Chapter 494: The Old Bookstore

It was dark and damp, as if forever trapped in the twilight atmosphere just before rain, with dim, chaotic yellow lights illuminating the mottled, worn-out signs of the shops on either side, brewing an especially eerie and sinister mood in the alley.

The adventurer team stepped through the puddles on the road, inspecting every corner of the alley that might be off, and displayed skilled teamwork and individual competence as they advanced.

The stalker assassin's figure would occasionally vanish from Yu Sheng's sight, as if melting into the shadows of the buildings, and then abruptly emerge from a corner next to some house, appearing and disappearing like a ghost. The wandering mage summoned a floating, ghostly blue eye that constantly swept over the paths behind them. The swordsman walked at the very front, ready to guard against any entities that might materialize ahead in the alley—though the probability was low, the Otherland sometimes experienced depth fluctuations, and the chance of any danger occurring early was never zero.

Meanwhile, the priestess, a young girl holding a short staff, walked at the center of the team, quietly muttering something that sounded like a prayer. With each recitation, she refreshed a faint blessing of clarity and healing on everyone.

Yu Sheng curiously sidled up to this priestess, who was technically one of "King's" summons, and overheard that the content of her murmuring was actually just a repeated few lines: "...Holy light is like the wind, blessing the cat; holy light is like a torch, illuminating the cat; only my cat, meow meow meow meow..."

It was incredibly catchy.

Little Red Riding Hood, obviously already familiar with the various combat units summoned by "King," was riding a huge wolf, directing several wolves at the team's edge to coordinate with the stalker. She also noticed the subtle expression on Yu Sheng's face.

"Pretty amazing, right? These 'summoned creatures' King conjures sometimes feel like they actually have intelligence," she said to Yu Sheng with a smile. "They can even hold simple conversations with outsiders. The highest-level summons—like the Sycophant and the 'Prime Minister'—can even understand and remember the rules of the 'outside' world, and it's hard to expose them even if they go out and interact with ordinary people. But in essence, all these summons are 'entities' generated from the 'Fairy Tale Otherland'... My wolves are the same."

"Interesting." Yu Sheng muttered, then turned his head to look at the "priest" in the team. This "shrine maiden" dressed as if she had stepped out of an RPG game or novel illustration from a previous generation smiled at him politely and rigidly repeated, "Only my cat, meow meow meow meow..."

Then she refreshed the whole party with another layer of Holy Cat Blessing.

"...To be honest, if you don't interact with them much, there's a bit of an uncanny valley effect."

"We thought so at first too, but after spending more time with King, we all got used to it," Little Red Riding Hood said with a laugh. "And compared to the high-level units King summons, these stiff combat units are actually more reassuring—I don't like the 'Sycophant' anyway. Those old guys are just like living people, almost too much so. Fortunately, King only lets them out when he wants to eat dried fish."

As they talked, they had already passed half the alley.

Yu Sheng looked up and saw the crossroads ahead. Crisscrossing wires were strung between the shops on either side, hanging dimly lit strings of lights, and faded pennants swayed weakly in the wind. The pennants bore auspicious phrases like "Great Business," "Smooth Sailing," "Rise in Officialdom," "Family Happiness," and other words of good fortune that seemed cheerful but, combined in this environment, felt a bit strange.

Under those dim strings of lights were shops with doors and windows tightly shut.

Only one shop had lights that were unusually bright, its door wide open, as if issuing a silent invitation.

King waved a paw, and the young swordsman holding the Village-Fine Sword approached the shop along with several shadow wolves. The stalker somehow followed, flashing into the door like a phantom.

"Your Majesty, the area ahead is secure."

The wandering mage in the team spoke hoarsely.

Yu Sheng and his group gathered around and saw that it was an old bookstore.

Little Red Riding Hood frowned, a clear look of wariness on her face.

"What's the story with a bookstore?" Yu Sheng asked curiously.

"The most common operating shops in the 'Dark Alley' are general stores, pet food stores, and old bookstores," Little Red Riding Hood explained. "Among them, general stores are the safest, but they only sell meaningless merchandise—neither useful for finding a safe exit nor harmful. Pet food stores only sell cat food, and you have to use a small piece of your skin as currency to exchange. Old bookstores are the most dangerous of the three—they might contain useful information, or they might be traps, or even directly contain books with mental contamination..."

She paused, shaking her head. "Clues and risks coexist, so it's troublesome and frustrating."

Yu Sheng thought for a moment, rubbing his chin. "Oh... indeed."

Then he casually opened a palm-sized door in the air beside him, put his hand at the entrance, and called out, "Lu—"

A sharp blade quickly poked out from the little door, cut a slit in his palm, and quickly withdrew.

Little Red Riding Hood stared in shock, then watched as Yu Sheng, holding his bloody hand, strode to the old bookstore's entrance. Without a word, he slapped seven or eight bloody handprints on the bookstore's outer wall, doorframe, and windows, and finally used the remaining blood to write a line of large characters: "Yu Sheng was here, also Little Red Riding Hood, also a cat."

The added part was obviously because the blood hadn't dried and he didn't want to waste it.

The girl in red, who had been a proper Spirit World Detective for several years, was stunned, and finally blurted out, "You really do spread like a bacterial lawn wherever you go, huh?"

Yu Sheng couldn't help but crack a smile. "You don't hang out with Irene that much..."

Saying so, he opened another small door beside him, pulled out a fox tail from the door to wipe his hand, and, despite the protest from the fox girl on the other side—"Benefactor, don't waste it, let me lick it!"—stuffed the tail back in. After this smoothly practiced routine, he patted his hands together and stepped into the bookstore.

Little Red Riding Hood watched dumbfoundedly from the side, then turned and poked King's cat head. "What did I just say? If no one stops him, he'll open doors everywhere. This guy's DNA is a door-shaped helix."

King's voice was deep. "No big deal. It's just opening doors within the same layer, and we're still at the shallowest part of the Dark Alley."

Yu Sheng ignored the muttering behind him. He had already entered this old bookstore with an especially nostalgic atmosphere.

A warm yet musty yellow light illuminated the store. To the right of the entrance was a wooden counter, cluttered with a few account books and several dirty A4 papers. The rest of the store's space was almost entirely occupied by tall, wide bookshelves lined against the walls.

Two-thirds of the bookshelves were filled with all sorts of old books, but the remaining third was not empty either—a strange, gelatinous substance with an odd texture piled up in the empty spaces of the shelves, forming soft, collapse-like accumulations as if books had "melted," and a black liquid kept dripping from those piles, quickly absorbed by the floor.

There was no one in the old bookstore. Behind the empty counter was a wooden chair that had lost its paint, with a piece of paper stuck to it that read: "Read read read read read read read..."

A pile of words cluttered together, becoming increasingly blurry toward the end, as if something pitch-black was desperately trying to squeeze out from the depths of the pile of text.

Yu Sheng frowned.

The blood connection was establishing and strengthening. He heard a strange, hollow whistling sound, but that sound... didn't seem to come from this bookstore.

It didn't even seem to come from any corner of this "Dark Alley." It came from somewhere more distant, more profound.

Somewhere outside this "Otherland."

He looked up toward the direction of the sound, but there were only tall bookshelves and the store's own walls, almost completely blocked by the shelves.

"Be careful of this black liquid," Little Red Riding Hood's voice came from behind. "This is 'rotting knowledge'—strongly mentally contaminating. Even if you're not afraid of mental contamination, it's best not to touch it, unless you want to hear ten thousand people babbling wrong chemical and physics formulas in your head."

Yu Sheng turned back in surprise. "How do you know so much? The detailed information library later doesn't seem to mention..."

Little Red Riding Hood pressed her lips together and said nothing, but the "King" beside her had already lightly jumped onto the counter, casually shuffling through the odds and ends while speaking offhandedly, "Because she accidentally touched it once before—the next day's midterm, she scored eight points on the science comprehensive, shocking the whole academic affairs office."

Little Red Riding Hood's face flushed bright red. "Shut, shut up!"

Yu Sheng stared in amazement, then quickly shifted his attention to the bookshelves around him before Little Red Riding Hood could bare her teeth.

That hollow whistling sound, seemingly from outside the alley, still circled in his mind as his eyes swept over the rows of old books on the shelves.

Most of the book covers were dusty, the spines printed with blurry text—illegible titles and impossible to guess the contents.

"Books that are normal in form and complete on the shelves can be read with caution, but avoid getting too absorbed," King proactively reminded. "Sometimes they contain hints about safe exits, or records of real events that seem to have occurred somewhere in the Borderlands—they might be past events, or ones happening now. But they won't predict the future, except maybe weather forecasts."

"Maybe they also record things about that 'Broken Tower'—in theory, old bookstores prioritize documenting changes in the Dark Alley itself," Little Red Riding Hood muttered nearby.

Yu Sheng slowly nodded. He glanced again at the paper on the chair behind the counter covered in "read" characters, and despite the eeriness, carefully pulled a dusty old book from the shelf, opening it with some curiosity.

On the yellowed paper, only a few large characters were written:

"Not enough mass."