Chapter 93 Museum
In the old theater that had been abandoned for many years, the empty ticket window was brightly lit, and the old ticket machine creaked, spitting out red paper tickets for admission out of thin air - this scene was undoubtedly weird, but Little Red Riding Hood seemed to have seen it countless times, and just waited calmly by the side.
A few seconds later, the creaking sound of the old ticket machine stopped, and three consecutive admission tickets fell into the window.
Little Red Riding Hood was stunned for a moment. Instead of reaching out for the ticket, she knocked on the glass of the ticket office again: "Wait, I want four tickets! Four people enter!"
However, there was no movement in the ticket window. After another two or three seconds, just when Little Red Riding Hood was about to knock on the glass again, the light in the compartment flickered a few times and then returned to darkness.
Only three red paper tickets were left, lying quietly in the dusty window.
Yu Sheng looked at the scene in astonishment, counted the number of people at the scene, and looked at Little Red Riding Hood in confusion: "...What is going on?"
"I don't know. This has never happened before," Little Red Riding Hood said hesitantly. She reached out to take the ticket and glanced at Yu Sheng, Hu Li and Irene. "The entrance to the museum has communication features. At every hour and half hour after sunset, it can accurately identify and respond to qualified admission requests. There has never been such a 'deliberate mistake'."
Yu Sheng frowned and glanced between the four people including himself. Then he was suddenly startled and his eyes fell on Irene.
The little doll twisted its body: "...What?"
Yu Sheng said hesitantly, "...Children under one meter tall are free of charge?"
Irene was stunned for a moment, then suddenly realized what was happening. She was about to jump up and bite him: "You are a child! Your whole family is children! You will be a child forever! Do you know how much harm your words can do to a mature lady?"
Yu Sheng used his hands and feet to suppress Irene's thrashing and jumping while looking up at Little Red Riding Hood: "Do you think my guess is reasonable?"
Little Red Riding Hood was still stunned at this time. She had been a ghost detective for so many years and had seen a lot of weird things, but this was the first time she had encountered such a weird method. She was stunned for a long time and didn't know how to respond. She could only mumble: "It does make some sense..."
Irene immediately shifted her hatred away from Yu Sheng and pounced on Little Red Riding Hood with a roar - and was then knocked to the ground in an instant by two wolves that suddenly emerged from the shadows.
Miss Doll looked like she was about to cry.
Yu Sheng could only pull Irene up and comfort her while curiously asking Little Red Riding Hood: "Has no one discovered this 'rule' before?"
Little Red Riding Hood smiled bitterly: "...No matter how crazy people in our line of work are, we will never let infants less than one meter tall go on missions."
Irene actually cried.
"Why are you being so blunt!" Yu Sheng frantically tried to appease the doll lady, looking helplessly at the red-dressed girl opposite him, "What should we do now? With one less ticket, can Irene still enter the 'museum' with us? Or is there really a 'free ticket' rule in the rules, so she will still be eligible to enter?"
"It's hard to say. We have to try it to know," Little Red Riding Hood said carefully, while handing the tickets to Yu Sheng and Hu Li. But then she looked at the dark ticket window with some doubt, muttering to herself, "... this kind of 'entrance'... really has such humane 'rules'?"
The dark ticket booth did not answer her question. In the huge old theater, only the corridor leading to the theater suddenly lit up with dim lights, as if urging the "audience" who had obtained the tickets to enter as soon as possible.
"Let's go, the passage is open," Little Red Riding Hood immediately put away her wild thoughts, turned around and walked towards the lighted passage, while waving to the students, "Follow me, don't do anything unnecessary."
Yu Sheng immediately put on a serious expression, and even Irene gritted her teeth and calmed down. Together with Hu Li, she followed Little Red Riding Hood towards the long and narrow passage.
The light extended along with the footsteps of the group, gradually illuminating the depths of the theater. Gradually, Yu Sheng seemed to hear footsteps coming from all around him - more and more footsteps, as if there were many invisible audiences walking with him in this dim corridor, heading towards the theater that was about to begin.
But after a while, the footsteps disappeared again.
A door appeared in Yu Sheng's field of vision. The door was half open, and the lights were on inside. He could see rows of neatly arranged seats and a stage at the end of the seats.
Little Red Riding Hood raised the paper ticket in her hand and said, "Hold the ticket up to the air. Like me, if you hear a scolding when entering, stop immediately and we will return to the entrance together. That means the entry has failed. Forcing your way in will cause a physical 'security guard' to be generated in the 'museum', which is very dangerous."
Yu Sheng immediately became alert, and together with Hu Li, they raised the admission tickets in their hands like Little Red Riding Hood, as if to show them to some invisible staff member at the door, and then slowly walked through the half-open door.
He didn't hear the scolding, and neither did Irene.
They walked into the theater, passed through the rows of dusty red seats at the back, and went to the end of the auditorium, where they sat down in the seats closest to the stage.
"We need to wash these clothes when we get home," Yu Sheng whispered to Irene, "This chair is too dirty - I should have brought some old newspapers when I came."
Little Red Riding Hood, who was standing by, heard his muttering and immediately gave him a surprised look.
She still couldn't get used to Yu Sheng's way of thinking, which was practical but seemed particularly strange when applied to "foreign operations".
At this moment, an urgent bell rang from outside the theater.
The lights in the auditorium dimmed rapidly as the bell rang, and the spotlights above the stage lit up with the sound of relays. Bright beams of light pointed toward the stage, and the next second, Yu Sheng heard applause.
Intensive applause, whistles, cheers, and all kinds of sounds suddenly rang out from the empty auditorium, like a sudden wave, rushing towards him from all directions.
He looked around amid the applause and felt the heat of the spotlight burning his head.
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Hu Li, Irene and Little Red Riding Hood stood near him, standing with him in the center of the stage.
Just as it is written in the information - enter the old theater, sit in the audience with your ticket, and when the applause sounds, the ticket holder will change from an audience member under the stage to an "actor" on the stage, and the Museum Night will open with applause.
All this will continue until the night is over, or until the "performance" on the stage makes the invisible applauders feel particularly satisfied, or until the actors on the stage unfortunately become new collections in the museum.
Various sets rose up from around the stage: beige walls, roofs with reliefs and colorful patterns, dark green and dark blue floors, doors, display cabinets, rooms...
Everything was moving rapidly before Yu Sheng's eyes, and was dazzlingly reorganized into a museum with a structure as complex as a maze. He saw a mural suddenly appear on the opposite wall. The picture depicted a giant red dragon, but in the blink of an eye, a knight made of plaster appeared near the wall. The knight raised his sword and stabbed the evil dragon in the mural. The two then fought together and formed a new relief.
Soldiers in ancient armor lined up and walked out of the gate in the distance. Halfway through, they were ambushed by a group of musketeers who were hiding in the painting. Amid the gunshots and smoke, the soldiers were annihilated. Flowers grew from their bones, turning into neatly arranged landscape flower pots and green plant walls along the tourist route...
The roar of the building deforming and the dazzling sight lasted for a full ten minutes before everything finally quieted down.
All that was left in front of Yu Sheng was a spacious corridor with various landscape paintings hung on both sides of the corridor. There were bright lights above his head and at the end of his sight there was vaguely a hall.
The wolves' uneasy whimpers could be heard from all around. Little Red Riding Hood had summoned her phantom wolf pack without her knowing. She glanced at Yu Sheng, who seemed to be a little stunned, and smiled: "Are you shocked? The 'Museum' is a very incredible place. If you exclude its dangers, it can even be regarded as an art palace full of fantasy - that's how Emorabi praised it before he died."
Yu Sheng came back to his senses and asked: "Who is Aimolabi?"
"An artist from outside the area, who was quite famous outside the border, died in the museum - for the pursuit of art," Little Red Riding Hood said with a hint of emotion, "If we are 'lucky' later, we may see an oil painting called 'Field' in a sky blue room, with the signature of Emorabi on it. It was 'created' by this artist after it became a collection of the museum."
“Can we still create something after it becomes a museum’s ‘collection’?”
"Anyway, that's what the experts have concluded. Occasionally, there are extra things in this museum that are related to the victims who disappeared here. Sometimes they are portraits or sculptures of the victims themselves, and sometimes they are works of art signed by the victims. The generally accepted view is that this is the 'collection' and 'creation' mechanism of the 'museum' - but don't worry too much. The danger level here is only level two. As long as you follow the rules, don't directly confront the 'security guards', and don't enter the dangerous room, the museum itself will not actively kill people. It's still peaceful."
(End of this chapter)
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