Chapter 85 – “The Lodge”

Eileen instantly noticed the form in front of Yu Sheng too, and the little doll rushed over with great excitement.

“We’re forming an organization! Yay!” For some reason, she was even more excited than Yu Sheng himself. “Have you thought of a name yet? It needs to sound really impressive, super mysterious, the kind where just dropping the name alone is enough to land you business…”

“A name… I have thought of a few,” Yu Sheng said, holding his pen and mulling it over. “Have you thought of any?”

“Call it Eileen’s Vanguard!”

Yu Sheng immediately turned his gaze to the fox girl. “What do you think would be a good name?”

Eileen bounced up and down. “Hey, don’t ignore me! What’s wrong with Vanguard? Just because we’re small doesn’t mean we can’t call ourselves a vanguard!”

Hu Li looked at the doll bouncing around, then at Yu Sheng and the form on the table, and after thinking for a long time, she cautiously offered: “I don’t really understand this sort of thing… could we call it ‘One Big Happy Family’…?”

Yu Sheng’s face instantly went blank.

Eileen was practically bouncing into his face now. “See, that name’s even worse than mine! You’d be better off listening to me than this silly fox—”

Yu Sheng sighed, figuring he really couldn’t count on these two clowns at home, and put pen to paper, writing down the name he’d already settled on long ago—

The Lodge.

Eileen immediately craned her neck to look, and froze for a moment when she saw the two characters. “‘The Lodge’? That’s the name? Why? It feels kind of weird…”

Yu Sheng had to reach out and push the doll’s head aside, as it was blocking his line of sight. “It’s because of my ‘doors.'”

Miss Doll was nudged to the side. She crossed her arms and thought about it for a moment, and seemed to gradually understand what Yu Sheng was thinking.

Those doors leading to distant places. Those incredible landscapes. And the faraway “place” that Yu Sheng had always been searching for. Plus, lodge was a word with multiple connotations–on the one hand it implied something akin to an Inn or a Hostel, filled with doors. On the other hand, it implied something of a secret society.

“On the road, huh…” Eileen nodded, murmuring softly, but the quiet lasted barely two or three seconds before the nonsense came spilling out again. “Then how about adding my element too? Put ‘Doll’ in front. And add the silly fox’s element too, like her tail or something. The full name would be ‘Doll Tail Lodge’… Fine, fine, forget it then. Stop glaring at me.”

Yu Sheng sighed, but he was more or less used to this doll’s troublemaking by now, so he ignored her and continued filling out the rest of the form.

In the section for founding team members, he carefully wrote down Eileen’s and Hu Li’s names.

“Leave the ID number column blank for now,” Ren Wenwen said, glancing up at Yu Sheng’s progress and pointing to the portable card printer sitting on the table beside them. “The chip cards are already loaded. Once the data comes through in a few minutes, they’ll be activated. Please fill in the basic personnel information below first.”

Yu Sheng let out an “oh,” hesitated for two or three seconds, then looked up at Eileen and Hu Li.

“What’s your education level?”

Eileen immediately crossed her arms and lifted her chin with pride. “Dolls don’t need school! The Ancestral Doll directly transmits ancient knowledge during the creation process, and then through the connections established by Alice’s Garden, dolls share experiences and observations with each other, building up their knowledge after birth!”

Hu Li hesitated, looking a bit embarrassed. “I was… still in elementary school at the time, and then things happened…”

Yu Sheng stood there with his mouth hanging open, as if suddenly confronted with some cold, cruel reality. At the same time, he felt all the ambition and expectations for the future he’d been building up slowly collapsing in the face of this cruel reality. After half a minute, he finally let out a long sigh and filled in the founding team member information for “The Lodge” with two entries that were destined to shock the industry—

One: prenatal education. The other: elementary school dropout.

Ren Wenwen came over to console him. “You don’t need to worry about it. The situation with non-human races is complicated. Many races have education systems that aren’t compatible with the Borderland’s, and their qualifications aren’t mutually recognized either. This field is basically just for reference…”

“Normally, the people registering organizations in the Borderland are all ‘locals,’ right?” Yu Sheng glanced at the clerk. “You don’t have to comfort me.”

Ren Wenwen froze for a moment, seemingly wanting to say something more, but just then, a series of buzzing sounds came from the portable card printer on the table.

“Ah, the ID data has come through.”

A moment later, Hu Li and Eileen finally received their identification documents—two small plastic cards that looked no different from an ordinary person’s ID.

“I think this photo is kind of ugly,” Eileen said, gripping the card—which was a bit large for her—with both hands, turning it over and over, then looking up at Ren Wenwen to complain. “Do you people who take ID photos all go through special training or something? No matter how good-looking someone is, they end up looking miserable in the photo—and you even changed my eye color…”

“That’s to make the ID usable in ordinary settings—though the situations where you’d use it yourself should be pretty rare,” Ren Wenwen replied casually as she organized the forms Yu Sheng had filled out. “Look, Miss Hu Li has no complaints.”

“Mm-hm, I think it’s great,” Hu Li said, nodding eagerly. She carefully tucked her ID card into her tail, then looked up at Yu Sheng with a happy smile on her face. “Thank you, benefactor, for going through all this trouble for me~”

Yu Sheng smiled without saying anything, just reaching out to ruffle her hair and scratch the soft fur behind her ears.

Hu Li loved this—she squinted her eyes, looking thoroughly content.

“Well then, the registration process is now complete,” Ren Wenwen said as she packed everything up, standing from her chair. “The license can’t be produced on-site. Someone will deliver it to you in a couple of days. Also, there’s one more thing—this is for you.”

With that, she rummaged through her backpack—which seemed capable of holding an endless number of things—and pulled something out, handing it to Yu Sheng.

It was a brand-new phone.

Yu Sheng stared in surprise at what she was offering, not daring to take it right away. “Huh? Why?”

“It’s special equipment. It comes preloaded with an intelligence-sharing and communications platform established by the Special Operations Bureau. It can also be used to activate support nodes set up throughout the Borderland, and it has various other auxiliary functions—for example, maintaining communications under certain harsh conditions, or locating the nearest liaison station in areas far from the Borderland but under Bureau management. If you’ve had contact with other spirit detectives before, you should have seen them using one. It’s different from an ordinary phone.”

Yu Sheng blinked, suddenly recalling the phone that Little Red Riding Hood used.

The style did seem quite similar to the one in Ren Wenwen’s hand right now.

He hesitated. “This thing… it’s free?”

“It costs money, though it’s reasonably priced,” Ren Wenwen said with a smile. “But you don’t need to worry about that—this is a personal gift from our Bureau Chief.”

Only then did Yu Sheng reach out and take it, still somewhat surprised. “A gift from Bureau Chief Baili Qing? Is that… appropriate?”

“You resolved the entity entrenched in the Night-shrouded Valley and brought two Bureau agents and one spirit detective safely back to the real world. This gift is merely a small token of gratitude,” Ren Wenwen said with great sincerity. “When I came, the Bureau Chief and our team captain specifically instructed me to tell you that if you need anything in the future, you can contact the Bureau directly. Especially in your daily life—if you ever encounter difficulties due to certain ‘supernatural causes,’ you absolutely must let us know. Don’t worry about being a bother.”

Yu Sheng listened, letting out a couple of vague “oh”s in a slight daze. The “care” that Ren Wenwen was conveying felt somewhat strange to him, though he couldn’t put his finger on what exactly felt off.

After another moment, seeing that the clerk showed no signs of saying goodbye and leaving, he couldn’t help asking curiously: “So, uh… is there anything else?”

Ren Wenwen opened her mouth, looking quite hesitant. She seemed to genuinely have something to say, but was too nervous and uncertain to bring it up.

“Just say whatever’s on your mind,” Yu Sheng said with a smile when he saw her hesitation. “If it’s something the Bureau needs, I’ll do my best to cooperate. After all, you’ve helped me out a great deal.”

“It’s not about the Bureau… it’s a personal matter,” the clerk said, wavering for a long time before finally mustering her courage. The competent, practiced demeanor she’d shown during the registration process had completely vanished. “I just wanted to confirm—are you the one who wrote ‘The Blizzard Mystery’?”

Yu Sheng’s expression froze for an instant, and then it clicked. He looked at her with some uncertainty. “Uh, yeah, I wrote it. Are you…”

The clerk’s face instantly lit up. “I’ve read your work! Lots of it! On my phone!”

Yu Sheng finally confirmed what he’d suspected, and his whole demeanor perked up on the spot. He turned to Eileen. “What did I tell you! See? What did I say! I’m a—”

Before he could finish gloating, Ren Wenwen had already whipped a notebook out of her bag and thrust it toward Yu Sheng with the intensity of an assassin lunging with a blade. “Could I please get your autograph?”

By this point Yu Sheng was beside himself with joy, happily taking the notebook and pen, nodding eagerly. “No problem, no problem…”

“This is amazing! When I first saw it in the files, I couldn’t believe it. I recommended your writing to our captain, and he said he couldn’t understand it…” Ren Wenwen was beaming with excitement. “Let me tell you, my absolute favorite character you’ve written is ‘Lin Qi,’ and I especially ship him with ‘Night Blade’…”

Yu Sheng: “…?”

The hand signing the autograph suddenly began to tremble.