Chapter 96 – Proactive Testing

Chapter 96 – Proactive Testing

“The ‘guards’ generated inside the museum won’t move across zones, so we can rest here in this corridor for a while,” Little Red Riding Hood said to Yu Sheng as she looked at the quiet corridor before them. “We’ll need to be extra careful when we move to other areas later. We still don’t know how many ‘guards’ the museum has generated in total. If they all happen to be clustered around the white exhibition hall… that would be really unfortunate.”

“The real question is how these ‘guards’ got ‘activated’ in the first place,” Eileen said, hopping down from Yu Sheng’s back and putting on a serious, contemplative expression. “We definitely didn’t make any mistakes, but those guards came at us swinging the moment they showed up, without even checking who was in the wrong…”

Little Red Riding Hood opened her mouth as if wanting to say something, but seemed deeply hesitant.

Eileen asked her directly: “What do you want to say?”

Only then did Little Red Riding Hood speak: “Actually, the most likely explanation is that someone besides us also entered the museum, and they triggered the museum’s ‘purge’ mechanism. But… theoretically that shouldn’t be the case. I checked before we came—there aren’t any investigators other than us scheduled to come here tonight…”

Eileen thought for a moment: “Maybe someone came in secretly? With some unspeakable purpose or something…”

“Very unlikely,” Little Red Riding Hood shook her head. “The Special Operations Bureau has regulations—opening an Otherworld within the Borderland requires advance registration. Every ‘node’ has monitoring capabilities, forming a massive sensor network. Any Otherworld passage or space-time rift opening unexpectedly would definitely trigger an alert.”

“Ah, well that’s true, we’re familiar with that.” Eileen nodded with absolutely no shame, though it was unclear whether she’d actually taken any of it in. Then her eyes darted over, and her attention landed on Yu Sheng.

Yu Sheng was currently squatting on the floor, picking up a somewhat twisted and deformed plastic arm.

This was left behind by the “guard” that had lunged forward and grabbed him in the last moment before they crossed through the door. The “door” had severed this arm, and probably because it was too far from the main body, the arm had now completely lost all vitality. Like a part that had fallen off a real plastic mannequin, it lay perfectly still.

Yu Sheng curiously examined this “severed limb” cut from an entity, then tapped it against the floor a few times. It produced a hollow sound.

Plastic. It looked like plastic, felt like plastic—the only question was whether it would taste like plastic too if you took a bite…

The moment this bizarre thought crossed Yu Sheng’s mind, a horrified shriek came from beside him: “Hey! Yu Sheng, what are you doing? That thing is plastic! You can’t eat it!”

“Obviously, I know it’s not edible. I haven’t lost it that badly!” Yu Sheng shot the little doll an exasperated look. “Even if it weren’t plastic, I still wouldn’t eat it—those ‘guards’ are humanoid, after all. There’s no way I could bring myself to do that. I’m just a little curious about how these ‘entities’ are able to move around.”

Eileen immediately patted her chest in relief: “Thank goodness, you scared me to death… I’m telling you, if you’d whipped out a pot right here and started braising that thing, I wouldn’t even have been surprised. You’re just that kind of person…”

Yu Sheng looked helpless: “Is that really the image you have of me?”

Little Red Riding Hood, meanwhile, watched from the side with a horrified expression.

She wasn’t horrified by Eileen shouting “you can’t eat that”—she was horrified because she was recalling the plate of stir-fried meat she’d seen the last time she visited No. 66 Wutong Road. She even suspected that Yu Sheng really had been considering whether that severed arm was edible just now—or at the very least, had been contemplating its texture.

Then she watched as Yu Sheng suddenly pulled a small knife from his pocket, made a small cut on his own arm, let some blood flow out, and smeared it onto the plastic arm.

A sense of eerie dread utterly different from “he’s going to eat it” welled up from the bottom of her heart, and Little Red Riding Hood cried out involuntarily: “What are you doing?”

“Trying to see if I can gather some intelligence and establish an advantage,” Yu Sheng said casually while carefully applying the blood. “My blood can establish connections with many things, including entities—I just don’t know if it still works on a ‘limb’ that’s already been severed.”

This time, Eileen standing nearby was much calmer. She’d long since built up a tolerance for this level of bizarre operations from Yu Sheng, and was even explaining to Little Red Riding Hood: “Yu Sheng’s blood is really strange. Both Hu Li and I have come into contact with his blood before…”

“So seriously, are you sure you don’t want a taste?” Yu Sheng turned to glance at Little Red Riding Hood and extended his arm. “Better hurry while the wound hasn’t healed yet—I’m telling you, my wounds heal really fast. If you don’t come now, you’ll miss your chance.”

Little Red Riding Hood instantly leaped off the wolf’s back and scrambled several steps backward: “No way!”

Then she turned to look at Hu Li, who had remained silent the entire time—her instinct told her that this great fox demon was probably the most normal-minded member of the “inn trio”: “Don’t you think there’s something wrong with all of this?”

But Hu Li merely gazed at Yu Sheng with an expression of pure adoration: “The benefactor’s immortal arts are truly profound. This is how the Technique of Witch Blood works!”

Little Red Riding Hood was completely bewildered. She had no idea what this “Technique of Witch Blood” even was—after all, she was just a high school student, and she hadn’t had much interaction with cultivators up to this point.

Meanwhile, on the other side, Yu Sheng noticed that the blood he’d smeared on the plastic arm was being absorbed at a speed visible to the naked eye.

“Seems like it’s working,” he murmured softly.

“It actually works?” Eileen immediately crowded over, staring at Yu Sheng with an expectant face. “What do you see? What do you see? Did you figure out why those ‘guards’ suddenly went berserk?”

“I just established a vague connection—I can’t probe for information that complex yet.” Yu Sheng waved his hand as he spoke, signaling the little doll to quiet down, then concentrated even harder, sensing the faint link established through the blood between himself and this “museum.”

He slowly narrowed his eyes, imagining his perception extending through the void, imagining his gaze passing through this long corridor, through door after door and hall after hall. Among the countless exhibits arranged in rows, he searched for the source of the arm, searched for… other presences similar to the arm’s source.

Suddenly, he sensed their existence.

He even felt as though he were standing right among them.

He was wearing a security guard’s uniform, his body twisted at odd angles, surrounded by plastic mannequins all dressed in the same guard uniforms.

But this was only a brief illusion—just like when he had sensed the Hunger’s movements before. Yu Sheng knew he had mistaken the “information” transmitted through the blood for an extension of his own body.

His connection with this “museum” hadn’t reached that level yet. But if the connection continued to strengthen, whether this sensation remained an illusion was uncertain—perhaps, just like during the “feast” in that valley, he could truly, if briefly, “become” those guards standing in the exhibition halls and corridors.

“Most of the ‘guards’ are concentrated in this direction, two intersections away from us,” Yu Sheng suddenly opened his eyes and raised his hand to point toward a certain direction along the side of the corridor. “They’re all stationary right now, as if they haven’t received any further orders to act. There are also a few scattered ones distributed across several exhibition halls in the distance, and none of them seem inclined to move on their own.”

Little Red Riding Hood’s eyes widened slightly, her face filled with disbelief.

This was the first time she had such a direct understanding of Yu Sheng’s abilities—their “fighting side by side” in Night-shrouded Valley last time had been more like lending a hand amid chaos, and the intelligence she’d gathered then was genuinely limited.

She immediately recognized just how useful this ability was.

With just a single contact, just one opportunity to “implant” his blood into a target, he could establish a stable “sensory link” and gain advance intelligence on entities within an Otherworld—their current positions and states. The implications of this for Spirit Detectives and investigators were self-evident!

And right on the heels of that thought, Little Red Riding Hood considered a second question: did this ability work on humans too?

Somehow, her mind suddenly flashed back to Yu Sheng’s invitation to “have a taste.”

The girl felt the hair on her body stand on end. She hurriedly reined in the wild thoughts racing through her mind, shaking her head while speaking rapidly: “Then this way we can avoid direct contact with those ‘entities’… Can you only sense the positions of the ‘guards’? Can you also sense the layout of the various exhibition halls? Like finding the white exhibition hall…”

“No,” Yu Sheng shook his head. “The connection is still too shallow, and it’s mainly a link established with the ‘guards.’ As for the museum’s own structure, I can barely sense anything at all right now.”

As he spoke, he made another small cut on his arm (the previous one had already healed) and, with an experimental mindset, evenly smeared his blood on the nearby walls and floor.

The blood quickly seeped into the floor tiles and wall plaster, but Yu Sheng barely felt any change.

“Probably not enough,” he said with complete seriousness. “I’m estimating I’d need to smear my entire body’s worth of blood across this place about three or four times over before it’d work…”

The expression on Little Red Riding Hood’s face instantly went far beyond mere horror.

Fortunately, Yu Sheng noticed the change in the girl’s expression in time and, with perfectly sound judgment, deduced why she looked like she’d seen a ghost. He quickly waved his hands: “Just kidding, just kidding. I’m just someone with a strong spirit of exploration.”

Little Red Riding Hood: “…”

Is that really how you use a spirit of exploration?!