Chapter 107 – Financial Pressure

Hu Li was very obedient. Without asking a single question after hearing Yu Sheng’s instructions, she picked up Eileen’s oil painting, stuffed it into her tail, turned around, and dashed out the door toward the attic.

Eileen, still lying on the bed and clinging to hope, began: “Hey, Yu Sheng, do you think a mira—”

Before she could finish, both little dolls simultaneously went dark in the eyes as if their power had been cut, then toppled over stiffly onto the bed.

Yu Sheng watched the scene expressionlessly, then tilted his head up at a forty-five-degree angle to stare at the ceiling. “Guess not.”

A few seconds later, he called out toward the hallway: “Hu Li! You can come back now!”

Hurried footsteps came from outside as Hu Li sprinted back down from the attic. After entering the room, she fished out the oil painting frame from her tail and handed it to Yu Sheng. “Benefactor! Here you go!”

The two little dolls on the bed both shot upright with a bounce, both looking somewhat dazed.

Yu Sheng casually hung the oil painting on one of their backs, transforming her into P1 Eileen.

But when Eileen “woke up,” instead of immediately lamenting the lack of a miracle, she stared straight at Hu Li: “Can’t you tidy up the inside of your tail?”

Yu Sheng’s curiosity was piqued. “Huh? You could see inside her tail? What’s it like in there?”

The moment the words left his mouth, he felt how bizarre they sounded—the kind of sentence that would qualify as grammatically nonsensical in any other context. But after careful consideration, he couldn’t actually find anything wrong with it. He could only blame this rocket-boosted Dorae-Fox’s tail for being so surreal that even describing its function made you sound like you were losing your mind…

“It’s pitch black inside, no idea how big it actually is—you can’t see the edges anyway. There’s a huge pile of stuff heaped up in the middle like a garbage mountain. The top layer is all food, including leftovers,” Eileen gestured animatedly as she described what she’d seen to Yu Sheng. “The moment I opened my eyes inside the painting, I was staring at half a box of instant noodles with a half-gnawed roast chicken sitting inside it…”

“I—I didn’t steal any of it,” Hu Li hastily explained, looking very nervous. “I told Benefactor about this before. The leftovers too—it would’ve been a waste to throw them away, so I just took them. Besides, nothing goes bad inside my tail.”

“Then at least organize it! Who keeps things piled up like a garbage mountain? Next time you go out shopping, buy a couple of shelving units and stuff them in your tail—you know, those supermarket stocking shelves. They’re super cheap.”

Yu Sheng, finding this conversation increasingly surreal, finally couldn’t help but interrupt: “…Can we talk about Eileen’s situation instead?”

The doll and the fox girl finally concluded their discussion about “mixing cargo and passengers in a tail, storing raw and cooked food together, and whether that violated food safety regulations” as well as “whether to stuff a couple of shelving units into a fox spirit’s tail,” and turned their attention to Eileen’s two bodies.

“Ahem. So it’s now confirmed that at least one doll body must remain within five meters of the oil painting, otherwise they both lose connection and Eileen’s soul returns to the painting,” Yu Sheng cleared his throat and began laying out the next round of testing. “Next, let’s see how far the ‘secondary body’ can go while the ‘primary body’ is carrying the painting on its back.”

“How do we test that? The house might not be big enough,” Eileen thought it over. “Go out? Head into the city? But running this kind of test while hiding from ordinary people sounds like a real hassle…”

“Which is why there’s a place better suited than the city.” A hint of a smile appeared on Yu Sheng’s face.

Before he could continue, Eileen had already figured it out. Both dolls spoke in unison: “The valley!”

“Enormous space, far enough from one end to the other, and absolutely zero worry about anyone disturbing us,” Yu Sheng nodded. “But before we head there, we need to make a trip out first. I need to pick up a few things.”

At the mention of shopping, Eileen grew inexplicably excited. Both dolls scooted to the edge of the bed in unison: “Ooh? Going shopping? What are we buying? Clothes? Food? Or are you finally going to buy me something? I’d actually love a change of clothes—the outfit I conjured on myself is nice and all, but sometimes I want something different… Did you know? I can change my clothes! It’s just that I don’t have anything else to wear… You need a new jacket too—yours got covered in blood yesterday and had that huge tear in it, it’s definitely ruined…”

The two dolls rattled off a whole barrage of chatter. At first Yu Sheng didn’t think much of it, but as Eileen gradually evolved from “speaking in unison” to “saying different things at the same time,” he started feeling that something was off. This little doll was clearly adapting rapidly to having two bodies. She began alternating between the two mouths to speak, and moments later, both mouths were talking simultaneously but saying completely different things…

Yu Sheng finally realized, belatedly, that his “spirit of scientific inquiry” had perhaps, possibly, maybe, potentially… created a problem.

Now there were two of the noisy little chatterbox!

“Use one body to talk! Stop yapping with both at once!” Yu Sheng hastily put a stop to the doll’s noise assault. “My head’s about to explode—and from now on too! No more of this racket!”

“Aw, I was just about to say I discovered this way of talking is way more efficient,” the Eileen carrying the painting pouted, then looked up with blinking eyes. “So what did you say you’re going to buy?”

“First, stock up on food—get a couple cases of instant noodles and vacuum-sealed chicken drumsticks and stuff for Hu Li as ‘reserves.’ Then buy some vegetable seeds, and now that I think about it, some farming tools too,” Yu Sheng began listing his shopping items one by one, rapidly calculating costs in his head as he spoke. “Oh right, I also need to hit up the building materials market… Actually, maybe we should hold off. This might get a bit expensive.”

At this, his expression turned worried. Another big shopping spree would truly drain his savings dry. His new manuscript still had no prospects, the “inn” hadn’t brought in any real business, and the commission he’d carried out with Little Red Riding Hood yesterday—who knew when the payment would come through. The other party had said it could arrive as early as today, but had specifically emphasized the words “as early as.”

These past days had been nothing but expenditures exceeding income—in fact, there was no income at all. Only expenditures remained.

And the biggest expenses were all on Hu Li. Clothes and daily necessities were at least one-time costs in the short term, but feeding her every day was no small matter. Yet Yu Sheng had to admit that every penny spent on Hu Li’s meals was far from wasted. After all, twenty chicken drumsticks per tail-blast sounded like a lot, but put another way—where else could you get a cruise missile for the price of twenty chicken drumsticks?

Give him a chicken farm right now, and he reckoned he could have this girl lay down a full carpet bombing across the entire Old City District…

On the other hand, Eileen’s household expenses were practically zero.

Aside from the material costs for preparing her body reconstruction (and even those were cheap materials), he’d never bought her clothes, never bought her food. In all this time, the only thing he’d gotten her was a little red hair clip—and even that was bought by proxy when Little Red Riding Hood took her shopping. One of those cheap little trinkets that looked like a children’s toy, and it had made the doll happy for an entire day…

Thinking about it this way, Yu Sheng actually felt a bit guilty toward the doll.

She was noisy, short-tempered, endlessly chatty, always pushing her luck, weak yet reckless—but when things got serious, she really stepped up.

“If it comes down to it, I’ll just have to dip into that ’emergency reserve fund.’ And if things really get too tight, I’ll go to the Special Operations Bureau and see if I can sell them that ‘iron lump’ we found last time directly…”

Yu Sheng muttered to himself, drawing a curious look from Eileen beside him: “What are you mumbling about?”

“Nothing. Let’s get ready and head out,” Yu Sheng waved his hand, speaking as he stood up. “We’re not going far this time—the agricultural market on the edge of the Old City District should have everything we need. Also, have Hu Li carry you out again for ‘camouflage’—and bring the oil painting so you don’t lose connection on the way.”

“Okay,” Eileen nodded, directing her other body to sit propped up against the headboard, then clumsily maneuvered her “primary” body—the one carrying the painting—off the edge of the bed. She wobbled a few steps across the floor before letting out a breath of relief. “Not bad. When the other body stays still, controlling just this one is much easier. Oh, how are we getting there? Taxi?”

“…I didn’t leave any coordinates there, otherwise I’d just open a door and save the cab fare,” Yu Sheng sighed. “We’ll have to take a ride-hail.”

A dozen or so minutes later, Yu Sheng arrived at the nearest intersection from his home with the fox—now shapeshifted into a girl with long straight black hair—and waited for their ride-hail to arrive.

“Once we have money, we really should buy a car, right?” Eileen’s voice echoed in the depths of Yu Sheng’s mind, tinged with anticipation for the future. “We can’t keep squeezing into ride-hails forever…”

Yu Sheng turned to glance at Eileen nestled in Hu Li’s arms, and raised an eyebrow: “What if it’s another Special Operations Bureau car?”

“…Then I’d rather take the ride-hail.”

Yu Sheng grinned, his mind wandering: “Actually, I think we should just get an electric scooter. A bigger one that can carry a passenger. Have Hu Li sit on the back—ride normally in the city, and once we’re somewhere with no people, she pops her tails out. Nine-tailed rocket-boosted electric scooter: a hundred kilometers for twenty cents of electricity and three steamed buns. If the scooter could do regenerative braking, we might even turn a profit on electricity…”

“You’ve got quite the imagination,” Eileen muttered, then caught herself. “Wait, where do I sit?!”

“I’ll put you in the front basket.”

“…Yu Sheng, you bastard!”

While they were bickering, a silver-gray car with sleek lines suddenly entered Yu Sheng’s field of vision. Eileen, who had been on the verge of springing up to bite someone while no one was looking, instantly went docile again, dangling her limbs limply in Hu Li’s arms to maintain her “disguise.”

With a squeak, the car stopped in front of Yu Sheng.

Hu Li leaned close to Yu Sheng and asked curiously in a small voice: “Benefactor, is that the car you called? It got here so fast?”

Yu Sheng paused for a moment, glanced at the ride-hailing app on his phone, and compared the license plate of the car before him: “…No, my car is still two intersections away waiting at a red light.”

While he puzzled over this, the silver-gray car’s window was already rolling down.

Good news: it wasn’t Xu Jiali’s rickety old Xiali that shook like it was shivering.

Bad news: the face revealed behind the driver’s window belonged to yet another familiar person—and one that gave Yu Sheng a bit of a headache.

Ren Wenwen beamed brightly: “Oh, it’s you guys! Heading out?”

(End of Chapter)