Chapter 632 Settling Accounts in a Dream
Eileen—in her eight-legged form—wandered back and forth on the hill, eventually discovering that the place was nothing but grass and rocks. As for what might have been on the other half of the hill, it had probably been leveled when the boundary bridge crashed down.
So she ended her exploration and walked along the hillside, which was full of rubble and debris, toward the open field at the foot of the mountain.
A breeze swept across the hills, carrying what sounded like a low, mournful whisper. Eileen stopped and looked back toward the mountaintop, only to see the solitary, dark tower standing askew in the distance, like a pillar connecting heaven and earth piercing through the chaotic clouds. Broken spatial rifts surrounded the tower, making it look like a strange tree.
"This is strange...this is strange..."
Eileen muttered a few words to herself and unconsciously quickened her pace, as if she felt a little uneasy in this "dream." She subconsciously moved away from the broken tower and the collapsed hill.
The chaotic, howling wind grew stronger, forming a barrier around the hill, gently yet omnipresently preventing her from reaching the plains. But suddenly, that obstruction vanished as if it were an illusion—Eileen burst out from a swirling gust of wind, feeling a familiar and peaceful aura surrounding her. Unnamed tall grass swayed gently in the breeze, making all eight of her legs feel a little itchy.
The doll (ominous sign) stood there in a daze for a while, then turned its head to look in the direction of the hill again, only to find that the hill was already far away, and the "boundary bridge" on the hill and the spatial rift in the sky had disappeared, as if they had never existed.
After its eight long limbs moved around a few times, Eileen turned to look in another direction and saw a thin mist swirling in the distance. The Crystal Tree of the Stars stood tall in the wilderness, and beneath its magnificent canopy was the solemn black cathedral.
C-shaped buckle and her knights built a happy old home—to be honest, it's much prettier than the toilet that Yu Sheng scrubbed.
The doll's dream ended, and her consciousness drifted across the border between memory and illusion, finally reaching the wilderness of the soul.
Eileen thought for a moment, then suddenly smiled happily and started walking towards the cathedral.
She's going to cause trouble for C-shaped buttons—first, she'll wreak havoc on the garden.
But she had only taken a few steps when she sensed a familiar presence nearby, followed by a voice in her ear: "...Why are you here?"
Eileen slammed on the brakes and turned to see Yu Sheng standing in the open field, looking completely bewildered.
"Hey, Mr. Yu!" Eileen greeted him happily. "Let me tell you, I was just having a dream..."
"I was dreaming too! I was just dreaming about a barbecue festival in Sun City where all the meat was skewers and I was about to take Hu Li there to eat when I turned around and found myself here—so you were sleepwalking and dragged me here?" Yu Sheng stared blankly at the giant spider Eileen in front of him, still looking a bit dazed from a dream. "Wait a minute, why are you looking like this here?!"
“I didn’t pull you,” Eileen waved her hand, then a smug look appeared on her face as she looked down at Yu Sheng and showed off her long legs. “How about that? Pretty cool, right? I’m not restricted by that painting anymore, much cooler than before when I could only float around like a paper doll! Look at my figure, look at my legs… I can use this body directly in my dreams! It seems like there’s no cooldown after unlocking here…”
For a moment, Yu Sheng didn't know whether he should remind the other person that "only growing taller in dreams" wasn't something to be proud of, but he swallowed the words back and abruptly changed the subject: "You said you were dreaming just now? What did you dream about?"
The smug doll (ominous sign) suddenly stopped, a brief look of confusion appearing on its face.
Yes, she was just having a dream, a very long dream that got stranger and stranger as it went on... She had so much to say to Yu Sheng, but what was she dreaming about?
"You haven't already forgotten, have you?" Yu Sheng's voice rang out from the side.
Eileen frowned deeply, trying to clear her mind of the chaotic distractions while struggling to keep her not-so-bright brain working. She subconsciously waved her hand and looked back at the "unreachable hill" in the wilderness of the soul, and finally pieced together some scattered fragments of her dream.
It was just a fleeting thought.
Yu Sheng saw the gigantic Eileen suddenly tense up. Although he didn't know what had happened, he instinctively shut his mouth and focused his mind. Then Eileen took a deep breath—and the next second, the doll's incredibly fluent tongue began to speak:
"I dreamt that I was an experimental model created by the ancient Holy Spirit, seemingly specifically to handle the boundary bridge issue. But I failed on my first mission. I also saw that the boundary in the previous version looked like a miniature garden map. The boundary bridge connection failed because it wasn't fully connected to the boundary; instead, it pierced through the map and crashed into another dimension. That place looked like this Soul Wilderness. The bridge piers crashed onto that mountain over there. I don't understand what happened. After coming down from the mountain, I was switched to your channel. Oh, my tongue, my tongue hurts, it hurts, it hurts..."
Yu Sheng felt like the other person's words were coming out like a machine gun, each word like a barrage of bullets hitting his forehead. He was completely stunned after listening, almost choking on his own breath: "Holy crap—"
Eileen was panting heavily, her tongue lolling out, when she saw Yu Sheng's reaction and glared at him: "I'm telling you, if you make me say it again, I'll get mad at you! I almost bit my tongue off..."
"No, no, I heard you, I heard everything," Yu Sheng quickly waved his hand, and before he could forget, he tried to mentally review the string of words several times to reinforce his memory. After going through it four or five times, he finally managed to focus on what he had heard—he felt that figuring out the contents of that string of words was like uncompressing a compressed file, and there were obviously many layers of details missing. "But I have to sort it out... Let's start with the Ancient Holy Spirit's sentence, what does it mean that you are 'an experimental model personally created by the Ancient Holy Spirit'? What exactly are you thinking of?"
Eileen quickly used this sentence as a keyword to retrieve her jumbled memories. After thinking seriously for a few seconds with her arms crossed, she nodded, raised her hand, and pointed at herself with her thumb: "Me, Alice Doll Special Type, awesome."
So that's how she came to this conclusion.
Yu Sheng: "...So awesome that you messed up on the very first mission?"
Eileen: "...Yu Sheng, you son of a bitch!!"
...
Yu Sheng and Eileen went over their accounts in their dream for an unknown amount of time before being woken up by a phone call in the real world.
When Yu Sheng opened his eyes, it was already bright outside, and it was almost noon. His phone was still buzzing on the bedside table. He turned over and saw that the caller ID showed Baili Qing.
Eileen jumped up, sat on the edge of the bed, and pointed at Yu Sheng: "Hahaha, so you can be woken up by a call from that emotionless guy... Oh my god—"
The little doll was having so much fun that it rolled over and fell off the edge of the bed.
Yu Sheng ignored the grumbling little thing, answered the phone and put it to his ear: "Hello? Director Baili?"
A familiar, cool voice came from the other end of the phone: "Yes, it's me... You're still not up?"
“I slept too late last night,” Yu Sheng said casually, “but it’s not a big problem. What’s up?”
"Regarding those Hermitage cultists who invaded the city yesterday," Baili Qing got straight to the point, "I have limited information. Could you come over so we can talk in person?"
Yu Sheng readily agreed: "No problem, I'll pack up and head over."
“Okay, I’ll wait for you in my office,” Baili Qing said, then added, “You can bring Hu Li over for dinner. Song Cheng said the braised chicken legs in the cafeteria are really good today.”
"no problem!"
Yu Sheng hung up the phone, but didn't rush to the station. Instead, he watched Eileen (blonde) crawl onto the bed on all fours, and then watched as the four boxes in the corner opened one after another, and a string of dolls crawled out and walked sleepily toward the bathroom.
Eileen (blonde) clung to the edge of the bed, her hands gripping the sheets, half her body hanging off the edge, staring wide-eyed at Yu Sheng.
"Why don't you help me out!"
"Oh, oh." Yu Sheng then reached out and pulled the little doll up.
"In the end, we still couldn't figure out what the scene at the end of my 'dream' where the Boundary Bridge appeared in the Wilderness of Souls meant," the little puppet muttered, sitting cross-legged in front of Yu Sheng, arms crossed and swaying. "I can't remember the details... I just remember the impression that 'the tower passed through the sky and landed on the hill.'"
Yu Sheng stroked his chin, staring at Eileen for a long time as he pondered, until she started to bare her teeth before he finally spoke: "Do you think those things really happened?"
Eileen blinked: "What do you mean?"
"Although much of your dream was generated from your fragmented 'memories,' making it feel very real, a dream is still a dream... Perhaps that scene was simply because there really is a Star-Derived Crystal Tree in the Soul Wilderness, and a 'Boundary Bridge' has indeed been fused to it? Your impression of this led you to see that tower appear on the hill at the end of your dream..."
Eileen stared intently at Yu Sheng with her bright blue eyes, her face unusually serious: "Do you even believe yourself when you explain it like that?"
Yu Sheng opened his mouth, but in the end he just raised his hand and scratched his messy hair.
“See, even you don’t believe it,” Eileen shifted forward, her legs crossed, leaning slightly forward. “I think that scene was definitely conveying some very important information… Just three thousand seven hundred years ago, in the previous version of the Borderlands—the one the Iron-Faced Man called the ‘Classical Era’—on that day, the Goddess of Omens came to this world. I went out on my first mission, the Boundary Bridge pierced through the Borderlands, and the tower fell on the Wilderness of Souls. Yes, that was the day… everything happened…”
Yu Sheng stared blankly at the doll in front of him, thinking that Eileen, who was so serious... had quite a presence.
The charismatic little doll raised its hand and pointed at Yu Sheng.
“So,” she said seriously, “what about you? On that day…would you be there too?”
(End of this chapter)
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