Xyrin Empire

Chapter 519: Chapter 519: Complete Chaos, Utter Chaos

In the living room, you could hear a pin drop.

Only the giant grand-style clock opposite was making a “tick-tock” mechanical sound.

“Pandora, Visca, stop playing! Go notify Bubbles, the Empire needs her!”

The two small figures instantly packed up the arsenal that sprawled across the living room and vanished from everyone’s sight in a flash.

“You… say that again?” I pressed my left hand on the enormous, ornate suitcase and asked Ding Ling for confirmation with a serious expression.

“If I remember correctly, the doll in the suitcase referred to herself as such, smashing through the room’s window and landing next to me at half past midnight. She’s so aloof she wouldn’t spare extra words, and has quite the rotten temper.”

Ding Ling knew the situation was bizarre, but she was more convinced that this odd group in front of her could handle any such matters; thus, with a face full of complaints, this missy who wouldn’t show up unless it was very important began to pour out her grievances to us.

“Also, she’s got severe paranoia, from the first day at my home she’s been trying to find her missing father who knows where, completely oblivious to how shocking it is for a doll to move on its own. I almost broke from stress trying to hide her. I thought I’d gotten a rare treasure that would make me a fortune, but I ended up paying for X.O.’s treatment after his hind leg was damaged by the Mercury Lamp… uh, forget I mentioned that last part, okay?”

No worries, compared to a certain missy who sustains her family’s finances by speculating on alien rent, your greed is hardly noteworthy.

And about X.O., if I’m not mistaken, he’s the family’s dog with mismatched legs shaped in an ‘X’ upfront and an ‘O’ behind at Ding Ling’s house, right? It’s surprising that the dumb dog who gets friendly with anyone hasn’t been snatched away to a dog meat restaurant yet.

Mercury Lamp—if I’m not mistaken, and if the setting of this world is correct, this should be the name of the first doll from “Rose Maiden.”

“Rose Maiden,” I never fully watched this anime initially, but after the hardcore otaku mom moved into our household, I was forced to digest roughly 40GB of related data. Excluding what I slept through, misunderstood, gulped down during meals, and ultimately forgot, I retained roughly 30% of the plot. It seems to recount the story of seven living dolls, under the divine guidance of Monarch Luo Zhen, fighting each other and collecting seven Dragon Balls to complete the doll’s completion plan, eventually giving birth to the perfect LEVEL 6 girl, a sad and touching post-modern urban superpower story filled with love and warmth…

I have this nagging feeling that if otaku mom knew about this brainstorming, by tomorrow I would find myself split up on every warship’s fuel reserves of the Imperial Fleet—is it just my imagination?

Okay, okay, I know I got something wrong, but there indeed is a doll named Mercury Lamp in the story of “Rose Maiden.” She is the first doll created by the miraculous Doll Master, Luo Zhen, but because he lost interest midway, she never obtained a complete body. Despite this, she deeply adores and looks up to her creator and is willing to pay any price to win against her sisters in battle, striving to become the ultimate perfect individual: a human-incarnated divine entity called… cough, cough, a perfect girl named Alice, proving to her “father” that she is not inferior to any sister, that she is not a “defect.” That’s the gist of it, so what Ding Ling mentioned…

“Searching the whole world for a father who’s God knows where,” is probably referring to Mercury Lamp’s attempts to find Luo Zhen.