Chapter 573 Postoperative Examination
Marlene quickly prepared to perform a postoperative examination on the "patient".
Under her guidance, Eileen (blonde) sat down on the alloy platform again, and Marys sat down with her. Then a set of robotic arms rose up from the edge of the platform and began to connect several cables to the back of Marys' neck and near the keyhole.
Yu Sheng watched the robotic arms busily connecting the servo robots and wondered, "Hey, aren't they supposed to be checking on Eileen...?"
“Marilyn is the analysis host, and she must be involved in the next check,” Marlene explained. “She also installed the Garden Network boot module—Eileen has been disconnected from the Garden Network for too long, and she has completely forgotten about it. Without her assistance, she would probably have a hard time even cooperating to complete the check.”
Yu Sheng exclaimed "Oh!" in realization. Eileen, who was sitting on the platform watching the servo robot next to her get connected, suddenly turned around and looked at Marlene excitedly: "Hey! Do I have to get connected too? Where do I connect it?"
“Of course you need a connection too,” Marlene nodded and stepped toward the platform. “I’ll help you.”
Upon seeing this, Yu Sheng also curiously went over. Although he knew nothing about the "inspection" that Marlene mentioned, he was genuinely interested in "where to connect the wires".
Then he watched as Marlene pulled a thin, shimmering cable from a groove on the edge of the platform and held the cable connector behind Eileen's neck.
Two seconds later, Marlene was still standing there, looking completely bewildered.
Feeling no movement behind her, blonde Eileen curiously twisted her neck and asked, "Hey sis, what are you doing?"
“Wait a minute…” Marlene snapped out of her daze, staring in astonishment at the blonde doll in front of her. “Where’s your overcurrent port?!”
Eileen was stunned: "...What's a flow port?"
Yu Sheng, standing nearby, reacted even more strongly than Eileen: "Wait a minute, is that hole in the back of her neck a connection point?!"
It's no exaggeration to say that the whole room fell silent as soon as he said that—even Mary was momentarily stunned.
Marlene froze for a couple of seconds, then seemed to realize something: "You, you wouldn't..."
Yu Sheng had never looked so embarrassed in his life: "I thought there was a piece missing and I covered it up."
The moment he finished speaking, his spiritual intuition kicked in, and he immediately saw out of the corner of his eye that the blonde girl on the platform had leaped into the air and pounced over with a scream, accompanied by Eileen's furious voice: "Yu Sheng! You son of a bitch!!"
Yu Sheng was immediately thrown into a panic. After all, dealing with a 1.67-meter-tall living doll was no easy task compared to dealing with a 66.6-centimeter-tall shorty, especially since the original body's blonde Eileen was ridiculously strong: "Hey, hey, don't bite! Let go! Let go! Hu Li, help me—"
Marlene, standing to the side, was still completely bewildered. This upright, well-bred doll, whose life trajectory had always been perfectly normal, had never encountered anything like this before. She was still clutching the data cable, trying to understand the logic behind Yu Sheng's "primitive alchemy" while pondering the underlying principles. After a long while, she subconsciously muttered, "This is impossible...this doesn't make sense..."
She blinked and looked at the two Irene dolls, one large and one small, clinging to Yu Sheng (at this moment, the 66.6 cm one also jumped on): "It shouldn't be like this... The Alice doll's body has a strong ability to reset itself. Even if there are some mistakes during the repair process, it will quickly recover after the body restarts. Theoretically, this shouldn't happen..."
But nobody listened to her at all.
Fortunately, Eileen didn't cause trouble for too long—she had probably been tricked by fate so many times that she had developed a psychological resistance, and she quickly calmed down again, then returned to the alloy platform and sat there sulking.
"So what do we do now?" The 66.6cm little doll sat next to the big doll, muttering in the same sullen pose, "Does this mean I'll never be able to connect to the internet back home for the rest of my life?"
Marlene, carrying the data cable, approached Eileen, wanting to offer words of comfort but unsure how to begin. She could only frankly state her thoughts: "Actually, this whole thing has been beyond my comprehension since the beginning. This wasn't part of my plan..."
“Of course, very few things involving Yu Sheng go according to plan,” Eileen sighed, taking the data cable from Marlene's hand. She looked at it with a melancholy expression, muttering to herself, “I guess I was just born unlucky…”
As she spoke, she didn't know what she was thinking, but she casually stuffed the end of the thread into her mouth, chewing on it like a spicy snack, while mumbling indistinctly, "When he sculpted my first body..."
Before she could finish speaking, Marys next to her "dinged" and restarted. A blue light flashed in the clockwork doll's eyes, and it opened its mouth and said, "Data source detected."
The room was even quieter than when Yu Sheng had said "it's been covered up."
Hu Li's eyes widened, and she was the first to break the silence: "This works?!"
Eileen was startled and instinctively reached for the thread she was holding in her mouth, but before she could raise her arm, Yu Sheng urgently stopped her: "Don't move! Hold it in your mouth! It was so hard to connect it!"
Eileen froze, sitting stiffly in place with the data cable still in her mouth, only daring to dart her eyes around. The little doll sitting next to the blonde body happily jumped off the platform, looking up at Marlene: "Hey sister, this thing of yours is amazing! I didn't know it was so compatible."
Marlene was still staring in disbelief: "...?"
Is this a compatibility issue?!
After struggling for a while, the living doll lady could only manage to utter one sentence: "What's the principle behind this?"
Upon hearing this, Yu Sheng laughed and said, "Hey, I have a friend who also likes to say that."
Marlene pursed her lips, glanced at the blonde doll sitting upright with a data cable in her mouth, and then turned her gaze to Maris.
The clockwork maid nodded slightly to her mistress, her eyes still gleaming with blue data light.
Marlene immediately decided to suppress all her doubts, taking it as an arrangement by the ancient Holy Spirit—after all, if she thought about it any deeper, she would really begin to suspect that the great progenitor of dolls didn't actually have that much ingenious construction and long-term design when creating the race of "Alice's dolls," but rather relied entirely on "my own imagination"...
“The examination has begun,” Marlene breathed a long sigh of relief, and after confirming that everything was going smoothly for Marys, she turned to Yu Sheng. “This process will take several tens of minutes, and it’s best if Marys and Eileen are not disturbed during this time—let’s go to the next room to wait.”
“Oh, okay,” Yu Sheng nodded quickly, then glanced at the 66.6-centimeter-tall Eileen one last time before leaving, “You can stay here with this body, but don’t touch anything here.”
The little doll waved its hand vigorously: "Hey, I know, I know, I'm not a child."
As she spoke, she climbed back onto the alloy platform, sat down next to her blonde body, and after a few seconds of silence, lowered her head, rested her head on her legs, and started giggling foolishly: "Long legs, hehe..."
Like a schizophrenic psychopath.
Fortunately, Yu Sheng and his gang had a deep familiarity with and unique understanding of similar mental problems and their main symptoms. They pretended not to see it and turned around to follow Marlene out of the "doll printing room".
Next to the doll printing room, there is a lounge that is not too big but comfortable and elegant.
Marlene prepared tea and snacks for her guests.
A faceless puppet servant pushed a cart into the room and placed hot tea and snacks on a round tea table covered with a purple tablecloth. A pointed window not far away was half-open, and the view of the garden could be seen through the window.
Yu Sheng sat down at the tea table and breathed a sigh of relief. After taking a sip of tea, he felt much calmer, both in his ears and in his heart.
A large tail stretched out from beside him and deftly snatched away the plate of snacks on the table.
A moment later, the plate of pastries was returned to the table, and each pastry on the plate was precisely bitten in half, with the other half left for Yu Sheng.
Yu Sheng turned his head and saw Hu Li lying on the ground next to him, wiping her mouth with her tail and yawning from time to time.
She was sleepy.
When the fox spirit girl is feeling sleepy, she sometimes enters a state of acting on instinct, like a... lazy wild fox.
After bending down and rubbing the fur behind the fox's ears, Yu Sheng looked away and chatted with Marlene, who was sitting across the round table.
The two weren't exactly close, so they didn't have much to talk about. They mainly discussed Eileen's situation, interspersed with some publicly available information related to Alice's Cottage. Yu Sheng had actually heard most of the latter from Baili Qing before, but hearing it from a real "Alice doll" added a lot of details.
Yu Sheng also learned for the first time that the mysterious Alice House in the eyes of outsiders actually involved itself in many folk fields.
They also have their own commercial routes, colonies, and industrial systems. Many Alice dolls like to interact with ordinary races and operate openly on civilized planets, while others prefer to live in seclusion and perform necessary "work" behind the scenes through servants or doll servants they create.
On some semi-civilized planets, there are even many "legends" related to living dolls—legends that almost become part of the local mythology.
As the oldest "power" in the world, and a race directly created by the ancient Holy Spirit, they have ample time and freedom to do almost anything.
“…Before severing the connection with the observable universe, the progenitor of the dolls left a message in the Garden Network, telling us to ‘live freely,’ so we chose to live the way we do now,” Marlene said with a smile, speaking slowly and deliberately. “We wander throughout the observable universe, contacting those groups willing to befriend us. We help the locals with their troubles related to ‘out-of-control supernatural beings,’ and we do business with them. If they wish, we can even be friends…”
"This universe has many different problems, most of which stem from the apocalyptic catastrophe before the 'second singularity explosion.' As a race directly created by the ancient Holy Spirit, we have taken it upon ourselves to solve these problems. This is why living dolls often appear in contaminated areas or strange events where severe distortions have occurred..."
Yu Sheng listened intently to what Marlene was telling him, feeling as if he were gaining a deeper understanding of the world from another perspective—from the viewpoint of an ancient, free race that roamed the entire universe.
But just then, Marlene, who was enthusiastically telling her story, suddenly stopped.
The living doll frowned slightly, as if listening intently to something, its expression gradually becoming somewhat subtle.
Upon seeing this, Yu Sheng immediately became curious: "What happened?"
Marlene hesitated, then continued, "What about Eileen...?"
Yu Sheng immediately tensed up: "What's wrong with Eileen!?"
"...Marily said she found that Eileen's mental functioning was somewhat abnormal."
(End of this chapter)
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