In the abandoned old theater that had fallen into disrepair for many years, the ticket window glowed brightly despite being empty.
The old ticket machine creaked and spat out red entry tickets without any warning—this scene was undoubtedly strange.
However, Little Red Riding Hood stood calmly to the side, as if she had witnessed this countless times before.
Moments later, the creaking from the machine ceased, leaving three connected tickets resting in the window.
Little Red Riding Hood hesitated for a moment, then didn’t reach out for the tickets.
Instead, she knocked on the glass of the ticket booth again. “Wait! We need four tickets! Four people!”
Yet the booth remained silent.
After a few more seconds, just as Little Red Riding Hood prepared to knock again, the lights in the booth flickered a few times before plunging back into darkness.
All that remained were three red paper tickets quietly lying in the dusty window.
Yu Sheng stared in shock at this scene, counted the number of people present, and looked at Little Red Riding Hood in confusion. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, we’ve never had this kind of problem before,” Little Red Riding Hood replied hesitantly as she took the tickets.
Her gaze swept over Yu Sheng, Hu Li, and Aileen. “The entrance to the ‘museum’ has communication features. At every full hour and half hour after sunset, it accurately identifies and responds to eligible entry requests. This is the first time I’ve seen it deliberately ‘mess up’ like this.”
Frowning, Yu Sheng glanced between the four of them for a moment and then suddenly froze, his gaze landing on Aileen.
The little doll turned around. “What’s up?”
Yu Sheng hesitated. “Children under one meter tall get in free?”
Aileen paused for a moment and then reacted, her whole body getting ready to leap at him. “You’re the child! Your whole family’s children! You’ll be a child your whole life! Do you know how hurtful that is to a mature lady?”
Yu Sheng hurriedly tried to restrain Aileen, who was flailing about, while looking up at Little Red Riding Hood. “Do you think my guess is reasonable?”
Little Red Riding Hood was still in shock.
After years of working as a detective in the spirit world, she had seen many strange things, but this kind of bizarre situation was indeed a first.
She hesitated and finally muttered, “It does make a bit of sense…”
Aileen immediately shifted her ire away from Yu Sheng and lunged at Little Red Riding Hood, only to be knocked down in an instant by two wolves that suddenly leaped out of the shadows.
The little doll seemed almost on the verge of tears.
Yu Sheng could only pull Aileen up and comfort her while curiously asking Little Red Riding Hood, “Has no one discovered this ‘rule’ before?”
Little Red Riding Hood gave a wry smile. “Even in our line of work, we wouldn’t send infants under one meter tall on missions.”
Aileen truly started to cry.
“Why do you have to be so blunt!” Yu Sheng frantically tried to calm the little doll, giving a helpless glance at the girl in red across from him. “What do we do now? We’re short one entry ticket. Can Aileen still come with us into that ‘museum’? Or does the rule really state that there’s a ‘free entry’ clause, and she would still be eligible to enter?”
“It’s hard to say; we’ll have to try,” Little Red Riding Hood responded as she divided the tickets between Yu Sheng and Hu Li.
However, she cast a suspicious glance back at the dark ticket window, murmuring to herself, “This ‘entrance’… could it really have such a human-like ‘rule’?”
The dark ticket booth gave no answer.
In the vast old theater, only the corridor leading to the stage suddenly lit up with dim lights, as if urging the ‘audience’ who had received tickets to enter quickly.
“Let’s go; the passage has opened,” Little Red Riding Hood immediately set aside her wandering thoughts and turned to walk toward the illuminated passage.
She waved to Yu Sheng. “Follow me; don’t do anything unnecessary.”
Yu Sheng quickly put on a serious expression, and even Aileen gritted her teeth and calmed down, following behind Little Red Riding Hood with Hu Li, moving toward the long, narrow passage.
The lights extended with the footsteps of the group, gradually illuminating deeper into the theater.
Soon, Yu Sheng seemed to hear footsteps around him—an increasing number of footsteps, as if many invisible spectators were walking with him down this dim corridor, heading toward the stage that was about to start the show.
But after a while, those footsteps faded away.
A door appeared in Yu Sheng’s view, half open, revealing a brightly lit interior where rows of neatly arranged seats could be seen, along with a stage at the end of those seats.
Little Red Riding Hood raised her paper ticket. “Hold up your tickets like this, and if we hear any shouts as we enter, stop immediately. We’ll return the way we came—that would mean entry has failed. Forcing entry will cause entities called ‘security guards’ to appear in the museum, and that’s dangerous.”
Yu Sheng quickly raised his guard, mirroring Little Red Riding Hood’s action of holding his ticket aloft, as if to show it to some unseen staff member at the door.
Then they slowly walked through the half-open door.
He didn’t hear any shouts, and neither did Aileen.
They entered the theater, passing through rows of dusty red seats until they reached the front of the audience area, sitting down in the closest seats to the stage.
“This outfit is definitely going to need a wash when we get back,” Yu Sheng whispered to Aileen. “These chairs are so dirty—I should have brought a few old newspapers with me.”
Little Red Riding Hood overheard his mumbling and glanced at him with surprise.
She still wasn’t quite used to Yu Sheng’s practical thoughts, which seemed particularly odd in the context of their “otherworldly mission.”
Just then, a hurried ringing sound came from outside the theater.
The lights in the audience quickly dimmed along with the sound of the ringing, while spotlights above the stage burst to life with loud clinks, casting bright beams onto the stage.
The next moment, Yu Sheng heard applause—
A chorus of clapping, whistling, and cheering erupted from the empty audience, a sudden wave of sound surging towards him from all directions.
In the midst of the applause, he glanced around, feeling the heat of the spotlight bearing down on him.
Hu Li, Aileen, and Little Red Riding Hood stood nearby, together in the center of the stage.
Just as the records said—upon entering the old theater and sitting in the audience with tickets, when applause erupted, the ticket holders would transform from audience members into “actors” on stage, and thus the museum night would commence amid the applause.
This would last until the night’s performance ended, or the “show” on stage satisfied the invisible applauders, or until the actors on stage unfortunately became new exhibits in the museum.
Various settings rose around the stage, beige walls, embellished and colorfully patterned ceilings, greenish-black and dark blue floors extending out, with doors, display cases, and rooms appearing one after another…
Everything moved swiftly before Yu Sheng’s eyes, reshaping into a complicated structure that resembled a maze—the museum.
He saw a mural abruptly appear on the opposite wall, depicting a giant crimson dragon, but in the blink of an eye, a knight made of plaster appeared near the wall, brandishing his sword against the dragon in the mural.
The two quickly became entangled, morphing into a new relief.
More soldiers clad in ancient armor lined up and emerged from a distant door, but midway, they were ambushed by a group of musketeers hiding in the oil painting.
Amid the sounds of gunfire and smoke, the soldiers met their fate, and flowers sprouted from their bones, turning into neatly arranged landscape planters along the visitor route…
The rumbling of shifting buildings and the dazzling sights lasted a full ten minutes before finally quieting down.
Before Yu Sheng lay a wide corridor, its sides adorned with various landscape paintings.
The lights above shone brightly, and at the end of his sight, he could vaguely see a large hall.
The unsettling whimper of wolves surrounded him; Little Red Riding Hood had summoned her illusionary wolf pack at some point.
She glanced at Yu Sheng, who seemed a bit dazed, and smiled. “Surprised? The ‘museum’ is an incredible place. If we set aside its dangers, it could really be considered a palace of artistic fantasies—Emolabi praised it like this just before he passed away.”
Yu Sheng snapped back to attention. “Who’s Emolabi?”
“An artist from afar, quite famous outside the borderlands, who died in the museum—seeking art,” Little Red Riding Hood replied with a hint of emotion in her voice. “If we’re ‘lucky’ later, we might see a painting called ‘The Fields’ in a sky-blue room, signed by Emolabi. That’s a piece he ‘created’ after becoming part of the museum’s collection.”
“Created after becoming a ‘collection’ of the museum?”
“Well, that’s what the experts summarized. Occasionally, new things appear in this museum, and they have some connection to the sacrifices that have disappeared here. Sometimes they are portraits or sculptures of the sacrifices, and other times, they are artistic works bearing the sacrifices’ signatures.
The generally accepted view is that this is the ‘collection’ and ‘creation’ mechanism of the museum. But you don’t have to worry too much; the danger level here is only level two. As long as we follow the rules, don’t directly confront the ‘security guards,’ and avoid dangerous rooms, the museum itself won’t actively kill anyone; it’s fairly peaceful.”
(End of Chapter)