Chapter 4

Bo Li lay awake in her own tent for a long time, unable to sleep.
Eric was definitely not an ordinary person.
No ordinary human healed like that.
Worse, he clearly could speak, yet chose silence, like some mute madman.
Bo Li couldn’t stop wondering if she’d done something before she time-traveled that had brought her here.
But as far as she could remember, she hadn’t done anything. She’d just tossed her hiking backpack into the trunk, stretched out across the back seat, and tapped open a random movie while she waited for her friend.
The movie was old and a little slow. She’d watched for a while, then dozed off, only waking halfway through.
Onscreen, the male lead wore a long black coat and a black top hat, his face a blur beneath the brim. He stood behind a richly dressed lady, slowly pulling on a pair of black leather gloves.
Just when Bo Li had decided this must be some nineteenth-century romance, the man suddenly looped his arm around the lady’s neck from behind and calmly strangled her.
By the time anyone discovered what had happened, she’d already been dumped into the boilers for the banquet. Her head had been boiled to mush; the lace hem of her dress drifted in the broth like congealed fat.
Bo Li: “…”
Her finger froze above the food-delivery app.
Only then did she finally notice the movie’s title—*The Phantom of the Opera*.
Bo Li: “???”
A quick online search told her it was a horror version of *The Phantom of the Opera*, shot in the 1970s, with the director adding copious amounts of splattering fake blood.
In the original story, the male lead falls in love with a young ballet dancer at the Paris Opera House. He secretly trains her voice while threatening the theater manager to put her on stage in place of the reigning prima donna.
Naturally, the prima donna refuses. So during her performance, the male lead somehow makes her croak like a frog in front of the audience, utterly disgracing her.
In this movie, the male lead just strangles the soprano with a noose and dumps her in the boiler.
In the original, although he kidnaps the heroine and imprisons her in an underground maze, forcing her to stay with him, one kiss from her is enough to make him relent. He gives up his extreme plan and lets her be with the other man.
In the film, he’s more like a monster without humanity. When his true face is revealed, it isn’t a simple unmasking—he literally tears his own face off.
Even at the end, he never becomes a better man for the heroine. He’s ready at any moment to die with her in a murder‑suicide.
Of course, the heroine doesn’t kiss him. She burns him to death in the underground maze instead.
But like most Western horror movies, it wasn’t scary at all.
Bo Li watched for a bit longer, then switched over to the delivery app.
To be fair, the movie was only above average at best. Western horror films were always like that—no real psychological pressure, just torrents of fake blood and explicit shots.
All of which was fine, back when she lived in a normal world.
…If she’d actually landed inside the horror version of *The Phantom of the Opera*, that would be far worse than any East Asian horror film.
At least in East Asian horror, as long as you didn’t offend the spirits, you could usually coexist in peace.
In a Western slasher world, though, there were too many ways to die.
A little brother who didn’t talk much; a mother who’d cheated; a camping trip; a picnic in the park; going to a party with your boyfriend and sharing a kiss—
Any of those could be enough to make you a target for a serial killer.
The more Bo Li thought about it, the more her skin crawled.
She would never again say Western horror wasn’t scary.
What kind of peaceful life had she been living before, to think being hunted by a psychopath wasn’t frightening?
It took her a long time to force her heart to calm down.
Even if Eric wore a mask and could sing and do ventriloquism and magic tricks, that didn’t mean he was the Phantom, much less the horror‑movie Phantom.
Besides, maybe she’d landed in the original novel.
…Which wasn’t all that different.
The original Phantom was insane too—if the heroine wouldn’t be with him, he’d blow up the Paris Opera House.
The musical’s Phantom seemed a bit more “normal,” but not by much. He hypnotized the heroine, kidnapped her, nearly hung her fiancé.
The only real difference was that he didn’t plan to blow up the theater—but if pushed, who knew?
All Bo Li could do was comfort herself: her name was Polly Clément, and this wasn’t the Paris Opera House at all but a circus. It had nothing to do with *The Phantom of the Opera*.
And even if Eric really were the Phantom, he wasn’t going to blow up Paris for her sake.
With that thought, she finally closed her eyes in peace.
At dawn the next day, Bo Li woke up as the sky was just beginning to lighten—the body she was in apparently had a reliable internal clock. Groggy, she sat up and fished out the pocket watch. It was only five‑thirty.
She was about to lie back down when she jolted upright and shoved the watch back into her binding.
The first-aid kit was still out in the open. She paced the tent, but couldn’t find a good place to hide it. In the end, she buried it in a pile of filthy clothes.