Chapter 316

Chapter 316: A New Sight Appeared in the Backyard

Irene and Foxy rarely saw Yu Sheng get angry. In their impression, Yu Sheng was always cheerful. If he could laugh, he laughed. If he couldn’t, he’d wait a bit and laugh later. Even if he fell into an otherworld and got beaten half to death, or ended up gnawing at some starving entity in a life-or-death struggle, he still came back smiling.

He was the kind of guy who could turn to ash between jokes. Irene had even suspected Yu Sheng’s whole life was made of nothing but fun.

But now, everyone here understood something: Yu Sheng could get angry too.

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

“Benefactor,” Foxy said, wrapping his hand with her tail and gently shaking it, “next time, I’ll fight them with you.”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He only pulled his hand back and rubbed the fur behind the demon fox girl’s ears.

“So now… what’s going on with this C Buckle?” Irene turned her head, expression complicated as she looked at the black coffin. “You heard her ‘echoes of the dead.’ That means she’s dead, right? But you put her in this Holy Coffin that can repair the artificial saintess. Do you think she can still be saved?”

“I’m not sure,” Yu Sheng admitted, shaking his head. “I did use Conversation with the Dead on her, but it wasn’t like before. What I saw wasn’t a message left after death. It was memories from the past. If you draw the line at ‘death,’ it’s like two rivers flowing in opposite directions. And the life form of the artificial saintess is special. I can’t judge her state back then with a simple ‘alive’ or ‘dead.'”

He paused, then looked up at the coffin.

“So I put her in here. I don’t know if it’ll work. But I adjusted the repair process the way I would for doll spirit-infusion and vitality awakening, then restarted the device.

“The repair is still running. I can feel it working in there. The system hasn’t thrown an error like she’s completely dead… but she also hasn’t woken up once.

“Maybe we’ll have to wait a while. Maybe we’ll be waiting forever. Who knows? Anyway, we did what we could.”

“…You really care about her,” Irene said, unable to stop herself.

“In that last second, she reached out to me,” Yu Sheng said seriously. “Even though I couldn’t hear what she was saying anymore, I could feel she didn’t want to die then. She still had a lot she wanted to do.

“She wanted to go home. She wanted revenge. She wanted to live. If she’d wanted to die after learning the truth, I wouldn’t have bothered. But since she reached out… I’m going to pull her up.”

Irene lowered her head, thinking hard. After a while, she looked up again and smiled, bright and easy. “All right. You helped me the same way back then, anyway.”

Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow. “I thought you’d be totally against it.”

“I didn’t finish our fight!” Irene said proudly, arms crossed and chin lifted. “When she comes out, I’m going to fight her. Don’t laugh. It’s going to be a serious fight!”

Yu Sheng ruffled her hair, then his gaze slid to Xuan Che, who hadn’t said a word.

Since earlier, Xuan Che’s face had been tight. He hadn’t spoken, but the ground beneath his feet was already layered with frost, clear proof he wasn’t calm.

Noticing Yu Sheng’s attention, Xuan Che broke the silence first. “I will report this to my sect. From what I know of my master, he will also pass it on to the revered leaders of the various schools under the Grand Void Spiritual Axis.

“Refining living people as sacrifices has always been a great taboo, from ancient times to now. Let alone doing it at this scale… harvesting people like wheat and refining them into tools.”

He drew a slow breath, steadying himself, then continued. “For a long time, evil paths like Holy Revere Hermitage and the angel cultists have been targets of harsh suppression under the rule of the Grand Void Spiritual Axis. Once they infiltrate, they harm civilians, defile forests, steal treasures, destroy relics. Anyone righteous may kill them. Now this clue only adds another crime to their kill order.

“I just never imagined they could be this insane. A place where they can act so wildly must be deep inside a star region they control. If you really think about it… those people are their own subjects, aren’t they?”

“If they never treated those people as people in the first place, why would they feel any burden?” Yu Sheng said, voice flat with disgust. “On this ship, I saw a lot and heard a lot. Holy Revere Hermitage has been possessed by dehumanization for a long time. They can tear themselves apart and rebuild into shapes that barely resemble a person. Even within their ranks, they divide themselves into classes based on so-called defects. You could say that, aside from the core doctrine of the Path of Saint Veneration being supreme, there isn’t a single member who still has full dignity and value as a ‘person.'”

Xuan Che thought for a moment, then forced out a bitter smile. “True. You can’t guess the thoughts of evil paths with ordinary reason. If they were rational, why would they fall into demonic ways? It seems I was too attached to my own assumptions.”

After confirming the Holy Coffin was still running normally, Yu Sheng led everyone out of the chamber.

They took the elevator again to the living area inside the high tower: a huge cluster of cabins that took up three full levels, including a residential section, a medical section, and an “eco bay” with a small-scale ecosystem.

The eco bay was lush and green. All kinds of plants grew thick and strong in their designated zones under strict automated control, genetically adjusted into what the Hermitage Order considered the most “perfect” forms. In the medical area, besides basic treatment devices, there was a store of horrifying things: spare human limbs and organs at various cultivation stages, flesh samples sealed in jars, and waste biomass that hadn’t been processed in time.

In the residential area, they found personal belongings left behind by Hermitage Order members: unimportant notes, prayer books marked with annotations, and odds and ends that looked like ordinary household items.

Of course, there were also many things that clearly weren’t “local products,” such as personal information devices far beyond Boundary City’s tech level, and food, tools, and unknown packaging covered in alien writing. Those had obviously been brought in from outside.

Sorting all of it and extracting useful intelligence was a complex, time-consuming project. Yu Sheng was painfully aware of how limited he was in that area.

“Later I’ll have to ‘borrow’ a huge amount of manpower from the Special Operations Bureau,” Yu Sheng said as they walked down a corridor near the core zone. “There are traces of Hermitage Order activity everywhere. Any tiny detail might expose key intel, like the coordinates of a secret starport where the high tower once docked. I also need to ask Bai Li Qing for engineering technicians to repair the outer armor band and the energy lines of the phase engine, plus an expert in system decryption to see if we can dig anything out of the navigation host. I can’t figure this thing out…”

Hunter, who had barely spoken all day, finally couldn’t hold it in. “Why don’t you just fly the spaceship straight into the Special Operations Bureau headquarters building? Park it right under the director’s nose and make her assign five hundred experts to sleep on its hood.”

Yu Sheng seriously considered it. Then he asked, completely earnest, “Is there a floor big enough to park it?”

Hunter: “…?”

Even though it was pitch-black under Hunter’s hood, Yu Sheng still felt like he could see the man’s expression go dark.

Yu Sheng decided not to push that topic.

In the end, he brought Irene and the others to the uppermost level of the high tower’s control hall (the bridge, if you wanted to call it that). He showed them the place where the Sage had fought him and then run off like a loudmouthed brat, and that wrapped up the tour.

Of course, they hadn’t toured the whole ship.

The tower was enormous, its internal structure sprawling and complex. If they seriously explored every corridor and every room, they’d probably still be trapped inside two days later. Yu Sheng only led them through a few main sections connected to the tower’s central passage. They skipped the vast areas full of machinery, storage bays, maintenance tunnels, and more. Besides that, there were several rooms that gave off strange, powerful, or dangerous energy reactions. Yu Sheng still hadn’t figured out what those areas were for, and they were obviously not good places for sightseeing.

Even so, they spent several hours inside the high tower.

Several hours was more than enough time for a pack of energetic troublemakers to discover the new thing that had appeared in the valley and sprint all the way from Fairy Tale Town to the edge of the Black Forest.

So when Yu Sheng pushed the door open and stepped out, the first thing he heard was shrieking chaos. He blinked and saw a whole crowd of kids racing around the ship’s docking platform, yelling and climbing everywhere. Princess Rapunzel was hanging off a bump on the ship’s rear armor, trying to grab the “King,” who had already climbed ten meters up. Jack and Dragonslayer were seriously discussing what the top of the tower looked like. Jack was planning to plant a bean and climb up to take a look, while Dragonslayer said he could just turn into a dragon and drop from the sky onto the tower tip.

But the most eye-catching of all was Princess Snow White. When Yu Sheng came out, she was about to lead her seven Thunder Titan up the tower like an assault team.

Mermaid was still on the ground playing accompaniment, blasting a grand, fiery BGM and getting hyped without knowing why she was hyped.

Little Red Riding Hood stepped out, took one look, and went pale. She roared so loud it felt like the whole sky shook:

“All of you! Get your asses over here!!”