Alien Hotel.

Chapter 513 A Valley Full of Dolls

Early the next morning, Yu Sheng went to the valley without doing anything else.

Eileen was running around in the valley, covering the mountains and plains.

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. After all, the valley is now vast and contains a large number of spatial subsets generated by the "Fairy Tale" alien realm. Even with four groups of mass-produced dolls, there aren't many after they're scattered around. But to be fair, in the areas with the highest concentration of mass-produced dolls—such as the teleportation hub and the Fairy Tale Town area—there are Eileens everywhere.

Some of them were being chased around town by the doll leaders, some were helping to clean the streets and alleys, some were helping to take care of facilities such as generators and water pumps, and a large number of dolls that were temporarily not on a mission were wandering around everywhere, on rooftops, treetops, and in the wilderness. Yu Sheng also saw several dolls that got lost and then fell into a vicious cycle, banging their heads against the wall near the castle. After they were knocked unconscious, they were carried back to restart by other mass-produced dolls that were passing by...

Yu Sheng sat with Little Red Riding Hood on the steps in front of the castle, watching a line of mass-produced Irene figures, each carrying a small shovel, walk past in the open space not far away. He wondered what they were going to do. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a small doll helping to lay tiles on the roof slip and tumble off the roof, getting stuck in a treetop. A few seconds later, other dolls came running over with bamboo poles and began to pry their trapped companions down from the tree...

“These dolls that run around everywhere have now become part of the town’s scenery, and everyone is quite used to them,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a smile. “Although they are very small, they are very helpful. They can understand simple things after being told them a few times, and they can learn complicated tasks after being shown a few times—Eileen doesn’t need to control them herself.”

Yu Sheng breathed a sigh of relief: "That's good. I was worried at first that the sudden increase in the number of these puppets would cause you trouble."

“No, not at all—these mass-produced dolls are actually much easier to manage than their ‘original bodies’,” Little Red Riding Hood waved her hand. “It’s just that because of their small size and simple minds, they sometimes get trapped in strange places, like falling into pits or getting stuck in trees. But if they are really trapped, they will shout for help, and the mass-produced dolls will also help each other in a simple way, so there’s not much to worry about.”

She paused, then added, "Grandpa Yun also likes them quite a bit. He's planning to build a pill-making workshop on the east side of town recently, and he's invited a lot of puppets to help. He says these mass-produced Eileen puppets are quite spiritual, and they even have innate spiritual bones, far surpassing ordinary mechanical puppets. Given time, they might even be able to awaken their spiritual roots. Anyway, I don't really understand, but he seems to be trying to teach these puppets how to establish their foundations recently..."

Yu Sheng was stunned. Involuntarily, the image of the ethereal Yun Qingzi solemnly preaching in front of a group of three-dimensional puppets flashed through his mind. However, he couldn't continue imagining the scene because it was too grotesque. When he came to his senses, he saw a mass-produced Irene strolling over. The little girl stopped a few steps away, staring at him and Little Red Riding Hood with her two dull, lifeless eyes, standing there motionless.

Mass-produced dolls often approached like this, mostly because their simple minds were curious about the "large humanoid objects" that appeared in their field of vision. So Yu Sheng didn't pay much attention to it, and just muttered casually, "...looks silly."

No sooner had he finished speaking than he saw the doll's eyes dart around, its pupils flashing with a sharp light. Then it came running over, shouting, "You're the idiot! I just came to see what you were doing out of curiosity, and here you are talking bad about me!"

Yu Sheng chuckled upon hearing this, casually picked up the little thing and placed it beside him, quickly changing the subject: "Seriously, are you sure you're okay with this? There are almost ten thousand 'clones' already, right? Even if you're just maintaining their most basic mobility, can you control them all?"

Eileen nodded matter-of-factly: "Sure."

Yu Sheng stroked his chin thoughtfully: "...This seems different from what I initially thought."

“It’s not what I initially thought,” Eileen, who had temporarily used a mass-produced body to take over, also looked thoughtful, swaying back and forth beside her. “At first, I always felt that with more bodies to control, my brain wouldn’t be able to keep up, and I was worried that so many unplanned ‘clones’ would make my thinking clog up, like a C-shaped knot… But for some reason, after the number of these mass-produced bodies exceeded three regiments, I actually felt…”

She paused, tilted her head back, and organized her thoughts: "Feeling much 'easier'? Or perhaps a little more insightful?"

Yu Sheng looked at the little doll with a bewildered expression: "Huh?"

"Haven't you noticed?" Eileen puffed out her chest confidently. "Haven't you noticed how smart and quick-witted I've become lately?"

“I didn’t find anything,” Yu Sheng said without hesitation. “If I had to say something, it’s that you’ve been talking more than usual lately… Hey, let go! Let go! Let go of my mouth!!”

Eileen bit Yu Sheng's arm, her eyes wide open: "Yu Sheng, you old man!"

Yu Sheng struggled to remove the little doll from his arm, then held her by the back of the neck at a safe distance. Ignoring her exaggerated movements, he carefully observed her for a long time before finally putting her down: "Seriously, do you really feel more 'relaxed' after mass-producing a certain number of bodies?"

Eileen stood on the ground with her hands on her hips: "Yeah, why would I lie to you?"

Upon hearing this, Yu Sheng frowned deeply.

"Don't make any more mass-produced machines for a while—not a single one," he suddenly said.

Eileen looked at him in surprise: "Why?"

Yu Sheng frowned, momentarily at a loss for words to explain to the little creature the subtle intuition and caution he felt. Having learned of the connection between "Eileen" and the "Goddess of Omens," he was now exceptionally sensitive to any changes in the doll's mind and mental state. However, this barely formed sense of unease lacked any real basis. After struggling to organize his thoughts, he managed to say, "I'm worried that the unstable part of your mind is taking this opportunity to become active..."

He paused, feeling that the explanation was too vague and the little doll probably wouldn't understand. But just as he was thinking about how to explain it further, Eileen suddenly nodded: "Oh, okay." Yu Sheng looked surprised: "You understood?"

“No!” Eileen said matter-of-factly.

Yu Sheng: "Huh?"

“But you’re smarter than me. We agreed last time that you would think of the complicated problems for me,” Eileen continued confidently. “This problem seems complicated, so you must have thought of it for me. Let’s do it your way.”

Yu Sheng: "..."

He never expected that this little thing would give up thinking based on such logic.

But the next second, seeing the little doll's self-righteous and confident expression, he couldn't help but laugh.

"Alright, then we'll do it my way."

Eileen cheered up and sat back down next to Yu Sheng, swinging her legs smugly for a while before suddenly asking, "So what's next?"

“Nothing planned for today, just rest and recharge,” Yu Sheng squinted. “In the evening, we’ll call the King, oh, and my nephew—he should be rested by now—and go to ‘Dark Alley’ again.”

……

Deep within the Secret Service, on a hidden floor.

The long corridor was empty and quiet, the light from the ceiling casting an unusual chill. A tall figure walked slowly down the corridor, the clatter of heels echoing between the walls.

Bai Liqing looked up at the connecting section ahead, marked with various danger levels and access warning signs.

Apart from the warning signs ahead, the entire corridor was pure white.

Wearing a white suit and with light-colored hair, Baili Qing seemed to blend into the corridor. She calmly gazed ahead, her faded eyes reflecting the door leading to the exit. After a long while, she looked away and spoke to herself, "The 'Archives' seems relatively peaceful today."

“It was quite lively here when Ankaela fell,” Baili Xue’s voice came from the side, her eyes appearing on the left wall, “...the whole building was bustling.”

Baili Qing hummed in agreement and continued walking forward. She passed the warning signs along the connecting section, completed the access control authentication at a gate, and then pushed open the seemingly ordinary door at the end of the corridor.

With a creak, the sound of the door opening seemed to echo in an extremely vast space, and a space of black and white came into Baili Qing's view.

It was clearly a floor inside the Secret Service building, but opposite the main entrance was a vast empty space!
The dark and chaotic space seemed boundless, with only countless large and small gray-white boulders floating in front of the gate that stood out of thin air. On each boulder stood countless pale and enormous bookshelves—countless ancient books and scrolls lay quietly on the shelves. Each bookshelf was extremely tall and large, and the upper parts of many shelves were in a fragmented state, with large and small pieces extending all the way to the end of the darkness.

Beyond the towering bookshelves are rows of broken white walls and massive pillars that have been broken and now float in mid-air—all of these broken architectural structures display ornate and intricate relief patterns, vaguely revealing a bygone glorious era.

The entire space is like a shattered, pure white library, floating in a time and space that has vanished.

Bai Liqing was clearly very familiar with this place. She stepped directly onto a gray-white boulder floating in mid-air, and then walked along a continuous floating path to the center of the bookshelves.

Countless low, indistinct whispers drifted from between the nearby bookshelves, sounding like discussions interspersed with greetings.

Then, a hoarse, aged voice came from the end of the path:
"Ah, colorless descendant—you've come again."

(End of this chapter)