Chapter 315

Chapter 316: A New Spectacle in the Backyard

Irene and Foxy had almost never seen Yu Sheng angry. In their minds, he was always cheerful: if he could laugh, he laughed; if he couldn’t, he waited a bit and then laughed anyway. Even after falling into the Otherworld and getting swarmed by things that weren’t human, or gnawing it out with a Hunger Entity, he would still come back smiling.

He was the kind of person who could joke even while turning to ash. Irene even suspected his whole life was built out of fun.

But now, everyone here could tell that Yu Sheng could get angry too.

A soft, warm touch brushed his hand. Yu Sheng looked down and saw a big fluffy tail rubbing against his wrist.

Foxy looped her tail around his hand and gently swayed it as she said: “Benefactor, next time I’ll go with you and fight them.”

Yu Sheng said nothing. He only slipped his hand free and rubbed the fur behind the Fox Maiden’s ear.

Irene turned toward the black, heavy Iron Coffin with a complicated look and asked: “So how is C Buckle doing now? You heard her ‘death echo,’ which should mean she died. But you put her into this ‘Holy Coffin’ that can repair an Artificial Saintess. Do you think she can still be saved?”

Yu Sheng slowly shook his head and answered: “I’m not sure. I did experience a Conversation With The Dead, but it wasn’t like the ones before. I didn’t see a message left after death. I saw her memories instead. If death is the dividing line, then these are two opposite rivers. And the ‘life form’ of an Artificial Saintess is very special. It’s hard to judge her state with a simple ‘alive or dead’.”

He paused and looked up at the Iron Coffin.

“So I put her in there. I don’t know if it will work, but I adjusted the repair procedure using the method for a Doll’s Spirit Infusion and Vitality Awakening, then restarted the device. The repair is still running. I can feel the mechanism inside working, and the Holy Coffin System hasn’t thrown an error because the Saintess is completely dead. But she still hasn’t woken up.

“Maybe we have to wait a while. Maybe we’ll be waiting forever. Who knows? We’ll just do our best.”

Irene couldn’t help sighing as she said: “You really do care.”

“In the very last second, she reached out to me,” Yu Sheng said seriously. “I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could feel she didn’t want to die yet. She still had things to do. She wanted to go home, take revenge, and live. If she had learned the truth and only wanted to die, I wouldn’t go to all this trouble. But since she reached out, I should pull her up.”

Irene lowered her head, thinking deeply, then looked up with a bright smile as she said: “All right then. You helped me the same way back then.”

Yu Sheng raised his eyebrows and said: “I thought you would complain.”

“I haven’t finished my fight with her! When she comes out, I’m going to fight her,” Irene said, folding her arms and lifting her chin with great pride. “Don’t laugh. I mean a real fight!”

Yu Sheng ruffled Irene’s hair, then glanced at Xuan Che, who had stayed silent this whole time.

Xuan Che’s face had been tight from the start. He hadn’t said a word, but frost had formed on the floor at his feet. His mood was clearly anything but calm.

Noticing Yu Sheng’s gaze, Xuan Che spoke first before Yu Sheng could ask: “I will report this to my sect and my master. Knowing him, he will inform the sovereigns of all the factions under the Grand Void Spiritual Axis. Using living people as sacrifice has always been a great taboo for us since ancient times, and now they have even made it into a system, harvesting humans like wheat and refining them into tools.”

He drew a breath, steadied himself, and went on: “In truth, groups like the Holy Revere Hermitage and the Angel Cultists have long been harshly suppressed under the Grand Void Spiritual Axis. Once they infiltrate, they do things like harm common folk in secret, defile mountains and forests, and steal or destroy treasures. The righteous kill them on sight. With what we learned today, their wanted list simply gets one more crime.

“I just never imagined they could be this heartless.

“Where they can run wild like this must be deep inside star regions they control. If so, the people they use are their own subjects.”

“If they never counted those people as people, then there’s no burden to carry,” Yu Sheng said plainly. “On this ship I saw a lot and overheard even more. The so called Holy Revere Hermitage has gone mad over ‘altering’ people. They even slice themselves up and rebuild their bodies into shapes that aren’t human. Inside, they divide members into ranks based on their supposed ‘defects.’ You could say that, besides the core idea of the ‘Path of Venerating the Saint’ being supreme, not a single Hermitage Member is treated as a full person with complete dignity and worth.”

Xuan Che thought for a moment, then gave a helpless, bitter smile as he said: “You’re right. You can’t guess the demonic with a normal person’s reason. If they truly had reason, they wouldn’t walk the demonic path. I was clinging to illusions.”

After confirming the Holy Coffin was still “running normally,” the group left the special chamber.

They rode the lift to the tower’s living zone. It was a huge cluster of compartments spread over three whole levels of the Giant Tower: living areas, a medical area, and an “Eco Bay” with a small self-contained ecosystem.

The Eco Bay was lush and green. Plants grew strong within carefully controlled habitats, and genetic engineering had tuned them to look “perfect.” The medical area had basic treatment gear, but it also stored a lot of unsettling things: spare human limbs and organs in culture, jars of flesh samples, and heaps of “waste biomass” that hadn’t yet been processed.

In the living area, they found many “personal items” left by Hermitage Members: small, unimportant notes, prayer books marked with symbols, and all kinds of everyday objects that looked like what ordinary people would use.

Of course, there were also plenty of things that clearly weren’t “local products”: personal information devices far beyond Boundary City’s tech level, and food, tools, and packaging covered in alien writing. These were obviously brought in from “outside.”

Sorting all this and extracting useful intelligence would be complex and time-consuming. Yu Sheng knew his own limits in that department.

Walking a corridor near the Core Zone, he said casually: “We’ll have to ‘borrow’ a big team from the Special Affairs Bureau. There are traces of Hermitage Members all over this tower, and any small detail might reveal key intelligence, like secret starport coordinates where this tower used to dock. I should also ask Bai Li Qing for some engineers to help repair the outer Armor Belt and the Phase Engine’s power lines, plus a few system-cracking experts to see whether we can dig data out of the Navigation Mainframe. I can’t figure that thing out.”

The quiet Hunter finally couldn’t hold back and said: “Why not just fly the ship to the Special Affairs Bureau’s headquarters and park it under the Director’s nose? Let her assign five hundred experts to sleep on the hood.”

Yu Sheng thought about the idea very seriously and asked: “Is there a floor big enough for it?”

“…?” said the Hunter.

Even though the space under the Hunter’s hood was already shadowy, Yu Sheng still felt the whole face go dark.

He dropped the topic.

Last, he took Irene and the others to the topmost Control Hall, the bridge, and let them watch the scene where that so called “Sage” made a rousing show of fighting and then ran away. With that, the tour ended.

They hadn’t toured the whole ship.

The Giant Tower was so enormous and so complicated inside that, if they tried to explore every corridor and every room, they would not get out for two full days and nights. Yu Sheng only showed the major compartments linked to the tower’s central shaft. They skipped the large zones of machinery, storage, and maintenance tunnels. There were also several rooms with eerie, powerful, or dangerous energy readings. Yu Sheng still didn’t know what those were for, so they were clearly not good places to visit.

Even so, they spent hours inside the tower.

That was more than enough time for the super energetic cursed children to notice the new toy in the valley and run from the little town all the way to the edge of the Black Forest.

So when Yu Sheng pushed the door open and stepped out, he first heard a chorus of squeals and shouts. He looked up and saw a swarm of Dollheads racing all over the docking platform, yelling, climbing, and jumping. Rapunzel was hanging off a bulge on the ship’s rear armor, trying to grab “King,” who had already climbed ten-plus meters up. Jack and the Dragon Slayer were earnestly discussing what the top of the tower might look like. Jack planned to plant a beanstalk and climb up to see, while the Dragon Slayer said there was no need for all that effort because he could turn into a dragon and drop onto the spire from the sky.

Most eye-catching of all was Snow White, who was just about to lead her seven Thunder Titans to climb the tower.

The Mermaid was on the ground providing musical accompaniment, blasting a stirring BGM without the slightest idea why it was stirring.

Little Red Riding Hood stepped out, took one look, and her blood ran cold as she roared, voice ringing across the valley: “All of you get over here now!”