arts of the Black Forest. Everything looked strange and chaotic. Giant trees punched through the roof and floor. Bare light tubes and ceiling joists hung from the crowns. The walls had become broken clods of soil and stone, half buried among rotting leaves and shrubs between the massive trunks. Yu Sheng also saw the bookshelves and tables. They were tilted and wedged into the wood, already fused to the trunks. All over the ground lay scattered books.

Carefully, he walked into this “room” that was now a dense forest. He moved through a forest view that kept shifting and enlarging. His eyes passed over the scattered books, then stopped.

He saw a stack of books, still wrapped, bound with a plastic strap, dropped in a patch of weeds.

His gaze was pulled to them hard. Even the hot bullet in his hand seemed to tremble.

He strode over, slipped off the strap, and shook out the bright covered books made for kids.

They were normal books.

Most were brand new, or at least printed in the last two years. The print quality was fair to good. The paper was fine. Not one of them was related to Squirrel Knight.

But Yu Sheng still felt a strange “link,” a feeling like a stare coming from the Black Forest, maybe even from Anka Aila, fixed on these books.

He frowned, then suddenly thought of something. He turned and spoke to the doll who had been nervously watching the forest around them: “Irene!”

The small doll flustered and answered: “Ah, ah?”

Yu Sheng said, serious now: “Check these books. Are they hiding something? Like the letter we found at Old Zheng’s.”

“Hold on, I’ll look!” Before he finished, the little doll jumped from his shoulder and started dragging the books that were far too big for her. “These are heavy… Wait! There’s paper stuck inside. You didn’t see it?”

She flipped open a cover. Right in front of Yu Sheng, she calmly drew out a yellowed, torn page from between the leaves, like it had been sitting there in plain sight the whole time.

Yu Sheng took the page. The first line he saw was the title “Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Ah, there’s more here, and here too. A lot stuck inside these,” Irene called as she rifled through a few volumes, pulling out page after page and handing them to Yu Sheng.

Fairy tale after fairy tale. One yellow page after another. And a coarse, clumsy cover printed with trees and a reddish brown squirrel:

“Squirrel Knight Takes You to Read Stories.”

Yu Sheng finally understood why Snow White had found nothing odd when she checked the books donated by the Sunshine Foundation.

The cultists had infiltrated the process and used a trick like the secret letters they sent to Old Zheng. They tore the old book apart and “stuffed” it into normal donated books. That is how they sent an old item, one with a strong symbolic tie to Anka Aila, into the orphanage. And maybe… this was also an important step in “training” the whole orphanage to become a proper container.

Clues snapped together. The knot in Yu Sheng’s mind suddenly came clear. Sitting in the middle of the books and the weeds, Irene waved the last two books in the air, then tossed them aside: “No more. That’s all!”

Yu Sheng nodded slowly. He roughly sorted the pages they had gathered, but his eyes were drawn again to the cover.

The red brown squirrel with its fluffy big tail sat there, holding a pine needle in a silly pose, one paw pointing at the title.

It blinked and sat up from the cover.

She waddled a few steps, hopped onto Yu Sheng’s wrist, and looked around.

“Ah! It’s you!” the squirrel cried happily, then hugged Yu Sheng’s finger. “Great, you’re okay. Those wolves were so scary… and you brought friends this time?”

“…Wow,” Irene said, eyes round at the scene. “No wonder it’s… uh, no wonder it’s in a dream?”

Foxy didn’t seem surprised. She greeted the squirrel like it was normal: “Hello.”

“Hello. Squirrel Knight is happy to see friends,” the squirrel cheered, then finally noticed what Yu Sheng was holding.

She saw the book. On the worn cover, a silly squirrel still sat on a stump by a forest path, clutching a pine needle.

“You… you found it?” The squirrel’s face showed humanlike shock. The pine needle even fell from her paw. “Where did you find it?”

“This isn’t the one you sent out back then,” Yu Sheng explained, settling the squirrel on his arm while he opened the torn fairy tale collection so she could see the pages inside. “This is another copy someone outside kept all this time. It’s the same batch and edition as the one you sent away. For some very… complicated reasons, this book was sent to the orphanage recently.”

Clutching his sleeve, the squirrel watched him turn the brittle pages and made a small sound: “Ah, it really isn’t that one. The one we had was filled in a lot.”

Yu Sheng looked up at once: “Filled in a lot?”

“Mm,” the squirrel nodded, and it felt like she smiled. “Because many places in the book had no printed words. So brothers and sisters would use the pictures to tell us the stories. And the kids who could write would put the stories in those blank spots. Some were what should have been printed. Some were what we made up. And some… were stories we heard from other places.

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

As she spoke, she suddenly began to cry again.

“I’m sorry… I lost it… we can never get it back… uhh…”

Yes. She had lost a “treasure” built by many children working together.

It held the stories written by all the children in the orphanage.