Dimensional Hotel

Chapter 226: Descent

An orderly emergency evacuation was underway in the nearby neighborhoods, and it was almost finished. Numerous Node Devices and defensive equipment had arrived on-site and were being installed around the Orphanage’s perimeter walls. An invisible barrier was rising over the entire area. Anyone with spiritual talent who gazed at the streets right now would see a faint glow shining in the night sky—a cocoon of light enveloping the masses of shadows underneath, shadows that kept swelling and writhing as if in constant flux, like some eerie “chrysalis.”

Because an angel’s descent posed the greatest threat of all, the Baseline Technology Restriction Act had been temporarily lifted. A large amount of technology far exceeding standard usage rights had been deployed here. As layers of defensive devices gradually powered on, the boundary of the sealed zone finally began to stabilize.

At least from the Orphanage’s outer walls, those horrifying sights were no longer visible.

Yet the situation within those walls remained grim.

One after another, a dozen black vehicles pulled up to the site, bringing in more Special Affairs Bureau Operatives. One of the cars drove right up to the Orphanage’s entrance. Its door opened, and a woman with long gray-white hair stepped out. She wore a white suit-dress and gazed up at the sky over the Orphanage with a solemn expression.

Li Lin felt his breathing tighten. Even though that pale figure did not appear to look directly at him, he could clearly feel her gaze fall upon him.

“How long have they been inside?” Bai Li Qing asked.

“Thirty-two minutes,” Li Lin answered at once. “Since they went in, there hasn’t been any obvious change in the pollution readings, but the overall environmental depth keeps rising. It’s currently at Internal Depth L-2. We can’t gauge the danger level.”

He had barely gotten the words out when a monitoring technician hurried over and handed him a tablet.

“Understood.”

Bai Li Qing simply nodded, then continued to stare at the sky above the Orphanage.

Behind her, a pair of hidden, immense eyes slowly opened, scanning the space within the walls.

With mere human sight, one would see the Orphanage looking “perfectly normal” from the outside. However, in Bai Li Qing’s mind, the real image of it slowly sinking into a “nightmare” emerged. She saw two towers twisting upward like umbilical cords, the ground covered by “sludge” that pulsed and swelled. And within those writhing cords, she could make out three tiny points of light moving about.

She kept her gaze on those three lights until a dizzy spell she could not resist forced her to look away.

“Can we lock onto them?” she asked inwardly.

“It’s too difficult,” came a mechanical, almost wooden reply from a female voice. “They’ve nearly departed the real world. In about ten more minutes, I suspect we’ll lose them entirely. But it’s certain the Dark Angels’ ‘corruption’ really doesn’t affect them. They’ve been inside the Orphanage over thirty minutes now, and the ‘marker of sight’ I left on them remains clean and intact.”

Bai Li Qing gave a soft “hm,” retracted her gaze from the Orphanage, and took out her phone.

“…It’s me. Prepare for ‘shattering.’ If there is no cease order within twenty-four hours, or if we observe any sign of angelic descent during that time, proceed with dome fragmentation. I’ll take responsibility. We need to drive that thing outside if we can. Of course…the best outcome is that we get through this night safely.”

…

Inside the Orphanage walls, the angel’s dream had merged with reality, like blood fused to flesh, or mud soaking into mud.

Everything was entangled. The limits of the real world felt blurred and unstable beneath this perimeter, and everyone’s thoughts echoed hollowly amid the ongoing collapse of the material realm. That echo spread through consciousness, slowly transforming into the image of a far-reaching Forest. Ɽ𝘈₦𝖔BЕŚ

It was the first tale from a certain Fairy Tale Book.

An old, low-quality book full of mistakes and blank spaces—yet it once brought great joy to many Cursed Children.

Yu Sheng walked into a room.

It had once been the reading room at the far end of the Orphanage’s second floor. Now its original layout overlapped with a vision of the dark Forest, making everything look strange and jumbled. Tall trees shot through the ceiling and the floor. Their crowns dangled broken lighting fixtures and bits of overhead framework. The walls had turned into crumbling dirt and stone, partially buried beneath rotting leaves and thorny shrubs. Even the bookshelves and tables lay embedded in the trunks, fused with the wood. All around the floor were scattered books.

Cautious, Yu Sheng stepped through this “dense forest” where the surroundings kept shifting and expanding. His eyes swept over the scattered books, and he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

He saw a small stack of brand-new books—still sealed together with plastic ties—lying in a patch of weeds.

He felt a strong tug in his mind, as though some force was drawing him to them. Even the hot bullet in his hand seemed to tremble faintly.

Yu Sheng hurried over, untied the plastic band, and let the brightly colored children’s books tumble out.

They were all normal books.

Most of them were new, printed within the last couple of years, with decent paper and solid print quality. None of them had anything to do with SquirrelKnight.

But Yu Sheng still sensed a strange “connection,” perhaps coming from the dark Forest, or maybe from Anka Aila—an intense attention fixed on these books.

He frowned, then glanced over at the little doll Irene, who was standing alert in the midst of the forest illusion. “Irene!” he called.

“A-ah?” she stammered nervously, still watching the surroundings.

“Check these books,” Yu Sheng said urgently. “Is there anything ‘hidden’ inside them? Like the message we found at Old Zheng’s place—”

“Give me a second!” Irene jumped off Yu Sheng’s shoulder before he could finish, straining a bit as she flipped through the oversized volumes. “Ugh, it’s so heavy… Wait! There’s a piece of paper stuck in here—didn’t you see it?”

While she spoke, she flipped one book open, and right in front of Yu Sheng, she naturally pulled out a slip of yellowed, torn paper. It was sitting in plain sight between the pages, as if it had belonged there all along.

Yu Sheng took the slip. The first line leaped out at him: Little Red Riding Hood.

“Ah, there’s more!” Irene called. “This one has them too. Lots of them!”

She leafed through several books in quick succession, pulling out one tattered page after another and handing them to Yu Sheng.

More and more fairy tales emerged, one faded page at a time. Then he spotted a crudely illustrated cover with a forest and a reddish-brown squirrel:

SquirrelKnight Takes You Through the Stories.

Immediately, Yu Sheng realized why Snow White, who had inspected these donated books from the Sunshine Foundation, never found anything suspicious.

Those Heretic Cultists had infiltrated the supply chain and used a technique similar to how they once exchanged covert letters with Old Zheng. They had taken the original old book apart and “slipped” it inside these normal donations!

That was how they smuggled a symbolic relic—an older copy of SquirrelKnight that strongly connected to Anka Aila—into the Orphanage.

And perhaps…this was also a vital step in “raising” the Orphanage into a proper “vessel.”

Countless clues came together in Yu Sheng’s mind, clearing away the tangle. Irene, still perched among the books and weeds, lifted the last two volumes in her hands and gave them a little wave before tossing them aside. “That’s it! That’s all of them!”

Yu Sheng nodded slowly, sorting through the scattered story pages. But his gaze kept returning to the cover.

On the cover sat a red-brown squirrel with a fluffy tail. She was posed rather clumsily, holding a pine needle as she pointed to the book’s title.

She blinked, then hopped off the page and landed on Yu Sheng’s wrist.

“Ah! It’s you!” the squirrel squeaked happily. She turned around to hug Yu Sheng’s finger. “I’m so glad you’re all right! Those wolves are terrifying…and this time, you brought friends?!”

“…Wow,” Irene murmured, eyes wide. “I guess that’s…um, the ‘dream world’ for you?”

Foxy didn’t seem at all surprised. He simply said hello to the squirrel, who greeted him with equal warmth. “Hello! SquirrelKnight is so happy to meet a new friend!” she squeaked, then noticed the book in Yu Sheng’s hands.

She saw the old cover, with a squirrel sitting on a tree stump along a woodland path, clutching a pine needle in its paws.

“You…you found it?!” The squirrel’s eyes went round with human-like astonishment. She even dropped the pine needle she was holding. “Where did you get that?!”

“This isn’t the one you originally gave away,” Yu Sheng clarified. He set the squirrel on his arm and flipped through the disassembled pages so she could see. “It’s from someone outside who’s been preserving another copy from the same printing. For some…very complicated reasons, it ended up here in the Orphanage.”

The squirrel held onto Yu Sheng’s sleeve and watched him turn the old pages. In a tiny voice, she said, “Ah, so it’s definitely not our original copy… The one we had was full of notes.”

Yu Sheng perked up. “Full of notes?”

“Mm,” the squirrel nodded, as though smiling. “There were a lot of blank spots in the book where no text had been printed. So some of the older kids wrote stories in those spaces, or told us stories using the pictures. Other kids who could write added in the missing parts—or made up their own. Some wrote down tales they’d heard from other places, too.

“That book was everyone’s treasure. It was…it was their treasure…”

Her voice trailed off. Suddenly, she started to cry.

“I’m sorry… I lost it… It’s gone forever…sniff…”

Yes, she had lost the precious treasure that so many children in the Orphanage had poured their hearts into.

All of their stories were in that book.

This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation