Chapter 292

Chapter 269: Puppet Dance

The audience was in an uproar. After such a performance, the entire theater was filled with enthusiastic applause and cheers. Countless spectators stood up from their seats to clap fervently, including many of Adele’s veteran fans who were extremely excited.

“Adele! Adele! Adele!”

In the thunderous audience, people began to spontaneously chant Adele’s name in unison. At the same time, the massive curtain at the end of the performance started to slowly close, and the performers began to be hidden behind the curtain.

Once the curtain had fully closed, the dancers immediately rushed to Adele with joyous exclamations. The staff members who had been nervously watching from below finally couldn’t hold back and rushed forward to surround Adele. To outsiders, this seemed like a highly successful performance, but to the dancers and theater staff who knew the truth, what had just happened had already made their hearts race.

Behind the curtain, Adele was being bombarded with questions from those around her, and she smiled while responding to the various concerns. She explained that she was fine, all the while constantly scanning and searching for a figure—specifically “Maria.”

However, she discovered that “Maria” had vanished without a trace behind the curtain.

“Gone…”

Amidst the commotion, looking at the complicated stage, Adele murmured softly.

…

Although the curtain on the stage had fallen, the enthusiastic voices in the audience did not diminish. They had changed from cheers to discussions as everyone eagerly talked about the wonderful performance they had just witnessed.

“Wonderful… truly wonderful. This is Miss Adele’s dance? It’s so beautiful. And her partner was also incredibly skilled. At first, I thought she was going to k*ll Miss Adele, which scared me. But I didn’t expect this to be part of the show. What a brilliant idea.” Nephnis, sitting in her seat, continued to exclaim after just enthusiastically clapping, then turned to look at Dorothy beside her.

“Miss Dorothyia, did you see it?! I feel we came here just for this… um?”

Nephnis excitedly told Dorothy, but suddenly realized something was off. At that moment, Dorothy was sprawled out in her seat, wiping sweat from her forehead with a piece of paper, breathing slightly heavily, seemingly exhausted.

“Miss Dorothyia, what’s wrong? Are you too hot?”

“Oh… probably. Maybe it’s because I wore too much today, or maybe it’s too crowded here.”

Dorothy sighed in relief, but the reality was certainly not like that.

In a sense, Dorothy had just accompanied Adele on stage, dancing in spirit.

Yes, Adele’s partner was not really the controlled corpse of Maria, but rather Dorothy herself. Just now, Dorothy had used her spiritual thread to manipulate Maria and danced with Adele.

When she realized that Maria was a controlled puppet and planned to stab Adele during the dance, Dorothy intervened. She utilized the Scholar’s ability to simulate the Puppet Master’s skills, connecting her spiritual thread to Maria and competing with the original controller for control of the puppet.

Maria was a puppet controlled by an extraordinary item similar to the doll ring Dorothy possessed. The controlled puppet was stiff and inflexible, unable to speak, and had low control sensitivity. Compared to Dorothy, who was more proficient in using spiritual threads, Maria was much less responsive. Thus, Dorothy easily seized control of Maria, intentionally making her miss when she tried to stab Adele.

Initially, Dorothy only intended to warn Adele, but unexpectedly, Adele pulled Maria, whom Dorothy controlled, to continue dancing, completely unaware of the threat she had just escaped. At first, Dorothy found it interesting and manipulated Maria to follow her.

To better complete the dance, Dorothy used the Scholar’s powerful learning ability to learn Adele’s dance on the spot under her guidance. However, Adele quickly noticed Dorothy’s strong learning ability and intentionally increased the difficulty of the dance, seemingly wanting to test the limits of Dorothy’s learning capacity.

Though Dorothy kept up with the learning process, she also sweated profusely due to intense concentration. Adele’s gradually increasing difficulty made the dance seem increasingly challenging and wild.

Dorothy felt that if it weren’t for the music stopping them, they would have entered some forbidden territory together.

“This woman is indeed quite problematic…”

Dorothy mused inwardly, then turned her thoughts to another issue—Maria’s situation.

During the process of controlling Maria to dance, Dorothy could sense that the original controller was continuously attempting to regain control using the extraordinary item they held, but was being suppressed by Dorothy.

Dorothy became curious about who was controlling Maria. Therefore, after the performance ended, she deliberately loosened her control. When she deciphered the commands sent to Maria, they instructed Maria to leave immediately, and it seemed the controller had consumed additional spirituality to contest for control.

This might indicate that the original controller wanted to reclaim Maria, Dorothy deduced. So, even though she still had one spiritual thread attached to Maria, she pretended to be unable to resist and returned control to the other party. Sure enough, after the curtain call, the controlled Maria took advantage of the chaos to run off the stage, using the remaining spiritual thread still attached to Maria, Dorothy could still track her down. If the controller wanted to reclaim Maria, Dorothy could also find the controller.

“So… where is Miss Maria now?”

Thinking this, Dorothy began to sense Maria’s trail.

…

Feiteng Theater, within a certain bathroom, a dancer in a dark red dress pushed open the door and entered the bathroom. After closing the door, she walked to the mirror in front of her, where the mirror reflected Maria’s expressionless face.

After standing before the mirror for a moment, Maria raised her right hand, gripping a small kn*fe, an ordinary iron blade.

With stiff movements, Maria reversed the grip of the kn*fe and placed it in front of her chest, then, without blinking, stabbed herself in the abdomen.

One stab, two stabs, three stabs… with a wooden and indifferent expression, Maria repeatedly stabbed her own abdomen, splattering bl**d across the bathroom, covering her entire abdomen in bl**d and gore.

Then, Maria lifted the kn*fe and pointed it at her face, forcefully carving several large gashes on her pretty face, blinding herself in the process.

Finally, Maria threw the small kn*fe out the window leading outside the bathroom, then lay on the floor, staring wide-eyed, reaching out to smear her bl**d on the ground, starting to write letters in a shaky, wobbly manner.

The letters were written crookedly, and when the last letter was completed, her head tilted, and she collapsed lifelessly.

The crooked, bloody letters formed a simple name.

“Adele”

“Adele”