Chapter 101

Chapter 101: Curtain Falls to Applause

Yu Sheng rushed to spill everything before his memory cleared itself. He even almost bit his tongue. It was pure instinct and short term memory carrying him through. When he finished and Little Red Riding Hood only answered with a confused “Ah?”, he felt awful.

Luckily, Little Red Riding Hood took a voice recorder from her pocket and pressed it on: “It’s a habit of mine. You should build the same habit. Carry a recorder that runs twenty four seven. Don’t use a Special Affairs Bureau phone. That wastes battery. A recorder is enough,” she said, tapping buttons while she talked to Yu Sheng, “The Otherworld throws surprises at you all the time, and your attention won’t always be sharp. A recorder lets you review anything, anytime.”

After a little static, the recorder played Yu Sheng’s breathless retelling.

Little Red Riding Hood, Irene, and Foxy all lifted their heads together. Confused, surprised, and curious stares fell on Yu Sheng.

Foxy spoke first, bright eyed: “Benefactor, that was amazing spirit communion.”

Irene shot her a look and then glared at Yu Sheng, her scarlet eyes fierce like a boss: “You accept every creepy Otherworld thing like it’s normal, huh? You were just standing there by the platform zoning out. When did the corpse talk?”

Yu Sheng glanced at the dried blood still at his fingertip and answered while thinking it through: “Maybe because I touched this. Right then I saw the whole hall freeze.”

He didn’t hold back. He told them everything he had just experienced, including the strange look of the Exhibition Hall and how Foxy, Irene, and Little Red Riding Hood all seemed frozen. Then he rubbed the dried blood on the platform again to test it, but nothing happened this time.

“It seems one time only,” he muttered, rubbing his fingers. “Little Red Riding Hood, does that sound reasonable?”

She didn’t answer. She was still trying to put the mess in order. Yu Sheng saw it at a glance and knew he didn’t need her answer. [Just like so many things about me, this also doesn’t make sense.]

The little Doll, Irene, stared a moment, then caught up and said softly: “I don’t think this was a hallucination.”

Yu Sheng pointed to the exit on the far side of the white Exhibition Hall and said: “We can check. The dead man told me the murderers tossed The Weeper into the corridor.”

Foxy headed that way at once.

Irene hurried to warn her: “Be careful. Don’t walk into a trap or anything.”

Foxy nodded because that made sense. She pinched a strange sign with her fingers. Eight of the nine tails behind her left her body at once and flew ahead, wrapped in Fox Fire like a swarm of scout and strike drones.

She even turned to introduce it to Yu Sheng, her voice excited: “Benefactor, this is my Tail Command technique.”

Yu Sheng’s face twitched, and he forced himself to look serious. At the same time he probed ahead. There were no hidden “guards” in the corridor.

Little Red Riding Hood had a hard time accepting the sight of a Demon Fox sending out a bunch of tails as drones. The corner of her eye twitched. She wanted to say something more than once and then swallowed it back each time.

A moment later, one fox tail swung back from deep in the corridor with something held at its tip.

It was a small white statue, a woman with hands over her face, crying in a twisted pose.

It was their original target.

Foxy pulled her tail back, hugged the statue, and ran back to Yu Sheng, offering it up like fresh prey: “Benefactor, it’s really here.”

Yu Sheng took the little sculpture, only a little over twenty centimeters tall. But having the commission item in hand didn’t give him any sense of “mission complete.” What looked like a simple fetch job, with the veteran guiding a rookie, had turned into a hard and complicated case.

Little Red Riding Hood studied the statue and said, her face complicated: “The statue really was in the corridor, so what you ‘heard’ from the dead man is probably true. I thought about the name you mentioned. You said Five something River. That’s a slip. But there is a Five Pines River district in the south of Boundary City, far from here. Boundary City is huge, and some of its districts don’t sound like the main city at all.”

Yu Sheng asked at once: “What about the phrases ‘help His Descent’ and ‘save the Savior from suffering’? Do they mean anything to you?”

She shook her head: “I’ve never dealt with the Angel Cultists. For an ordinary Spirit Realm Detective, that’s too dangerous. If we run into any clues like that, we report them at once and get as far away as we can. The people at the Special Affairs Bureau know much more. But I strongly suggest you avoid asking about them.”

Yu Sheng frowned: “Why?”

She answered solemnly: “The ‘angels’ the Angel Cultists revere are really Dark Angels. Think of the thing you saw in the Valley last time. People who worship that as an Apotheosis will not end well. Among all the mad cults and extremist Organizations, the Angel Cultists are the most unreasonable. Even the Blackpoint Group, which is wanted across many lawful zones, issues wanted orders for Angel Cultists in its own territory. That’s how evil they are.”

She worried he still didn’t grasp the danger, so she added: “They aren’t just crazy. They also seem to have real ties to the Dark Angels. Deal with them too much and the madness spreads. Even the Dark Angels will turn an eye toward you. So the ‘regular forces’ who hunt Angel Cultists must take strict mental evaluations after every contact and are put on administrative leave. Really, avoid that group if you can.”

The seriousness in her voice made Yu Sheng straighten. He remembered the eerie giant eye in the Valley and nodded: “Got it. I understand.”

Little Red Riding Hood let out a breath and looked around the white Exhibition Hall, which now felt even more eerie and ruined.

She said what they all were thinking: “We should leave.”

Yu Sheng asked: “So how do we get out? I mean the normal way.”

Before she could answer, Irene was the first to look puzzled and ask: “Why not just use Door Opening to go home?”

Yu Sheng looked awkward: “Better not. It’s late at night, and you can’t call the Special Affairs Bureau from inside the Otherworld to file a report. If their alarms go off suddenly, that’s scary. Also, I want to experience the proper way to withdraw from the Otherworld.”

Little Red Riding Hood coughed lightly and then explained: “There are two ways to leave the Museum the normal way. One, survive here until the ‘night show’ ends, which is morning in the real world. Two, make ‘Night at the Museum’ end with a grand ‘curtain fall’ so thunderous applause fills the theater. After the applause, the performance ends early.”

“Waiting until morning is way too long,” Yu Sheng said at once. “How do we make the ‘curtain fall’? What do we do?”

“There isn’t a clear rule,” she answered. “Think of our whole time in the Museum as a performance on stage. We have to make the invisible audience feel satisfied or amazed. There are many ways, and sometimes it triggers for weird reasons. Someone once painted in an Exhibition Hall. Someone else just hummed a song. Some people even got applause during a fight with teammates. The most ridiculous case was an Investigator trapped and badly hurt in an Exhibition Hall who cursed the Museum in despair. The more he cursed, the louder the applause grew.”

Yu Sheng went silent. [Is it really that random?] He shifted his gaze to the little Doll on his shoulder.

Irene puffed her cheeks and scolded him: “Why are you looking at me like that? It’s rude to stare at a lady. My bold words come straight from the heart. You have a stereotype about me.”

Yu Sheng thought about it and agreed that having Irene shout insults until the “audience” outside felt satisfied seemed unreliable. He turned to Little Red Riding Hood and asked: “We just had a big chase with the ‘guards.’ That was exciting. Didn’t that satisfy the ‘curtain fall’ condition?”

She shook her head and analyzed carefully: “Fights are actually the least likely to work, because the ‘guards’ are part of the Museum’s mechanism. Fighting them seems to count as part of Night at the Museum’s normal script. It doesn’t feel ‘amazing’ or ‘off script.’ From what I understand, the condition is something that shouldn’t happen inside the Night at the Museum script.”

Yu Sheng started thinking. Little Red Riding Hood saw his look and realized at once what that meant. [He has another idea.]

He asked: “You said running into guards is a normal piece of the ‘script,’ right?”

She nodded, puzzled: “Right.”

He smiled and said: “Then what if we create a huge piece of ‘art’ without meeting any guards?”

She blinked: “Huh?”

Yu Sheng turned to Foxy and asked: “Do you still have tail reserves?”

Foxy nodded quickly: “Plenty, and I still have Fox Fire. That’s unlimited.”

“That’s perfect,” Yu Sheng said, grinning, very pleased.

Little Red Riding Hood felt a chill from that smile and finally couldn’t hold it in: “What exactly are you planning?”

Yu Sheng pointed at the doorway not far away and said: “See over there? We came through that way. There’s a huge Exhibition Hall with piles of statues and antiques. Have Foxy stack every spare tail there. Before the guards show up, we set off a huge blast. If that’s not enough, we burn every Exhibition Hall along the path and bring down every corridor.”

Little Red Riding Hood stared, speechless. What shocked her even more was that Foxy nodded without the slightest doubt. [Why does his smile feel scary.]

Before she could protest, and before Yu Sheng could actually move, a sound rolled in from all directions at once.

Thunderous applause filled the Museum.