Alien Hotel.

Chapter 490: Intelligence Regarding the "Dark Alley"
Yu Sheng looked at the old post that Little Red Riding Hood had found with great care, his brows furrowed slightly.

After a while, he suddenly looked up and asked, "What is this 'dark alley' that's mentioned here?"

“It’s an alien realm, with the entrance in an old street in the Qinghe District in the east of the city. Under stable conditions, the depth is around L2, and the danger level is 2,” Little Red Riding Hood replied immediately. “It’s a relatively risky place for ordinary spirit detectives.”

"What exactly is it like? Tell me in detail?" Yu Sheng asked curiously.

Little Red Riding Hood then recalled for a moment and began to explain to Yu Sheng: "'Dark Alley' looks like an ordinary old street from the outside, but inside it is always cloudy and evening, and the temperature is the same as in the real world. The dark alley is about two hundred meters long, with a large number of old shops on both sides. Most of the shops cannot be entered, but there will always be at least one shop that is open. There is no one guarding it, and it sells some 'strange' goods. Sometimes there are very valuable goods, but there may also be dangerous traps."

"The alley is one-way, with one end blocked by a concrete wall and the other end being a crossroads. Each fork in the road at the crossroads leads to an almost identical 'alley,' but only one of them is relatively safe. Although many people in the border communications field have summarized various methods and patterns for identification, those distinguishing features often fail, so you basically have to rely on luck and intuition to make a choice."

"After entering a safe alley, continue forward. As long as you don't fall into a trap or intentionally die, you will gradually return to the old street in the real world. However, if you go the wrong way, you will enter a more eerie and gloomy version of the 'dark alley'. At the same time, from this entry onwards, entities - cats - will gradually begin to generate in the dark alley."

Yu Sheng immediately raised an eyebrow: "A cat?"

“Yes, it’s a dangerous entity,” Little Red Riding Hood nodded. “It looks like a black cat, similar in size, shape and movement to a house cat, but its fur feels like plastic or rubber, and its movements have a noticeable ‘stuttering’ quality, giving the visual experience similar to ‘frame skipping’ in a video.”

"Once the 'cats' are generated, they will start to approach people who enter the alley. Their 'contact' will cause wounds similar to knife cuts, and even just touching their fur will cause injury."

"The first 'cat' that is generated is not fast, roughly the walking speed of an adult. Explorers have ample time and opportunity to pass through the alley to reach the next intersection. However, if the wrong path is chosen again and the alley is re-entered, the number of 'cats' will increase by one, and their movement speed and attack power will also increase. If the wrong path is chosen again, the number and speed of 'cats' will increase again, and their attack power will also increase, and so on."

Yu Sheng stroked his chin: "No upper limit?"

“At least in terms of numbers, no upper limit has been found so far,” Little Red Riding Hood shook her head. “The Secret Service has conducted tests, using fully armed Deep Sea Pilots in conjunction with psychics with powerful psychic vision to 'clear' the alleys. They relied on the psychics' judgment to keep choosing the wrong side of the road, and eventually, even when the alley was crammed with thousands of supersonic charging cats, more 'cats' kept spawning—and by then, even the Deep Sea Pilots' force field shields and charged armor were almost unable to withstand them.”

"However, although their numbers have not yet reached an upper limit, their speed should still be limited—currently, it is speculated that they should not exceed the speed of light..."

Yu Sheng subconsciously twitched his lips: "Then the danger level of this thing, when added up, is more than level 2, right..."

“Under normal circumstances, explorers are unlikely to be so unlucky as to take the wrong turn hundreds or thousands of times in a row—and a few ‘cats’ are not necessarily fatal to well-trained professionals,” Little Red Riding Hood shook her head. “The danger rating is based on a comprehensive assessment of various characteristics, such as normal conditions and whether the danger source is avoidable. The Secret Service’s extreme tests are not the same as those.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Yu Sheng scratched his head, then asked curiously, “So how do we deal with these ‘cats’? Just fight them?”

"When there are only a few, it's easy to deal with them. Although they are very resilient and difficult to destroy completely, you can still fight them head-on if there are only three or four. Also, if you are lucky enough to find a 'pet shop' open when you enter the alley, you can pay some money to buy a can of cat food. That can be used to bribe the 'cats' that spawn in the alley, and they will take you directly to the emergency exit."

Yu Sheng: "...You can do that!?"

“Sure, it’s part of the inherent mechanism of the Dark Alley,” Little Red Riding Hood said matter-of-factly. “Many otherworldly realms have some strange mechanisms, so this is already considered quite normal.”

She paused, then shook her head: "But conversely, if you're unlucky, it's a much bigger problem... Every year, there are exceptionally unlucky spirit detectives who repeatedly fail in their spiritual intuition when choosing a path, and they are killed by 'cats' in dark alleys, or fall into traps disguised as shops, becoming part of the alley. There are even rumors that many of the goods sold in those alley shops are actually victims swallowed up by the alley..."

Yu Sheng stroked his chin thoughtfully, building up a preliminary understanding of the "dark alley" from the information provided by Little Red Riding Hood. However, his attention soon returned to the "tower" he had started with.

"Does the crossroads at the end of the dark alley only lead to the alley on the next floor or an emergency exit?"

“Logically speaking, that’s how it is,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a serious expression. “No one has ever mentioned that the end of the alley leads to some strange space where a tower is located, nor have there been any investigation reports of other forks in the road.”

Yu Sheng frowned, his gaze falling back onto the phone screen, and he scrolled down to the content below the post.

There were many replies under the post. In such a serious exchange of information involving help from a foreign land, almost no one would deliberately cause trouble or join in the fun. Most of the replies were asking for more details about the tower and the current situation of the person involved. The poster responded to almost all the questions seriously, and the most recent post went back to some time last year.

The most frequently asked question was how the person involved left the tower—although the poster initially emphasized that he couldn't remember the experience, people were clearly still very interested in it.

After several exchanges, the poster finally mentioned a detail—"cold and eerie". Ever since he returned from that tower, he had been plagued by nightmares, trapped in that dark tower in his dreams, and every time he woke up, he would feel a coldness that seemed to seep into his bones, as if...waking up from a grave.

"A chilling cold that seeps into your bones..."

Yu Sheng subconsciously raised his head and looked towards the small square, searching for Eileen's figure.

The children were already at nap time, so no one was playing with her anymore. She found a big rock by the roadside and was now diligently polishing the ominous star—she had been polishing that stone ball for several days, and it still hadn't changed at all. But the little doll seemed to firmly believe that as long as she persisted, she could polish it smooth, so she was still full of energy.

As for what to do after polishing the Ominous Star smooth, she obviously hadn't thought about it at all.

I wonder how long this strange new interest of the little doll will last.

“I think we need to find the person who posted this,” Yu Sheng suddenly said. “Judging from the replies below, no one else has seen that ‘tower’ except him. He himself is getting worse and worse because he is plagued by nightmares. When he last replied, he was even considering going to see a strange doctor to ‘cut out his brain’.”

“This person hasn’t sent anything on the border communications since his last reply a few months ago,” Little Red Riding Hood said, taking back her phone and swiping the screen with a frown. “This situation isn’t good… I’ll try to contact him first, and if there’s no response, I’ll have to ask Captain Song for help.”

Yu Sheng nodded slightly.

Little Red Riding Hood put away her phone, stood up, stretched lazily, and waved to Yu Sheng: "I'm going back to my driving practice now!"

"Keep it up," Yu Sheng replied with a smile, then added after a moment's thought, "Stop carrying the car into the parking space, you're just fooling yourself..."

Little Red Riding Hood made a face at him, then jumped off the castle roof and darted into the driving range in a blur. She skillfully jumped into the car, started it, released the clutch, turned it off, started it again, released the clutch, turned it off, got out to sulk, got back in, and started the car again…

Yu Sheng felt that she wouldn't be able to pass the second part of her driving test.

She's usually a very reliable girl, so why is she stuck on getting her driver's license...?

Yu Sheng got up from the pile of soft fox tails, then turned his head slightly and saw that Hu Li had woken up at some point—a pair of big golden-red eyes were staring straight at him, with the corners of the eyes slightly curved.

"wake up?"

"Hmm." The fox spirit girl nodded, then rolled over and lay on all fours on the roof. She stretched her body and yawned, her nine tails stretching comfortably in mid-air, swaying like a peacock's tail. After stretching, she hummed contentedly before slowly returning to Yu Sheng's side to continue lying down.

Then, after a short while, she suddenly blurted out, "My benefactor, do you think Eileen would want to know about the 'Goddess of Omens'? What if one day we really do find out something..."

Yu Sheng turned his head and saw the big ears on Hu Li's head twitching.

“I’m very alert even when I’m asleep,” the fox girl said smugly, “I can hear what you’re saying.”

“Then it seems I can’t talk bad about you while you’re sleeping anymore,” Yu Sheng said with a smile, then his expression turned serious. “Actually, sometimes I have doubts and wonder if the ‘truth’ is really that important to Eileen. After all, in a sense, it’s good that she’s carefree, and with her n… personality, she really can live carefree forever.”

Hu Li raised her head, her expression serious: "My benefactor, were you just trying to say that with her 'brain'?"

Yu Sheng's expression stiffened for a moment, but he pretended not to hear and continued, "But don't you think that in the matter of the 'Goddess of Omens,' it's not that we've been investigating something, but rather that the matter itself... has been chasing us all along?"

As Hu Li listened, her eyes slowly widened.

(End of this chapter)