With July fast approaching and the days growing hotter, the doll shop on the narrow street remained firmly shuttered, quiet and deserted.
A small doll with curly hair and a red hat, dressed in a Lolita dress, entered through the back door. She leaned close to the dollmaker’s ear and whispered something, then sat down on the sofa with lively energy, waiting obediently like a customer.
“Finally, a pair has been fired. Let’s try them on.” The dollmaker, wearing a leather apron, sat at the table holding a glass eyeball already sealed with a transparent coating. The little ghost-hourglass sat on the dollmaker’s lap, nervously clutching its own hourglass.
The puppeteer used a scalpel to scoop out the eyeball—already necrotic from the toxin—from the Wángliáng’s eye socket, then cleaned out the debris inside.
At first, the Wángliáng felt uneasy. Although he was a test subject and his body was like glass—unable to bleed—he could still feel pain. It hurt when the poison blinded his eyes, and it hurt when his shoulder was shattered. The pain made him afraid, but he didn’t know how to express it.
Yet the Puppet Master’s hands were peculiar; even when his blade touched or cut into the body, the Wángliáng felt nothing. He silently tilted his head back and waited as a glass eyeball, still warm with the Puppet Master’s body heat, was placed into the socket.
Once the eyeball was set in place, the Wángliáng distinctly felt the nerves connecting, his body accepting this new pair of eyes.
Wangliang stared blankly, clutching the puppeteer’s arm where the sleeve had been rolled up. The puppeteer waited quietly, then took out a gilded curling comb used for dolls and began to comb Wangliang’s slightly wavy hair.
“Such sparse hair,” the puppeteer chuckled.
Wangliang didn’t know what “shyness” meant; he awkwardly raised the hourglass to shield his face.
The Puppet Master opened a drawer, selected some white and gray strands, combed and blended them with a fine-toothed comb to match the Wángliáng’s natural hair color, then used a small hair pin to attach them to the Wángliáng’s head in small clusters. He trimmed the ends to match the original hair with scissors, curled them with a curling iron, and smoothed them out.
The puppet master’s special innate ability, “Hands of Creation,” allows him to add or remove parts from any living creature. Anyone who falls into his hands feels no pain, just like a puppet, and perfectly accepts the parts he installs. After parts are removed, the cross-sections of the limb joints automatically transform into ball-and-socket joints.
Once the neural connections to the eyeballs were complete, the scene before the Wángliáng gradually came into focus. The first thing to enter his field of vision was the face of a white gentleman, with a pair of light-colored eyes—narrow at the corners—set beneath high browbones.
“Xie… thank you…” The Wángliáng was still in the cultivation phase, and his speech was slurred.
The puppeteer lifted his chin, wiped the fingerprints from his eyes with a cloth, then took a well-tailored outfit from the puppet wardrobe and dressed the Wángliáng in it.
A female Alpha’s voice suddenly rang out from the reception sofa, which had been unoccupied until then.
Qishenggu leaned casually against the ornate sofa prepared for the dolls, wearing a long dress sewn by the dollmaker. The dress blended seamlessly with her extremely long, floor-sweeping golden-blue peacock tail feathers.
“You’d be better off becoming a doctor; humans would like you.” She looked somewhat frail, her face a sickly pallor, her eyelids faintly flushed. She unfolded a small feather fan to cover her lips and coughed twice.
This was due to the irreversible damage caused to Qishenggu’s body by being forced to leave the incubation chamber before her cultivation period was complete, yet her appearance resembled that of tuberculosis—the most romantic of diseases, as described by 19th-century European poets.
Several exquisitely crafted dolls, dressed in magnificent gowns, sat on the sofa awaiting their owners, but even these masterpieces paled in comparison to Qishenggu’s face.
Hearing Qishenggu speak, the dollmaker chuckled. “Do you think humans deserve to have a doctor?”
In his youth, Nix graduated from the finest medical school and became an intern. That was until he took on a case involving a construction worker whose lower leg had been severed by rebar during an accident. The worker was forced to undergo an amputation but couldn’t afford a prosthetic. If he could never stand again to work, his wife and children would starve to death. He wept privately, begging Nix to find a solution. Nix had no choice but to fit him with a ball-and-socket prosthetic leg—a task that was, in truth, a mere formality for him.
Another intern who had assisted him in examining the patient reported him, claiming that Nix had performed the surgery without authorization and that the prosthetic he had fitted had caused severe tissue necrosis, leading to complications that ultimately resulted in the worker’s death.
Only Nix himself knew that the Hand of Creation was his innate ability, and that rejection was impossible. He was well aware of the agreement reached between his colleague and the worker.
In the end, Nix was fired from the hospital, sent to prison, and forced to pay the worker’s family a hefty settlement that left him deeply in debt. The intern who reported him, meanwhile, got his wish and became the only resident to be hired and promoted. While in prison, Nix met several members of the Redthroat, and from then on, he abandoned his medical career.
The wobbly little feather fan of the Strange-Born Bone nodded in agreement.
The shop door was suddenly pushed open rudely, and Eris walked in carrying a short-barreled shotgun.
“Where have you been?” the puppeteer asked. “I’ve told you many times not to come back through the front door with a gun. These puppets are too easily damaged during the move.”
“I went to the theater to watch a ballet. Don’t worry, no one saw me.” Eris spotted the Wraith Hourglass sitting on the Puppeteer’s lap. His cheerful expression instantly darkened, and he kicked it away. “Get down from there. Where do you think you’re sitting? Do you even deserve it?”
The Wraith Hourglass was kicked off and rolled across the floor a few times before quietly shrinking behind the hourglass, hugging its legs and crouching in silence.
Eris was in a bad mood, so he casually used the barrel of his gun to lift the hem of Qishenggu’s skirt, feeling a bit curious.
“Eris, you shouldn’t look under a woman’s skirt.” The Puppet Master tapped the tabletop lightly.
“Fine, fine, fine.” Eris straddled the table with a long stride, resting her feet on the Puppet Master’s thighs. “Wangliang has new eyes, and that female peacock has a new skirt. What about me?”
“You have a new mission.”
“……”
“These past few days, the Story Puppet told me an interesting secret. The Messenger’s lover—the Lightning Ghost—had already been selected by the Institute, but the Red Fox City breeding facility injected her with a mimicry serum, causing the pregnancy to terminate. Fearing accountability from the Institute, they stubbornly sewed the eggs back into the Lightning Spirit’s body time and again, causing even greater harm. By the time the Lightning Spirit was transported to the Institute, his injuries were so severe he had curled into a ball. Left with no choice, the researchers decided to cut off the tip of his tail to forcibly awaken him… Haha, it seems the Divine Messenger already knows the truth.”
“The eavesdropping doll has also brought back news.” The puppeteer glanced at the Red Riding Hood Lolita doll sitting on the sofa. “The Divine Messenger is plotting revenge against the Red Fox City Breeding Base. On June 24th—that is, tomorrow—he will take action.”
“What do you want me to do? Stop him?” Eris said nonchalantly.
“Go to Red Fox City and wait for him. Remember, you must make sure everyone knows that Bai Chunian is behind this.”
Nix pulled another sealed eyeball and a carved ear out of the drawer. “These are for you. Whatever you see will be automatically recorded here. The ear lets you hear me speak.”
“Hmm…?” After inserting the new eyeball, Eris immediately unzipped his pants to take a look down below, then looked up at the Puppet Master, sticking out a tongue marked with black lines and grinning.
“Hurry up. It’s already the 23rd today,” the Puppet Master said helplessly.
“Hmph, fine, I’ll go.” Eris hoisted the shotgun and headed for the front gate, but the puppeteer called him back, and he went to the back door instead.
By the time he reached Red Fox City, it was already 11:00 PM on the 23rd.
Following orders from higher-ups, all entrances and exits to the Red Fox City Breeding Base were tightly sealed. Eris circled the perimeter a few times; there truly was no way to slip through.
He snapped his fingers, and his J1 ability, Misfortune Descends, quietly activated.
The safety door of the elevator in the breeding base’s underground garage suddenly short-circuited. Eris strode in unhindered, found an observation deck with a decent view, sat down in a chair, and crossed his legs.
The observation deck was part of the outer perimeter of the cultivation base. Senior officials would typically make a symbolic tour of the facility from here. Since the observation deck was separated from the core area of the cultivation base, there were usually very few security personnel stationed there.
When the only security guard on duty approached, he made eye contact with Eris sitting in the chair. Before he could utter a word in astonishment, Eris shot him dead.
“You’re in my way, old man.”
Through the glass of the observation deck, one could see culture tanks filled with pale yellow nutrient solution, containing immature test subjects suspended in various poses. Though still in their early stages, they were already taking shape and possessed attractive features—clearly selected specifically for the leaders’ viewing.
Researchers in uniforms came and went, administering routine injections to the specimens in the culture tanks. After the injections, the specimens twitched and struggled silently in the culture fluid.
Several researchers gathered around one of the test subjects’ culture tanks. The mentor was demonstrating the subject’s regenerative abilities to the interns, using a machine to sever one of its fingers. The subject thrashed wildly in the culture medium as the finger slowly regrew.
There was a female test subject inside. Eris covered her eyes, because the Puppet Master had said they weren’t allowed to look at women’s bodies without permission.
The atmosphere was calm and dull, not at all like something was about to happen.
“Pfft. That little white cat is just bluffing. I don’t believe he’d actually show up. How many times has he lied before?” Eris glanced at the watch the Puppet Master had strapped to his wrist with utter annoyance. It was 11:16 PM.
The Puppet Master’s voice came through his earpiece: “Don’t let your guard down.”
Eris startled, glancing around. He remembered there was a listening device in this ear, allowing him to hear the Puppet Master speak.
The view from the observation deck was limited, and Eris soon began to doze off.
At 11:59 PM, the watch vibrated slightly, waking Eris.
Eris woke up, rubbed his eyes, ran a hand through his hair, and glanced at the watch.
As the second hand pointed to twelve, it was now June 24th, 12:00 AM.
“Nothing happened at all,” Eris thought, feeling utterly bored.
Suddenly, the lights went out, and the brightly lit cultivation facility was plunged into darkness. The electrical circuits in research facilities are designed differently, so large-scale power outages are rare.
The researchers immediately began to clamor. The supervisor restored order and called the electrical technician, urging him to fix the problem quickly. Many surgeries were still in progress, and the test subject cultivation chambers and observation tanks all required power to function.
The supervisor turned on the emergency power supply while on the phone, and the emergency lights in each area came on, finally calming the researchers down.
With a little light finally filling her field of vision, Eris curiously pressed her face against the glass to see what was happening inside.
“The supervisor is on the phone… He can’t get through; looks like his phone has no signal,” Eris described the situation to the puppeteer. “Hehe, can’t send messages either—no internet.”
The sound of sliding rails came from the left, drawing Eris’s attention. She realized the noise was coming from the elevator shaft. Thanks to the emergency power, the elevator’s display hadn’t gone dark; instead, the numbers were plummeting at a terrifying speed. Suddenly, it crashed down to the lowest floor with a deafening boom.
Blood slowly seeped out from the gap between the elevator doors.
“Wow!” Eris’s eyes widened. She stood frozen for a moment, then stamped her feet excitedly. “He’s really here!”