Yu Sheng felt that ever since that frog had ripped his heart out, he'd become a lot more open-minded.
For instance, right now, he had woken up from a strange dream that was wrong in every way, opened a bizarre locked room, found a talking oil painting, and even though this painting clearly had some kind of evil entity hiding in it, he was still very calm.
He even took a step forward, took the oil painting off the wall, and examined it carefully in front of him.
The frame had a good weight to it, and the texture in his hand felt valuable. After careful observation, he discovered that the surface of the pitch-black frame was covered with intricate and exquisite patterns. The patterns seemed to be some kind of continuously written text, yet they cleverly intertwined and twisted into a vine-like structure, ultimately connecting seamlessly with the patterns on the edge of the painting.
Yu Sheng didn't understand painting, nor did he understand art, but he felt that this thing must be very valuable.
But the person hiding deep within the oil painting still refused to show herself. The hem of her dress at the corner of the painting just retracted a little more.
Yu Sheng tried to look into the painting from the side, but he couldn't see anything.
"I know you're in there," he said to the oil painting, shaking the heavy frame. "You're just fooling yourself by hiding now."
A slight rustling sound came from the corner of the painting, but there was no response.
Yu Sheng placed the frame on the floor, crouched down, and took out a lighter from his pocket.
He lit the flame, brought it close to the frame, and said with a deadpan expression, "I'll count to three. If you don't come out, I'm burning this thing."
After two or three seconds, a light, delicate voice came from the oil painting: "…Mere mortal flames. That thing is useless against an aberrant entity."
But Yu Sheng was sure he could hear a hint of guilt in this voice.
So he directly touched the flame to a corner of the frame: "Oh, then I'll just give it a try—"
A scream rang out almost at the same time as he lit the fire: "Don't! Are you really lighting it?!"
Yu Sheng instantly extinguished the lighter. Immediately after, he saw a figure hastily jump out from the edge of the painting, which resembled a thorny vine.
It was a young girl, dressed in a complex and gorgeous Gothic black dress, with a hairpin adorned with white lace in her hair. Her long hair was as black as ebony, her skin as white as snow, her features lovely, yet she had a pair of heterochromatic scarlet pupils—those eyes were wide open at this moment, staring intently at Yu Sheng, as if to confirm whether the human outside the frame would really burn the painting.
Yu Sheng admitted that he was startled when the girl suddenly jumped to the center of the painting.
Although the girl in the painting didn't look scary upon closer inspection, and was even quite beautiful, with such a gloomy and dim background and such a sudden appearance, anything that jumped out of the painting would have been startling, not to mention the girl had a pair of eyes that looked like they were soaked in blood—she then moved closer to the front of the painting, pressing her face completely against the canvas, her eyes almost filling the entire painting, looking even more bizarre.
"Don't light the fire," the girl's voice came from the oil painting. "This is the only place I have to live."
"You should back up a bit first," Yu Sheng subconsciously maintained some distance from the oil painting. For some reason, he felt that her scarlet eyes were unusually sinister. When that shade of red stared at him, it seemed to gradually seep into his memory and thoughts, making it harder and harder to erase from his mind the longer he looked. But in order to maintain the upper hand in the conversation, he forced himself not to look away. "I can not light the fire."
"Oh." The girl in the painting was surprisingly easy to negotiate with. She didn't seem to notice Yu Sheng's momentary abnormality. She nodded and retreated to the center of the painting, sitting down on the chair covered with thick red velvet. Then she bent down, picked up a stuffed teddy bear that she had dropped on the floor, and held it in her arms, continuing to stare at Yu Sheng's movements from her seat.
A Gothic girl holding a teddy bear, sitting on a red velvet chair—in a daze, Yu Sheng felt as if he was seeing the "original," "normal" picture of this "oil painting."
And then he frowned slightly, discovering some abnormalities in the picture.
He noticed the girl's exposed wrists. They were clearly… spherical joints.
Human joints couldn't possibly be shaped like that.
Only a doll's would be!
Perhaps the gaze from outside the painting was too obvious. The girl in the painting shifted her body a little 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 just before speaking—he knew very little about this "world," and rashly asking questions about the supernatural realm might expose his own weaknesses. So, he changed the question at the last moment: "…Who are you? Why are you here?"
The girl in the painting obviously hesitated, but after a moment, she answered Yu Sheng's question.
"My name is Irene," she adjusted her posture slightly, as if trying to appear more formal. "I come from 'Alice's Cottage,' and I am one of Alice's dolls… but that was a long time ago."
A doll?
Yu Sheng keenly noticed this word, and at the same time, he subconsciously glanced at the obviously inhuman spherical joint structure on "Irene's" wrist. Then, his attention shifted to the two terms she had mentioned so naturally:
"Alice's Cottage" and "Alice's dolls."
What did that mean? He understood what a doll was, and he could accept a talking doll and a doll that was alive and kicking in an oil painting through his imagination and open-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"… sounded like a collective term for a group?
The girl in the oil painting in front of him was a member of a large group that called themselves "Alice's dolls"?
Once Yu Sheng's train of thought started, it was a bit hard to stop. His ability to associate things began to run wild—
There was more than one like her? There was a whole group? Were they all hanging in people's houses like her? With housing prices so high, they still had to occupy someone's room, lock the door and not let them in, and even laugh at the homeowner for not having a key, but in reality, they could be scared off by a lighter…?
…He felt that the main purpose of this organization was a bit mysterious…
Perhaps Yu Sheng had been silent for a bit too long. Irene finally couldn't help but speak, "Why did you suddenly stop talking… You're not still thinking about lighting the fire, are you?!"
"I have a question for you." Yu Sheng suddenly looked up, the seriousness in his expression startling the girl in the painting.
"Ah… go ahead."
Yu Sheng said with a serious face, "Is that 'Alice's Cottage' you mentioned a business that specializes in suppressing housing prices?"
Irene: "…Huh?"
"Like, someone pays you, and you hang yourselves in other people's houses, occupying the space, laughing secretly at night and locking the doors during the day, with the goal of bringing down the neighborhood's housing prices—kind of like hanging yourself at the property management office to contribute to stabilizing housing prices…"
Irene stared with her scarlet eyes, taking nearly half a minute to finally catch up with Yu Sheng's insane train of thought and understand what this man with a lighter was talking about. She immediately looked annoyed. "You… you can insult me, but you can't insult the Ancestor of Dolls and my sisters! I… 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 with a locked door! Oh right, and that dream I had before, was that your doing too? And that annoying laugh…"
He asked a series of questions, his momentum building with his anger, but after asking, he felt a little unsure again. He remembered the frog in the rainy night and felt that this equally sinister-looking oil painting should be just as dangerous. This doll-in-the-painting who called herself "Irene" seemed easy to talk to now, but who knew if she would suddenly change her expression and attack him in the next second, striking him down before the painting with her bear…
But he quickly shook off this uncertainty, because he remembered that nothing major seemed to have happened after the frog had "opened him up." He had just died once, that was all. Could this doll-in-the-painting, who could be scared off with a lighter, actually eat him?
Yu Sheng was very open-minded now. This world was already so bizarre, and he had already experienced death by elation. Now he didn't want to have so many worries anymore. He just wanted to figure out what was going on with all the strange things around him… starting with this painting.
And "Irene" was even easier to talk to than he had imagined.
The doll in the painting did not lash out, nor did she swing the stuffed teddy bear in her arms at Yu Sheng's face. Faced with a barrage of aggressive questions, she just shrank back in her chair, a look of… guilt actually appearing on her face.
"I… this is an accident. I wasn't like this before," she twisted her body uncomfortably, squeezing the teddy bear in her arms until it was misshapen. "I had an accident a long time ago and was sealed in this painting, and I also lost contact with the other dolls…"
She looked up again, 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, so 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: "…"