A Living Actor Can Also Play a Dead Person

[Final act -- "Who Is the Dead Person"]

The instant the words in blood appeared.

The Chen Family compound vanished completely.

The red lanterns.

The wedding tables.

The bridal gown.

All were swallowed by darkness.

Shen Niannian felt the ground give way beneath her feet.

The next second.

Smack!

A beam of pale light fell from overhead.

She was standing in the center of an enormous stage.

(｡ŏ_ŏ)

Below the stage.

The audience was packed tightly together.

They had no faces.

No features.

Only pitch-black heads.

Hundreds upon thousands of them.

Sitting quietly in the darkness.

In the center of the front row.

Su Wangyin held her blood-red paper parasol.

She sat at her ease.

Looking ready to enjoy the show.

Xie Linyuan, however, was nowhere to be seen.

The third act had ended.

His role as the "groom" had evidently left the stage with it.

Shen Niannian quickly looked around.

Ye Qinglan.

Cao Yong.

Zhang Yu.

The Chen Family master.

A few guests.

All eleven remaining players were present.

But the number of people--

Was wrong.

Shen Niannian counted again.

Fifteen!

On the stage.

There were fifteen actors in all!

And the four players who had already died.

Wu Lei.

Fang Kai.

Liang Feng.

Lin Yue.

They had all reappeared!

The livestream chat erupted instantly.

"?????"

"Weren't they dead?!"

"Wu Lei was hanged in the first act!"

"Lin Yue was just eaten by the coffin!"

"They haven't come back to life. They must be paper stand-ins!"

"Right! Dead Men's Theater has been using paper figures to fill roles all along!"

Shen Niannian stared at the four of them.

Her Identity Archive scanned them one by one.

[Target: Servant A]

[Actor type: Paper stand-in]

[Role status: Normal]

She checked Lin Yue next.

[Target: Madam]

[Actor type: Paper stand-in]

[Role status: Normal]

Just as she had thought.

They hadn't come back to life.

Dead Men's Theater had simply brought their roles back onto the final stage.

Fifteen roles.

Not one could be missing.

That matched exactly what the instance had emphasized from the very beginning.

[Actors may die.]

[But roles must not go wrong.]

Just then.

The rules of the final act appeared above the stage.

[1. All fifteen roles must remain onstage until the final curtain call.]

[2. The audience will ask the actors questions. Answer according to the events that have taken place throughout the play.]

[3. Answers may only use role titles, not actors' names.]

[4. Only one actor may answer at a time. If the answer is wrong, that actor will die, and the theater will fill the role again.]

[5. If no one answers correctly before the countdown ends -- all actors' roles will go wrong.]

When the last rule appeared.

Every player went pale.

All roles going wrong.

What did that mean?

They had seen it happen too many times already.

Death!

And they would all die together!

Smack!

Most of the stage lights suddenly went out.

The thousand-odd spectators below the stage.

All raised their heads in unison.

Immediately afterward.

Hundreds upon thousands of voices overlapped.

"Who--"

"Is--"

"The dead person?"

[Final act, first question: Who Is the Dead Person?]

[Time remaining to answer: 180 seconds]

Three minutes!

Shen Niannian frowned.

Who was the dead person?

Four actors onstage had clearly already died.

But the rules required them to answer with--

Role titles.

They couldn't use the actors' names.

A man who had cleared two instances immediately looked at the paper figure of Wu Lei.

"Servant A."

Ye Qinglan whipped her head around.

"Wait, don't rush!"

But the man had already spoken.

"The dead person is Servant A!"

The entire theater fell silent.

The next second.

The heads of every spectator below the stage.

Turned toward him in unison.

The man's face instantly changed.

"That's not right?"

Smack!

A huge, deathly pale hand suddenly reached out from behind the stage curtain.

It seized his head.

"Wait! Wu Lei clearly died in the first act, and the Servant A here now is a paper figure. What's wrong with my answer?!"

No one answered.

Crack!

The man's head was forcibly twisted a full 180 degrees.

His corpse crashed to the ground.

[Player Ma Hui has died.]

[Players currently alive: 10]

A few seconds later.

A paper figure walked out from backstage.

Its features rapidly changed to resemble Ma Hui's.

It returned to his role's place onstage.

[Role filled.]

[Incorrect answer.]

[Countdown continuing: 136 seconds]

At that moment.

A chill ran down everyone's spine.

The livestream chat also realized what had happened.

"An actor dying doesn't mean the role is dead!"

"Wu Lei died, but the role of Servant A has been alive the whole time!"

"The question is asking who's dead in the play!"

"This final act is testing everything that happened in the earlier acts!"

Ye Qinglan was already quickly recalling the events.

"We can't look at who's a paper stand-in now. We have to look at which role was itself dead in the play."

Cao Yong frowned.

"The younger daughter was a sacrifice in the first act and did die in the second, but her soul was later restored, so the younger daughter isn't dead now."

Shen Niannian nodded.

Right.

I can rule myself out.

Then who else?

She quickly scanned the fifteen roles.

The master.

The madam.

The elder daughter.

The youngest daughter.

The servant.

The steward.

The accountant.

The sedan chair bearer.

The matchmaker.

The Taoist priest.

The guests...

And so on.

Shen Niannian suddenly remembered someone.

She whipped her head around.

Zhang Yu.

The young player who had barely made an impression since the first act.

When he first entered the instance,

his theater ticket had read-

[Role: Second Young Master]

[Identity in Act One: Corpse]

Shen Niannian's eyes brightened slightly.

That's it!

Zhang Yu himself had still been alive during the first act.

So everyone had subconsciously assumed he wasn't dead.

But the Dead Men's Theater had never cared about the actors themselves!

It cared about their roles!

"Zhang Yu."

Shen Niannian immediately asked, "Did your Second Young Master ever come back to life or get resurrected later in the story?"

Zhang Yu froze.

Then he quickly shook his head.

"No. In the first act, I lay in the side courtyard as a corpse according to the plot. From the second act onward, my role prompts only told me to remain in the designated spot as the Second Young Master. I never came back to life."

The answer was almost certain now.

Ye Qinglan realized it too.

"So, as far as the plot of the whole play is concerned, the Second Young Master has been dead all along. It's just Zhang Yu, the actor playing him, who's still alive."

[Countdown: 82 seconds]

Shen Niannian didn't answer right away.

After all, a wrong answer really would get her killed.

She focused her attention on Zhang Yu.

[Target: Zhang Yu]

[Species: Human]

[Current Actor Status: Alive]

[Role in the Play: Second Young Master]

The next line slowly refreshed.

[Role Status: Dead]

They had it!

Just then,

Cao Yong suddenly looked at Su Wangyin below the stage.

"Tower Master Su, since you've watched from beginning to end, you must know the answer, right?"

Su Wangyin turned her red parasol slightly.

She couldn't even be bothered to look at him.

"Who are you?"

Cao Yong: "..."

His face paled slightly.

An S-rank eerie being

didn't care about his question at all.

She wasn't even interested in knowing who he was.

Shen Niannian, however, had an idea.

She called straight down to Su Wangyin:

"Su Wangyin, if I get the answer wrong, will you save me?"

Only then did Su Wangyin raise her head.

Her red lips curved slightly.

"No."

Shen Niannian: "?"

(⊙_⊙)

That was a blunt answer!

"Why?"

"If you get a rules question wrong and the theater kills you, why should I cheat for you?"

Su Wangyin looked at her with a smile.

"But I can give you a hint. You've already seen a dead person bouncing around full of life since the first act."

Zhang Yu: "..."

Every other player instantly looked at him.

This difference in treatment

couldn't have been more obvious.

When Cao Yong asked,

Su Wangyin had replied, "Who are you?"

When Shen Niannian asked,

she not only answered

but also threw in a hint.

The livestream chat instantly went wild.

"Hahahahaha!"

"Cao Yong: Tower Master Su?"

"Su Wangyin: Who are you?"

"Shen Niannian: Will you save me or not?"

"Su Wangyin: No, but I'll secretly tell you where the answer is."

"These high-ranking eerie beings really don't treat the other players as people!"

"So Shen Niannian's identity itself is the real cheat!"

Shen Niannian was completely reassured.

She looked up at the audience in the darkness.

"The answer is-the Second Young Master."

Zhang Yu himself stood beside her,

his expression unusually complicated.

A living person

listening to someone announce in public that he was dead

was bound to feel a little strange.

The next second,

the entire theater fell deathly silent.

[Judging...]

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

Clap!

The first clap rang out.

Immediately afterward-

Clap, clap, clap!

More than a thousand faceless spectators applauded at once!

[Correct answer!]

[Dead role: Second Young Master.]

The theater ticket in Zhang Yu's hand instantly turned black.

But he himself was still standing perfectly fine onstage.

[First question passed.]

All the players breathed a sigh of relief at once.

Shen Niannian also clenched her little fist.

(๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

Just as I thought!

This was the Dead Men's Theater's most fundamental rule.

The actor's own condition

didn't matter at all.

The role in the play-

was what was real!

But before everyone could celebrate for even two seconds,

the applause abruptly stopped.

All the faceless spectators below the stage

raised their heads in unison once again.

Then,

an even colder voice echoed through the theater.

"Then-"

"Who..."

"killed the dead person?"

The smile slowly vanished from Shen Niannian's face.

"..."

(°ー°〃)

The good news:

They had answered the first question correctly.

The bad news:

This damn theater had a second question.