Chapter 40 – The Situation Wasn’t What Was Expected

Eileen cried her heart out.

Yu Sheng didn’t try to console her. Mainly because, first, he genuinely had no idea how to, and second… he was afraid that if this doll was so overwhelmed with grief that she lost her senses, his attempt at comfort might just set her off and cause her to leap up and bite someone.

She really would have to jump to bite anyone now.

Though, the good news was that she could bite people now. Back when she was in the painting, all she could do was yap.

After quite a long while, Eileen’s grief finally settled down just a little. Yu Sheng quickly shuffled a couple of steps toward the table and hesitantly opened his mouth: “So, um… don’t be sad anymore. Next time I’ll make you a new body, a normal-sized one. For now, this one… you can just make do with it for a bit? If that won’t work, tomorrow I’ll get you another one…”

“This, this one will have to do for a while,” Eileen sniffled twice and said with a face full of aggrieved indignation, “Let’s just go with this for now, you don’t need to go through the trouble — even if you made me a new body tomorrow, I couldn’t switch into it right away. A living doll’s soul can’t keep switching containers all the time. At, at least not for a few months…”

As she spoke, sorrow welled up in her again, and it looked like she was about to burst into tears once more.

Yu Sheng quickly grabbed a small glass bottle and held it up to Eileen’s face to catch them.

“What are you doing?” Eileen asked, sniffling as she watched Yu Sheng’s baffling behavior.

“The tears of a living doll,” Yu Sheng said with complete seriousness. “Next time when I make your body, we’ll try to use higher-grade materials. I’ll spend these few months gathering materials, and then I’ll make you one that glows gold…”

Eileen thought about it for a moment, then wailed: “Yu Sheng, you son of a—— ah——”

After yet another long while, the doll’s grief finally calmed down once more.

Eileen climbed up onto the pile of old books nearby and sat at the top of the stack, staring blankly and contemplating life. Yu Sheng sat beside the table keeping the doll company, contemplating life right along with her.

“At, at least it’s better than before,” Eileen muttered quietly, though it was hard to tell if she was speaking to Yu Sheng or to herself. “At least now I can run around on my own.”

“And watch TV on your own,” Yu Sheng quickly agreed. “That’s so much more convenient than before, right.”

Eileen let out a long sigh, as if she wanted to appear weighty and solemn, but because she was so small (66.6cm), the sigh conveyed not even the slightest bit of gravitas.

Yu Sheng turned his head and stole a glance at Eileen as she was now, his gaze landing on the wrists and knees she had exposed.

The ball joints distinctive to dolls looked especially conspicuous.

“Even though a clay doll was used as the container, it still ended up with these ball joints like a puppet,” he said thoughtfully.

“Obviously, it’s a poseable doll. How would it move without joints?” Eileen turned her head and gave Yu Sheng a sideways glance. “This is the form recorded in my soul, so no matter what the container originally looked like, the body after the soul completes its reshaping will always become this — if you don’t like ball joints, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Oh, it’s not really that,” Yu Sheng said casually. “But speaking of the form recorded in your soul… your soul also has a record of you being one meter sixty-seven…”

Eileen instantly leaped from the pile of books onto Yu Sheng’s arm and grabbed his thumb with both hands, bending it back with all her might: “Can you please not. bring. up. sore. subjects!”

Yu Sheng yelped and jumped up. He frantically pulled the doll — who was tiny (66.6cm) yet freakishly strong — off his arm while quickly explaining: “I’m just curious, just curious! Exactly what went wrong during your reshaping process? Your features didn’t go off at all, so how did your body size shrink by so much…”

“How would I know!” Eileen was pulled off his arm by Yu Sheng and was now being held up in the air by her collar. “There shouldn’t have been any problems. Everything felt perfectly normal during the rebirth process, yet the body size ended up off at the very end… Hey! Can you please put me down first!”

“Only if you promise not to bend my fingers anymore.” Yu Sheng held Eileen up by the collar and told the doll in a completely serious tone, waiting for her to nod before setting her back on the table.

“Haah, forget it, there’s no use thinking so much about it,” Eileen sighed again. After pacing back and forth on the table a few times, she shook her head. “I still need to find a way to get in contact with the sisters at Alice’s Cottage. If I can get home, the sisters will definitely have a way…”

Hearing this, Yu Sheng grew a little curious: “You keep bringing up Alice’s Cottage and the dolls… where do the sisters you mentioned usually stay? Are there any other dolls besides you in this city? And speaking of your ‘organization’… what exactly do you all usually do?”

These were questions he’d been wanting to ask for a while, but troublesome things had been coming one after another lately, and only now did he finally get a chance to ask.

“Us? We are a clan created by the Ancestral Doll. Our mission… actually, there isn’t much of a mission. Sometimes we go deal with the Otherworld, sometimes we help other organizations handle troublesome entities, but most of the time the dolls just do whatever they enjoy,” Eileen recalled, beginning to speak. “Most of my sisters don’t operate in the human world, but there should indeed be a contact point in Boundary City… though I don’t remember exactly where, and after so many years, the contact methods and contacts have probably all changed by now…”

She climbed back onto the pile of old books, propped her chin on both hands, and slowly continued speaking from within her memories: “When we operate in the human world, we always use some kind of disguise. Living dolls look very much like humans, so it’s easy to blend into crowds. This city is so enormous — without a specific method of contact or finding a specific contact person, it’s not easy to find a living doll that’s gone into hiding…”

Yu Sheng listened from the side. Although he’d already suspected before that all kinds of strange and bizarre creatures might be hiding in this city, he still felt rather astonished: “Unbelievable… I always thought the residents of this city were only humans…”

“How could that be,” Eileen rolled her eyes at Yu Sheng. “This is the Borderland, after all.”

“The Borderland, huh…” Yu Sheng quietly repeated the word.

“In a place like the Borderland, anything is possible. Not to mention anything else — isn’t there a strange fellow hiding right here in this Old City District who thinks of himself as a human being?” Eileen waved a hand and jumped down from the pile of old books. “Let’s head downstairs. I’ve had enough of being up here. Now that I finally have the ability to move around freely, I want to take a good walk around this big house~”

“Fair enough,” Yu Sheng let out a breath and patted his face to wake himself up. “Spending the better half of the day just sculpting your body — I’m hungry. Let’s go downstairs and make something to eat.”

As he spoke, he turned and walked toward the attic exit. But he had barely taken two steps when he heard Eileen shouting behind him: “Hey, wait for me! I’m not down yet!”

Yu Sheng turned around to see Eileen taking a running start across the table, jumping with all her might onto the creaky old chair, then climbing to the edge of the chair and slowly sliding down its leg hand over hand and foot over foot, taking quite a while before finally making it safely to the floor…

Yu Sheng: “…”

Eileen paddled her little short legs and worked hard to run over to Yu Sheng’s feet. Only then did she notice the gaze that had settled on her. She immediately tilted her head back and tried her best to put her hands on her hips, attempting to look dignified: “What are you looking at me for?”

“Nothing,” Yu Sheng shook his head. “Just feel like it’s pretty… pretty cute.”

He had almost let the word “amusing” slip out.

Eileen paused, not catching the suspicious hesitation in Yu Sheng’s words: “I, is that so?”

Then she walked alongside Yu Sheng toward the exit. After just two steps, she reached out and tugged at his trouser leg: “Oh right, thank you.”

Yu Sheng looked down. He tugged his waistband up and gave her a puzzled look.

“Thank you for preparing a body for me. Things were too chaotic earlier, and I never properly thanked you.” Eileen said with complete sincerity.

Yu Sheng couldn’t help but look the doll up and down (66.6cm), and after holding back for a long time, he finally couldn’t resist: “You ended up like this, and you’re still thanking me?”

“One thing is one thing. The size issue is some unknown problem that arose during my own reshaping, but the body was indeed carefully prepared for me by you,” Eileen said, tilting her head back and looking particularly solemn (though it really didn’t come across that way). “Even if it is a little ugly.”

“…You didn’t have to add that last part.”

“A, anyway, what I promised you before still stands,” Eileen quickly said. “I’ll help you from now on. Whether it’s helping in a fight or providing support in the occult arts, I’ll be very useful. Even if I find the other sisters in the future and return to Alice’s Cottage, I’ll still come back to help you. It’s just…”

She paused at this point and thought for a moment.

“How about, how about we set it at a hundred years first?” She looked at Yu Sheng, cautiously confirming. “You should be dead of old age by then, right?”

Yu Sheng: “…I’ll do my best.”

“Then it’s settled at a hundred years,” Eileen said with a happy smile, her mood suddenly lifting for reasons unknown. She then turned around and paddled her little short legs toward the attic exit. “Then let’s hurry downstairs…”

Her voice cut off abruptly. She lurched forward suddenly, tumbling like a puppet whose strings had all been cut at once, and her momentum sent her skidding far across the floor until she slammed into the wall on the other side.

The smile on Yu Sheng’s face froze the instant Eileen went flying.

“Wha… what the hell?!”

He blanked for a moment, then rushed to Eileen’s side in a few steps and bent down to pick the little doll up off the floor.

The doll’s eyes were tightly shut. There was no tension anywhere in her body. The limbs that had held warmth just a second ago were now cold as ordinary clay, though the skin still maintained the soft, living texture — yet there was no sense of life to be felt at all.

Yu Sheng was completely dumbfounded.

Then he heard Eileen’s voice, coming from the large table not far away —

“Yu Sheng! I, I’m back inside here!”