Chapter 562: "Recycling"

The golden-haired Erin who had pursued the "Nemesis" here three thousand seven hundred years ago, the mysterious ancient doll—her shattered body lay not far from the remains of the Nemesis god, exactly as Yu Sheng had seen in the illusion.

The battlefield environment had been chaotic earlier, and the spatial rifts spreading around the Nemesis god's corpse had distorted time and space over a wide area. When Yu Sheng had passed overhead, he hadn't had time to carefully observe the rest of the square, so he only found her now.

Huli set the little doll on the ground. The latter looked at the broken shell before her with a somewhat complicated expression, then after a while raised a hand to scratch her head. "It feels strange, looking at my own 'corpse' shattered on the ground like this, and I can't even remember what I looked like back then... This face feels a bit unfamiliar."

"Actually, it looks a lot like you," Huli said seriously. "It's just that the hair and eye colors are different. This one has golden hair and blue eyes... Oh, and her figure seems a bit better than yours too."

Erin immediately jumped up. "Stupid fox, I'll fight you!"

Huli raised a hand and pressed the jumping little doll back down. "Figure! I said figure! Not height!"

"...Oh, right?"

Yu Sheng, however, didn't pay attention to the tussle beside him. After silently staring at the broken shell for a while, he stepped over to the torso of the golden-haired doll and carefully picked up its head.

A crisp sound like breaking porcelain entered his ears. The doll's neck snapped off with a crack, and he held the golden-haired head in his hands. The eyes, which had been half-open, finally slowly closed.

The little doll beside him seemed startled for a moment, then immediately shouted, "Hey! Yu Sheng, be gentle! You knocked my head off!"

"This thing was already broken," Yu Sheng quickly explained, then felt something odd as soon as the words left his mouth. "Ah, no. This topic sounds weird somehow."

Erin put her hands on her hips. "You think something is creepy now? I watch you courting death out there every day and I don't say anything..."

"Alright, alright," Yu Sheng waved his hand. "We've finally found your original body. Quickly gather all these fragments and take them back to see if they can be repaired for use. Huli, lend me your tail to put these in."

Huli looked pleased. "Okay, Benefactor~"

Then the group began to pick up the broken doll fragments scattered on the ground—the large pieces were manageable, but the smaller fragments required extra care. As she picked them up, Erin didn't forget to remind them, "Don't miss the small ones. Try to collect as many as possible. The more complete, the higher the chance of repair... Hey, Yu Sheng, you stepped on my finger!"

Huli muttered while picking up the tiny doll fragments, "I thought once you found your body, you could just 'jump' into it and come back to life. Turns out you still have to piece it together yourself..."

"Nonsense! How could I use it directly when it's shattered like this?" Erin hugged one of her arms and looked up at Huli as if she were stupid. "Do you think everyone is like you, with all your parts plug-and-play..."

Huli corrected her seriously, "Only my ears and tail can be pulled off!"

"Tch... Hey, C-clip, you almost stepped on my foot! Be careful!"

Bai Liqing was helping on the side. Her usually expressionless face seemed a bit strained now. Listening to the noisy commotion beside her and watching the scene of this group collecting fragments for a "corpse"—including the person herself among the workers—she couldn't help but sidle up to Yu Sheng. "Are you all... always this 'lively'?"

"This is nothing. Wait until all four of Erin's 'mainframes' are together," Yu Sheng said with a laugh. "If you catch Huli's mealtime on top of that, it gets even more chaotic. Compared to that, this is a silent film."

Bai Liqing's eyes widened slightly. Then she unconsciously glanced at Luna, who was quietly picking up fragments with her head down, and said with a rather emotional tone, "In the end, this 'artificial saint' is the most steady and quiet one..."

Yu Sheng thought for a moment, his expression somewhat subtle. "...Hard to say."

Bai Liqing was startled, obviously puzzled by why he would say that. Just then, Luna seemed to have discovered something. She pulled an item out of a pile of collapsed stone blocks and carried it over to Yu Sheng. "Found something strange."

Yu Sheng's attention was immediately diverted. He looked down at what Luna was holding, and his expression changed to one of surprise.

The object was dark and restrained in aura, cold and eerie, gripping the heart. It had a round mouth and a long handle, heavy. The material was neither stone, wood, nor iron, and it was impossible to tell what it was made of. Yet it had lain beside the god's corpse for over three thousand years without any sign of corrosion or deformation, making it clear at a glance that it was no ordinary item!

It was just a bit odd in shape—it looked like a flat-bottomed pan.

Well, it was a pan.

The gazes of several people instantly focused on Luna's hand. Yu Sheng was stunned for a moment, then remembered what the Alice doll named "Marlene" had told him before. Immediately, Erin beside him also reacted. The little doll leaped up with a whoosh, grabbed the pan, and clung to Luna's hand, overjoyed like nothing else. "This is mine! This is mine!"

Luna stammered, "Okay, here, for you."

Then she set both Erin and the pan on the ground—at least she didn't throw them.

The little doll struggled to grab the pan's handle, tried several times to find a good grip, then lifted the pan high and happily waved it at Yu Sheng. "Yu Sheng, look! Marlene said every Alice doll should have their own pan, and now I have one too!"

Then she happily ran around Yu Sheng in circles, holding the pan, laughing and giggling. She exuded a kind of excitement and joy that even she couldn't quite explain—the interwoven memories mixed in her head, but she didn't care which part belonged to Erin and which part belonged to the Nemesis. She was just happy. In her joy, she didn't even consider what the strange pan was actually for.

Yu Sheng was also quite happy, mainly because watching a 66.6-centimeter-tall doll running around on the ground holding a pan almost as tall as herself was a very amusing sight. Especially when, on her third lap, she finally managed to trip herself—after all, the pan was almost as heavy as she was.

But the excited little doll wasn't discouraged at all. She still hugged the pan as if it were a treasure and even said a rare "thank you" to Luna.

Then the group collected all the doll fragments they could find and stored them all in Huli's tail.

"There shouldn't be any missing," Yu Sheng said, looking around and clapping his hands. "If there are, they're at the powder level, which shouldn't affect the roughly complete shell."

"It's fine. Leaving some gaps is okay. They'll be repaired during the 'spirit infusion' process later," Erin said, sitting on Yu Sheng's shoulder while hugging her pan, beaming with joy. "Once this original body is fixed, I'll definitely be back to my old self. Then I'll let you see with your own eyes—my one-meter-seventy-eight height, long legs..."

Yu Sheng turned his head to look at the little doll. "Aren't you one meter sixty-seven?"

Erin: "Ah, close enough. I wear high heels and put on a hat..."

Yu Sheng ignored the nonsense this guy was spouting out of sheer excitement. He casually patted her head and then turned his gaze to the "ancient mechanism" in the center of the square, which had already stopped running.

After a moment's hesitation, he stepped over to it.

Erin knew Yu Sheng's style too well. Seeing this, she guessed what was coming. "Ah... You're not going to take this thing back too, are you?!"

Huli, who understood him well, added, "Benefactor can't feel at ease without bringing back some local specialties."

Luna also nodded. "Mm, right."

Yu Sheng pretended not to hear the muttering beside him and silently walked over to the silent floating cube. He reached out and pressed his hand against one of its corners.

"Knowledge" flowed into his mind. He seemed to naturally know what to do.

Threads of red emerged from the mysterious patterns on the cube's surface, emitting a dim fluorescence that flowed through the device like breathing.

A low, pleasant hum came from deep within the device.

Yu Sheng's consciousness gradually sank. In a daze, he seemed to see again the massive phantom in that chaotic space—energy glands, virtual computing units, living runes, superstring structures...

The Boundary Bridge in reality no longer existed. The errors accumulated over three thousand years had long exceeded its limit. After the residual power of the Nemesis goddess faded, the Boundary Bridge naturally underwent an information-level collapse, and its material structure in this universe naturally vanished. Yu Sheng had witnessed this process himself and was quite certain of it.

But strangely, through touching the "control mechanism" that remained of the Boundary Bridge, he could still "feel" it.

Perhaps the blood that had soaked the Boundary Bridge recorded enough information, or perhaps the "knowledge" transmitted to him by the Nemesis goddess carried enough intelligence related to the Boundary Bridge. Now, Yu Sheng could clearly sense that "bridge" inside his mind—he didn't understand it, but he could see it at any time.

It was like a blueprint preserved in memory.

This strange situation seemed different from when he had resolved the Ankaela and Astral Being crises before.

Yu Sheng frowned, carefully sensing this incredible phenomenon, and then gradually began to understand it.

Meanwhile, noticing the contemplative expression on Yu Sheng's face, even Erin, who had been chattering away, subconsciously quieted down.

Then she saw Yu Sheng pull his hand back from the massive cube.

The red patterns on the cube's surface flashed twice rapidly, then silently began to disintegrate. As if experiencing billions of years of weathering in an instant, this seemingly indestructible "Angel artifact" turned into rising dust in just a few seconds. Then, even the three pillars standing around the cube silently collapsed.

Erin stared wide-eyed at the scene. For a moment, she inexplicably felt sad, thinking that the last remnant of the Boundary Bridge was about to disappear—the part of her heart belonging to the "Nemesis" felt some sorrow about it—but the next second, she saw the dissipating dust quickly turn blood-red, swirling around like a bloody mist, and then absorbed entirely by Yu Sheng.

The sadness that had just surfaced and hadn't yet been sorted out instantly turned into a head full of question marks.

"...Yu Sheng, why do you eat everything?!"