Chapter 93 – The Museum

Inside the old theater that had been abandoned for years, the unmanned ticket window was brightly lit. The antiquated ticket machine creaked and groaned, spitting out red paper admission tickets from thin air — an undeniably eerie sight, yet Little Red Riding Hood stood calmly to the side as though she had witnessed this countless times before.

A few seconds later, the creaking of the old-fashioned ticket printer stopped, and three connected admission tickets dropped into the window.

Little Red Riding Hood froze for a moment. Instead of reaching for the tickets, she knocked on the glass of the ticket window again. “Wait, I need four tickets! Four people entering!”

But there was no response from behind the ticket window. After another two or three seconds, just as Little Red Riding Hood was about to knock on the glass again, the light inside the booth flickered several times before returning to darkness.

Only three red paper admission tickets remained, lying quietly in the dust-covered window.

Yu Sheng stared at the scene in bewilderment. He counted the people present and looked toward Little Red Riding Hood with some confusion. “…What’s going on?”

“No idea. This has never happened before,” Little Red Riding Hood said, her tone hesitant. She reached over and picked up the tickets, her gaze sweeping across Yu Sheng, Hu Li, and Eileen. “The ‘Museum’ entrance possesses communicative characteristics. At every hour and half-hour after sunset, it can accurately identify and respond to qualified admission requests. There’s never been a case of it ‘deliberately getting it wrong’ like this.”

Yu Sheng furrowed his brow, scanning back and forth twice among the four of them — himself included — before suddenly freezing, his gaze landing on Eileen.

The little doll squirmed. “…What?”

Yu Sheng’s tone was somewhat hesitant. “…Children under one meter get in free?”

Eileen blanked for a moment, then suddenly realized what he meant. She was about to leap up and bite someone. “You’re the child! Your whole family are children! You’ll be a child your entire life! Do you have any idea how much damage that kind of remark does to a mature lady?!”

Yu Sheng wrestled Eileen down with all four limbs to suppress her flailing and bouncing while looking up at Little Red Riding Hood. “Do you think my guess is reasonable?”

Little Red Riding Hood was still standing there in a daze. She’d been a spirit detective for many years, and she’d encountered her fair share of bizarre things, but this particular brand of bizarre was truly a first. After spacing out for a long while without knowing how to respond, she could only manage a vague mumble: “It does make a certain amount of sense…”

Eileen immediately redirected her aggression from Yu Sheng, letting out a howl as she lunged at Little Red Riding Hood — only to be instantly flattened by two wolves that suddenly emerged from the shadows.

Miss Doll looked like she was about to cry.

Yu Sheng could only pull Eileen back up and comfort her while curiously asking Little Red Riding Hood, “Has nobody ever discovered this ‘rule’ before?”

Little Red Riding Hood wore a bitter smile. “…No matter how crazy people in our line of work are, nobody would send an infant less than a meter tall on a mission.”

Eileen actually started crying.

“Why did you have to be so blunt about it!” Yu Sheng scrambled to console Miss Doll, casting a helpless glance at the red-clothed girl across from him. “So what do we do now? We’re one admission ticket short. Can Eileen still come in with us to this ‘Museum’? Or does the rules really include a ‘free admission’ clause, and she’ll still be allowed entry?”

“Hard to say. We’ll have to try and find out,” Little Red Riding Hood said carefully, distributing the tickets to Yu Sheng and Hu Li. But then she cast another suspicious glance at the dark ticket window and muttered to herself, “…Would this kind of ‘entrance’ really have such a… humanized ‘rule’?”

The dark ticket booth offered no answer to her question. In the vast old theater, only the corridor leading to the auditorium suddenly lit up with dim lighting, as if urging the ticket-holding “audience” to take their seats promptly.

“Let’s go, the passage is open,” Little Red Riding Hood immediately shelved her idle thoughts and turned toward the illuminated corridor, waving at Yu Sheng. “Stay behind me and don’t do anything unnecessary.”

Yu Sheng immediately put on a serious expression. Even Eileen managed to calm down — albeit with teeth still clenched — and together with Hu Li, they followed behind Little Red Riding Hood into the long, narrow passage.

The lights extended along with the group’s footsteps, gradually illuminating the depths of the theater. Slowly, Yu Sheng seemed to hear footsteps coming from all around — more and more footsteps, as if many invisible audience members were walking alongside him through this dim corridor, heading toward the show that was about to begin.

But after a while, those footsteps all vanished.

A door appeared in Yu Sheng’s field of vision, half-open, with bright lights inside. He could see rows upon rows of neatly arranged seats, and at the far end of those seats, a stage.

Little Red Riding Hood held up her paper admission ticket. “Hold your ticket up in the air, like this. If you hear a shout of rebuke when entering, stop immediately. We all turn back the way we came — that means admission has failed. Forcing your way in will cause the ‘Museum’ to generate physical ‘security guards,’ and they’re very dangerous.”

Yu Sheng immediately heightened his vigilance. Together with Hu Li, he mimicked Little Red Riding Hood and raised his admission ticket, as if presenting it to some invisible staff member at the door, then slowly walked through the half-open entrance.

He didn’t hear any shout of rebuke. Neither did Eileen.

They entered the auditorium, passing through row after row of dusty red seats from the back, walking all the way to the front of the audience section, where they sat down in the seats closest to the stage.

“Going to have to wash these clothes when we get back,” Yu Sheng murmured to Eileen. “These seats are way too filthy — if I’d known, I would’ve brought some old newspapers.”

Little Red Riding Hood overheard his muttering and cast him a somewhat astonished look.

She still couldn’t quite get used to Yu Sheng’s way of thinking — practical as it was, it seemed extraordinarily peculiar in the context of an “Otherworld operation.”

Just then, a rapid ringing of bells came from outside the auditorium.

The lights in the audience section dimmed rapidly with the sound of the bells. The spotlights above the stage clicked on one by one with the banging of relays, bright beams of light all pointing toward the stage. The next second, Yu Sheng heard applause —

Dense applause, whistles, cheers, all manner of sounds erupting suddenly from the empty audience seats, like a wave appearing from nowhere, surging toward him from every direction.

He looked around amid the applause, feeling the heat of the spotlights searing down on the top of his head.

Hu Li, Eileen, and Little Red Riding Hood stood near him. Together, they were standing in the center of the stage.

Just as the documents had described — enter the old theater, sit in the audience with your ticket, and when the applause begins, the ticket holders would transform from spectators below the stage into “performers” upon it. The museum Night would thus commence amid the applause.

All of this would continue until the night show ended, or until the “performance” on stage left those invisible applauders feeling exceptionally satisfied, or until the actors on stage unfortunately became new exhibits in the museum’s collection.

All sorts of set pieces rose up from around the stage — beige walls one after another, ceilings adorned with reliefs and colorful patterns, extending floors of dark green and dark blue, doors upon doors, display cases upon display cases, rooms upon rooms…

Everything moved rapidly before Yu Sheng’s eyes, reassembling in a dizzying whirl into a museum with a structure as complex as a labyrinth. He saw a mural appear abruptly on the opposite wall, depicting a crimson dragon. But in the blink of an eye, a plaster knight materialized near the wall, its sword thrust toward the dragon in the mural. The two clashed and merged together, becoming a new relief.

Then soldiers in ancient armor marched out from a distant door in formation, only to be ambushed halfway by a company of musketeers lying in wait within an oil painting. Amid the bang of gunshots and drifting smoke, the soldiers were annihilated to the last. Flowers sprouted from their bones, transforming into neatly arranged ornamental flowerpots and green plant walls along the visitor route…

The rumbling of transforming architecture and the dizzying spectacle continued for a full ten minutes before everything finally settled into stillness.

All that remained before Yu Sheng was a spacious corridor, its walls lined with landscape paintings of every variety. The lights above his head burned brightly, and at the far end of his line of sight, he could faintly make out a great hall.

The uneasy, low whimpering of wolves drifted from the surroundings. At some point, Little Red Riding Hood had summoned her pack of phantom wolves. She glanced at Yu Sheng, who appeared somewhat dazed, and smiled. “Quite a shock, wasn’t it? The ‘Museum’ is an incredible place. If you set aside its dangers, it truly could be considered a palace of art brimming with fantastical imagination — that’s exactly how Aimorabi praised it on his deathbed.”

Yu Sheng snapped back to his senses. “Who’s Aimorabi?”

“An artist from outside the region. Quite famous beyond the Borderland. Died in the museum — in pursuit of art,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a touch of wistfulness. “If we’re ‘lucky’ later, we might come across a sky-blue room containing an oil painting called ‘Fields’ bearing Aimorabi’s signature. That’s a work this artist ‘created’ after becoming part of the museum’s collection.”

“You can still ‘create’ after becoming one of the museum’s ‘exhibits’?”

“That’s what the experts have concluded, at any rate. New things occasionally appear in this museum, and they bear certain connections to the victims who vanished here. Sometimes it’s a portrait or sculpture of the victim themselves, and other times it’s an artwork bearing the victim’s signature. The generally accepted view is that this is the museum’s ‘collection’ and ‘creation’ mechanism. But don’t worry too much — the danger level here is only Class Two. As long as you follow the rules, don’t directly confront the ‘security guards,’ and stay out of dangerous rooms, the museum itself won’t actively kill anyone. It’s relatively peaceful.”

(End of Chapter)