Wenmo writes mostly ghost stories, with short stories ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 words. His published books are no more than 300,000 words long. His stories are known for being short and concise, with a light writing style and wildly imaginative ideas.
The novel I'm currently writing is a novel that's being serialized online, called "The Painter." It's a ghost story told in the first person, and it's one of the longer books Wenmo has been writing.
Linghu Lan clicked on it casually, started reading, and quickly became engrossed in it.
...
The Painter
I was born in a small mountain village, surrounded by mountains and water, where transportation was extremely underdeveloped.
Later, the government decided to build roads to every village and light up every household. Only then did we have roads and lights in our area, which allowed me to leave the mountain village and get into an art academy outside the village.
It is said that poor and remote areas breed unruly people, but in our area, it is more like poor and remote areas breed zombies.
According to the elders, our village used to be a place where zombies appeared. Because the feng shui was good a long time ago, many emperors and generals built their tombs there.
As a result, an earthquake occurred later, causing the mountains to collapse and the rivers to shift, which disrupted the feng shui. What was once a place where good feng shui gathered and gathered good energy became a place where filth and evil accumulated.
Those emperors and generals buried underground underwent a zombie transformation. Some became red-eyed, green-haired bronze corpses, some became flying zombies that could fly and burrow underground, and some emperors who were too noble in life became the most powerful zombie tyrants.
These are all legends passed down by the village elders. In the past, people often came into the village looking for someone to guide them to collect zombies, saying that zombies could be used as "medicine" and also to rid the local area of pests.
But anyone with eyes can tell that it was tomb raiding.
However, the villagers did not dislike these people, because some of them were capable. They could simply look at the stars in the sky, observe the terrain, make a few gestures on the astrolabe, and combine this with the villagers' oral accounts and folk tales. They could then point to the ground and know where to dig a hole.
This skill is extremely formidable. Villagers might spend their entire lives trying to find the right spot to dig a hole, but this person's single finger strikes the mark perfectly, which is truly admirable.
Therefore, cooperation between the villagers and the tomb raiders was inevitable.
Many villagers made their fortunes by guiding tomb raiders, building tombs and getting married. However, some were unlucky and lost their lives.
In those years, every tomb raiding team that came to the village had someone die, but there was one exception: no one ever died in that team because there was a painter in that team.
In ancient times, being a painter was a lowly profession, a minor art. Even painters who painted for emperors were not considered respectable and were considered craftsmen with very low social status.
But this painter held a very high position in the group, and everyone treated him with great respect, because he did not paint living people, but dead people.
I've heard that this painter possesses a unique skill that seems to reach the very depths of the underworld, capable of capturing the souls of the dead within his paintings.
Before each painting session, he would meditate for a while, allowing his soul to enter the tomb and take a look at the appearance of the deceased's body. Then, his soul would return to his body and, from outside, draw the appearance of the deceased's ghost.
In this way, the soul of the tomb owner is painted into the painting, so that he will never rise from the dead or become a corpse again, and tomb robbers can safely take away the contents of the tomb.
They had been working together like this for many years without ever making a mistake, until they came to our village. They successfully robbed several tombs, but when they were preparing to rob a general's tomb, an accident happened.
That day.
There was a faint halo around the sun in the sky. Tomb raiders called this "two suns in the sky, all ghosts fleeing," a very auspicious omen.
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