Chapter 496 The King's Power
The big hole disappeared as if it had never appeared, and the collapse and shaking of the old bookstore also stopped abruptly. Only the "rotten knowledge" that kept flowing down from the bookshelves continued to accumulate, and after touching the floor, it quickly turned into something like mud, emitting an unsettling smell of decay.
Yu Sheng then turned around and left this old bookstore which had become increasingly weird and had lost its value for exploration. Almost at the moment he ran out of the store, a "bang" sound of a door closing came from behind him - the door of the shop closed, and the entrance that was originally illuminated by bright lights immediately became as dim as other surrounding shops.
Little Red Riding Hood and the King stood at the door. The man and the cat were looking into the depths of the alley with vigilance. The short staff in the "priest's" hand emitted a soft and warm light, illuminating a small area around them.
"The hole disappeared," Yu Sheng said quickly. "Before it disappeared, I saw fog all over the outside, and something like spider silk extending from the distance."
"Could you please not be so reckless all the time?" Little Red Riding Hood turned around and looked at Yu Sheng helplessly. "Even if you're not afraid of death, at least take ordinary people like us into consideration... Wait, spider silk? What kind of spider silk?"
"What else could it be? It's similar to the ones Irene usually uses," Yu Sheng sighed. "Didn't we come here to look for clues in this regard? Now we have a clue. Something is indeed 'seeping' in from 'outside' the dark alley. Unfortunately, the hole only lasted for a moment and it even collapsed the old bookstore..."
"This is a foreign land. Everything will be restored before our next entry, but I don't recommend digging holes anywhere next time," Little Red Riding Hood said, pointing across the road. "The 'destruction' just now caused changes in the dark alley. The situation... is not right."
With the girl's reminder, Yu Sheng immediately noticed many changes in details in the alley.
The sky seemed a little darker than I remembered when I first entered the alley. The already damp stone brick floor now had a layer of unpleasant dark moss. All the buildings on both sides of the alley became even older and more dilapidated than before. The light strings that crisscrossed between the roofs on both sides flickered on and off as if there was a bad connection, and the colors of the lights kept changing like an illusion, which made people dizzy.
The shops across the street had their doors and windows closed tightly, and the signs illuminated by dim lights were covered with thick dirt. The words beneath the dirt were not only blurred, but upon closer inspection, they were completely indistinguishable - they looked like words, but in fact, they were all randomly combined lines and had no meaning at all.
Yu Sheng: "This is..."
"We went straight into the next level, the 'dark alley,'" Little Red Riding Hood said with a serious expression. "We didn't come in through the intersection, but entered this even more eerie version of the alley the moment we left the second-hand bookstore."
Yu Sheng blinked, then suddenly realized: "Wait, what about the 'cat'? Isn't there a physical entity - a cat - that will appear in the dark alley deeper down?"
"That's why I said something's not right—there's no entity generated here, and... all the shops in this alley are closed," Little Red Riding Hood looked up and around. "Normally, there should be at least one shop open in this dark alley."
Yu Sheng pursed his lips and looked around cautiously.
The entire alley is now eerily quiet, but in this extreme silence, it seems as if countless pairs of eyes are staring at this side in the darkness, staring at the uninvited guests who have invaded the alley and are causing damage in it.
Yu Sheng thought he heard a faint cat's meow, but when he looked up, he only saw mossy corners of the wall and the ground.
"Let's go to the intersection at the end of the alley and see if we can enter a more normal level," the king suddenly said, sitting on the wandering wizard's shoulder, his cat face serious. "I think we may not have fully entered the 'next level', but are stuck between the first dark alley and the second level. That's why the surroundings seem so strange, and there are no normal entities generated."
Yu Sheng looked at the tabby cat sitting on the wandering wizard's shoulder with some surprise. He felt that the cat was behaving like an experienced, steady and reliable old ghost detective at that moment - this was in stark contrast to its lazy appearance when it usually lay on the 200-square-meter cat climbing frame and basked in the sun all day long.
He expressed his surprise, but the king muttered lazily, "What's so surprising about that? I've seen a lot of foreign lands. I usually have to go in and rescue any unlucky person from the orphanage who accidentally gets trapped in a foreign land. And I usually have to take on commissions to make money. As a kitten, do you know how much burden I bear in life..."
Yu Sheng turned to look at Little Red Riding Hood, who nodded. "It's true. As the most capable and well-rounded member of 'Fairy Tale,' the King has extensive experience as a spirit detective... He's considered an expert in the entire borderland."
"Um, that's why I wanted to ask just now," Yu Sheng finally couldn't help but speak, "It's a cat, so how does it usually take on missions..."
"It's simple. If it wants to deal with other spirit detectives or investigators, it goes there on its own. People in our line of work are used to strange things anyway," Little Red Riding Hood said casually. "If it wants to deal with ordinary people, it summons a clever subordinate to communicate with the client, while it pretends to be a pet cat."
Yu Sheng immediately thought it made perfect sense, thinking that "Tales of Fairyland" was indeed a long-established, established ghost detective organization with a wealth of experience in handling all sorts of bizarre cases. In comparison, his "hotel" hadn't even received a single serious commission yet...
But then he thought again, it seems that the "hotel" is not without business, but it is only dealing with major cases...
The group walked in the "dark alley" which was so quiet that it was a little eerie. The alley was not long and they soon reached the end of the road.
A crossroads with the same dead silence appeared in front of Yu Sheng.
He looked towards the intersections curiously and saw that the scenes at every intersection were almost identical. They all led to a dim alley. All the buildings on both sides of the alley had their doors and windows closed, and the distance was hazy. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn't see what was happening a hundred meters away.
He hesitated for a moment, then turned to look at Little Red Riding Hood: "Which way?"
The girl frowned tightly and did not respond for a while.
The huge shadow wolf prowled near her, sniffing around the intersection.
After a long while, Little Red Riding Hood finally broke the silence: "...There is no passage leading to the next floor. All three are emergency exits."
Yu Sheng was stunned.
All three are emergency exits?!
If this situation were to occur during a normal exploration operation, everyone would be happy. After all, for most spiritual detectives and investigators, the primary goal was to safely evacuate the foreign land with intelligence or supplies. The appearance of three safe exits at the end of a dark alley wasn't just smoke rising from their ancestral graves; it was like their ancestral graves spewing 200-meter-long propulsion flames, a guaranteed safety net that only their ancestors could muster by setting the underworld on fire.
But Yu Sheng didn't come here for a safe evacuation today.
"Oh no, doesn't the information say that there is only one correct 'safe exit' at the intersection at the end of the alley, and the other two lead to deeper levels?" He said subconsciously, "How can this directly trigger the guaranteed exit...but we're going deeper?"
"I don't know either. Something's not right today," Little Red Riding Hood said, clearly confused. "How about you, King, have the wizard use the Great Divination Spell and try again?"
The king did not respond to Little Red Riding Hood's words. Instead, it suddenly jumped down from the "wandering wizard" and stared at the depths of the street in the direction it came from with its pair of vertical pupils in the dim light, as if it had discovered something.
Before Yu Sheng could ask, 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 corners.
But in the next second, Yu Sheng's eyes suddenly became blurry - the mottled moss and shadows shook instantly, and then something slowly "squeezed" out from the shadow, 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 texture.
It slowly walked towards the king, but its movements were like a cut video, with flickering and teleporting phenomena like "frame skipping" every few steps.
Entity, "cat".
The moment the first black cat appeared, Yu Sheng noticed that many dark corners in the alley suddenly became restless.
Shadows were wriggling in the corners of walls, eaves, windowsills and roadsides. Countless cat-shaped silhouettes of all sizes came into his sight. A large number of entities were entering three-dimensional space from the two-dimensional plane. Pitch-black cats walked out from every corner of the alley, staring at the uninvited guests at the intersection with their pale, glowing eyes.
The invisible gazes I felt along the way didn't seem to be illusions.
Little Red Riding Hood subconsciously took a half step back, looking at the scene in front of her in astonishment: "It's cats... but why are there so many of them all at once?!"
"They don't seem very happy," Yu Sheng was also startled, but then he realized something, "But looking at this situation... it seems like they are urging us to leave through the emergency exit?"
At this moment, the king suddenly took two steps forward and came to the middle of the road.
The tabby cat stared at the black cats gathered in the alley, especially the first black cat that appeared not far away, and slowly arched its back.
Its voice was low and menacing—
"Logically, a cat of your level has no right to hail me."
The little black cat opposite: "Ha——"
The king was visibly startled, and immediately arched his back even higher: "Ha!"
As a result, several black cats on the opposite side arched their backs at the same time: "Ha!!"
Then both sides started to "ha" each other.
Yu Sheng: “……?”
The situation seems to be a little different from what I said at the beginning.
However, just when the cats on both sides were panting and the situation was getting more and more tense, the king suddenly stopped. When the black cat opposite let out a "ha", he waved his claws.
The four-member adventurer team disappeared into thin air in an instant.
A group of great magicians wearing star-studded robes, carrying amethyst staffs, and with energy fluctuations all over their bodies that could almost distort space, suddenly filled the entire intersection.
The king licked his paw and said, "Prepare a Sunburst."
The little black cat opposite: "Meow~"
(End of this chapter)
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