Chapter 202 – One of Ten Thousand Doors

Chapter 202 – One of Ten Thousand Doors

The call ended, and Yu Sheng stood there holding his phone in a slight daze. Two seconds later, he finally lowered his head to look at Eileen (main unit), who was right by his feet. “How come I can’t tell whether she’s angry or not…”

“She didn’t seem to actually swear this time, but I think that’s just because she’s gotten used to it,” Eileen analyzed with a perfectly serious expression. “Looking on the bright side, at least this time you didn’t have a sudden whim to stir up trouble at midnight…”

Yu Sheng cleared his throat twice, forcefully shoved the guilt in his heart back down, and turned his attention to the door before him.

A mottled, aged wooden door leaned at an angle against the white wall of the basement. The door frame and the surrounding floor were covered in bizarre, intricate lines and symbols. Several candles burned quietly nearby, and the air carried a faint scent of incense—still from that batch of goods from the five-yuan store.

Whether the Spirit Infusion ritual would succeed was still uncertain, but the atmosphere certainly looked the part.

Yu Sheng took a slow breath, calmed his slightly nervous nerves, and then began following the method he’d previously devised through his own creative modifications. He cut open his palm and guided his blood into the door.

Spirit Infusion—pouring one’s own “spirituality” into originally lifeless matter. Since clay could become a doll’s flesh and rebar could become a doll’s bones, a door could naturally also serve as a target for Spirit Infusion.

The candles crackled and popped, their flames gradually rising higher. Blood seeped silently into the mottled old wooden door. Gradually, the lines and patterns drawn on the surrounding floor with ordinary ink began to take on a faint dark-red hue, as if the blood were progressively replacing every part of the alchemical array’s structure. Yu Sheng even heard a faint, searing sound.

He widened his eyes in surprise.

“What’s wrong?” Eileen immediately noticed Yu Sheng’s reaction. “Does something feel off?”

“No, it’s that it feels… too smooth,” Yu Sheng said incredulously, sensing the connection established through his blood. “Even when I was shaping your body, there wasn’t such an obvious sensation of ‘something taking form,’ but right now I can clearly feel the spirituality reshaping this door… Is it because of those amplification nodes you set up?”

“Maybe it’s because you’re establishing a connection with a ‘door,’ and that’s inherently your own power?” Eileen analyzed quite seriously, then immediately became smug. “Of course, the main reason is definitely that my amplification nodes were set up perfectly!”

Yu Sheng paid no mind to Little Doll’s self-congratulatory boasting. He simply controlled the entire Spirit Infusion ritual with even greater care, then placed his hand on the door handle while continuing to “reshape” the door.

Just as when he had remolded clay and lotus roots into a doll’s torso and limbs, the door’s form began to change.

Faint creaking sounds came from the door. Its frame edges suddenly softened and deformed as though they had gained life. The original wooden structure began to gradually “dissolve” into the wall behind it, forming organic, adhesive connections. Then the surface of the door began to sprout fine, vein-like patterns, which gradually smoothed out and became thorn-like lines with a faint metallic sheen.

Then Yu Sheng gently turned the handle—and the connection with the Valley was instantly established.

But instead of pushing the door open as he usually did, he maintained it in its about-to-open state while carefully sensing the situation on “the other side.”

He needed to also shape the corresponding “connection point” on the Valley’s side in one go.

This step was not easy. He had to devote a considerable portion of his attention to generating a physically substantial, permanently stable door apparatus on the “platform” on the Valley’s side. Although he could control the soil and rock within the Valley to form any shape, this was ultimately “remote control”—ensuring precision, position, and connection stability all at once was quite challenging.

Yu Sheng failed three times in a row.

By the fourth attempt, the candle flames at the edges of the alchemical array were visibly becoming unstable.

But this time, he succeeded.

He felt a fixed connection lock into place. A physical door had formed at the corresponding position on the Valley’s side, and it could remain stable without him continuing to maintain it.

Several minutes later, after triple-checking that the connection was stable, Yu Sheng finally let out a gentle sigh of relief and released the door handle.

Hu Li had been watching nervously from the side the entire time and finally blinked. “Benefactor, did you do it?”

“Should be done,” Yu Sheng said with a smile and a nod. He glanced at the door that had now fully fused into and embedded itself in the wall, then stepped half a pace to the side. “Eileen, come try it out. In theory, this door now works the same as the front door at No. 66 Wutong Road—people like you and Hu Li who have received my blood can open it directly, and it leads permanently to the Valley.”

Eileen was actually still quite uneasy about this thing, but after a moment’s hesitation, she nodded out of trust in Yu Sheng himself, and stepped forward.

The little lady of the dolls stood silently before the door.

Silence was the roar of 66.6 centimeters.

Yu Sheng: “…Should I have left a small opening in the lower half for—”

“Shut up! No! I can reach it!”

Eileen whipped around and pointed at Yu Sheng with a triple shout plus a middle finger, and then two other Eileens walked over. Right before Yu Sheng’s eyes, the three little dolls nimbly stacked themselves in a triangular formation. Only then did they manage to grab the door handle, and with a mighty twist—

The door opened.

The wide, pleasant scenery of the Valley flooded into everyone’s view.

Still stacked together and clinging to the door handle, Eileen instantly forgot the annoyance of one second ago, her eyes widening in amazement. All three bodies spoke in unison: “Wow— Yu Sheng, you actually pulled it off! It really works!”

Then the Eileen on top leaped down and scampered joyfully toward the other side of the door. “Let me go check things out first!”

But at that moment, Yu Sheng suddenly felt something seemed off about the view on the other side. “Hey, wait a second, I think I messed up that side’s—”

But he was a step too late. The little doll had already jumped through the doorway.

The next second, her figure dropped straight down. “Waaah—”

Followed by a “splat.”

Yu Sheng and Hu Li hurried over and poked their heads through the door, only to see the little lady of the dolls sprawled flat on the gravel outside the edge of the Valley platform.

The two Eileens remaining on the basement side were hopping and cursing: “Yu Sheng, you bastard! You opened the damn door on the edge of the platform?! Why didn’t you just open it in the sky while you were at it!”

Yu Sheng frantically willed the ground on the other side to rise, lifting the fallen Eileen up to the level of the door frame. Then he and Hu Li went through to pick up the dazed little doll. While straightening her clothes, he hastily explained his original plan: “So, uh, I had planned for the door to face the interior of the platform. That way, in the future, I could line the whole perimeter of the platform with doors, and the entire area would be a great hall. I was going to call it the ‘Hall of Ten Thousand Doors’—connecting to every corner of the universe. The platform’s edge would be the hall’s outer wall…”

Eileen sprang up and grabbed Yu Sheng by the hair. “Then why did I fall off?!”

“…I opened it backwards.”

“Yu Sheng, you bastard! I’ll &*%… ￥%￥…”

For the next two minutes, Eileen’s cursing was truly spectacular.

Time ticked by minute by minute. On the third minute, the doll’s anger subsided.

She sat on the platform, watching Yu Sheng busily adjusting the door, and muttered: “Honestly, your ‘Hall of Ten Thousand Doors’ idea is pretty cool. It’s got that mysterious organization vibe—you know, the kind that doesn’t show up for forty-something episodes of the main plot, only sends one person out whenever the protagonist finally makes a breakthrough to flash their silhouette in the post-credits scene, and then whenever a season runs out of ideas the director has the whole organization wiped out. Sometimes they get wiped out right at the beginning too.”

“You should really watch fewer garbage dramas,” Yu Sheng grumbled while wiping his sweat. “And when you give examples, can’t you pick something more auspicious? Does it always have to end with getting wiped out?”

“That’s what’s trendy right now. Without some blood feud driving them, the protagonist has no motivation,” Eileen said, resting her chin on both hands and watching Yu Sheng. “Can you get it fixed? You’ve been at it for a while… If it really doesn’t work, just leave this door opening backwards. It could serve as a trap against intruders—anyone who doesn’t know better opens the door and takes a tumble right off the bat…”

“Everyone who can open this door has authorization. What would it be guarding against?” Yu Sheng said without looking up. “Alright, it’s fixed. Come take a look.”

Under his control, the portal with its minor error had finally been repaired.

A flat-topped gate of simple, archaic design now stood quietly on the platform. Its frame and panels had a stone-like, pale gray texture. Though quite plain in appearance, it was precisely this simplicity that lent it a certain air of mysterious solemnity.

The door’s “handle” was a triangular “stone block” embedded in its surface. The stone’s surface bore no decoration whatsoever, its edges rough. It was simply set directly into the center of the door—somewhat jarring at first glance, yet somehow fitting perfectly with the overall “style” of the gate.

Now, anyone who had received the “blood” could turn this triangular stone at the center of the door to open a passage from here to the basement of No. 66 Wutong Road.

Eileen and Hu Li came over curiously. The two of them examined the gate standing at the platform’s edge, and the little doll rubbed her chin with a slight nod. “Not bad. Honestly, it’s got way more design sense than that toilet you built before.”

Yu Sheng looked exasperated. “How many times do I have to say it—that wasn’t a toilet!”

“Yeah, yeah, your ‘Phase One construction project,'” Eileen waved her hand impatiently, then looked curiously at the triangular “handle” in the center of the door. “By the way, why is the handle in the center?”

“For aesthetics. It adds a sense of mystery—and it confuses anyone using it for the first time, so you can’t immediately tell which side the hinge is on…”

Eileen: “…Are you insane? Then why is it a triangle?”

Yu Sheng scratched his nose. “Oh, there’s actually a meaning behind that. It symbolizes the three leaders of the Lodge—that’s the three of us.”

Eileen looked suspicious. “…Really?”

Yu Sheng sighed. “Actually, I was trying to sculpt a tiger head, but the tiger head didn’t turn out well, so I figured I’d try a dog head instead. The dog head didn’t work either…”

Eileen: “…”

A moment later, the little doll took half a step back and gazed solemnly at the door before her, and at the triangular handle embedded in its center.

“A design symbolizing the three founding leaders of the Lodge. How wonderful,” the doll praised, her face utterly expressionless.

Yu Sheng nodded along. “How wonderful indeed.”

Hu Li looked at Eileen, then at Yu Sheng, having no idea what had just happened. She just clapped along with them. “Mm-hmm, how wonderful indeed…”

(End of Chapter)