Chapter 92

Chapter 92: Gathering Knowledge

The girl in the red coat stood under the streetlight, the pale light falling across her slightly thin frame. Shadows writhed around her feet and nearby, and inside the shadowspawn, pairs of alert, prying eyes hid and watched. One pair noticed the outsiders approaching—and Little Red Riding Hood sensed Yu Sheng’s group at the same time.

“Sorry,” Yu Sheng said, raising a hand in greeting. “The car was a bit slow. Have you been waiting long?”

“Just a few minutes,” Little Red Riding Hood replied. Her gaze flicked aside. “I already sent my wolves to circle the area. No unusual changes. The museum should be very stable tonight. Good night to act.”

She looked back at him. “Did you read the info I sent?”

“I did.” Yu Sheng nodded, following her gaze toward the large building standing silent at the end of the road.

But it wasn’t any museum. It was an old theater that had stopped operating years ago.

The entrance to the so-called museum was inside that theater.

“After museum night opens,” Little Red Riding Hood said, voice low and steady, “don’t touch any exhibits that breathe. Don’t stare at portrait paintings for too long. Don’t go into red rooms. If you see plastic mannequins wearing guide uniforms, watch their hand signals and don’t enter any door they point to or hint at.”

She exhaled, still uneasy. “Those are the main rules.”

As she walked, still listing reminders, Yu Sheng found himself thinking of the starter materials he’d read in the Border Comms Encyclopedia when he first registered with the Special Operations Bureau.

That had been his biggest gain from signing on: a complete, systematic set of basic intel about the supernatural world, including the terms Li Lin and Xu Jiali tossed around like casual slang—depth, danger level—things Yu Sheng had heard but never fully understood.

Depth, simply put, measured how far an otherworld deviated from reality. With reality as level zero, depth climbed from L-0 to L-5. An L-1 otherworld might only look a little strange—an ordinary person might even stumble out by accident. But L-5… aside from extremely rare survivor records that couldn’t be replicated, nobody believed there was any real chance of escaping. People weren’t even sure L-5 truly had an exit, and experts didn’t dare claim they knew.

Normally, an otherworld’s depth stayed relatively stable. It could fluctuate under certain conditions, though, and those sudden shifts were one of the main reasons spirit realm detectives and investigators died. Exploring when an otherworld was shallow was always safer.

Danger level was another key parameter. Most of the time, it rose with depth—the shallower the otherworld, the safer it tended to be; the deeper it got, the more likely it was to kill you. But it wasn’t absolute. Some shallow otherworlds produced bizarre entities that were terrifying, while some L-3 spaces—even though they were considered high-risk—contained stable safe zones.

Because of those exceptions, danger level and depth were treated as separate measures.

And danger level didn’t only apply to otherworlds. It could be used for entities on their own, too.

As they neared the theater, Little Red Riding Hood said, “To be honest, by the rules, I shouldn’t bring a newcomer like you into an L-2 otherworld like the museum. New detectives usually start with L-1. Shallow otherworlds are more stable and easier to evacuate from.”

She glanced at him. “But you can’t be counted as an ordinary rookie. You even handled Nightfall Valley. You lack experience and knowledge, sure, but your strength has been over the line for a long time.”

“It’s fine,” Yu Sheng said easily. “I’m here for experience.”

He hesitated, then glanced at her. “By the way… I suddenly feel like you’re used to looking after people.”

Little Red Riding Hood’s steps slowed a fraction. “Why?”

“You usually look mature and cold,” Yu Sheng said, “but once you’re doing something, you keep reminding people of everything. When you lead rookies like us, you sound like a guardian guiding a team.”

Her expression shifted—subtle, hard to read. She didn’t answer. She just curled her lip and kept walking.

After a few steps, she broke the silence. “So you understand depth and danger level, right?”

“Yeah,” Yu Sheng said. “Depth is how messed up the place is. Danger level is how likely the place—or whatever’s inside it—is to kill you.”

“That’s rough,” Little Red Riding Hood said, “but pretty vivid.”

She nodded toward the building. “The museum’s depth is L-2. Standard otherworld depth. It’s clearly different from reality—things start to warp. It’s dangerous for ordinary people, but the space inside still fits common sense and the way humans think. Follow the rules and nothing will happen.”

Yu Sheng didn’t wait for her to finish. “Danger level two means it won’t actively kill and it doesn’t have indiscriminate malice. But if you break the rules, you can still get seriously hurt—or die.”

“Not bad.” She sounded relieved. “If you remember that, I’m not worried.”

They stepped through the theater’s half-closed iron gate into a lobby paved with dark green tiles. Passages on both sides led deeper into the building. Opposite the door were several pitch-black ticket windows.

But the first thing Yu Sheng noticed was the strange device placed in the center of the lobby.

It was a black-gray metal pillar with four edges, wider at the bottom and narrower at the top, about half a person tall. Small lights at its top brightened and dimmed in a slow rhythm. From inside came a low, intermittent buzzing. It was running.

“This was placed by the Special Operations Bureau,” Little Red Riding Hood said, pointing to it. “We call it a node. Formally, a constant-type node generator. The low-frequency cognitive interference it releases affects ordinary people and keeps them away from known dangerous sites in the Borderland. The effect is weak, but it’s enough for normal people who haven’t had a spiritual awakening.”

“Are there a lot of these in the city?” Yu Sheng stared, surprised. “I’ve never noticed them.”

Little Red Riding Hood looked at him. For a heartbeat, she seemed about to say something—then swallowed it.

“How effective is it?” Yu Sheng pressed, still curious. “Can it really block ordinary people?”

“It works well,” she said, “but no safety measure has a one-hundred-percent interception rate. Even if you sealed this place with steel and concrete, some people would still show up with hydraulic cutters and jackhammers to go looking for death.”

She sighed. “There are always stubborn ones. And there are gifted ones who force themselves through the dizziness and shaking legs because they insist on ‘exploring.’ Or they’re just unlucky—born with high inspiration, so the node doesn’t affect them. So there are always idiots who fall into an otherworld and wait for us to rescue them.”

Her voice cooled. “In the end, they either become our paycheck, or they become tragic cases in internal bureau notices. And in a small number of cases… after crying their lungs out and getting treatment, they become new detectives, investigators, or agents.”

“Why not just demolish this place?” Foxy asked.

“Demolish it?” Little Red Riding Hood looked helpless for a moment, remembering Foxy’s lack of common sense. “Then things get really funny. What you demolish is only a known entrance. The otherworld itself isn’t in the physical dimension. If you destroy a controllable entrance, the next time it opens somewhere else, nobody will know where.”

Yu Sheng felt a complicated wave of emotion. Looking for death really did seem like a human instinct. You couldn’t stop it.

Little Red Riding Hood stepped up to the node and swiped her identification card across the top.

“Registering entry and exit,” she said, turning back and shaking the card at Yu Sheng. “If we die in there, the corpse collector will at least know where to fish us out. Once you enter an otherworld, outside communication basically gets cut off. Registering at the node is the last place we can leave a trace in the real world.”

Yu Sheng stepped forward with Irene and Foxy and registered too, muttering, “Good thing we got IDs for those two.”

The node hummed softly.

Then Little Red Riding Hood led them to the far end of the lobby and stopped before the dark ticket windows.

The old theater had been abandoned for years, so the booths were long out of use. Two of the four windows were crisscrossed with plastic sealing tape. One of the remaining two had been cleared out, leaving only piles of junk. The last still had a ticket-printing machine inside, coated in dust.

Little Red Riding Hood stopped in front of that one, checked the time on her phone, and waited.

After two or three minutes, she raised a hand and knocked on the glass.

“Night show,” she said clearly. “Museum night. Four tickets.”

Warm light bloomed inside the empty booth. The bulbs were broken, yet the compartment flooded with brightness—as if an invisible clerk left behind in memory still sat behind the window.

The old ticket machine creaked and clattered. Its empty feed spun again and again, and it began to spit out red paper entry tickets.