Chapter 5: Irene in the Painting

Yu Sheng felt that ever since he had his heart and lungs "hollowed out" by that frog, his heart had grown significantly broader.

For instance, right now: he had just woken up from a bizarre dream that felt wrong no matter how he looked at it, opened a mysterious locked room, and found a talking oil painting. Even though there was clearly some sort of sinister entity hiding inside that painting, he remained remarkably calm.

He even took a step forward, took the oil painting off the wall, and held it up to examine it closely.

The frame had some weight to it, and the texture in his hands suggested it was quite valuable. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that the pitch-black surface of the frame was covered in intricate and exquisite patterns. The lines seemed like some sort of continuously written script, yet they were cleverly interconnected and twisted into vine-like structures, eventually merging seamlessly with the patterns on the edges of the canvas.

Yu Sheng didn't know anything about painting or art, but he felt this thing had to be worth a fortune.

The creature hiding in the depths of the oil painting still refused to show itself, though the hem of a skirt in the corner of the image retreated just a little bit further.

Yu Sheng tried to look at the inside of the painting from an angle, but he saw nothing.

"I know you're in there," he said to the painting, shaking the heavy frame. "Hiding now is just lying to yourself."

A bit of rustling came from the corner of the image, but there was no response.

Yu Sheng placed the frame on the ground and, while squatting down, pulled a lighter from his pocket.

He flicked it on, brought the flame close to the frame, and said expressionlessly, "I’ll count to three. If you don't come out, I'm going to set this thing on fire."

Two or three seconds later, a light, childish voice came from the oil painting: "...A mere mortal flame. That stuff is useless against supernatural entities."

But Yu Sheng was certain he could hear a hint of nervousness in that voice.

So, he touched the flame directly to a corner of the frame. "Oh, then let me try—"

A scream rang out almost simultaneously with his action. "Don't! You're actually going to do it?!"

Yu Sheng extinguished the lighter instantly. Immediately after, he saw a figure hurriedly jump out from the edge of the image, which looked like thorny vines.

It was a young girl dressed in a complex and gorgeous gothic black dress, wearing a hair clip adorned with white lace. Her long hair was pitch black, her skin as white as snow, and her face was cute, yet she possessed a pair of heterochromatic scarlet eyes—eyes that were currently wide open, staring straight at Yu Sheng as if confirming whether the human outside the frame would really burn the painting.

Yu Sheng admitted that he had been startled when the girl suddenly jumped into the center of the frame.

Although the girl in the painting didn't look scary upon closer inspection—she was actually quite pretty—given the gloomy, dim background of the painting and the suddenness of her appearance, anything jumping out of that frame would have been startling. Not to mention, the girl had eyes that looked like they were soaked in blood. She then leaned forward, pressing her face completely against the canvas, her eyes filling the entire painting, which looked even more eerie.

"Don't light the fire," the girl's voice came from the painting. "This is the only place I have to live."

"You step back first," Yu Sheng subconsciously kept a bit of distance from the painting. For some reason, he felt the girl's scarlet eyes were exceptionally sinister; that shade of red seemed to seep into his memories and thoughts as he stared at it, making it harder to erase from his mind the longer he looked. But to maintain the upper hand in the conversation, he forced himself not to look away. "I can choose not to light it."

"Oh." The girl in the painting was surprisingly easy to talk to. She didn't seem to notice Yu Sheng's momentary abnormality, nodded, and retreated to the center of the frame. She sat down on a chair covered in thick red velvet, then leaned over to grab a plush teddy bear she had dropped on the floor, hugging it to her chest. She sat there, staring straight at Yu Sheng's movements.

A gothic girl sitting on a red velvet chair, hugging a teddy bear—in a daze, Yu Sheng felt he was seeing the "normal" image of this "oil painting."

Then, he frowned slightly, noticing something strange in the image.

He noticed the girl's exposed wrists. They were clearly... spherical structures.

Human joints couldn't possibly grow like that.

Only a doll's would!

Perhaps his gaze from outside the frame was too obvious, as the girl in the painting twisted her body unnaturally and frowned at Yu Sheng. "Why are you staring at me?"

Yu Sheng opened his mouth, initially wanting to ask about her wrist joints, but he stopped himself before he could speak. He knew too little about this "world," and rashly asking about matters involving the supernatural might expose his own weaknesses. So, when the words reached his lips, he changed the question. "...Who are you? Why are you here?"

The girl in the painting hesitated, but a moment later, she answered.

"My name is Irene," she adjusted her sitting posture, as if trying to appear more solemn. "I come from 'Alice's Cottage.' I am one of Alice's dolls... but that was a long time ago."

Dolls?

Yu Sheng keenly noted the word, while subconsciously glancing again at the clearly non-human spherical joints on "Irene's" wrists. His focus then shifted to the two terms she had mentioned so naturally

"Alice's Cottage" and "Alice's dolls."

What did that mean? He understood dolls, and he could accept talking dolls or dolls jumping around in oil paintings through imagination and his broad-mindedness, but that "Alice"... what was that?

The cottage sounded like a place name, or perhaps an organization named after a place, and "Alice's dolls"... did it sound like a collective term for a group?

Was the girl in the oil painting before him a member of a large group that called themselves "Alice's dolls"?

Once Yu Sheng's train of thought started, it became hard to stop. His imagination began to run wild—

Were there others like her? A whole group? Did they all hang in people's houses just like her? With housing prices so high, they occupied a room, locked the door, refused to open it, and mocked the owner for not having a key, yet in reality, a single lighter could scare them...?

...It really felt like the main purpose of this organization was a bit mysterious...

Perhaps because Yu Sheng had been silent for too long, Irene finally couldn't help but speak up. "Why did you suddenly stop talking... You aren't still thinking about lighting the fire, are you?!"

"Let me ask you something." Yu Sheng looked up abruptly, his expression so serious it startled the girl in the painting.

"Ah... go ahead."

Yu Sheng said with a straight face, "Is that 'Alice's Cottage' of yours specialized in taking orders to suppress housing prices?"

Irene: "...Huh?"

"You know, someone pays you, and you hang yourselves in other people's homes, occupying the space, lying around, stealing joy in the middle of the night, and locking the doors during the day, all to drive down the neighborhood's housing prices—the nature of it is equivalent to hanging yourself at the property management office to help stabilize prices..."

Irene stared with her scarlet eyes, taking nearly half a minute to finally catch up with Yu Sheng's insane line of reasoning and understand what the man with the lighter was talking about. She immediately looked indignant. "You... you can insult me, but you cannot insult the Ancestor of Dolls and my sisters! We... we are a very powerful..."

"Then why are you hanging in my house!" Yu Sheng interrupted the girl in the painting with a glare. "And locking a door! Oh, right, and that dream I had earlier, was that your doing too? And that annoying laugh..."

He asked a series of questions, taking advantage of his anger to appear imposing, but he felt a bit insecure inside after asking. He remembered the frog from that rainy night and felt that this oil painting, which looked just as sinister, must be equally dangerous. The doll in the painting who called herself "Irene" looked easy to talk to now, but who knew if she would suddenly change her expression, attack him, and cut him down in front of the painting with a bear in the next second...

But he quickly shook off that insecurity, remembering that after the frog "opened him up," nothing major had happened—he had just died once. Could this doll in the painting, who could be scared off by a lighter, really eat him?

Yu Sheng's heart was very broad now. The world was already this bizarre, and he had already experienced dying from "happiness." He didn't want to have so many concerns anymore; he just wanted to figure out what was going on with all the weird things around him... starting with this painting.

And "Irene" was even easier to talk to than he had imagined.

The doll in the painting didn't attack, nor did she swing the plush teddy bear at Yu Sheng's face. Faced with his aggressive questioning, she just shrank back on the chair, and there was actually a hint of... guilt on her face.

"I... this is an accidental situation. I wasn't like this before," she twisted her body uneasily, deforming the teddy bear in her arms. "I had an accident a long time ago, was sealed in this painting, and lost contact with the other dolls..."

She looked up again, glancing at the room outside the oil painting.

"As for why I'm in your house, this... I don't know either. I'm trapped in a painting, and I can't decide where I'm hung... Are you sure you didn't buy me at an art exhibition one day and hang me on the wall yourself?"

Yu Sheng: "..."