Chapter 155 Interactive Session?

"Sister, can’t I really sit with you?"

The little girl knelt on her seat, peeking her head out from behind the backrest, staring at Lin Yun with unmistakable longing.

Lin Yun smiled at her again, and just as the girl’s face began to light up, clearly thinking she was about to give in, Lin Yun said, "No, sorry. I need to keep my bag right there beside me."

The little girl’s lips curled into a pout, her whole expression turning aggrieved, so pitiful that everyone else in the group found themselves staring at her despite themselves.

"Sister Lin, want to switch seats?"

Song Xizheng, standing off to the side, suddenly spoke up.

"Heh, having girls on both sides of me makes me a bit uncomfortable, honestly." He scratched the back of his head, looking slightly embarrassed. "Plus I’ve got long arms and legs — can’t really stretch out properly when I’m squeezed in the middle like this."

Lin Yun considered it for a moment. "Sure, that’s fine. But you’d better keep a close eye on my bag and Song Zhenzhen’s while you’re there."

"No problem at all!"

The two of them got up and traded places.

The little girl simply watched the whole exchange unfold, momentarily at a loss for words.

She turned to look at Lin Yun with an expression of pure betrayal, as though Lin Yun had personally wronged her somehow.

Then she shot a glare in Song Xizheng’s direction — the one who’d swapped seats with Lin Yun this time — before turning back around and settling into her seat without another word about wanting to sit beside anyone.

Lin Yun silently gave Song Xizheng a discreet thumbs-up. Not bad — the kid had actually come up with a decent excuse on the spot.

Song Xizheng grinned back at her. "Little troublemaker. Someone’s finally got her figured out, huh."

Not long after, a steady stream of tourists began filing into the theater, each one drifting toward whichever seat caught their fancy.

Even the row where Lin Yun and her group sat ended up with a handful of tourists scattered along it.

Still, every one of them kept a seat or two of distance from the group — a small but noticeable gap, as if some unspoken sense of caution kept them apart.

Ten o’clock.

Without warning, the house lights cut out, and the stage lights flared to life in their place.

The performance of Red Sleeve Pavilion had begun.

The curtain drew back slowly, revealing a scene that struck all of them as strangely familiar.

It was the very set they recognized from the Red Sleeve Pavilion haunted house.

A puppet done up as Madam Yao swayed her hips as she crossed the stage toward the backyard. Two new girls had arrived that day, and she needed to go inspect them personally — sizing up exactly how best to break them in.

The scenery shifted with such speed that Lin Yun and the others couldn’t begin to guess how it was being managed backstage.

Each transition unfolded so smoothly, without the faintest hint of clumsiness, that it almost felt like the scenes were simply meant to flow into one another this way.

The two girls lay bound and helpless on the ground, their bodies limp with exhaustion. Days of starvation had already stripped them of the strength to cry out or even struggle against their restraints.

The entire stage remained eerily silent. The puppets’ mouths moved as though speaking, yet no sound ever escaped them. The only noise came from the faint creak and shuffle of the puppets’ movements across the boards.

Madam Yao crouched down, reached out, and pinched one girl’s face, tilting it up to catch a better look.

That was when Lin Yun realized — the girl was Xiao He.

So this performance, then, was telling a story from before the events they already knew, something that had happened prior to Hongxiu Tower as they understood it.

The others made the same connection the moment they recognized her.

Xiao He, it turned out, had been sold into this place by her own parents. She hadn’t come willingly — but after days of starvation, resistance had simply stopped being an option.

She pretended to submit to Madam Yao, and once she’d finally been allowed to eat her fill again, she began quietly plotting her escape.

But the girl who’d been sold alongside her had already submitted fully to Madam Yao. Sensing that something about Xiao He’s behavior seemed off, Madam Yao instructed Xiang Lian to approach Xiao He and claim she, too, wanted to run away.

Xiao He had still been very young at the time. Despite everything she’d already been through since being sold into the Red Sleeve Brothel, she remained naive enough to trust others easily.

The instant Xiang Lian began playing the part of a fellow victim, Xiao He confided her whole escape plan to her and asked her to run together.

Xiang Lian turned right around and reported every detail of Xiao He’s plan straight back to Madam Yao.

Rather than stop them, Madam Yao chose to let the plan proceed — allowing Xiang Lian to "escape" alongside Xiao He, all so she could catch them both in the act.

But... something appeared to be going differently this time. Unexpectedly so.

Why had this puppet version of Xiao He suddenly bolted off the stage entirely?

Lin Yun and the others watched, stunned, as the puppet playing Xiao He leapt straight off the stage and came sprinting toward the audience seating.

A pack of Red Sleeve Pavilion thugs surged after her, determined to drag the puppet back under control.

"What in the world — puppets can actually run off the stage now?" Song Zhenzhen leaned in and whispered sharply into Lin Yun’s ear.

Lin Yun looked just as baffled as she felt. "No idea. Maybe it’s some kind of feature built into the theater?"

"Well, that’s certainly unique." Song Zhenzhen clicked her tongue twice, half in disbelief.

The puppet Xiao He seemed to cry out silently for help. She’d barely made it four or five rows into the audience before she stumbled and fell, and within seconds the pursuing thugs from Hongxiu Tower had caught up and seized hold of her.

The puppet struggled desperately against their grip, her tearful eyes darting to the tourists seated around her, silently pleading for someone, anyone, to step in.

But the surrounding tourists merely watched on with blank, unreadable expressions as she was hauled back up onto the stage.

Once dragged back to the Red Sleeve Pavilion set, the puppet Xiao He was subjected to a brutal punishment at Madam Yao’s hands — struck again and again with a whip that had been soaked in chili water.

She tried to twist free, but with her body bound tightly to a wooden pillar, there was nothing to do but endure blow after blow from Madam Yao.

Still, since she remained a paid-for asset, once Madam Yao had sufficiently vented her fury, she instructed Xiang Lian to tend to Xiao He’s wounds afterward, careful to prevent any lasting scars.

Xiang Lian, for her part, played her role flawlessly — she, too, received a symbolic punishment from Madam Yao, though in truth she came away from it entirely unharmed.

Watching Xiang Lian get beaten as well, the puppet Xiao He was struck with regret, blaming herself for not having thought her plan through carefully enough, believing her carelessness had gotten Xiang Lian punished right alongside her.

And so the puppet Xiao He fell back into line, playing the part of someone thoroughly frightened, someone who would never dare attempt an escape again.

But only she knew just how desperately she still longed to break free from that place — especially after witnessing, with her own eyes, how easily Madam Yao could kill a girl who dared to resist her, without so much as a flicker of hesitation.

The filthy secrets buried within Hongxiu Tower’s walls were, in truth, no secret to anyone outside them at all.

Xiang Lian later reported Xiao He’s recent behavior back to Madam Yao, but Madam Yao refused to believe the girl had truly reformed. In her experience, someone who had already tried to escape once would inevitably try again a second time, or a third.

Sure enough, the puppet Xiao He was still quietly nursing thoughts of escape.

Even with Xiang Lian’s warning already in hand, Madam Yao still managed to catch Xiao He in the act once more.

Just as before, the puppet Xiao He broke away and ran straight off the stage — only this time, she was heading directly for the seats where Lin Yun and the others sat.

She rushed forward, dropped to her knees on the floor before them, and grabbed hold of Song Xizheng’s clothing, silently begging him to save her.

Though no sound came from the puppet’s moving mouth, the desperation in her plea was unmistakably clear.

Song Xizheng froze completely. Wait — was this actually meant to be some kind of interactive segment built into the Red Sleeve Pavilion performance? Nobody in the little red vests had said a single word about that!

The rest of the group looked just as startled that the puppet had chosen to approach Song Xizheng of all people.

Before any of them could say a word, they noticed the tourists seated in front suddenly turn their heads in unison to look their way — and the ones beside and behind them followed suit a moment later.

The weight of all those stares pressed in from every direction, impossible to ignore.

Every last one of them had clearly caught on to how strange this whole situation had become.

Song Xizheng swallowed hard, glanced down at the puppet Xiao He still clinging tightly to his clothes, then lifted his eyes toward the Hongxiu Tower thugs already closing in on their position.

"Song Xizheng — push her away."

Standing close by, Lin Yun spoke quickly, urging him to shove the puppet off before things got worse.

Something about the expressions on those puppet thugs’ faces had never sat right with her — and neither, she realized now, had this particular puppet Xiao He.

She couldn’t shake the growing suspicion that when Xiao He first ran off the stage, she had actually meant to run straight toward them from the very start — and that stumbling, that fall, hadn’t been part of the act at all, but a genuine mistake.