Alien Hotel.

Chapter 489 Mysterious Tower
Yu Sheng leisurely basked in the sun on the roof of the castle with Little Red Riding Hood (although there was no sun there). Hu Li had already fallen asleep beside him at some point. The fox spirit girl stuffed a bunch of tails behind Yu Sheng, then curled up on her side, hugging the big tail she usually used to store food, snoring softly in the sunlight, with a faint smile on her face.

“She seems carefree…” Yu Sheng turned his head to look at the fox girl who was fast asleep next to him, and scratched the fur behind her ear. “She’s really living a peaceful life as long as she’s well-fed.”

“There’s an even more carefree one in the valley,” Little Red Riding Hood said slowly, leaning against the shadow wolf she had summoned, while lounging on the roof.

Yu Sheng raised his eyelids: "Who? Rapunzel?"

“Golden Retriever? She’s not carefree at all. She has a lot of worries, like the homework she has to hand in when school starts,” Little Red Riding Hood squinted. “I’m talking about the snake.”

Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow: "Snake Princess? Didn't she return to Thousand Peaks Spirit Mountain yesterday?"

“She’s back again. Now she can open that door by herself, so she’s always wandering around the valley and the sacred mountain, eating as if she’s visiting someone’s home,” Little Red Riding Hood yawned. “She should be picking wild berries in the Black Forest right now. When she’s full, she’ll swim along the river all the way to the town to play with the king. She’ll play until dark and then go to sleep in the woods to the north. She’s living a carefree life, just like a protected species.”

Yu Sheng was just listening casually when he suddenly became a little surprised: "She wants to play with the king? Isn't she always getting beaten up because she keeps climbing on the king's cat tree?"

"Yeah, that's what we'll play."

Yu Sheng: "...?"

"Don't ask me, I don't know what she's thinking either. The king is so annoyed right now—I've never seen anyone so irritable in my life."

Yu Sheng blinked, but just as he was about to say something more, a series of vibrations from his phone interrupted him.

I took out my phone and saw that the border communications system was sending out messages like crazy. When I opened it, they were all from the Alice doll named Marlene—a lot of video footage and accompanying explanations.

He read through them one by one, and when he got to the last one, he suddenly sat up.

The battle record, seemingly "Eileen's" last confrontation with an enemy... A massive shadow crouching atop a mysterious, shattered tower... A blonde figure rushing towards the tower...

“This is data I found deep within the Garden Network,” Marlene sent another message. “The data is severely damaged, and the upload path cannot be traced, but it is certain that it was uploaded by the ‘Eileen’ from 3,700 years ago at the last moment before she fought with some mysterious enemy—the footage continues until the moment she rushes to the top of the tower, after which the recording stops.”

"It's still uncertain whether there are any more records in the Garden Network... My exploration triggered the Scavenger Programs, which may prevent me from diving again in the short term. Also, Maris experienced some malfunctions when she dived into the network with me and is currently in poor condition... We probably won't be able to search for more information in the Deep Network for the time being."

"Another detail is that when I was operating in the deep network, I noticed that my mental body was entangled by a 'spider web'..."

Yu Sheng looked at the message sent by the living doll, then went back to carefully examine the video data that Marlene had processed a second time and sent to the border communications. His brows gradually furrowed.

After a while, he sent Marlene a message: "...Why is that 'Eileen' carrying a frying pan?"

He quickly received a reply: "That's our Alice doll's standard weapon."

Yu Sheng: "...?"

"The reasons behind this are very complicated," Marlene's tone in the message seemed somewhat conflicted, "A complete explanation might require 259 million words..."

Upon seeing this, Yu Sheng immediately said that no further explanation was needed—after all, he already had enough strange and wonderful things in the world.

Of course, another important reason for his reply was that Little Red Riding Hood leaned over to take a look and whispered something to him—

"What's so strange about that? When the number one expert of Thousand Peaks Spirit Mountain fights, he just grabs a brick and goes in. Your raccoon can launch its tail, but at least their frying pan has a handle. Isn't that more like a 'weapon' than a fox-carrot missile?"

Yu Sheng thought Little Red Riding Hood was right; she truly had the brain of someone who had just finished the college entrance exam.

He then continued to study the information Marlene had sent him, while secretly peeking towards the small square.

Eileen was still running around wildly with a group of kids, while Teacher Su and a few fairy tale "parents" were somewhat helplessly maintaining order at the edge of the square. Yun Qingzi had moved a stool and was sitting on the roadside, watching the children play happily, with a plate of sunflower seeds next to him—of course, given that the old man was now a spirit and unable to eat, his method of eating sunflower seeds was to grab them and refine them instantly...

Very high-end and sophisticated.

Yu Sheng stared at the squeaking little dolls in the square for a long time, then looked away and compared them with the blond figure on his phone screen carrying a frying pan and rushing towards the "Outer God," flipping them back and forth several times... but in the end, he still couldn't get them to overlap.

However, judging from the content at the end of the video, the kind of reckless and uncivilized attitude that comes across as somewhat similar is indeed quite accurate.

It's mainly the people with poor manners.

“So this was your style all along…” Little Red Riding Hood heard Yu Sheng’s mutterings, but her attention was clearly drawn to the images on her phone. The girl frowned slightly as she looked at the last few pictures taken from the video. As Yu Sheng was scrolling through the pictures, she suddenly reached out and stopped him: “Wait, let me see.”

Yu Sheng glanced at Little Red Riding Hood with some surprise, then handed over the phone: "You..."

He saw Little Red Riding Hood flip to one of the pictures, click to enlarge it, and look at the details in the picture with a somewhat solemn expression.

That was a scene captured as Marlene's gaze returned from the top of the tower. In the slightly distorted image, the broken spiral staircases and the floorboards that seemed to float in mid-air as if weightless could be clearly seen, as well as the dark-colored wall structure next to the staircase covered with intricate reliefs.

"This looks familiar."

Upon hearing this, Yu Sheng was taken aback: "This looks familiar... Do you know what this place is? Have you been there?!"

“I’ve never been there, but I remember seeing a photo that looks a lot like this somewhere,” Little Red Riding Hood said, frowning as if she was trying hard to remember something. “It was a few years ago, in some post on the Border Communications forum… wait a minute, let me check!”

As she spoke, she pulled out her phone, opened Border Communications, and began rapidly scrolling through her bookmarks, muttering to herself as she swiped through the pile of pages: "I remember that post was quite popular back then, I even bookmarked it... Ah, why is there so much random stuff..."

Yu Sheng stared blankly at the other person fiddling around, craned his neck to take a look, and was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume. He couldn't help but ask, "...You never clean up your bookmarks? And you bookmark everything?"

Little Red Riding Hood frantically swiped her phone screen without looking up: "These are all things that might come in handy, it's no trouble to just add them to my favorites..."

"That's right, clicking is easy, but finding something inside is a nightmare—don't you at least remember the keywords? Try searching for it?"

Little Red Riding Hood: "I searched, and this is what it looks like after filtering with keywords."

Yu Sheng was immediately filled with awe and fell silent.

But watching the girl sweating profusely as she searched through her browsing history from several years ago, he suddenly found it amusing.

Little Red Riding Hood usually gives people the impression of being calm, reliable, and intelligent. She is the most prestigious "parent" in fairy tales, but in reality, she also has a rash and even childish side.

Of course, we can't say that now, since he's already eighteen and has already retaken his driving test twice.

"Ah, that's it!"

Little Red Riding Hood's delighted voice interrupted Yu Sheng's reverie. He quickly pulled his wandering thoughts back and craned his neck to look at what was displayed on the other person's phone.

It was a post that combined sharing with asking for help.

The poster first posted a picture in the border communications forum, showing a person standing on a broken staircase looking up at the interior of the tower—it was clearly taken in a hurry, as the edges of the image were shaky.

It matches a frame from the video Marlene sent!

"This is the place!"

Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood spoke in unison.

Then their eyes all turned to the description below the post—

"...I stumbled into this place while carrying out an investigation in the 'Dark Alley,' when I was fleeing from a physical 'cat'... Suddenly, fog rolled in, and then a fork in the road appeared at the end of the dark alley, a road not recorded in the documents. The fork led to a strange area with a tall tower standing there..."

"I cannot determine whether this eerie area is still part of the 'Dark Alley'. It is likely another alien realm because there are obvious 'fault' features at the edge of this space, and there is no physical passage that can directly return to the 'Dark Alley'."

"I documented many scenes inside and outside the tower, but for some reason, most of the photos were damaged after I returned to the real world, covered by eerie shadows or tangled threads, making them illegible. Only this photo survived—but I don't know when I took it..."

"Note: The photo may have been taken accidentally. It is suspected that this is related to the 'mechanism' of the tower. Perhaps it erases all conscious recording behavior, but random or timed shooting may be able to bypass this mechanism."

"Now I'm posting this photo in hopes of any possible clues related to this tower... I can't remember how I left the tower, but it's been appearing in my dreams every day for the past ten days."

“I suspect that a part of me is still trapped in that tower.”

(End of this chapter)