Chapter 170: Did You Like This Play?

After Tong Yin scratched those few marks into Linglan’s badge with her knife, some of her memories had come flooding back at last.

She remembered clearly that today was the very day Tong Yin was meant to leave this world behind — yet she still couldn’t bring herself to go see her off.

She was terrified that if she actually watched Tong Yin leave, she’d end up sobbing like an absolute fool right there in front of her.

Worse still, she was afraid she might even... resort to something desperate and shameful just to make Tong Yin stay behind instead.

She simply couldn’t bear the thought of losing Tong Yin, her dearest friend in the world.

Once her shift finally ended for the day, Lily of the Valley turned down every invitation to dinner and made her way back to the castle entirely alone.

She stood outside Tong Yin’s door for a long while, hesitating over whether to go inside at all.

Linglan worried, deep down, that she simply wouldn’t be able to accept the reality that Tong Yin was about to belong to an entirely different world from her own.

After standing frozen there for some time, Linglan finally drew in a steadying breath and reached for the doorknob. She had to face this eventually, whether she liked it or not — there was simply no avoiding it any longer.

To her utter shock, the moment the door swung open, she found Tong Yin still standing right there — someone who, by all rights, should have already left this world entirely.

Linglan’s heart leapt with sudden joy. Tong Yin... she couldn’t bear to leave after all, could she? She stayed for my sake! Of course she had — given how close the two of them had been since childhood, Tong Yin would absolutely choose to stay behind for her!

Her heart pounded wildly in her chest.

But slowly, unease began creeping in. Something about this felt distinctly wrong.

Even though she hadn’t made much noise herself, the door had swung open with a fairly audible creak — so why hadn’t Tong Yin reacted to it at all?

Her joy cooled rapidly, replaced almost instantly by an inexplicable, gnawing sense of dread.

"Yinyin...?"

Tong Yin knelt motionless on the floor, head bowed low, seemingly lost somewhere deep in thought. She’d apparently held that exact same position for the entire afternoon without moving once.

At the sound of Linglan’s voice, Tong Yin’s head finally shifted, turning stiffly upward to look at her.

Her neck ached faintly from having stayed locked in that position for so long; the sudden movement sent a sharp twinge through it.

The moment their eyes met, Linglan froze completely.

Tong Yin’s expression looked utterly lifeless in that instant, every trace of light long since drained from her eyes — like a hollow shell with no soul left inside it at all.

"...Yinyin, why are you still here?"

Shouldn’t she have already left by now?

Tong Yin lowered her head once more, her voice hoarse and cracked from hours of silence. "I... was kept behind."

"I was left behind here. For absolutely no reason at all."

Linglan reeled with shock. How could this possibly be happening? Hadn’t Tong Yin flatly refused to take a new name? Her personal panel and system had still been fully intact — so how on earth could she have been left behind regardless?

She pushed the door shut behind her and rushed over to pull Tong Yin into a tight embrace.

"Yinyin..." She wanted desperately to say something, anything at all, but no words would come to her.

Tong Yin whispered softly, "Lily of the Valley... I can’t go home anymore."

Linglan pressed her lips together tightly and simply held onto Tong Yin in silence, saying nothing at all.

Tong Yin’s personal panel still technically worked, but only barely — limited now to basic storage functions and purchases through the points mall, nothing more.

Every task in her task center had vanished entirely, and every other function had gone completely dark. Once her remaining points ran dry, even the points mall itself would eventually become nothing more than a useless, hollow app.

People like her had simply been forgotten by this world entirely, left behind without a trace.

Once she’d finally accepted her fate, Tong Yin resigned herself to it and took up her role as a staff member within the amusement park.

Linglan gradually fell into silence as the days wore on. As far as she was concerned, all of this was her fault, and hers alone. If only she’d refused back then. If only she’d thought things through more carefully before agreeing to any of it.

Eventually, all that buried emotion erupted at once, and Tong Yin and Linglan found themselves locked in a fierce, bitter argument.

Tong Yin simply couldn’t understand Linglan anymore — couldn’t fathom why she insisted on shouldering all of this blame entirely on her own shoulders.

Neither of them could quite grasp why Linglan seemed to have become an entirely different person. She knew perfectly well that those other survivors were just like the two of them — and yet she’d handed them straight over to the staff regardless, without hesitation.

Linglan, for her part, felt just as certain that Tong Yin simply didn’t understand her own reasoning at all — that everything she’d done had only ever been an attempt to find some way, any way, to get Tong Yin sent back home.

As far as she was concerned, so long as Tong Yin’s personal panel hadn’t vanished entirely, there had to still be some way back for her.

Perhaps the system had simply glitched out due to some unforeseen accident. As long as the panel itself remained functional, surely the survivors would eventually be released back out of the amusement park, and Tong Yin would find her way home after all.

Later on, Tong Yin’s singing voice happened to catch the attention of the amusement park’s owner himself.

From that point forward, Tong Yin’s official identity shifted into that of a full NPC.

This, in turn, eventually led to the later scheme of using her songs to control and capture other survivors throughout the park.

Tong Yin had considered resisting more than once, but she simply lacked the strength to manage it entirely on her own.

After all, she’d already suffered through the brutal consequences of resistance far too many times by that point to count.

She was thrown into the dungeons beneath the castle again and again, enduring endless torment down there each time.

Linglan, meanwhile, tried repeatedly to convince Tong Yin to simply behave herself and stop resisting altogether, if only to spare her further suffering.

And so, the two of them found themselves arguing all over again.

Though really, "argument" wasn’t quite the right word for it — it was closer to an entirely one-sided tirade, Tong Yin venting while Linglan simply absorbed every word.

Linglan simply stood there quietly, letting Tong Yin’s harsh words wash over her without offering a single word in her own defense. In her mind, it was entirely because of her that Tong Yin had been forced to endure all of this suffering in the first place.

If only she’d been stronger somehow, Tong Yin never would have had to suffer through the dungeon at all.

This cycle repeated itself for a long, grueling stretch of time. Tong Yin would be released from the dungeon, only to resist again and find herself thrown right back into it shortly after.

And every single time, Linglan went back to rescue her, pulling her back out of that darkness again and again without fail.

But by then, the bond between them had already frayed beyond repair, drifting so far apart that things could never quite return to how they’d once been between them.

...

Lin Yun and Song Xizheng remained frozen in their seats, utterly silent, unable to move.

They understood perfectly well what this particular performance had been trying to tell them.

They’d also finally pieced together exactly who Linglan and Tong Yin really were within the story itself.

Tong Yin was the very same woman who’d been singing those eerie folk songs late at night not long ago, and Linglan was, without question, the same Linglan working the visitor center right now.

The moment they’d heard Tong Yin sing "Grandma’s Bridge," they’d already suspected she might be a survivor trapped here too, much like Yan Yue before her.

But what neither of them had ever expected was that Lily of the Valley herself... had once been exactly the same.

This one performance had revealed so much, all at once.

Neither of them had any idea just how much this amusement park actually knew about the survivors trapped within it, or how they’d managed to learn so much about them in the first place.

The realization sent a genuine chill crawling down both Lin Yun’s and Song Xizheng’s spines simultaneously.

"Sister Lin..." Song Xizheng stammered out at last. "The show’s over now. Should we... head out?"

Lin Yun’s lips parted slightly, then closed again, and she simply nodded in silence.

This time, unlike before, the puppet performance hadn’t featured any puppets leaping off the stage to interact with the audience directly.

Once the show finally ended, the surrounding tourists chatted and laughed easily amongst themselves as they filed out alongside their companions.

Nothing about the scene struck anyone else as unusual in the slightest — it looked, to every outside eye, like nothing more than an ordinary theater performance wrapping up.

The two of them made no attempt to squeeze through the crowd alongside the other tourists. Instead, they lingered quietly in their seats a while longer, waiting until the crowd had mostly thinned out before finally making their way toward the exit.

"Did you two enjoy this particular play?"

The two of them paused abruptly, only then realizing that every other tourist in their entire row had already cleared out, leaving them completely alone.

Turning around, they immediately recognized her — the very same little girl who’d appeared before, back when they’d watched "Red Sleeve Pavilion."

She’d materialized silently behind them at some point without either of them noticing, quietly watching the two of them this whole time.

Seeing that neither of them offered any response, the little girl repeated her question once more, patient and unhurried:

"Did you two enjoy this particular play?"

"I’ve personally seen every single show this puppet theater has ever put on, and out of all of them, this one’s easily my favorite."

"So? What about you two? Did you like it?"

This is an additional Chapter. ♥️♥️