Chapter 581 Two Mysteries, Two Conjectures

Eileen's new body seems to have quite a few secrets, but the little thing herself doesn't seem to be thinking too much about it—she's just enthusiastically studying her ball joints that can be disassembled and reassembled at will, sometimes popping one off with a "pop" and then snapping it back on, or spreading her arms and legs out and crawling around in four directions, or reassembling her arms backwards and asking Yu Sheng to guess whether she's raising her left or right hand...

Yu Sheng felt incredibly uneasy watching this bizarre scene. While washing Eileen's head in the basin of water, he muttered to himself, "It's a good thing you've shrunk back in size now, otherwise you could have really scared someone to death, I'm telling you..."

Eileen: "Gurgle gurgle..."

Yu Sheng: "Speak with another body!"

So a black-haired clay doll that had just finished washing its face climbed onto the shelf next to it, put its hands on its hips and tilted its head back: "Why aren't you finished washing yet!"

"It's almost there, it's almost there. There's a black spot on your chin that's hard to rub off," Yu Sheng said as he took Eileen's head out of the basin of water. He even instinctively shook the water off, but he got bitten hard on the second shake. He had to apologize quickly and then casually asked, "Be careful that your joints don't get looser and looser from all this taking them apart. You'll be laughing at Luna when you sneeze."

“No, the degree of joint looseness of our Alice dolls was determined from the day they were born,” Eileen said confidently. “Besides, I can reinforce them with those gold threads. I can just pull on them myself and they won’t fall off.”

"...With this kind of talent, what else could you possibly do?" Yu Sheng scoffed, wrapped a towel around the little doll's head and ruffled it a few times, then snapped her head back onto her neck with a "click." "Alright, let's go downstairs and see what Hu Li and Luna are up to."

Yu Sheng led a string of Eileen downstairs, but as soon as they reached the living room, he saw two figures in front of the electrical box—Luna was opening the cover of the electrical box to reset the main switch, while Hu Li, holding a sesame seed cake, offered her advice while munching on it: "I think it's definitely an old wiring problem. Listen to me, draw a Ten Directions Lightning Spell under the circuit breaker, it'll be really powerful..."

Luna lowered her head: "You're unreliable too."

Hu Li pursed her lips, then her ears twitched as she turned her head and saw Yu Sheng coming down the stairs. She immediately rushed over happily: "My benefactor, you're up! I don't know what happened, the power went out again. I was going to heat up the food I brought back from the cafeteria yesterday for you, but the microwave isn't working..."

“I know the power went out. Eileen tried to recharge her body but messed it up,” Yu Sheng waved his hand. “Since we’re all here, let’s come and discuss Eileen’s current situation together.”

A moment later, Yu Sheng and the others sat around on the sofa in the living room, watching Eileen (blonde) perform a solo feat on the coffee table, splitting into four groups and crawling all over the dark table.

Upon seeing this, Hu Li's pile of tails exploded with a "bang," standing up like a sword mound behind him in a fluffy display: "This is outrageous! Eileen, aren't you being a bit too grotesque?"

"You, who spends all day shooting things out with your tail, are talking to me about the bizarre?" Eileen made a face at Hu Li as she reassembled herself. "Do you know how much of a shock I felt when you first shot that thing out... Hey, wait a minute, I have another special skill..."

“Let’s stop the talent show here for now,” Yu Sheng said, seeing that the girl was about to demonstrate her left and right hand reversal and wave-shaped cover upside down techniques. He quickly reached out to stop the little puppet. “Now let’s talk about serious matters… There are two main things: one is the abnormality of your current body, and the other is the situation in your ‘mind’.”

Eileen tilted her head back and blinked.

Immediately following was a chorus of five voices exclaiming in unison: "What?!"

"Don't panic. You can run and jump now, so it's not a big problem," Yu Sheng said, not surprised by Eileen's reaction. He first comforted the little doll who seemed to be startled. Then he carefully considered his words and looked into her eyes. "Let's talk about the mental aspect first. It was found out when Maris examined you before. I mentioned it to you at the time."

"Eileen, do you ever feel like there's something 'foreign' in your 'mind'? I mean, at the level of your thoughts, like hazy, incomprehensible memories that don't belong to you, or like you have some thoughts that are out of your control, blocking your train of thought or even affecting your thinking? Or maybe your thoughts are fragmented—do you understand what I mean?"

Yu Sheng tried hard to find the right sentence to convey his meaning clearly. He didn't know if the little doll in front of him, who was always confused, could understand. Anyway, Eileen listened carefully and after listening, she actually showed a serious expression of thinking. After thinking hard for nearly half a minute, she shook her head vigorously.

"No, I feel great," the little doll said confidently, then added nervously, "Wait, what did you find out?"

“A large ‘data packet’ exists deep within your memory,” Yu Sheng said with a serious expression. “It not only occupies a lot of storage space, but also consumes a considerable amount of your underlying computing power—we speculate that it may be a remnant of the ‘ominous’ part of your body.”

Then, Yu Sheng told the doll in front of him everything he had discovered during the previous inspection, just as he had told Marlene, without holding back.

Eileen doesn't usually think things through, but this time, she seemed to understand what Yu Sheng was saying.

"Mom..."

The little doll exclaimed in a low voice.

"Stop groaning. This might be a tough situation. Marise and Marlene are completely helpless right now, and they're even planning to ask for help from the Garden Network," Yu Sheng shook his head. "You really don't feel anything? You don't have any corresponding memories? Didn't you already integrate a part of the Goddess of Omens' memories? In that part..."

“No,” Eileen shook her head vigorously again. “I only remember some fragmented pieces, all from before my hometown was destroyed, starting from that so-called ‘Sanctuary’ project, or rather, from when the scholars started calculating the Creator’s Equation. That part of my memory is now blank.”

As Eileen spoke, she frowned deeply again—she was carefully searching through her jumbled memories. There were a few flashbacks where she seemed to return to the perspective of the goddess of omens, but those memories vanished like flowing water in an instant.

“It seems that… ever since the ‘Shelter’ project began, the ‘Omen’ personality has been consciously compressing itself,” the little doll muttered. “All the computing power and memories were making way for the later ‘Shelter’… although in the end the shelter was never built, sigh.”

Yu Sheng looked up and exchanged glances with Hu Li and Luna beside him.

The fox's ears twitched.

"...You didn't just pack the entire blueprint of the shelter into your memory, did you?!" The fox spirit girl stared wide-eyed.

Eileen was stunned: "Really? Really?"

“How would I know! I’m just guessing,” Hu Li said, wagging his tail vigorously. “But you just said that since the Sanctuary Project began, your memories of the ‘omen’ have been fragmented. That’s such an obvious clue.”

The little doll sat cross-legged on the coffee table, its five bodies forming a circle like the Thinker, but after several minutes it didn't seem to have any real thoughts.

“Let’s note this down first,” Yu Sheng said, glancing at the scene and temporarily keeping in mind the conclusion that “the abnormal data structure in Eileen’s memory may be related to the ‘sanctuary’ project of the Ominous Mother Civilization.” “The second question is about Eileen’s current body.”

The blond doll straightened up immediately, its eyes sharpening.

“I still find the phenomenon of this body suddenly ‘shrinking’ after two hours of normal activity very suspicious,” Yu Sheng stroked his chin. “For these changes to occur after the ‘spirit infusion’ was completed, and even after Maris’s examination process was finished, it means that at least during those two hours, some kind of ‘force’ or ‘factor’ was maintaining Eileen’s original body in a ‘normal’ form…”

"Right, right! I was in my normal form back then. This body is shrunken like this now, that's definitely not right!" Eileen perked up immediately. "Something definitely went wrong back then. The way I jumped off the platform and walked towards you, there was clearly a state switch..."

Yu Sheng seemed not to hear the little doll's mutterings, but continued to stroke his chin thoughtfully, his gaze still fixed on the blonde Eileen: "'Eileen' is in her normal form when she has the upper hand, and she is in her three-part doll form when 'Ominous Goddess' has the upper hand? Or... does this body really need to be recharged regularly?"

“Who knows? Anyway, it’s not like I’m charging,” Eileen said, resting her head on her hands. “The key is that I don’t feel any decline in my physical strength or anything. It doesn’t feel like I’m completely exhausted.”

Yu Sheng was deep in thought, but before he could come up with anything, a vibration from his phone startled him from his reverie.

I took out my phone and saw a message from Baili Qing:

"Are you there? Come to the Secret Service if you have time."

A pair of large, furry ears popped out from the side: "My benefactor, my benefactor, who is it?"

Yu Sheng casually held up his phone screen in front of Hu Li: "Baili Qing went back to work and asked me to come over. Perfect timing, I also have something I want to talk to her about."

As he spoke, he recalled the strange "illusion" he had seen through those spacetime rifts during his "synchronization" with the celestial crystal tree.

The distant, ethereal starlight, the colossal ship, and the curtain of flames, all seemingly from the edge of the universe.

What do those images mean? Does the Secret Service have any intelligence on this?

Yu Sheng wasn't sure, but apart from the Secret Service, he couldn't think of anywhere else in the world where the answer might be.

(End of this chapter)