Chapter 5 Irene in the Painting
Yu Sheng felt that he seemed to have become much more relaxed since the frog had opened up to him.
Just like now, he woke up from a strange dream that was wrong no matter how he looked at it, opened a weird locked room, found a talking painting, and even there was obviously some evil thing hidden in the painting, but he was still very calm.
He even took a step forward, took the painting down from the wall, and looked at it carefully in front of his eyes.
The frame was quite heavy, and the texture in the hand made it seem valuable. After careful observation, he found that the surface of the black frame was covered with intricate and exquisite patterns. The patterns seemed to be some kind of continuously written text, but they were cleverly connected and twisted into a vine-like structure, and finally connected with the patterns on the edge of the picture.
Yu Sheng didn't understand painting or art, but he felt that this thing must be very valuable.
The guy hiding deep in the painting still refused to show up, except that the corner of his skirt was slightly retracted.
Yu Sheng tried to look sideways into the picture, but saw nothing.
"I know you're in there," he said to the painting, shaking the heavy frame, "you're deceiving yourself by hiding now."
There was a slight rustling noise in the corner of the screen, but no response.
Yu Sheng put the picture frame on the ground, squatted down and took out a lighter from his pocket.
He lit the flame, moved closer to the frame, and said expressionlessly: "I'll count to three, and if you don't come out I'll light this thing."
After two or three seconds, a soft, childish voice came from the painting: "...It's just a mundane flame. It's useless against strange entities."
But Yu Sheng was sure that he could hear a sense of guilt in this voice.
So he directly set the flame on a corner of the picture frame: "Oh, then I'll light it and try——"
The scream rang out almost at the same time as he lit the fire: "Stop! You really have to light it!!"
Yu Sheng instantly extinguished the lighter, and then he saw a figure hurriedly jumping out from the edge of the picture that looked like a thorny vine.
It was a young girl, wearing an intricate and gorgeous Gothic black dress, a hairpin with white lace on her head, long black hair, snow-white skin, a lovely face, but with a pair of strange scarlet eyes - those eyes were wide open at this moment, staring straight at Yu Sheng, as if confirming whether the human outside the frame would really burn the painting.
Yu Sheng admitted that he was startled when the girl suddenly jumped into the center of the picture.
Although the girl in the painting was not scary at all if you looked closely, and was even pretty, the eerie and dark background and her sudden appearance would have scared anyone who appeared on the screen, not to mention that the girl had a pair of eyes that looked as if they were soaked in blood - she then moved closer to the picture and pressed her face completely against the canvas. Her eyes almost filled the entire painting, making it look even more eerie.
"Don't light the fire," the girl's voice came from the painting, "this is the only place I can live."
"Step back a little," Yu Sheng subconsciously kept a distance from the painting. Somehow, he always felt that the scarlet eyes of the other party were extremely evil. When staring at him, the red color seemed to gradually seep into his memory and thoughts. The more he looked at it, the harder it was to erase it from his mind. However, in order to maintain the upper hand in the conversation, he forced himself not to look away. "I can choose not to light the fire."
"Oh." The girl in the painting was very easy to talk to. She didn't seem to notice Yu Sheng's momentary abnormality. She nodded and retreated to the center of the picture. She sat down on the chair covered with thick red velvet. Then she bent down and picked up a stuffed teddy bear that she had just thrown on the ground and held it in her arms. She just sat on the chair and continued to stare at Yu Sheng's movements.
A Gothic girl holding a teddy bear and sitting on a red velvet chair - in a trance, Yu Sheng felt that he saw the original "normal" picture of this "oil painting".
Then he frowned slightly and noticed something unusual in the picture.
He noticed the girl's exposed wrist, which was clearly... spherical in structure.
Human joints cannot grow like this.
This is what puppets look like! Perhaps because the gaze outside the picture was too obvious, the girl in the picture twisted her body unnaturally and frowned at Yu Sheng: "Why are you staring at me?"
Yu Sheng opened his mouth and wanted to ask about the other party's wrist joint at first, but he stopped the question before he opened his mouth - he knew very little about this "world", and rashly asking about things related to the extraordinary field might expose his shortcomings, so he changed the question at the last minute: "...Who are you? Why are you here?"
The girl in the painting obviously hesitated for a moment, but after a moment she answered Yu Sheng's question.
"My name is Irene," she adjusted her sitting posture slightly, as if to make herself look more serious, "I come from Alice's House, and I'm one of Alice's puppets... but that was a long time ago."
Puppet?
Yu Sheng noticed this word keenly, and subconsciously glanced at the spherical joint structure on "Eileen's" wrist that was obviously different from that of humans. Then, his attention was focused on the two words that the other party mentioned very naturally:
"Alice's House" and "Alice's Dolls".
What does this mean? He understands puppets. As for talking puppets and lively puppets in paintings, he can accept them with his imagination and tolerance, but what is that "Alice"? The hut sounds like a place name, or maybe an organization named after a place name, and "Alice's puppets" sound like a collective name for some group?
Is this girl in the painting one of the many people who call themselves "Alice's puppets"? As soon as Yu Sheng's thoughts started to flow, he couldn't stop them. His associative ability started to soar.
Is there more than one person like her? Are there a group of them? Are they all like her, hanging in every house? The house price is so high, but they still occupy people's houses, lock the door and refuse to open it, and laugh at the owner for not having a key, but in fact, they can be fooled with a lighter...? ... I always feel that the main purpose of this organization's existence is a bit mysterious...
Perhaps because Yu Sheng had been silent for a long time, Irene finally couldn't help but speak: "Why did you suddenly stop talking... You're not still thinking about starting a fire, are you?!"
"I want to ask you something." Yu Sheng looked up suddenly, and the seriousness in his expression scared the girl in the painting.
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"Ah...you tell me."
Yu Sheng said seriously, "Is the 'Alice House' you mentioned specifically for taking orders and lowering the price of the house?"
Irene: “…Ah?”
"If someone pays you, you will hang yourself in someone else's house, occupy the house and lie on the ground, secretly have fun in the middle of the night and lock the door during the day, with the purpose of driving down the housing prices in the community - it is equivalent to hanging yourself at the door of the property management company to help stabilize the housing prices..."
Irene stared with bloodshot eyes, and it took her nearly half a minute to finally catch up with Yu Sheng's crazy train of thought and understand what the man with the lighter meant. She immediately showed an angry look: "You...you can insult me, but you can't insult the puppet ancestor 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 the door is locked! Oh, and that dream I had before, was it also your fault? And that annoying smile..."
He asked a series of questions, taking advantage of his anger to sound aggressive, but after asking, he felt a little uneasy. He thought of the frog in the rainy night, and felt that the strange-looking painting in front of him should be equally dangerous. The puppet in the painting who called herself "Irene" looked easy to talk to now, but she might suddenly change her face and attack him in the next second, killing him in front of the painting...
But he soon got rid of this guilty feeling, because he remembered that after the frog made him "happy", nothing serious happened. It was just a death. Could this puppet in the painting that could be fooled with a lighter eat him? Yu Sheng was very open-minded now. The world was already so weird, and he had experienced being happy to death again. Now he didn't want to have so many concerns. He wanted to figure out what was going on with the many weird things around him... Let's start with this painting.
And "Eileen" was easier to talk to than he had imagined.
The doll in the painting did not suddenly attack, nor did she swing the stuffed teddy bear in her arms and hit Yu Sheng in the face. Facing a series of fierce questions, she just shrank in her chair, and her face actually looked a little... guilty.
"I... this is an accident. I wasn't like this originally." She twisted her body uneasily, squeezing the teddy bear in her arms out of shape. "I had an accident a long time ago and was trapped in this painting. I also lost contact with the other dolls..."
She raised her head again and looked at the room outside the painting.
"As for why I'm in your house, I don't know. I'm trapped in a painting and I can't decide where I'm hung. You didn't buy me and hang me on the wall when you were at an art exhibition?"
Yu Sheng: “…”
Thanks to Mr. O from Aurora Club for the silver cuteness~
(End of this chapter)
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