Alien Hotel.

Chapter 496 The King's Power

The large hole disappeared as if it had never existed, and the collapse and shaking of the old bookstore suddenly stopped. Only the "rotten knowledge" that kept flowing down from the bookshelves continued to accumulate, and after touching the floor, it quickly turned into some kind of sludge-like substance, emitting an unsettling stench of decay.

Yu Sheng then turned and left the increasingly eerie and uninteresting old bookstore. Almost the instant he ran out of the door, a loud bang came from behind him—the door closed, and the brightly lit entrance became as dark as the other shops around it.

Little Red Riding Hood and the King stood at the doorway, the two of them warily watching the depths of the alley. The short staff in the "priest's" hand emitted a soft and warm glow, illuminating a small area around them.

“The hole disappeared,” Yu Sheng said quickly. “Before it disappeared, I saw that it was all fog outside, and there were spider web-like things extending from a distance.”

"Can you please stop being so reckless?" Little Red Riding Hood turned around and gave Yu Sheng a helpless look. "Even if you're not afraid of dying, at least consider the pace of ordinary people like us... Wait, spider silk? What kind of spider silk?"

“What else could it be? It’s similar to the kind Eileen usually uses,” Yu Sheng sighed. “We came here to find clues in this area, and now we have a clue. Something is indeed ‘infiltrating’ into the dark alley ‘outside.’ Unfortunately, the opening only lasted for a moment, and it even caused the old bookstore to collapse…”

“This is another world, and everything will be restored before we enter again, but I don’t recommend you dig holes anywhere next time,” Little Red Riding Hood said, pointing across the road. “The ‘vandalism’ just now has changed the alleyway, and things… aren’t quite right.”

At the girl's prompting, Yu Sheng immediately noticed many changes in the details of the alley.

The light seemed dimmer than when I first entered the alley. The already damp stone brick ground was now covered with an unpleasant layer of dark moss. All the buildings on both sides of the alley looked older and more dilapidated than before. The strings of lights that crisscrossed between the rooftops flickered on and off as if they were not properly connected, and the colors of the lights changed constantly like an illusion, making me dizzy.

All the shops across the street had their doors and windows tightly shut, and the signs, illuminated by dim lights, were covered with a thick layer of grime. The writing under the grime was not only blurry but also completely indistinguishable upon closer inspection—it looked like words, but in reality, they were all just randomly combined lines that had no meaning whatsoever.

Yu Sheng: "This is..."

“We went straight into the next level of ‘dark alley’,” Little Red Riding Hood said seriously. “We didn’t come in through the crossroads, but the moment we left that old bookstore, we entered this even stranger version of the alley.”

Yu Sheng blinked, then suddenly realized: "Wait, what about the 'cat'? Doesn't a physical cat appear in the deeper alley?"

“That’s why I said something’s not right—no entities are generated here, and… all the shops in the alley are closed,” Little Red Riding Hood looked up and around. “Normally, there should be at least one shop open in the alley.”

Yu Sheng pursed his lips and cautiously looked around.

The alley was eerily quiet, but in this extreme silence, it was as if countless eyes were watching from the darkness, watching the uninvited guests who had invaded the alley and were causing trouble.

Yu Sheng thought he heard a faint meow, but when he looked up, he only saw the moss-covered corner of the wall and the ground.

“Let’s go to the crossroads at the end of the alley first and see if we can enter a more normal level,” the king suddenly spoke up. He was sitting on the wandering mage’s shoulder with a serious cat face. “I think we might not have fully entered the ‘next level’, but are stuck between the first level’s dark alley and the second level. That’s why the surroundings seem so strange, yet no normal entities are generated.”

Yu Sheng looked at the tabby cat sitting on the wandering mage's shoulder with some surprise, feeling that the other party was behaving like an experienced, calm and reliable old spirit detective at this moment—a stark contrast to its usual lazy appearance of lying on the 200-square-meter cat tree all day sunbathing.

He voiced his surprise, only to be met with the king's lazy grumbling: "What's so surprising? I've seen all sorts of strange lands. I'm always the one who has to go in and rescue any unlucky kid from the orphanage who accidentally gets stuck there. Besides, I also have to take on quests to earn money—as a little cat, do you know how much I have to bear in life..."

Yu Sheng turned to look at Little Red Riding Hood, who nodded: "What it said is true. As one of the most capable and versatile members of the 'Fairy Tale,' the King has a wealth of experience as a spirit detective... He's an expert in the entire border region."

“Um, that’s why I was just about to ask,” Yu Sheng finally couldn’t help but ask, “It’s a cat, so how does it usually accept missions…”

“It’s simple. If it needs to deal with other spirit detectives or investigators, it will do it on its own. Anyway, we’re used to weird things in our line of work,” Little Red Riding Hood said casually. “If it needs to deal with ordinary people, it will summon a clever subordinate to communicate with the client while it pretends to be a pet cat.”

Upon hearing this, Yu Sheng immediately found it very reasonable, thinking to himself, "Fairy Tale" truly lives up to its reputation as a long-established spirit world detective organization, with a wealth of experience in handling all sorts of strange and unusual cases—in comparison, his "Inn" hasn't even received a single proper case yet...

But then he thought again, "The 'hotel' isn't exactly without business, it's just that it deals mostly with big and serious cases..."

The group walked through the eerily quiet alley. The alley wasn't long, and they soon reached the end of the road.

A similarly desolate crossroads appeared before Yu Sheng.

He looked curiously toward the intersection and saw that the scene at each intersection was almost identical, all leading to a dimly lit alley. All the buildings on both sides of the alley had their doors and windows tightly closed, and the distance was shrouded in mist, making it impossible to see what was happening a hundred meters away no matter how he looked.

He hesitated for a moment, then turned to Little Red Riding Hood: "Which way?"

The girl frowned deeply and did not respond for a moment.

A huge shadow wolf lurked around her, sniffing around the crossroads.

After a long while, Little Red Riding Hood finally broke the silence: "...There is no passage to the next floor; all three are emergency exits."

Yu Sheng was stunned. All three were emergency exits?!
In a normal exploration operation, this situation would be ideal, as the primary objective for most spirit detectives and investigators is to safely evacuate from the alien realm with intelligence or supplies. The appearance of three safe exits at the end of a dark alley is nothing short of a stroke of good fortune; it would require their ancestors to unleash a 200-meter-long jet of flame, and even burn down the underworld, to create such a miraculous safety net.

But Yu Sheng didn't come here today for a safe evacuation.

"Wait a minute, didn't the information say that there's only one correct 'safety exit' at the crossroads at the end of the alley, and the other two lead to deeper levels?" he blurted out instinctively. "How can this directly trigger the guaranteed exit... but we're supposed to go deeper into the alley?"

"I don't know either. That's why things are so strange today," Little Red Riding Hood said, clearly confused as well. "Why don't you, Your Majesty, have the sorcerer try the Great Prophecy spell again?"

The king did not respond to Little Red Riding Hood's words. Instead, he suddenly jumped off the "wandering wizard" and stared intently into the dim light at the depths of the street in the direction he had come from, as if he had discovered something.

Before Yu Sheng could even ask a question, the king let out a threatening growl, followed by a low shout: "Come out!"

That direction was empty, with only mottled moss and shadows in the corner.

But in the next second, Yu Sheng’s vision suddenly blurred—the mottled moss and shadows trembled instantly, and then something slowly “squeezed” out of the shadows, like some kind of fluid drilling from the two-dimensional shadow plane into the three-dimensional space.

It was a small black cat with fur that had a rubbery or plastic-like texture.

It slowly walked towards the king, but its movements were like cut-out video footage, with "frame skipping" and teleportation phenomena occurring every few steps.

The physical entity is a "cat".

The moment the first black cat appeared, Yu Sheng noticed that many dark corners in the alley suddenly became restless.

Shadows lurked in the corners, eaves, windowsills, and along the roadside. Countless cat-shaped silhouettes of all sizes came into his view. A large number of entities were moving from the two-dimensional plane into the three-dimensional space. The pitch-black cats emerged from every corner of the alley, their pale, dimly lit eyes fixed on the uninvited guests at the intersection.

The invisible gazes I had felt along the way seemed to be real.

Little Red Riding Hood instinctively took a half step back, staring in astonishment at the scene before her: "They're cats... but how come there are so many all of a sudden?!"

“They don’t seem too happy,” Yu Sheng was startled, but then he noticed something else. “But judging from their posture… it’s as if they’re urging us to leave through the emergency exit?”

Just then, the king suddenly took two steps forward and came to the middle of the road.

The tabby cat stared at the black cats that had gathered in the alley, especially the first black cat that appeared not far away, and slowly arched its back.

Its voice was deep and menacing—

"Logically speaking, cats of your level have no right to hiss me."

The little black cat across the way: "Ha—"

The king was visibly startled, then immediately arched his back even higher: "Ha!"

As a result, several black cats on the other side arched their backs together and yelled, "Ha!!"

Then the two sides started exchanging greetings.

Yu Sheng: "...?"

The situation seems to be a little different from what was initially said.

However, just as the two cats were getting increasingly tense with their hissing, the king suddenly stopped and, with a hiss from the black cat opposite, swung its paw.

The four-person adventurer team vanished into thin air in an instant.

A group of archmages dressed in star-studded robes, carrying amethyst staffs, and whose energy fluctuations could almost distort space, suddenly filled the entire intersection.

The king licked his paws: "Prepare for a blast of Sunfire."

The little black cat across the way: "Meow~"

(End of this chapter)