Chapter 101 – Curtain Falls Amid Applause

While he still hadn’t forgotten the rapid-fire barrage of information, Yu Sheng blurted out everything he’d heard in one breath, nearly biting his tongue in the process. The entire recitation was sustained by sheer instinct and a sliver of short-term memory. So when Little Red Riding Hood responded with a blank “Huh?” after he finished, he nearly lost it.

Fortunately, Little Red Riding Hood immediately fished a voice recorder out of her pocket.

“It’s a habit of mine. You’d do well to develop it too—carry a recording device that’s on twenty-four hours a day. Don’t use the phone issued by the Special Operations Bureau; it drains the battery too fast. A voice recorder works fine,” Little Red Riding Hood said while operating the device. “You’ll always run into unexpected situations in the Otherworld, and human attention isn’t always reliable. Having a recording device for reviewing things on the fly is incredibly useful.”

After a faint crackle of static, the recorder played back the torrent of information Yu Sheng had just rattled off.

Little Red Riding Hood, Eileen, and Hu Li all looked up simultaneously, their gazes—puzzled, astonished, and curious—landing on Yu Sheng at once.

Hu Li was the first to speak: “Benefactor, this is…”

“He said it,” Yu Sheng raised his hand and pointed at the corpse beside him. “He started talking so suddenly I almost didn’t react in time. Good thing my short-term memory is decent.”

Eileen and Little Red Riding Hood instantly looked horrified. Only Hu Li continued gazing at Yu Sheng with carefree admiration: “Benefactor’s spirit-channeling technique is truly masterful!”

“How can you just accept every bizarre thing that happens?! No matter what weird situation pops up with Yu Sheng, you think it’s perfectly normal?” Eileen stared at Hu Li in disbelief, then turned to Yu Sheng, her scarlet eyes wide open. “What exactly happened? Weren’t you just standing next to that platform in a daze for a second? When did the corpse start talking?!”

“Maybe… it’s because I touched this?” Yu Sheng was also pondering the question. He looked thoughtfully at the trace of dried blood still on his fingertip. “I suddenly saw the entire Great Hall freeze in place…”

He held nothing back, recounting his brief experience in full—including the anomalies in the hall and the eerie states of Hu Li, Eileen, and Little Red Riding Hood. After finishing, he curiously rubbed his finger against the bloodstain on the display stand again, but this time the phenomenon of the “dead man speaking” did not recur.

“Seems like it was a one-time thing,” Yu Sheng muttered, rubbing his fingers together. “Little Red, does this make any sense?”

Little Red Riding Hood said nothing, still stuck in a state of “this is too chaotic and I haven’t sorted it out yet.”

One look and Yu Sheng knew he didn’t need an answer. This clearly didn’t make sense.

Just like the many inexplicable things that had happened to him before. Just like the countless things in this world that made no sense to him.

The Little Doll, after spacing out for a moment, managed to process the situation. She spoke hesitantly: “I think… this probably wasn’t a hallucination.”

“Whether it’s a hallucination or not, we’ll know if we go check,” Yu Sheng said, raising his hand to point at the exit on the far side of the White Exhibition Hall. “The deceased told me the killer discarded the Weeping One statue in the corridor.”

Hu Li immediately headed toward the corridor.

Eileen hastily called after her: “Hey, be careful. Don’t walk into a trap or something.”

Hu Li thought that sounded very reasonable and nodded. She raised her hand in a strange gesture, and eight of her nine tails immediately detached from her body, soaring ahead of her wreathed in Fox Fire—like a swarm of reconnaissance drones slowly advancing forward.

She even turned back to introduce the technique to Yu Sheng: “Benefactor, this is called ‘Tail Control Arts’…”

Yu Sheng’s face twitched. He struggled to keep a straight face and feign seriousness, while simultaneously extending his perception ahead to confirm there were no hidden “security guards” in the corridor.

Little Red Riding Hood still couldn’t quite accept the sight of this fox spirit sending her tails out like drones. The corner of her eye twitched, and several times she opened her mouth to say something, but each time she swallowed her words.

Moments later, one fox tail returned from the depths of the corridor, its tip curled around an object.

It was a pristine white statuette—a sculpture of a woman weeping in a strangely contorted pose, her face buried in her hands.

It was the original objective of this commission.

The fox girl retracted her tail and returned to Yu Sheng, cradling the statuette with delight. She presented the commission item like a hunter offering up prey: “Benefactor, it really was there!”

Yu Sheng reached out and took the small sculpture, no more than twenty-some centimeters tall. Yet having the commission item in hand brought him no sense of satisfying completion whatsoever.

What was supposed to be a simple, straightforward retrieval mission—a veteran guiding a newcomer through a quick run—had turned into an exceptionally thorny and complicated incident.

“The statue really was in the corridor… so the intelligence you ‘heard’ from the deceased is most likely genuine,” Little Red Riding Hood said, her expression complicated as she gazed at the Weeping One sculpture in Yu Sheng’s hand. “I thought about it just now—the ‘Wudao River’ you mentioned was probably misremembered, but there is indeed a district called Wusong River in the southern part of Boundary City. It’s far from here… Boundary City is enormous, and some districts have accents that differ from the main urban area.”

“What about ‘help Him descend’ and ‘deliver the Lord from the sea of suffering’? Do you understand what that means?” Yu Sheng asked curiously.

“I’ve never dealt with Angel Cult followers—that’s far too dangerous for an ordinary Spirit Detective. When we come across leads related to them, the first thing we do is report it, then get as far away as possible,” Little Red Riding Hood shook her head. “The people at the Special Operations Bureau definitely know more, but… I really wouldn’t recommend you go digging into this.”

Yu Sheng frowned. “Why not?”

“Because the ‘angel’ that the Angel Cult worships is, to put it bluntly, the Twilight Angel—the thing you saw in that valley last time. People who worship that thing like a god—do you really think they could be anything good?” Little Red Riding Hood spoke with a grave expression, her voice heavy.

“Even among all the unhinged cults and extremist organizations out there, Angel Cult followers are the most unreasonable bunch. Even the Black Dot Syndicate—an extremist force widely wanted across many orderly territories—issues bounties on Angel Cult followers within its own controlled regions. That should tell you just how twisted these people are.”

Perhaps worried that Yu Sheng still didn’t fully grasp how dangerous those fanatics were, she immediately added: “It’s not just that they’re insane. More importantly, they seem to genuinely have some kind of connection to the Twilight Angels. Too much contact with them, and the madness spreads. The Twilight Angels themselves may even turn their gaze upon you. That’s why even the ‘regulars’ tasked with eliminating Angel Cult followers have to undergo strict psychological evaluations and mandatory administrative leave after every encounter. Seriously, never get involved with that group if you can help it.”

Yu Sheng could sense the gravity of the matter from Little Red Riding Hood’s solemn, repeated emphasis. He recalled the grotesque, terrifying giant eye he had seen in that valley, and his expression turned equally serious. “Alright, I understand.”

Little Red Riding Hood let out a breath of relief and surveyed the White Exhibition Hall, which now looked particularly eerie and thoroughly wrecked.

“We should leave.”

“How do we get out?” Yu Sheng asked. “Uh, I mean the normal procedure.”

Before Little Red Riding Hood could respond, Eileen piped up with a puzzled look: “Huh? Can’t you just open a door and go home?”

“Let’s not do that,” Yu Sheng said, looking a bit embarrassed. “It’s the middle of the night, and there’s no way to call the Special Operations Bureau from inside the Otherworld. If the alarm suddenly goes off over there, it’d scare people. Besides, I’d like to experience the normal extraction process from the Otherworld for once.”

“Ahem, there are only two ways to leave the museum normally,” Little Red Riding Hood cleared her throat lightly. “Either we survive here until the ‘evening performance’ ends—which means the next morning in the real world—or we bring Museum Night to a grand ‘curtain call’ that fills the theater with prolonged, thunderous applause. Once the applause sounds, the performance ends early.”

“Waiting until the night show ends would take far too long,” Yu Sheng shook his head immediately. “What does it mean to bring Museum Night to a grand curtain call? What do we need to do?”

“There’s no clear standard. Basically, if you think of our entire time in the museum as a ‘performance’ on stage, we need to make the invisible audience members sitting in the theater feel ‘satisfied’ or ‘astonished,'” Little Red Riding Hood explained. “There are many ways to achieve this, and sometimes applause is triggered for seemingly inexplicable reasons. Someone once improvised a painting in an exhibition hall. Someone else just hummed a song. There was even someone who triggered applause during an argument with a teammate. The most absurd case was an investigator trapped in an exhibition hall, badly wounded. In desperation, he started cursing at the museum, and halfway through his tirade, thunderous applause suddenly broke out…”

Yu Sheng: “…”

It was that random?!

After a moment of amazement, he turned his gaze to the Little Doll, who had once again climbed onto his shoulder.

Eileen immediately caught on and glared with feigned ferocity: “What are you looking at me for?! Hey, it’s very rude to treat a lady this way, I’ll have you know! When I speak my mind, it’s always from genuine feeling. You have a stereotype about me…”

Yu Sheng thought about it and decided that having Eileen curse out the “audience” into satisfaction was indeed a bit unreliable. He turned to Little Red Riding Hood: “Our whole chase battle with the ‘security guards’ just now was pretty intense. Doesn’t that satisfy the conditions for a ‘curtain call’?”

“‘Combat’ is actually the hardest way to trigger a curtain call, because the ‘security guards’ are part of the museum’s own mechanisms. Fighting them seems to be classified as a normal part of Museum Night’s regular performance—it doesn’t achieve the effect of being ‘astonishing’ or ‘going off-script,'” Little Red Riding Hood analyzed seriously. “From what I understand, the condition for triggering a curtain call should be ‘something happening that shouldn’t occur within the script of Museum Night.'”

Yu Sheng immediately began mulling it over.

This time, without Eileen needing to point it out, Little Red Riding Hood had a flash of intuition and realized something—Yu Sheng had another idea.

Sure enough, Yu Sheng soon spoke up: “You just said that encounters with security guards are a reasonable part of Museum Night’s overall ‘script,’ right?”

Little Red Riding Hood didn’t know what he was thinking, but nodded blankly: “Right.”

“Then what if we created massive ‘art’ without encountering any security guards at all?”

Little Red Riding Hood: “…Huh?”

Yu Sheng didn’t bother explaining. He turned directly to Hu Li: “Do you have enough tail reserves left?”

Hu Li nodded eagerly: “Plenty. And I still have Fox Fire available—that one’s unlimited.”

“Then we’re good.” Yu Sheng broke into a grin, his expression exceptionally pleased.

Little Red Riding Hood found his smile somewhat unsettling and finally couldn’t hold back: “What exactly are you planning?”

Yu Sheng let out a mischievous chuckle and pointed at the doorway not far off. “See over there? We came through from that direction earlier. There’s a huge exhibition hall on the other side, packed with sculptures and antiques. Have Hu Li pile all her stored tails in there, and before security shows up, we blow it sky-high. If that’s not enough, we torch every exhibition hall along the way, blast every corridor to rubble…”

Little Red Riding Hood stared in slack-jawed disbelief. But what stunned her even more was that Hu Li nodded without a moment’s hesitation.

Yet in the very next second—before Little Red Riding Hood could voice her objections, before Yu Sheng could actually take any action—a sound that erupted suddenly from every direction interrupted everyone.

Thunderous applause filled the museum.

(End of Chapter)