Chapter 489: The Mysterious Tower

Yu Sheng leisurely basked in the sun on the castle roof with Little Red Riding Hood (though there was no sun here). Huli had already fallen asleep beside them without anyone noticing—the fox girl had stuffed a pile of tails behind Yu Sheng and curled up on her side, hugging the big tail she usually used to store food, snoring softly in the dim light with a faint smile on her face.

“She’s worry-free...” Yu Sheng turned his head to look at the fox girl sleeping against him, scratching the fur behind her ears. “Really just fill her belly and the world’s at peace.”

“There’s someone even more carefree in the valley.” Little Red Riding Hood lounged against her summoned Shadow Wolf, sprawled lazily on the roof.

Yu Sheng raised his eyelids. “Who? Rapunzel?”

“Big Golden Retriever? She’s not carefree. She has plenty to worry about, like homework due at the start of the semester,” Little Red Riding Hood squinted. “I’m talking about the snake.”

Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow. “Snake Lady? Didn’t she go back to Thousand Peaks Spirit Mountain yesterday?”

“She came back. She can open that door on her own now, so she’s constantly shuttling between the valley and the mountain like she’s visiting neighbors, eating everywhere,” Little Red Riding Hood yawned. “Right about now she should be picking wild fruit in the Black Forest. When she’s full, she’ll swim all the way down the river~~~ to the town, find the King to play, play until dark, then sleep in the small woods to the north. Every day she’s as carefree as a first-class protected animal.”

Yu Sheng had been listening casually, but now he was a bit surprised. “She plays with the King? Isn’t she always getting beaten up because she keeps climbing into the King’s cat tree?”

“Exactly. That’s what they play.”

Yu Sheng: “...?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know what she’s thinking either. The King is so annoyed now—this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone drive him to the point of having no temper.”

Yu Sheng blinked. Just as he was about to say something else, a series of vibrations from his phone interrupted him.

He pulled out his phone and saw that the Border Communication app was frantically pushing messages. Opening it, they were all from that Alice doll named Marin—a large amount of image data along with accompanying explanations.

He scrolled through them one by one. When he got to the later ones, he suddenly sat up straight.

Suspected final combat record of “Irene” against an external enemy... a vast shadow crouching atop a mysterious broken tower... a golden-haired figure charging toward the tower...

“I found this data deep inside the Garden Network,” Marin sent another message. “The data is severely damaged, and the upload path cannot be traced, but it can be confirmed that the ‘Irene’ from 3,700 years ago uploaded it at the last moment before engaging a mysterious enemy. The footage continues until the moment she charges toward the tower top, after which the recording cuts off.

“It’s still uncertain whether there are more records in the Garden Network... This exploration triggered the janitor programs, and they might ban me from diving deeper for a while. Also, Maris suffered some malfunctions while diving into the network with me—she’s not in good condition now... We probably won’t be able to search for more data in the deeper layers for now.

“One more detail: while active in the deep network, I noticed my mental body was entangled by a ‘spider thread’...”

Yu Sheng looked at the message from that living doll, then went back to carefully examine the images that Marin had reprocessed and sent via Border Communication. His brow gradually furrowed.

After a while, he sent Marin a message: “...Why is that ‘Irene’ holding a frying pan?”

He soon received her reply: “That’s the standard weapon of us Alice dolls.”

Yu Sheng: “...?”

“The reason behind this is complicated,” Marin’s message seemed a bit conflicted. “Explaining it fully would probably take 2.59 million words...”

As soon as Yu Sheng saw that, he immediately indicated that no further explanation was needed—he already had enough strange things in this world.

Of course, another important reason for his reply was that Little Red Riding Hood had leaned over to look and muttered to him—

“What’s so strange about that? The number one expert of Thousand Peaks Spirit Mountain carried a brick into a fight. Your Huli can shoot her tails. At least a frying pan has a handle—it’s more of a ‘weapon’ than a fox-radish missile.”

Yu Sheng thought Little Red Riding Hood had a point. As expected, a brain that had just finished the college entrance exam was sharp.

Then he continued scrolling through the data Marin had sent, occasionally sneaking a peek toward the small square.

Irene was still running wild with a bunch of doll-headed kids. Teacher Su and a few fairy tale “parents” were maintaining order at the edge of the square with helpless expressions. Yun Qingzi had pulled up a stool and was sitting on the roadside, cheerfully watching the children play, with a plate of melon seeds beside him—though since the old man was now in a spirit form and couldn’t eat, his method of eating melon seeds was to grab a handful and “refine” them on the spot...

Very high-end and classy.

Yu Sheng stared at the shrieking little dolls in the square for a long time, then looked back at the golden-haired figure charging toward an “outer god” with a frying pan on his phone screen, comparing them back and forth... and ultimately couldn’t match them.

But from the content at the end of the video, that reckless yet crude demeanor did seem somewhat similar.

Mostly the crude part.

“So that’s how you were from the start...”

Little Red Riding Hood heard Yu Sheng muttering, but her attention was clearly drawn to the images on the phone. She frowned slightly at the final screenshots extracted from the video, and when Yu Sheng swiped to the next image, she suddenly reached out to stop him. “Wait, let me see.”

Yu Sheng looked at Little Red Riding Hood with some surprise and handed her the phone. “You...”

He saw her scroll to one image, tap to enlarge it, and examine the details with a grave expression.

It was a scene captured as Marin’s view withdrew from above the tower. In the slightly distorted edges of the image, the broken spiral staircase and floor slabs floating weightlessly in midair were clearly visible, along with the dim wall structure beside the stairs covered in intricate reliefs.

“This looks familiar.”

Yu Sheng was taken aback. “Familiar... Do you know where this is? Have you been there?”

“I’ve never been there, but I remember seeing a photo very similar to this somewhere,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a tight brow, as if trying to recall. “It was a few years ago. It was in some post on Border Communication... Wait, let me search!”

She pulled out her own phone, opened Border Communication, and began frantically scrolling through her bookmarks, muttering while swiping through piles of pages: “I remember that post had quite a lot of discussion back then, and I even bookmarked it... Ah, how did so much junk end up here...”

Yu Sheng was a bit stunned watching her fiddle with the phone. He craned his neck to look and felt dizzy, unable to help himself: “...Do you never clean out your bookmarks? And you save everything?”

Little Red Riding Hood kept scrolling without looking up: “It’s all stuff that might come in handy someday. Clicking save takes no effort...”

“Sure, clicking save takes no effort, but finding something in there is a huge pain—can you at least remember a keyword? Try searching?”

Little Red Riding Hood: “I did. This is after filtering by keywords.”

Yu Sheng felt deep respect and kept quiet.

But watching the girl frantically searching through browsing records from years ago, he suddenly found it amusing.

Little Red Riding Hood usually gave the impression of being steady, reliable, and smart—the most authoritative “parent” in the fairy tales. But she also had this flustered, even childish side.

Of course, he couldn’t say that now. She was eighteen and had already retaken Subject Two twice.

“Ah, this is it!”

Little Red Riding Hood’s surprised voice interrupted Yu Sheng’s random thoughts. He quickly pulled his wandering mind back and craned his neck to see what was on her phone.

It was a sharing + help-seeking post.

The original poster had uploaded a picture in the discussion section of Border Communication. It showed a view looking up from a broken staircase inside a tower—clearly taken in a hurry, with the edges shaking badly.

It matched exactly one of the frames in the video Marin had sent!

“This place!”

Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood said in unison.

Then their eyes simultaneously moved to the description under the post—

“...I accidentally ended up here while carrying out an investigation commission in the ‘Dark Alley.’ At the time, I was fleeing from an entity called ‘Cat’... Suddenly fog rose in the alley, and then at the end of the Dark Alley appeared a fork not recorded in any data. The fork led to a strange area with a tower standing in it...

“I can’t determine whether this strange area is still part of the ‘Dark Alley.’ It might be another alien domain, because the edges of this space have obvious ‘fault’ features, and there is no physical channel to return directly to the ‘Dark Alley.’

“I recorded many images of the tower’s interior and exterior, but for some reason, most of the photos were damaged after I returned to the real world, covered in strange shadows or thread-like things that made them impossible to see clearly. Only this photo survived—yet I don’t know when I took it...

“Note: The photo might have been taken by accident. I suspect this is related to the tower’s ‘mechanism.’ It might erase all conscious recording, but random shots or timed shots taken unconsciously might bypass this mechanism.

“Now I’m posting this photo, seeking any clues related to this tower... I can’t remember how I left the tower, but it has appeared in my dreams every day for the past ten days.

“I suspect part of me is still trapped in that tower.”