Chapter 93: Museum

Chapter 93: Museum

In the long-abandoned old theater, a deserted ticket window was brightly lit. The old ticket machine creaked as it spat out red admission slips out of thin air. The scene was undoubtedly eerie, yet Little Red Riding Hood looked as if she had already seen it countless times, standing calmly to the side.

A few seconds later, the creaking of the old ticket machine stopped, and three connected admission tickets fell inside the window.

Little Red Riding Hood froze slightly. She did not reach for the tickets. Instead, she knocked on the glass again. “Wait, we need four tickets! Four people entering!”

However, there was no response from inside the ticket window. Another two or three seconds passed, and just as Little Red Riding Hood was about to knock again, the light inside the booth flickered a few times before going completely dark.

Only three red paper admission tickets remained quietly lying in the dust-covered window.

Yu Sheng stared at the scene in confusion, counted the people present, then turned to Little Red Riding Hood. “…What is going on?”

“I don’t know. This has never happened before,” Little Red Riding Hood said uncertainly. She picked up the tickets and glanced at Yu Sheng, Hu Li, and Irene. “The Museum entrance has communicative properties. After sunset, at every hour and half-hour, it can accurately recognize and respond to qualified entry requests. It has never made a ‘deliberate mistake’ like this.”

Yu Sheng frowned, scanning the four of them, then suddenly froze. His gaze landed on Irene.

The doll twisted slightly. “…What?”

Yu Sheng hesitated. “…Is it free admission for children under one meter?”

Irene froze for a moment, then suddenly reacted and tried to jump up and bite him. “You’re the child! Your whole family is children! You’re a child for life! Do you know how insulting that is to a mature lady?!”

Yu Sheng struggled to hold her down while looking up at Little Red Riding Hood. “Do you think that guess makes sense?”

Little Red Riding Hood was still stunned. She had been a spirit-world investigator for years and had seen plenty of bizarre things, but this kind of bizarre was still new to her. After a long pause, she could only say vaguely, “…It does have a bit of logic to it.”

Irene immediately shifted her hatred to Little Red Riding Hood and pounced with an angry squeak, only to be instantly pinned to the ground by two wolves that emerged from the shadows.

The doll looked like she was about to cry.

Yu Sheng could only pull her up while comforting her, then asked curiously, “Has no one ever discovered this rule before?”

Little Red Riding Hood smiled bitterly. “…We in this line of work are not so heartless as to send infants under one meter tall on missions.”

Irene actually cried.

“Why did you have to be so direct about it!” Yu Sheng hurriedly soothed her while looking helplessly at the red-cloaked girl. “So what now? One ticket is missing. Can Irene still enter the Museum with us, or is there really a free-entry rule and she still qualifies?”

“Hard to say. We’ll have to try,” Little Red Riding Hood said after some thought. She handed out the tickets to Yu Sheng and Hu Li, then glanced again at the dark ticket window and muttered to herself, “…Would an ‘entrance’ like this really have such human-like rules?”

The dark booth gave no answer. Inside the large old theater, only the corridor leading to the auditorium suddenly lit up with faint light, as if urging the ticket-holding “audience” to enter quickly.

“Let’s go. The passage is open,” Little Red Riding Hood said, immediately snapping out of her thoughts. She turned and headed toward the lit corridor, waving at Yu Sheng. “Follow behind me. Don’t do anything unnecessary.”

Yu Sheng immediately put on a serious expression. Even Irene gritted her teeth and calmed down, following Hu Li as they walked after Little Red Riding Hood into the long, narrow passage.

The light extended forward with their steps, gradually illuminating the depths of the theater. Slowly, Yu Sheng thought he heard footsteps around them, more and more of them, as if many invisible spectators were walking alongside him through the dim corridor toward the upcoming performance.

But after a while, those footsteps vanished.

A door appeared ahead. It was half-open, brightly lit inside, revealing rows of neatly arranged seats and a stage at the far end.

Little Red Riding Hood raised the paper tickets. “Hold them up in the air like this. If you hear a reprimand during entry, stop immediately and retreat with me. That means entry has failed. Forcing your way in will cause the Museum to generate ‘security’ entities. Very dangerous.”

Yu Sheng immediately became alert. He and Hu Li raised their tickets as instructed, as if presenting them to an invisible attendant at the entrance, then slowly walked through the half-open door.

No reprimand came. Neither did Irene hear anything.

They entered the theater, walked through rows of dusty red seats, and eventually reached the front of the audience area, sitting down near the stage.

“I need to wash these clothes afterward,” Yu Sheng whispered to Irene. “These chairs are filthy. We should’ve brought some old newspapers.”

Little Red Riding Hood, sitting nearby, overheard and looked over in mild surprise.

She still had not quite adapted to Yu Sheng’s habit of thinking in purely practical terms that somehow became extremely strange when applied to Other Domain operations.

At that moment, a sharp bell rang from outside the theater.

The auditorium lights dimmed rapidly with the ringing. Spotlights above the stage flicked on with relay clicks, beams of light pointing toward the stage. The next moment, Yu Sheng heard applause.

Dense applause, whistles, cheers, and countless overlapping sounds erupted from the empty seats like a sudden tide, surging toward him from all directions.

He looked around under the applause, feeling the heat of the spotlights burning above.

Hu Li, Irene, and Little Red Riding Hood stood nearby with him, now positioned on the stage.

As the materials had stated, once inside the old theater, holding a ticket and sitting in the audience, when the applause begins, the ticket holders are transformed from audience members beneath the stage into “actors” upon it. The Museum Night officially begins in applause.

This continues until the night performance ends, or until the “performance” satisfies the unseen applauders, or until the actors on stage become new exhibits in the Museum.

Set pieces rose rapidly around the stage. Pale yellow walls with relief carvings and colored patterns, green and deep blue floors extending outward, doors, display cases, rooms.

Everything shifted rapidly before Yu Sheng’s eyes, reorganizing into a labyrinth-like museum structure. A mural suddenly appeared on a wall opposite him, depicting a crimson dragon. In an instant, a plaster knight emerged nearby, raising a sword to strike at the dragon in the mural. The two immediately clashed and fused into a new relief sculpture.

Armored soldiers marched out from a distant gate, only to be ambushed midway by musketeers hidden in oil paintings. Amid gunfire and smoke, the soldiers were annihilated, and flowers grew from their bones, transforming into neatly arranged potted plants and green wall displays along a visitor path.

The roaring of transforming architecture and the dizzying spectacle lasted a full ten minutes before everything finally settled.

Before Yu Sheng stood a wide corridor. Various landscape paintings hung on both sides. The ceiling was brightly lit. At the far end, a hall could be vaguely seen.

Uneasy whimpers from wolves came from around them. Little Red Riding Hood had at some point summoned her spectral wolf pack. She glanced at Yu Sheng, who still seemed slightly dazed, and smiled. “Startled? The Museum is an incredible place. If you ignore its danger, it can even be considered a palace of artistic imagination. That’s what Amolabi said before he died.”

Yu Sheng recovered. “Who is Amolabi?”

“A traveling artist, quite famous outside the Boundary Zone. He died in the Museum, for the sake of art,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a trace of emotion. “If we are lucky later, we might see a painting called Fields in a sky-blue room, signed by Amolabi. That was created by him after he became a Museum exhibit.”

“He can still create works after becoming an exhibit?”

“That’s what the experts say. Occasionally, new things appear in the Museum. They are connected to those who died here. Sometimes it is their portrait or sculpture, sometimes it is an artwork signed by them. The general consensus is that this is the Museum’s mechanism of ‘collection’ and ‘creation.’ But don’t worry too much. The Danger Level here is only two. As long as you follow the rules and do not directly confront the security or enter dangerous rooms, the Museum itself does not actively kill people. It is relatively peaceful.”