Alien Hotel.

Chapter 678 Near Home
In its warp state, the Alien Hotel sped past the stars at faster-than-light speed. When all the starlight could no longer catch up with the ship, the distorted celestial projections on the outer wall of the warped space finally disappeared, leaving only an endless and profound darkness outside the spaceship.

Hu Li was monitoring the status of the warp drive, while Eileen, after enthusiastically fiddling with the "control panel" for quite some time, finally felt a bit bored.

"When will we get there?" The little doll (blonde) lay sprawled on her seat, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling of the main control room. "Normally, we can get anywhere in the blink of an eye, but suddenly we have to fly slowly. It's so hard to get used to..."

“This is slow? This is a teleportation!” Yu Sheng glanced helplessly at the little doll. “Don’t take my ‘teleportation’ for normal travel speed. Besides, I’ve never been to the place we’re looking for before. How else can we get there if we don’t fly like this?”

“We don’t have the permission code for the target stargate,” Hu Li also looked up. “Then we can only rely on the spaceship’s own warp to get there. If we had the stargate code, we could find the nearest stargate in Shuji and ‘jump’ directly over there. Although it would take some time, it would be many times faster than warp.”

Eileen sat up abruptly, staring wide-eyed at the great fox demon: "Hey, Hu Li, when did you learn all these amazing skills...?"

“Recently,” Hu Li’s ears twitched, “I’ve finished reading my benefactor’s flight manual and borrowed a lot of information from Baili Qing and Luo.”

"real or fake……"

“Really?” Hu Li said earnestly, then advised Eileen, “You should read more books. There’s a saying: ‘In books, you’ll find beauty like jade…’”

Eileen blinked: "What do you mean?"

Hu Li: "The literal meaning is that there are beautiful girls in the book, but you can't take it literally..."

Eileen perked up: "Wow—you mean the kind with illustrations? Wouldn't that be a bit inappropriate...?"

The raccoon slapped the armrest of the chair with its tail: "That's why you can't take it literally! This sentence is telling you that reading can..."

Eileen went back to playing with her immersive, mindless control panel.

Yu Sheng ignored the chaotic conversation between Eileen and Hu Li. After watching the commotion for a while, he got up and left his seat. While keeping a close eye on the spaceship's status, he leisurely left the control hall.

He found Luna staring blankly in a corridor near the hall.

The “artificial saint” stood quietly in front of a viewing window—the huge porthole occupied almost an entire wall on the side of the corridor. Outside the porthole, one could see part of the hull structure of the Otherworld Hotel. A subsystem module connected to the “main tower” floated not far away, and the connecting bridge between the two emitted a shimmering light. Apart from that, there was only endless darkness and nothingness in the warped space.

Occasionally, phantom images of light and shadow from the real universe seem to appear in the depths of that darkness, floating on the boundary of warped space, but upon closer inspection, they seem to be just illusions—there is nothing in the darkness.

Yu Sheng had heard Luo mention this phenomenon. She said it was because the "existence" of the real universe was directly reflected into the observer's consciousness, rather than being an optically visible phenomenon. This was because, in the transition state, light from the real universe could no longer catch up with the spaceship, but the "existence" of the universe itself was still at work. Information from the material world would continue to connect with the observer's mind in a way that was beyond the comprehension of intelligent beings. Mortals could not see its full picture and could only see some illusions.

Yu Sheng often sees more in those illusions—messages with double slashes and the like.

So what is Luna looking at here?
"What are you thinking about?" Yu Sheng asked casually as he approached the viewing window.

Luna hesitated for a moment, then lowered her head slightly: "I... don't know."

"Don't you know what you're thinking?" Yu Sheng tilted his head. "Or are you overthinking things and don't know how to say it?"

Luna turned her head, and the corridor lights shone down from above, falling on her nun's veil as if a layer of hazy, illusory light were spreading out.

"Thinking too much," she said softly, then remained silent for a long while before slowly speaking, "If I find the Star Gate, will I find my home?"

“Not entirely,” Yu Sheng shook his head. “Finding the Stargate is just finding the entrance to the Hermitage’s lair. After crossing the border, we will face an unfamiliar starry sky—a mysterious and closed ‘Order Kingdom.’ According to the Secret Service, they control at least a dozen colony planets… Your home is just one of them, and it may be well hidden by them.”

“But as long as we can find the Holy Land, we can find the map,” Luna stammered, her voice firm.

Yu Sheng didn't speak for a moment, but just quietly looked at Luna in front of him.

He knew that this "artificial saint," created entirely from advanced technology, was essentially still the same country girl who had just left her hometown. She knew little about the "outside world," and even less about interstellar space. She probably didn't understand what a stargate was, let alone imagine the long journey required to travel from one planet to another—her understanding of her homeland was limited to the golden wheat fields, and didn't touch upon the vast starry sky above. But she was already trying to understand what was happening in her own way.

“Yes, once we find that planet called ‘Holy Realm’ and take it, we’ll definitely be able to find your home,” Yu Sheng nodded. “The Council’s fleet will sweep through the entire star sector, and the Flying Feather Star Region is also preparing—if those priests refuse to talk, I’ll make their souls confess.”

Luna slowly nodded: "Okay."

"...But what about after that? Have you thought about it?" Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment before speaking, "If we really find and liberate your hometown, will you want to go home and visit?"

Luna was silent for a few seconds, then lowered her head and looked at her hands, which were made of starship armor alloy.

"I have no idea."

“Yun Qingzi is researching methods to reshape the physical body, but he says the technology used by the artificial saintess is too wicked. The way of combining the human soul and the machine soul is too wild. He hasn’t found a way to transfer your consciousness safely. Luo is considering the cloning technology of the Black Dot Group… but she encountered the same problem as Yun Qingzi, and she doesn’t have your genetic sample yet,” Yu Sheng said slowly while thinking. “The Special Operations Bureau—they are trying to find a way out through artificial human technology, relying on the spirit fox black iron skeleton to achieve the adaptability of the organism to the ‘machine soul,’ but the progress is not good.”

"In addition, Qianfeng Lingshan is also trying to find a solution. They contacted the Ten Palaces' Mechanism Workshop. Although I think it's unreliable, it's still a possible alternative. There's also Eileen... She posted on the Garden Network, asking if the nanoprinting pool for living dolls could be used on living people—don't say I told you about the last one, just pretend you didn't know."

Luna abruptly raised her head halfway through Yu Sheng's sentence. Her face, usually imbued with a fixed smile and seemingly cast in living metal, displayed a complex and vivid expression for the first time. She stared at Yu Sheng in astonishment, and after a long pause, finally stammered, "B-Everyone..."

“Everyone is trying to find a solution—though it may not be a reliable one,” Yu Sheng nodded. “And it’s not just for you—it’s also for those other ‘saints’ and ‘knights’ who can still be saved. The crimes of the Secret Order are countless, and those priests deserve to die, but those souls trapped in the machine’s shell are different.”

He paused for two seconds, then slowly added, "To dismantle such a large force, the cleanup... is a huge undertaking."

Luna didn't speak, she just stood there motionless.

“No rush, we have plenty of time—and plenty of things to do,” Yu Sheng laughed, turning to look at the dark expanse of space outside the viewing window. “Take your time to think it over. Even when that day comes, you can still think it over slowly—that’s how many things are. Before they happen, you think about them a thousand times, but when the day comes, perhaps everything will fall into place naturally.”

Luna blinked, and after a while, she slowly turned around and looked outside with Yu Sheng.

"Yes, that's right."

The long leap will eventually come to an end.

After an unknown amount of time, accompanied by a prompt from the navigation system, the faster-than-light engine of the Alien Hotel began to reduce its power. A deep tremor echoed through the spaceship—distant starlight shone again through the cracks in the darkness onto the portholes, the warped space receded, and the spaceship returned to the material universe.

Yu Sheng had already returned to the control hall. As he looked at the starlight reappearing outside the huge curved viewing window, his attention almost immediately fell on a dim "star" nearby.

That was the only large object in sight, a brown dwarf that failed to ignite into a star because its mass was below the critical value.

The intense thermonuclear reaction ended before it could even begin. The surface of this failed "sun" was left with only some dark red hot spots floating on a "cold" (relative to normal stars) ocean of hydrogen, like a celestial tomb suspended in the universe.

Immediately afterwards, the spaceship's early warning system issued a series of intensive alarms, and the radar detected a large number of man-made signals in the local star system.

Yu Sheng's first reaction was to check if the Oddity Lodge's concealment system was working properly, and he only breathed a slight sigh of relief after confirming that the barrier was still open.

Then Hu Li began to operate the spaceship's radar array somewhat awkwardly, starting to determine the specific locations of those signals and trying to distinguish which one was the Hermitage's illegal stargate.

Yu Sheng then controlled the spaceship to activate its conventional engines while in stealth mode, slowly leaving the area in low-speed cruising mode and moving in the direction indicated by Hu Li.

“There’s a ‘big thing’ on the side of this brown dwarf,” Hu Li looked up at Yu Sheng, his tail wagging. “I suspect it’s the ‘stargate’—there are a lot of signal responses around it, which may be the stargate’s defense forces.”

"Slowly make your way there, find a suitable spot, and then contact Baili Qing..."

(End of this chapter)