Chapter 409: The First Mass-Production Unit |
Hotel Valley, portal hub, on the terrace connected to the outer gallery of the second tier of the great pyramid.
The eternal rain of Sentinel Silence and its bustling night city were an intriguing alien landscape, but lingering too long in that unending drizzle inevitably weighed on the spirit. Back beneath the bright, clear sky of this valley, Yu Sheng felt his whole mood loosen.
Standing at the edge of the hub pyramid’s terrace, he drew a deep breath of the valley’s uniquely fresh air and gazed around with an easy heart.
Not far away, the fairy-tale town bathed in daylight had sprouted several new whimsical buildings since his last visit. The king’s knights patrolled between town and forest; Little Red Hood’s wolf pack chased one another over the open fields; Sleeping Beauty trimmed the flourishing rose bushes before her house. A silver-gray drone suddenly skimmed across the town, flying straight toward the far end of the valley with a basket of treats and a brand-new axe slung beneath it, clearly bound for the hunter and the squirrel in the forest.
Out in the fields between the town and the portal hub, Luna was teaching a gaggle of bobbleheads to recognize the crops. She still wore the nun’s outfit she had picked up in Sentinel Silence and seemed to like it quite a bit. The small cursed children clustered around her had already grown familiar with this strangely dressed big sister. They ran laughing at her heels.
On the nearby terrace, Foxy had just set up a long drying rack. Borrowing the valley’s sunshine and the gentle breeze, the demon-fox girl hummed an unknown tune as she happily hung her freshly washed tails neatly along the rack. Eight furry fox tails swayed lightly in the wind, with a little doll’s dress clipped between them.
Fresh from a bath, Irene sat cross-legged on a capstone at the terrace’s edge. She had changed into new clothes. Her hair was still damp. When the wind blew, she tipped her face into it and squinted in contentment, a silly smile spreading across her face.
“I still prefer sunny days,” the little doll turned and said to Yu Sheng with utmost seriousness, “the rain never stops in Sentinel Silence. I keep feeling that in that environment my joints are going to grow mold.”
Yu Sheng chuckled and walked over to ruffle her hair.
“Great,” Irene said at once, leaping from the capstone onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder before turning back to wave vigorously at Foxy as she called: “Hey, silly fox!”
Foxy had finished hanging her tails and was admiring her handiwork with satisfaction. She reacted at once, scampering up to Yu Sheng in delight as she asked: “Coming, coming. Are we making Irene a new body?”
“Let’s go,” Yu Sheng nodded and crooked a finger, “time to give our Hotel some combat power.”
The three left the terrace, passed from the outer gallery into the pyramid’s interior, and quickly traversed a short corridor to reach the alchemy laboratory Yu Sheng had carved out inside this “wondrous structure.”
Given that Yu Sheng could not do any alchemy besides dollmaking, the place could be treated as a dedicated doll workshop.
The lab occupied the second floor of the hub pyramid. Even discounting corridors, storerooms, and maintenance bays, the remaining space was extravagantly large, and the main alchemical workspace was practically an indoor plaza. [When he first built it, he had regretted the size a little, wondering if dedicating so much space to dollmaking was wasteful. Looking at it now, he had, by sheer accident, made it just right.]
With the lights blazing, the three of them went straight to the central alchemical dais. Yu Sheng steadied himself and began the familiar preparations for making a doll.
First he laid out the various ritual materials scrounged from the Special Service Bureau. Next he controlled the alchemical dais to generate a spirit-infusing array. At the same time, he drew stone and soil from the ground near the portal hub and conveyed them into the laboratory for use.
While Yu Sheng made these preparations, Foxy had already begun crafting Irene’s new “skeleton.”
With a reach into her own tail, the demon-fox girl pulled out a lump of spirit-fox mystic iron. A bright flame flared at her tail tip, and she set to work with argon-fox welding to cut and cast the metal.
Yu Sheng conjured casting grooves in the floor beside the dais, then reconsidered and tightened their dimensions a little. He also reminded Foxy: “Use less of it. There’s no need to make this one as sturdy as last time. This is a mass-production unit. Do your best to keep costs down.”
Watching all this with wide eyes, Irene lasted until Yu Sheng had shrunk the skeletal grooves three times before she could not hold back and protested: “Stop shrinking them, for real. You’ve turned the thigh bones into wire. It still has to be battle capable. At least keep the basic strength.”
Foxy put in a reminder: “Benefactor, if we use too little mystic iron, it may impact energy storage. In battle, she might run out of power after a dozen beams.”
Yu Sheng considered. He had been thinking that with a mass-production unit, endurance was not the point. On the field, if it could fire in step with the main body for a few volleys or serve as a power bank for the main body, that would be enough. But then he caught Irene’s aggrieved expression. [And, honestly, more firepower is always better.] He adjusted the dimensions back up a little.
“Let’s build a prototype first,” Yu Sheng said, watching Foxy pour the skeleton cast, “then have Irene control it in her so-called low-bandwidth mode and test how it runs independently on simple commands. If it works, we will start producing in batches.”
Irene had climbed onto a nearby alchemical bench. Propping her chin on her hands, she watched Yu Sheng and Foxy work with a pensive look, who knew what ticking inside that little head. After a few minutes her eyes flicked and she asked: “Should we add a self-destruct function?”
Yu Sheng was in the middle of figuring out where else he could shave costs. It took him a second to process what she meant. When he realized, he was shocked and asked: “Are you serious?”
“It is a mass-production unit,” Irene explained with great earnestness, still propping her chin with both hands, “if we toss them into a fight, it won’t hurt if one gets destroyed. Considering the limited performance, if one is sent alone on an exploration mission and gets captured, it probably won’t escape anyway. Better to add a self-destruct. It gives the enemy a surprise. Also, I think it is pretty cool.”
Yu Sheng was stunned by the sheer brilliance of the idea. A second later, he found himself deeply intrigued. The vague sense of wrongness evaporated as he leaned in to confer with Irene: “How would it blow? Stuff a couple of bombs in the belly? We can ask Dorothy. She is swimming in munitions. Or borrow incendiaries from Matches. We could do self-destruct plus arson.”
“Feels too weak. How much can you even fit? It sounds underpowered.”
“Ask Immortal Yuan Hao? He forges artifacts. Those Immortals have all kinds of black tech. Plenty of things with enormous punch.”
“I am not stuffing a brick of an artifact in my stomach.”
“Then we need structural innovation,” Yu Sheng rubbed his chin and said, “see if we can integrate an overloading mechanism into the body, a way to dump in one burst all the energy stored in the mystic iron.”
“I have an idea,” Irene’s eyes shone with enthusiasm, “based on my days of rolling lightning pellets, if you mess those up, they really do explode.”
Their thoughts opened up at once. You offered one notion, I raised another, and soon they were happily discussing how to pack a big boom into Irene’s mass-production chassis. Neither felt anything odd about the topic. After a long spell, they both stopped, each thinking their own thoughts, and Yu Sheng was the first to break the silence as he said, thoughtful: “I get the feeling this topic is a bit too perverse.”
Irene copied Yu Sheng’s chin-rubbing and mused: “That seems right.”
“No, the self-destruct plan is not workable,” Yu Sheng frowned, weighed it over, and finally shook his head, “these mass-production units will operate in the valley. This is our base. If a bunch of mass-production dolls with bombs in their bellies run around here and one goes off because it gets bumped, that would be a disaster. There are a lot of kids here.”
“That seems right.”
“But you have reminded me,” Yu Sheng said seriously after thinking it through, “we can add some functions to these mass-production units. Before, I made your bodies as mere shells for you to inhabit. I never thought along these lines. Now I have an idea.”
Irene blinked, eyeing him with suspicion as she asked: “What idea?”
“Do you remember my Portable Wutong Road No. 66?”
“Uh?”
“We can embed that into the mass-production units.”
…
Moments later, a newly adjusted doll skeleton was transferred onto the alchemical platform.
What followed was second nature to Yu Sheng.
In his hands, stone and soil were granted a brief false life. They writhed swiftly to sheathe the skeleton on the platform, forming a doll’s shell. A drop of blood mixed into the shell to serve as the key medium for carrying spirit. The incense of the spirit-infusing rite was cast into the candleflame, and in the suddenly rising fire, true vitality gradually emerged.
The body shaped from stone and soil took on a hint of blood color. False life became real breathing and a mimicked heartbeat. Then, at the precise moment, Yu Sheng bestowed a name upon this blank vessel.
“Irene.”
The spirit infusion completed in the blink of an eye. The mass-production Irene on the alchemical platform opened her eyes, slow and dull.
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