Chapter 410

Chapter 410: New Function

The Little Doll—only 66.6 centimeters tall—sat up on the alchemy platform. She blinked sluggishly. It took her a long moment, like she was finishing a boot sequence, before she finally lifted her head. Her gaze drifted blankly to Yu Sheng.

Yu Sheng had been about to ask Irene whether the mass-produced body was running in “low bandwidth mode,” but one look at that dopey, slow-eyed stare told him everything. With a “wise” expression like that, the bandwidth was clearly not going to be high.

Even Foxy couldn’t help muttering, “This one doesn’t look very smart.”

“No kidding,” Yu Sheng said. “Low bandwidth—do you even understand what low bandwidth means?”

Irene (Rebar), standing beside him, rolled her eyes and started issuing commands to the mass-produced version on the platform. “I’ll have her climb down and walk around a bit first…”

The moment Irene finished speaking, the mass-produced Irene swayed. Like a machine running a careful self-check after startup, she stared at her own hands, then her feet. Two or three seconds later, she finally stood—stiffly, awkwardly—edged backward off the platform, and then promptly faceplanted.

Yu Sheng stared.

Foxy stared.

“What are you looking at?” Irene snapped, cheeks faintly pink. “A body that just woke up needs time to adjust, okay?”

Still acting as the host, she jutted her chin and tried to sound confident. “Before, I always took over a new body directly, so of course it was steady. Now I’m trying to let the body move on instinct, and I’m telling you, this is—”

She didn’t get to finish. The mass-produced Irene, who had just struggled to her feet, went down again with a soft thud… and then started crawling in a bizarre, gloomy posture, like some haunted puppet dragging itself across the floor.

Yu Sheng couldn’t watch anymore. He stepped forward and hauled the crawling doll upright. “I think your first step should be taking over for a bit,” he said. “At least teach this body what ‘walking upright’ even is.”

Irene blinked, looking slightly dazed. “Y-yeah… right?”

Then came another round of chaos. Foxy was completely clueless, Yu Sheng only half understood, and Little Doll wasn’t exactly reliable either. Three unreliable idiots crowded together, trying to figure out how to make a living doll with no brain follow simple commands. They failed again and again—until, at last, Irene seemed to find the rhythm and successfully awakened the sleeping “spirit” inside that completely blank mass-production body.

Yu Sheng couldn’t quite describe what happened in that moment.

He felt it.

Something appeared inside the hollow shell in his hands—a vivid texture, as if the empty container suddenly had weight in a way it hadn’t before. The body that had only held a shallow spark of life became, in an instant, a real “living thing” with spirit. Slowly, the small body turned its head, stiff eyes staring in this direction.

Yu Sheng hesitated, then set the mass-produced Irene on the floor. She wobbled, arms twitching as if searching for balance, and then steadied herself.

She had no self, let alone any “intelligence.” At her core, she was still a container Irene directly controlled. But now, that container carried the faintest hint of spirituality—something between a soul and an empty shell.

“…So this is a machine spirit?” Yu Sheng murmured, frowning as he watched the doll’s slow, blank movements. “Or, in Xuan Che’s terms… an artifact spirit?”

“Come here,” Irene said, waving.

For the first time, instead of directly “taking over,” she tried to make the body move by issuing commands.

The mass-produced doll reacted immediately. After locating Irene, she walked straight toward her.

“Oh—oh—oh! It worked!” Irene burst out, spinning toward Yu Sheng. “Yu Sheng, look! It worked!”

She turned back, delight written all over her face. Staring at the “mass-produced me” standing in front of her, she examined the doll from head to toe for a long moment. “Wow… seeing my own body like this for the first time feels kind of unreal.”

Yu Sheng sighed. “Only you could get used to it this fast. Anyone else would be dying of awkwardness if another ‘them’ wobbled around in front of them.” He waved a hand. “Alright. Try something more complex. Then we test the new function.”

“Yep!”

Irene answered immediately and began running test after test.

First came basic running and jumping, then finer movements—climbing and grasping—and finally the high-difficulty test: imitating writing.

The mass-produced doll carried out the host’s commands without a sound. She looked stiff the whole time, but she completed almost every task perfectly.

Yu Sheng watched with a quiet kind of amazement. Right now, two Little Dolls were lying on the floor. Irene held a ritual engraving knife and carved a set of complex alchemical runes into the ground, while the mass-produced doll lay beside her with another knife, copying her movements and reproducing the runes line for line.

Honestly, two tiny figures sprawled on the floor and scratching away like that was oddly entertaining.

“Basic movement is fine. Execution is fine,” Irene said as she climbed to her feet and dusted off her hands. Then she leaned down and patted the mass-produced doll’s skirt. “Sometimes her reactions are slower, and she can’t handle sudden, complex situations. But if she runs into trouble, she should ask for help. I think I’ve successfully taught her the concept of ‘asking for help.’”

The mass-produced doll stared blankly, as if listening—or maybe simply tracking Irene’s gestures. After a moment, she clapped her hands once, then reached out and patted Irene’s skirt too.

“…Her learning and imitation are very strong,” Irene added, without missing a beat.

Foxy asked curiously, “So you have to teach every single mass-produced doll like this in the future?”

“No.” Irene waved it off. “After this, they can learn from each other. Mass-produced dolls aren’t flexible, but sharing knowledge and experience between them is even easier than for humans. Teach one of them something new, and the rest will pick it up quickly.”

Foxy paused, then her ears twitched as she caught on. “They’re networking?”

“It’s ‘we,’” Irene corrected, deadly serious. “All Irene are linked together—mass-produced or not. But right now there’s only this one mass-produced test sample, so I can’t say what it’ll look like once there are a lot of them. We’ll see.”

Little Doll might be small, but she always thought big.

After the basic tests, it was time for the new function.

“Next, we’ll see whether the mass-production unit’s special ability actually works,” Yu Sheng said, exhaling softly. His gaze settled on the blank-faced doll. “Go farther away first.”

The mass-produced doll hesitated, as if confirming whether she should obey Yu Sheng’s command. Then she nodded, turned, and walked toward a corner of the lab.

“Will this really work?” Irene stared at Yu Sheng, nervous. “Don’t you break my first mass-production unit!”

Yu Sheng snorted. “When have I ever made you worry?”

He glanced at Little Doll, then focused on the mass-production unit not far away.

More precisely, he focused on the precast gate inside her body.

He steadied his breathing and lifted a hand toward the air beside him—

Following the principle of “portable Wu Tong Road No. 66,” Yu Sheng had left the imprint of a gate inside the mass-production unit’s skeleton. But it wasn’t quite the same as the gate he used in everyday life.

In terms of manufacturing, every “Irene” contained Yu Sheng’s blood. That blood effectively granted every Irene equal door-opening permission—and an activation key.

Blood and gate, together, complete.

Yu Sheng gently pressed at the space beside him.

At the far end of the lab, the mass-produced doll suddenly turned blurry and unreal. Ripples spread out from her tiny figure, and in the next second she seemed to fold inward—vanishing in an instant—only to reappear beside Yu Sheng like a flicker of light snapping into place.

Foxy stared at the scene, then realization hit her all at once. It looked exactly like the way Hotel teleported in and out of the valley.

Yu Sheng smiled.

Just as he’d predicted, Hotel’s teleportation method could be reproduced.

Back then, when he sent that enormous ship from outer space into the valley, he fused the gate he opened with the ship’s phase engine, treating the entire ship as a door. That was why, at the moment of opening, he could “flip” the ship’s coordinates to the other side of the door—sending it straight to the destination: the Black Forest.

It wasn’t the same process as how he normally opened a door, but the principle wasn’t that different.

At least, to Yu Sheng, the essence was the same.

A gate symbolized separation and connection. It was a bond linking two places that had been cut off from each other. Opening the door meant two spaces fused and coexisted—whether “you” passed through the door, or the door passed through “you.” Whether you stepped into the other side, or the space beyond the door arrived beneath your feet.

As long as the result was the same, the form and the process didn’t matter.

Even the shape of the door didn’t matter.

Yu Sheng lowered his head and smiled at the mass-produced doll now standing beside him, looking faintly dazed. It was hard to tell if she was stunned from teleporting, or if she was simply always like this.

Irene wandered over and peered up at him. “So… the new function isn’t just that you can summon them whenever you want, right? If that’s all, you can already pull people over with door opening.”

“Of course it’s not that simple,” Yu Sheng said with a laugh. “Mass-produced dolls with a built-in precast gate can do a lot more than that.”

Irene blinked, deep in thought.