Chapter 101
Chapter 101: Curtain Call in Applause
Yu Sheng dumped everything he’d heard before it could slip away. The corpse had talked so fast he’d barely managed to catch it, and half the time he felt like he was repeating words on instinct, clinging to a sliver of short-term memory.
When he finished, Little Red Riding Hood only managed another stupid, stunned, “Huh?” and Yu Sheng felt his stomach sink.
Luckily, before the silence could get any worse, Little Red Riding Hood pulled a recorder out of her pocket.
“It’s a habit. You should build it too—carry a recording device that’s always on, twenty-four hours a day,” she said as she operated it. “Don’t use the phone issued by the Special Operations Bureau. It drains the battery. A recorder is better.
“In the otherworld, sudden situations happen all the time. People don’t notice everything. With a recorder, you can review it anytime. It helps.”
A soft burst of static, and then the recorder played back the whole rapid-fire string Yu Sheng had just repeated.
Little Red Riding Hood, Irene, and Foxy all looked up at once. Confusion, shock, curiosity—three sets of eyes landing on Yu Sheng like spotlights.
Foxy spoke first. “Benefactor, this is…”
“He said it,” Yu Sheng blurted, pointing at the corpse beside him. “It talked too suddenly. I almost didn’t react. Good thing my short-term memory isn’t terrible.”
Irene and Little Red Riding Hood looked horrified.
Only Foxy stayed carefree, staring at Yu Sheng with open admiration. “Benefactor’s spirit-speaking technique is truly amazing!”
“How can you accept every weird thing like it’s normal?!” Irene stared at Foxy like she’d lost her mind, then whipped back to Yu Sheng, her red eyes wide as saucers. “What was that? You were just standing there spacing out, right? When did the corpse start talking?!”
“Maybe… because I touched this?” Yu Sheng held up his fingertip, still smeared with a tiny trace of dried blood. “Back then, I suddenly saw the whole hall freeze…”
He told them everything—the color draining, the strange silence, the way Foxy, Irene, and Little Red Riding Hood had all locked up like statues.
Afterward, he even rubbed the dried blood on the display again out of curiosity. This time, nothing happened.
“Looks like it was one-time,” Yu Sheng muttered, rubbing his fingers. “Little Red Riding Hood, does any of this make sense?”
She didn’t answer. She just stood there, stuck in the expression of someone trying to untangle a mess too big for her hands.
Yu Sheng didn’t need the answer. It clearly didn’t make sense.
Just like a lot of things that happened to him didn’t make sense. Just like countless things in this world didn’t make sense.
Little Doll stared blankly for a moment, then finally managed, “I think… this wasn’t a hallucination.”
“If it’s real or not, we’ll know once we check,” Yu Sheng said, pointing toward the exit at the far end of the white hall. “The dead man said the killers threw the Weeper statue into the corridor.”
Foxy immediately headed for the corridor.
Irene hurried after her. “Hey, be careful. Don’t run into traps or something!”
Foxy paused, nodded like that was reasonable, then lifted a hand and made a strange gesture.
Eight of the nine tails behind her detached at once and flew ahead, swirling with foxfire like a slow-moving cloud of scout drones.
She even turned to explain it to Yu Sheng, as if giving a tour. “Benefactor, this is called Tail-Commanding Art…”
Yu Sheng’s face twitched. He forced his expression into something serious and checked ahead with his senses, confirming there was no hidden “security guard” in the corridor.
Little Red Riding Hood still hadn’t recovered from the sight of a demon fox using her own tails as drones. Her eye twitched. She looked like she wanted to say something about it, and each time she swallowed it back down.
A moment later, one fox tail returned from deeper in the corridor, its tip wrapped around something.
A small, pure-white statue—woman covering her face with both hands, crying in a twisted pose.
The original target of the commission.
Foxy pulled her tail back, hugged the little statue like she’d caught prey, and trotted over to Yu Sheng. She thrust it at him proudly. “Benefactor, it’s really here!”
Yu Sheng took it. It was only about twenty centimeters tall, light in his hands.
But getting the item gave him no sense of mission accomplished at all.
What was supposed to be a simple fetch job—a veteran carrying a rookie through an easy run—had turned into something thorny and complicated.
“The statue really was in the corridor,” Little Red Riding Hood said, staring at the Weeper statue in Yu Sheng’s hands with a complicated expression. “So the intel you ‘heard’ from the dead man is probably real too.”
She frowned, thinking quickly. “You probably remembered the place name wrong, but in the south of Boundary City there really is a district called Five Pines River. It’s far from here… Boundary City is huge. Some districts have accents that don’t match the core city.”
“What did ‘help His descent’ and ‘save the savior from the sea of suffering’ mean?” Yu Sheng asked. “Does that ring a bell?”
“I’ve never dealt with Angel Cultists,” Little Red Riding Hood said, shaking her head. “It’s too dangerous for an average spirit realm detective. If we run into clues like that, we report immediately and get as far away as possible. The Special Operations Bureau definitely knows more, but…”
She hesitated, then her tone sharpened. “I really don’t recommend you go digging into this.”
Yu Sheng frowned. “Why?”
“Because the ‘angel’ the Angel Cultists worship is basically a dark angel.” Her voice went grave. “The thing you saw in the valley last time—those lunatics worship something like that as a god. Do you think they can be anything good?”
She seemed afraid he still didn’t understand, so she pressed harder.
“Even among all the deranged cults and extremist organizations out there, Angel Cultists are the most impossible to understand. Even Blackpoint Group—wanted across multiple order-controlled regions—still issues its own wanted order against Angel Cultists within its territory. That tells you how twisted they are.
“And it’s not just that they’re crazy. More importantly, they seem to have some kind of connection to dark angels. If you deal with them too much, madness spreads. You might even draw the gaze of a dark angel. So even the regular units responsible for wiping out Angel Cultists have to undergo strict mental evaluations and take administrative leave after every contact. Seriously. If you can avoid it, never get involved with that group.”
Yu Sheng felt the weight in her repeated warning. He remembered the eerie, terrifying giant eye he’d seen in the valley, and his expression turned solemn. “Okay. I understand.”
Little Red Riding Hood exhaled slowly and looked around the white exhibition hall, which now felt even more eerie and ravaged.
“We should leave.”
“How do we get out again?” Yu Sheng asked. “Uh. I mean the normal way.”
Before Little Red Riding Hood could answer, Irene spoke up first, puzzled. “Huh? We’re not just going home with door opening?”
“Better not,” Yu Sheng said, a little awkward. “It’s late. In the otherworld we can’t even call the Special Operations Bureau to report. If their alarm suddenly goes off, that’s… pretty scary. Besides, I want to experience the normal evacuation process.”
Little Red Riding Hood coughed lightly. “If you want to leave the museum normally, there are only two methods. Either you survive here until the night show ends—that is, until the next morning in the real world—or you bring Museum Night to a grand curtain call and make endless applause ring out in the theater. After the applause, the show ends early.”
“Waiting until the night show ends takes too long,” Yu Sheng said immediately. “What does it mean to make it end in a grand curtain call? What do we do?”
“There’s no clear standard.” Little Red Riding Hood sounded tired just saying it. “If you treat everything we’ve done in the museum as a performance on a stage, then we need to make the invisible watchers in the audience seats feel satisfied—or amazed. There are lots of ways. Sometimes applause triggers for no reason at all. Someone improvised a painting in an exhibition hall. Someone hummed a song. Someone got applause in the middle of an argument with a teammate.
“The most ridiculous one was an investigator trapped in an exhibition hall, badly injured. In despair, he started cursing the museum… and while he was cursing, the applause suddenly exploded.”
Yu Sheng went silent.
So it was that random?
After the shock passed, his gaze drifted to Little Doll, who’d climbed back onto his shoulder.
Irene immediately reacted, glaring with great menace—well, her version of menace. “Why are you looking at me?! Hey, that’s rude to a lady. When I speak my mind, it’s because I mean it. You’ve got a stereotype about me…”
Yu Sheng thought it over and decided relying on Irene to curse the museum into entertaining the audience was not a plan he’d bet his life on.
He looked back at Little Red Riding Hood. “That chase and fight with the security guard just now was pretty exciting. Doesn’t that already count?”
“Combat is actually one of the hardest ways to trigger a curtain call,” Little Red Riding Hood said seriously. “Because the security guard is part of the museum’s mechanism. Fighting it is judged as normal performance—part of the script of Museum Night. It doesn’t count as shocking or off-script.”
Yu Sheng immediately started thinking.
This time, Little Red Riding Hood didn’t need Irene to point it out—she suddenly realized Yu Sheng had an idea.
Sure enough, he said quickly, “You said running into the security guard is a reasonable part of the script, right?”
She nodded cautiously. “Right.”
“Then what if we make a huge piece of ‘art’ happen without even running into it?”
Little Red Riding Hood blinked. “…Huh?”
Yu Sheng didn’t explain. He turned straight to Foxy. “Do you still have enough tail stock?”
Foxy nodded so hard her ears bounced. “Plenty. And I can use foxfire too. That’s unlimited.”
“Then we’re good.” Yu Sheng grinned, looking almost pleased with himself.
Little Red Riding Hood felt a chill at that smile and finally couldn’t hold back. “What are you trying to do?”
Yu Sheng pointed toward the doorway not far away. “See over there? That’s the way we came. There’s a huge exhibition hall there—packed with sculptures and antiques. We’ll have Foxy stack all her stored tails in there. Before the security guard shows up, we’ll set off a big one. If that still doesn’t work, we’ll burn every exhibition hall on the way out and blow down all the passages—”
Little Red Riding Hood stared at him, dumbfounded.
What made it worse was that Foxy nodded without hesitation, like this was a perfectly normal evacuation plan.
But the next second—before Little Red Riding Hood could question it, before Yu Sheng could actually do anything—a sudden sound from all directions interrupted them at once.
Applause thundered through the museum.