Chapter 146 – Exploiting a Bug to Enter the Map

Honestly speaking, the moment Little Doll uttered the words “unity of mind and intent,” Yu Sheng immediately felt it would be quite difficult. Mainly because most of the time he and Eileen spent together was in a state where both of them thought the other was out of their mind—but then he thought about it more carefully. If both of them thought the other was crazy, wasn’t that itself a kind of unity of mind and intent?

His train of thought wandered off without him noticing, and within a few seconds it had derailed so badly that even its own mother wouldn’t recognize it. In the end, it was Eileen who smashed her forehead into his head: “I told you to clear your mind! Not to let it fly away! At least keep your attention on Door Opening—”

“Oh oh, right.”

Only then did Yu Sheng snap back to his senses, quickly reining in his focus before earnestly beginning to execute the steps for Door Opening.

But this time, he only summoned a “null-value door” that led nowhere, then gradually relaxed his mind while maintaining the door’s stability.

He felt Eileen’s tiny palm pressing against his temple.

He saw Eileen’s other hand rise up, pointing toward that door from afar.

Wisps of black threads grew and extended from Little Doll’s fingertips, silent and soundless, like some strange “organism” with a life of its own, rapidly interweaving in the air, squirming, shifting, splitting, proliferating…

Some of the threads pierced into his flesh, pierced into his mind. An eerie, bone-chilling sensation crawled along his spine, enough to make one’s skin crawl.

If this had been his first encounter with Eileen’s threads, Yu Sheng probably would have instinctively flung Little Doll away by now—these sinister, uncanny things looked anything but harmless no matter how you looked at them. They’d be more at home in a script about “a scheming curse-doll finally seizing the chance to strike against her own keeper in a bid to usurp the number one seat at No. 66 Wutong Road.” Truly suspicious indeed.

But he was used to it by now—this was probably just how the dolls from Alice’s Cottage were.

Meanwhile, another portion of the threads spreading through the air was extending toward that door—their tips converged together like a bizarre tentacle, first cautiously touching the door, then beginning to probe and pierce into its interior.

The connection was established.

Yet at that very instant, Yu Sheng suddenly felt a wave of… disorientation.

The sound of wind in the valley vanished. The surrounding scenery had at some point become shrouded in a heavy, dim veil, as if boundless fog filled his vision. And deep within the fog, he saw…

A golden-haired doll, shattered to pieces, lying silently amid ruins consumed by darkness. An enormous shadow lay fallen alongside the doll deep within the ruins—the dead doll’s eyes were open, and through the brief phantom vision behind the veil, Yu Sheng suddenly had the illusion that those eyes were gazing at him.

But everything vanished in an instant. He didn’t even have time to confirm whether that dead golden-haired doll was the same one he’d once seen in the mirror before all the phantoms dissipated like smoke.

All he heard was Eileen’s energetic shouting in his ear: “Hey hey hey! The door opened, the door opened! I think this thing connected! Yu Sheng, check if I did it right…”

Yu Sheng jolted awake with a start and saw that the door to the Dark Forest had already slowly opened in his hands. Countless black threads wreathed in eerie dark mist interwove and snaked inside and outside the door, tracing chaotic patterns like a thicket of thorns guarding the doorframe. On the other side of the door lay that forest shrouded in shadow.

The door to the Dark Forest had truly been successfully opened.

Yu Sheng stared somewhat dazedly at the door entangled in black “thorns.” Honestly speaking—it was a bit weird, but it actually looked pretty cool.

What concerned him more, though, were those “phantoms” he had just seen.

“Eileen.”

“Hm?”

“Did you see anything just now? When our minds were connected, did you see any visions or anything like that?”

“No,” Little Doll froze for a moment and looked at Yu Sheng in confusion. “I was just concentrating on helping you locate the door, afraid something would go wrong… What did you see?”

Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment but decided not to hide it from Little Doll: “…I saw that golden-haired doll again.”

“Which golden-haired doll?” Eileen didn’t immediately catch on. “You’ve been getting to know other dolls out there?”

“The one I told you about, the one I saw in the mirror,” Yu Sheng reminded her. “Torn to pieces, dead in who-knows-where. You even said you’d help bring her home someday when you got the chance.”

“Oh oh, I remember now!” Only then did Eileen react, and immediately her brows furrowed tightly. “How did you see her again? What did you see this time?”

“…The same scene as last time, but I felt like her gaze was resting on me,” Yu Sheng said slowly. “I don’t know what happened either. I just saw it the instant your ‘threads’ connected to me… I thought you might have sensed something too.”

He and Eileen stared at each other blankly. But even after puzzling over it together for a long while, they arrived at no conclusions whatsoever.

Plenty of guesses did pop up in Yu Sheng’s mind, but without a single clue to go on, all those guesses ultimately amounted to nothing more than idle speculation.

He could only set the matter aside for now and refocus his attention on the door before him—though this time, that mysterious golden-haired doll had inevitably left a deep impression in his heart.

Hu Li walked over and grabbed Yu Sheng’s arm, looking a little worried.

“The door to the Dark Forest is open,” Yu Sheng consoled her, rubbing the soft fur behind the Fox-Spirit Girl’s ears. “You’ll come in with me in a bit.”

Hu Li immediately nodded: “Mm.”

“Eileen, you stay out here,” Yu Sheng said to the doll on his shoulder. “Observe what it looks like when we pass through the door. Hu Li and I will stay on the other side for a few minutes, then open a door straight back—if everything goes smoothly, our ‘landing point’ when we return should still be right here.”

“You don’t need me to go in with you?” Eileen looked a bit uneasy. “What if you get lost in there? Wouldn’t you need this ‘dream expert’ to help?”

“Opening a door back to reality from the Dark Forest side doesn’t require your ‘navigation,'” Yu Sheng explained. “By comparison, having you stay outside as ‘insurance’ for me and Hu Li is actually the safer bet.”

“Alright,” Eileen felt this made sense and didn’t waste words, jumping straight down from Yu Sheng’s shoulder. “Then I’ll hold down the fort here for you two—we agreed on a few minutes, so don’t go dying in there…”

The moment Little Doll finished speaking, Hu Li clenched her fists hard, her face deadly serious: “I will protect my benefactor with my life!”

Eileen waved her hand dismissively: “That won’t be necessary. Just focus on protecting yourself. Yu Sheng’s life isn’t worth much anyway…”

Yu Sheng opened his mouth, but after struggling for a long while, he couldn’t come up with a retort.

What made it even more depressing was that not even Hu Li objected…

“I must have owed you two in a past life.”

He could only sigh like that, then grabbed the fox girl’s hand and turned to walk through the door.

After an instant of dizziness and sensory recalibration, he was already standing in the familiar Dark Forest.

Distant, faint wolf howls. The hollow sound of wind blowing through the forest. A dim sky caught somewhere between dusk and nightfall. Shadows everywhere. And those bushes that always seemed to be hiding something, bristling with ill intent.

Nothing had changed from what he remembered. This Dark Forest seemed to be eternally like this.

Beside him, Hu Li’s eyes were wide as she looked around in every direction. It was her first time in this place—having already heard plenty about this forest from Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood, she was extremely vigilant. The cluster of tails behind her stood upright like a sword graveyard, and even the fur on her ears had puffed up slightly.

After a quick check of the surrounding environment, Yu Sheng called out mentally: “Eileen, we’re in.”

“Saw you go in,” Little Doll responded immediately. “The door on this side has disappeared. It looks the same as when you normally use Door Opening.”

“Our bodies also passed through the door, right?” Yu Sheng asked. “They didn’t stay behind on the outside?”

“No, your bodies went straight through.”

Hearing Little Doll’s reply, Yu Sheng let out a soft breath and looked down at his own hands.

Sure enough, after a series of “bug-exploiting” maneuvers, he had successfully entered the Dark Forest in the flesh—and had even managed to bring along a cyber-cultivating fox.

Everything was just as he had predicted. For the Dark Forest, the boundary between “consciousness” and “body” wasn’t so clear-cut. Products from the Dark Forest could be brought into the Real World in material form, and matter from the Real World could, under specific conditions, be sent into this Dark Forest—the underlying principle behind this might remain unclear for now, but for him, having this conclusion was enough.

What Yu Sheng had feared most was that the Dark Forest was truly a pure “consciousness” world, or to put it more bluntly, something conceptual and abstract.

Conceptual, abstract things were the hardest to deal with, because it meant you could only fight them with equally conceptual and abstract means—and humans were ultimately creatures who lived in reality. Combating “the abstract” was not something humans excelled at.

At any rate, Yu Sheng considered himself to be “human,” and he would only think according to human logic.

But since the Dark Forest could establish a connection with the Material World through “bug-exploiting,” everything became much more manageable.

It meant it had a health bar.

Yu Sheng liked things that had health bars.

“Benefactor, what do we do next?” Hu Li crept over cautiously, keeping her voice low. “Should we find those wolves and fight them? Or wait for that ‘squirrel’ you mentioned to show up?”

“The wolf pack is intangible, and that evil wolf has its own conditions for appearing. It won’t be easy to deal with right away,” Yu Sheng shook his head. “We’re not here to fight this time, and we’re not looking for the squirrel either.”

As he spoke, he extended his hand and pulled open another door.

This time, what lay on the other side of the door was no longer chaotic darkness, but a clear reflection of the valley’s scenery.

He could even see Eileen standing on the other side of the door, staring this way with wide, astonished eyes.

“Hey, Yu Sheng, I can see you!”

“Looks like after entering the Dark Forest in the flesh, I can open normal doors from this side,” Yu Sheng smiled and nodded at Little Doll on the other side. Then he turned to look at the fox girl beside him. “Time to go—but before we leave, we need to ‘say hello’ to whatever’s behind the Dark Forest.”

“Huh? Say hello?” The Fox-Spirit Girl was taken aback. “What kind of hello?”

“The twenty-chicken-drumstick kind.”

“…Alright!”

(End of Chapter)