Chapter Ch208.1 - Female Lead

translator: xiin

editors: apricot & juurensha

The crowd seemed immersed in this tense atmosphere, and the scent of blood suddenly spread out from beneath the curtain. Some players stumbled back two steps, while others blurted out, “Holy shit, Little Red Riding Hood was chopped up!”

Wu Jin looked at Caesar, who was exclaiming loudly with wide eyes, “……”

The dance room was in chaos. Wu Jin was in a daze as he turned to the big boss, “I was the one who chose Andersen, right?”

Wei Shi nodded.

Wu Jin was going crazy, “So, why did I choose Andersen?” A long time later, he comforted himself, “It’s better than Wilde, at least it’s not Angela Carter…”

The AI handed out the script in front of the mirror in the dance room. It seemed that this was an incomplete script; there was a stretch of bloody red covering part of the A4 printouts.

The director casually turned on the old TV set in the training room. When the static noise sounded out, Wu Jin even thought that Sadako might have been about to climb out of the TV.

The TV signal finally returned to normal, and the screen began to play a strange scene on repeat:

The gloomy sky overhead was eerie, there was rain pouring down, and the crowd holding the coffin moved forward silently. The film was in black and white, but the black was off-color, and the brightness of the red and green lights in the old style screen weren’t strong enough, giving the entire video a gloomy blue tone.

Only when the heroine appeared did Wu Jin realize that the video was originally meant to be in color.

The pale little girl wore blood-red dance shoes, and her facial features were blurred in the heavy rain. She walked slowly along with the coffin.

Wu Jin bowed his head and opened up the script to the first paragraph.

“On the day her mother was buried, Karen was wearing her red dance shoes…”

The AI director paused the video, “This is your choreographer demo. The last round of the 60 into 12 will be performed in front of the audience.”

Someone suddenly raised their hand in the training room.

However, before the director could call out their name, there was a sudden burst of thunder in the sky.

More than one person twitched in a conditioned reflex.

The lighting outside the window was very dark. It was more than one shade darker than it had been when the players had gathered, and the sky outside was now depressing and dreary.

The dark clouds blocked out the afterglow of the setting sun, and scattered raindrops hit the glass windows of the training room. The air was filled with the awful metallic smell of wet rust for a moment. Wu Jin rubbed his elbows and felt the chill in the air. As time went on, the sound of rain grew louder and louder, and the scene outside the window that had originally been clear now became a confused blur.

“It’s raining.”

Wu Jin opened his mouth, then turned back and paused.

The big boss’s gaze was locked on the TV. Wu Jin followed his vision and abruptly opened his eyes wide.

In the dim training room, on the TV screen. In the paused video, the sound of rain, the coffin, and passers by were all still. Only the little girl in the red dance shoes was slowly, slowly turning her head back.

Wu Jin: “!!!”

Her dark pupils, which accounted for nearly two thirds of her eyes, were large and lifeless. Her miserable, blue neck was twisted at a nearly 180 degree angle as she looked out of the screen and slowly continued to turn her head.

Several teams of players sucked in breaths of air at the same time.

Hadn’t the video been paused?!

Wu Jin’s thoughts flew around in his mind. Meanwhile, the big boss beside him had long stopped watching the horror film on the screen and had stuck himself in a dead corner of the camera to rub Wu Jin’s camouflaged curls.

Wu Jin: !!! Ah!?

The sound of the rain outside the training room window grew louder, and the pounding rainstorm almost overlapped with the video. The AI director named the trainee who’d raised his hand just now, “Go ahead.”

The trainee opened his mouth politely and spoke in a gentle tone, “Instructor. What about the female lead in the choreography? There are only male trainees here.”

The man’s voice was pleasant, and as soon as he opened his mouth, Wu Jin immediately thought of Wen Lin. The man was even standing beside Caesar––

However, Wu Jin soon rejected this speculation.

The speaker was a little thinner than Wen Lin and had a gentle smile on his lips. He stood half a body length behind Caesar, and it was vaguely clear that they’d formed an alliance. Caesar was an assault position, and this other person seemed to provide strategic protection for his teammate.

A support position.

Wu Jin confirmed this silently. In fact, there weren’t many support players in either the Crosson Show or the Stardust Cup youth training. Snipers and support players in the team usually required close tacit understanding training, such as with Zoe and Wen Lin.

Additionally––

The pre-match data summaries flashed through his mind. “In the Stardust Cup youth training competition, the player with the highest popularity is the King of Hearts, and the second is Northern Wolf’s youth training team’s backup assistant, Jin Canshuo…”

Wu Jin clearly remembered that when he watched the game with the big boss, the first team to appear had been the Imperial top seeded team ‘Northern Wolf’. Jin Canshuo’s high vote rate was related to the fact that most fans liked to follow Northern Wolf’s trainees in general. At that moment Wu Jin recalled what Wen Lin had said previously.

“Jin Canshuo is a support player with a high level of adaptability, so he became a team substitute soon after signing his contract. Of course, due to his high adaptability, he doesn’t show a distinct style with anyone. The professional competitions aren’t short of someone like him, but having him play at a lower level of competition is a waste of his talent, so they simply tossed him into the Stardust Crup to join the youth training.”

“As for Canshuo’s strength… in the youth training match, as long as he’s there, he can casually lead any hamster in the sniper position to victory.”

Wu Jin looked up. He still couldn’t tell if the player was the legendary Jin Canshuo, and he didn’t know how Caesar had gotten involved with them.

At this time, the group of trainees were quietly waiting for the director’s response. Outside the window, the rain raged on, and the girl with the red shoes on the screen held up her umbrella and no longer looked back.

“The female lead in the choreography,” The AI director nodded, “That’s a good question.” Then, the AI gave a strange smile, “Of course, she won’t be accompanying you during training.”

“But she will watch you.”

“When you slack off during training, she’ll come out to supervise. She’s everywhere.”

There was an abrupt silence.

The AI director smiled broadly, “In that case, let’s first choose the C position to wear the shoes.”

The static signal flashed, and the TV screen began to play again. The little girl in the red shoes walked around the church alongside the coffin, and it was as though she would never let the soul in the coffin rest in peace. The stage props symbolizing the C position were taken out of the cupboard and placed beside the severed feet––

It was a pair of bright red rubber shoes.

The crowd retreated!

The story of ‘The Red Shoes’ was vague in Wu Jin’s memory. It was roughly about a girl in red shoes who kept dancing until her feet were cut off by the executioner, and she crawled through the forest, leaving a bloody trail. Finally, she was redeemed after confession in a church.

“… She had to dance, all the way until she reached the black forest. The shoes were already bound to her feet, and she would dance until she became a skeleton…”

The female lead’s curse started the moment she put on the red shoes.

All the trainees who’d been fighting over the c-position were now silent. Wu Jin’s gaze swept across every face in the training room, and it was like he’d imagined; those who didn’t wear the shoes might not encounter an accident, but anyone who wore the shoes would definitely run into trouble. The middle and upper ranks did nothing, and even the trainees who were in dangerous spots in the rankings weren’t willing to be the first test subject and fight against the story’s core rule of the ‘red dance shoes’.

Nobody wanted to wear the shoes.

The AI spread their hands and put the shoes away, “Well then, I’ll let the female lead hand over the red shoes.”

The AI withdrew, and the room was finally given over to the cameras and trainees.

The thunder outside the window was heavy, and the room was stained with blood.

The black curtain once again covered up the two severed legs, and the stage music for the ‘Red Shoes’ sounded out in the training room, just like it had in the video.

The soundtrack for <Red Shoes> was sinister and menacing. Most of the time, there was no melody, and instead, it was like the sound of liquid dripping over metal with the unique reverberation of a horror film, or the tip of a fingernail scraping back and forth over a cold and hard surface.

Wu Jin: “……” He really hadn’t expected that the background stage music would be played with a waterphone.

The waterphone was a special musical instrument used in horror films. It was also called the ‘instrument from hell’. Soon, some players covered their ears. They felt chills running down their backs, and rushed over to open the door and step out into the corridor.

The training room was very dreary in the rainstorm, and the empty mirrors seemed particularly strange. Wu Jin broke into the cabinet at the back of the training room as several other trainees looked on, then came back a brief moment later.

“The red shoes are still there.” Wu Jin kindly extended a hand of friendship to the teams around him, “It’s not a big problem. This is a talent show, not a horror show.”

Then, he pulled the big boss over and began to fill in camera time like crazy.

Starting from this episode, the live broadcast had been changed to video broadcasting, and the likelihood of winning votes depended on camera time, public opinion, and initial support. Wu Jin could vaguely put together a model in his mind: 12 contestants would be eliminated in each episode, and there would be people dying behind the scenes and out in the open, and some would definitely be eliminated during the actual instances. It was just that he didn’t know how to allocate the proportions or what the core drivers would be.

At this time, there were 24 people in the Andersen instance, 20 in the Brothers Grimm instance, and 15 in Wilde’s instance.

What the themes were for the other two groups, whether or not there were fair checks and balances among the three groups, and where the King of Hearts was…

However, according to Wu Jin’s words, “Red shoes, green shoes, any shoes that will catch the camera’s attention are good dance shoes.”

In just one hour of recording, Wu Jin created all possible opportunities to suck blood from Zhu Lan, the trainee who was ranked 2nd. He could really be called Crosson’s vampire. He even ruthlessly made use of the dead player Nicholas, specifically doing a brilliant performance of ‘missing my teammate, submitting a forum post in praise of Nicholas’s life’ in front of the camera.

Wu Jin did all sorts of performances, and forgot about the female lead in Red Shoes in a flash.

The group of players around were stunned.

Wu Jin immediately waved his hand shyly, “We can’t win in a fight, so we’ll just muddle through for a round.” Then, he dragged the big boss out to the corridor, looking for a place with nobody else around.

Wu Jin pondered slowly, then repeated in a low voice, “…When you slack off in training, she’ll come out to supervise. She’s everywhere…”

“If we don’t pick a c-position, does that count as slacking off? When will she come out?”

The Crosson show camera was close to the two of them. Wei Shi crossed his arms over his chest, “You mean the female lead?”

Wu Jin nodded, then said, “I went through the cabinet in the training room. The red dance shoes are in a glass cabinet, and the key is in the director’s hand. We can’t take it out. It’s a little strange, the ceiling height here is lower than it was in the previous training room, and––”

Wei Shi suddenly narrowed his eyes and gestured for Wu Jin to be quiet.

Wu Jin was stunned for a moment. The sound of fingernails scraping across a smooth metal surface could be heard approaching in an instant. At this moment, he could tell that the background music and scraping sound in ‘Red Dance Shoes’ came from two separate sources. His back was suddenly cold, and it felt as though a shadowy wind had passed by in the lightless corridor that was dark from the rainstorm.

A bolt of lightning suddenly illuminated their field of vision!

Wu Jin looked up at the wall behind the big boss, and his pupils suddenly opened to their maximum width.

A bloody print about ten centimeters long inexplicably seeped out from the snow-white walls. Wei Shi reacted quickly and pressed Wu Jin into a corner of the wall, and both people’s short blades were drawn out at the same time like white streaks of light. It seemed that both of them wanted to protect the other behind themselves.

The Crosson Show’s live stream room.

The audience, who had been waiting for their Scarf CP to feed them sugar, fell silent before bursting out abruptly, “Holy shit ahhhhhh!! What was that just now?! Is this a horror movie?!”

In the scrolling comments, the members of the audience who’d already chosen the green child protection mode all spoke up compassionately, “I told you guys long ago, in the previous, previous, previous… previous round of the competition, when there were moths everywhere, I already turned on the protection mode.”

The scrolling comments came one after another, full of howls as though something terrible had just flashed by.

Ying Xiangxiang showed a lovely, lady-like smile, “Instructor Blood Pigeon, that moment just now, could the contestants see it?”

Blood Pigeon shook his head firmly, “They couldn’t see it. Our cameras have night vision on in order to give the audience a thorough understanding of what’s actually happening. In the natural lighting in the corridor leading to the training room, even if it was a genetically modified person, the trainees won’t be able to see what caused the incident.”

Ying Xiangxiang nodded, “It’ll be very interesting.”