Chapter 41 – A Free Puppet

Yu Sheng was completely bewildered.

The instant he saw Eileen suddenly “disconnect” and go tumbling, he had almost convinced himself that the puppet had died on the spot due to a defective shell — fortunately, the voice that reached him from behind cut off that frightening line of thought just in time.

Yu Sheng stood there holding Eileen’s shell, his head lifting stiffly as he looked toward the large table that had been used for working clay.

The classical oil painting with its ornate frame leaned quietly against the edge of the table. Eileen was inside the painting, eyes wide open, staring over at him with a look of complete panic.

“I — I don’t know what happened either!” Noticing Yu Sheng’s gaze, Eileen immediately waved her hands frantically. “One second I was still running forward, and the next time I opened my eyes I was already back here. What’s going on? What is this…”

A slightly grating, low-pitched laugh drifted out from the picture frame — it sounded mocking, yet also carried a faint trace of sympathy.

It came from the plush toy bear. This time, Yu Sheng finally witnessed with his own eyes that it was laughing.

Eileen’s temper was not the sort that could take this lying down. She immediately stomped over to the red velvet chair, snatched up the toy bear sitting on it, grabbed it by the neck, and shook it vigorously. “You’re still laughing! Still laughing! Did you do this?! I ended up back here again!”

But a toy bear with no mind of its own could hardly respond. It just kept on giggling in Eileen’s grasp, which only made the puppet angrier and angrier.

Seeing this, Yu Sheng quickly stepped forward, intending to calm down the puppet girl inside the painting. “Hey, don’t get so worked up — let’s think of a sol…”

He had barely gotten halfway through the sentence when the puppet girl in the painting, who had been choking the toy bear and throwing it over her shoulder into an armbar, vanished in an instant. The very next moment, Yu Sheng felt the puppet body in his hands snap back to life with a sudden jolt. Before he could even react, the little figure — all 66.6 centimeters of her — had lunged onto his arm and, carried by momentum, attempted a chokehold (failed), a shoulder throw (failed), and an armbar (failed), all in one go.

But she was quite strong, and she squeezed the flesh on his arm so hard it ached.

Yu Sheng had no choice but to forcefully peel Eileen off his arm, hold her up in front of his face, and shake her. “Snap out of it, snap out of it — it’s me, Yu Sheng. You’re out again.”

Eileen slowly came back to her senses. She hung in midair for a moment in a daze, raised her head and looked around, and finally fixed her gaze on Yu Sheng’s face. “…Huh?”

Then the two of them simultaneously looked up toward the painting frame in the distance, and both fell into a stunned silence.

After a moment, Yu Sheng wordlessly carried Eileen and stepped backward, retreating all the way to the spot where she had fallen earlier. With his final step, the puppet body in his hand instantly went limp, as though the power had been cut, its life force dissolving away.

Eileen’s figure abruptly appeared inside the oil painting. She glanced around and looked up at Yu Sheng with a blank expression. “I’m back again. So it really is…”

Yu Sheng casually raised the puppet shell in his hand toward the direction of the painting, bringing the two closer together.

The shell suddenly came back to life, just as though the earlier “power cut” had never happened. Eileen’s voice came through it, picking up the half-sentence she hadn’t finished inside the painting: “…a matter of distance?”

“It seems so.” Yu Sheng frowned slightly as he watched, then moved the puppet a little farther away. He watched the puppet shell in his hand “power off” again, and Eileen’s voice came from not far away: “Well, this is going to be…”

Yu Sheng sent the puppet forward again.

Eileen: “…a bit of a problem… Can you stop playing around?! In the time it took me to say one sentence, you’ve cut me apart several times!”

Yu Sheng sheepishly brought Eileen back to somewhere close to the painting and explained as he did so, “I mainly wanted to confirm exactly how far your ‘signal’ range is.”

“Does it make a difference whether it’s five meters or six? At most it’s just those two steps!” Eileen dangled in his grip and flailed about, then suddenly felt something else was off. She glared up at Yu Sheng. “Put me down! Why do you keep carrying me around like this?!”

Hearing that, Yu Sheng quickly set the increasingly irritated puppet Miss down on the ground and the two stared at each other.

Only then did Eileen realize that she practically had to crane her head back ninety degrees just to talk to Yu Sheng.

Yet her pride would not allow her to ask Yu Sheng to crouch down and speak with her — and besides, even if he did crouch, she would still have to look up.

“Stand there and don’t move,” the puppet said suddenly.

Yu Sheng blinked. “What are you doing?”

He found out what Eileen wanted to do a second later — the puppet latched straight onto his leg and started climbing up, like shimmying up a tree, scrambling up in two or three moves with the agility of a monkey, and then plopped herself down directly on his shoulder.

Yu Sheng was a little stunned but didn’t dare move, terrified of sending Eileen tumbling off. “I haven’t agreed yet…”

Eileen was completely unapologetic. “You didn’t ask for my agreement when you were using me to test the signal range just now either.”

Yu Sheng had nothing to say to that.

The two made their way back to the large table and began studying the oil painting.

“I really did come out — I could feel it. My ‘soul’ was in this body I’m in now,” Eileen said, frowning, her expression conflicted as she stared at what had once been her “prison cell.” “But…”

“But from what we can observe, this painting still seems to be your ‘foundation.’ The body you have now is like something being remotely controlled — cut the distance and you lose the signal.” Yu Sheng calmly shared his assessment.

Eileen lowered her head and looked utterly dejected. But this time she didn’t cry — probably because the series of blows had been severe enough that a brain-dead level of mental fortitude had built up in the short term.

After seeing how calm the puppet’s reaction was, Yu Sheng actually panicked, and hurriedly tried to reassure her: “Don’t be too pessimistic though — maybe it really is just this body that isn’t working right? I’ll practice my craft some more, and next time when I reshape the shell…”

“Tell me,” Eileen suddenly spoke, cutting off Yu Sheng’s rambling. The expression on the little puppet’s face was complicated — it was impossible to tell exactly what she was feeling in that moment. “If you’re running around carrying your own prison cell on your back, does that count as escaping or not?”

Yu Sheng was startled. After a moment’s thought he said, “I once saw someone who was running around carrying their own prison cell on their back — it ended pretty badly for them. But they were on the inside of their cell. At least in your case, you’re on the outside…”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Eileen muttered under her breath, then jumped down from Yu Sheng’s shoulder. She leaped onto the table, approached the oil painting that had sealed her with a complicated expression, stretched out both hands to grip the frame, gently lifted it, then set it back down. She turned around and tried to hoist it onto her back.

The painting, however, was large — although Yu Sheng could lift it easily with one hand, for Eileen it was nearly as tall as she was.

“…Do you have any rope at home?” the puppet asked, lifting her head.

“Yes!” Yu Sheng nodded at once. “Wait a moment — I’ll go get it right now!”

A little over ten minutes later, Eileen watched as Yu Sheng carefully tied knots on the painting’s frame and adjusted the position of the loops. Once the preparations were more or less done, she stepped forward. “I think that’ll work.”

“Come try it,” Yu Sheng nodded, standing the frame upright and watching as Eileen somewhat clumsily threaded her arms through the carrying ropes. “How does it feel? Are the loops in the right position? Should I tighten them a bit more?”

Eileen tugged at the loops on her shoulders, walked two laps on the table with the frame on her back, and nodded in satisfaction. “No need — it fits perfectly!”

“Is it heavy?”

“Not at all — I’m very strong!” As she said this, Eileen bounced in place on the table with the painting on her back, and then began trotting in circles around the edge of the table.

A tiny puppet (66.6 cm tall), with a painting frame nearly equal to her own height strapped to her back, running back and forth on a table — the scene looked, to say the least… rather peculiar.

But as Yu Sheng watched, a smile slowly spread across his face.

Because he could see that Eileen was smiling too. The puppet seemed to have shaken off her earlier foul mood and was gradually cheering up.

She was more optimistic than Yu Sheng had imagined.

“It’s actually pretty light!” Eileen stopped at the edge of the table and said to Yu Sheng with a grin. “This way I don’t have to worry about the ‘distance’ restriction anymore — I’m so clever!”

“You’re genuinely optimistic, I’ll give you that,” Yu Sheng said with heartfelt admiration. “I thought you’d be in low spirits for a good while.”

“One has to look ahead — and so does a puppet,” Eileen said cheerfully, jumping down from the table and climbing back up Yu Sheng’s arm to his shoulder again — this time less nimbly than before, since she had to mind the painting frame on her back and keep it from bumping around or hitting Yu Sheng’s head. “Compared to before, at least I can move around freely now. If I have to carry it, then I’ll carry it. Besides, the one still living in the painting doesn’t seem to want me straying too far either… Let’s go, let’s go — downstairs. You still haven’t eaten dinner — and I want to watch TV!”

Yu Sheng paused, turning his face slightly to catch the puppet in the corner of his eye — she was beaming, seemingly full of anticipation for what lay ahead.

“Alright, let’s go cook,” he said, raising a hand to steady Eileen as he rose from the chair. “And then tonight we start looking into the passage back to the valley.”

“Mm,” Eileen replied, her spirit equally fired up. She wore a brilliant smile and pointed grandly ahead. “Giddy up!”

Yu Sheng promptly plucked the little puppet off his shoulder. “I’m going to drop you, you know.”

Eileen immediately curled up. “Don’t, don’t — I just got carried away by the moment…”

Yu Sheng shook his head with an exasperated laugh, settled the puppet back on his shoulder, and strode forward.

Outside the window, night had gradually fallen. The street lamps of the Old City District were lighting up one by one in the darkness, their hazy, warm glow flowing through the old streets and narrow lanes, drifting in through the window with a pervading sense of tranquility.

“Yu Sheng, it’s completely dark outside now.”

“It is.”

“Hehe, I’m kind of looking forward to it…”

“Looking forward to what? The dark?”

“No, I’m just a bit excited — it has nothing to do with it getting dark~”

“…I don’t get it.”

“Tch.”

(End of Chapter)