Yu Sheng felt as though his heart had broadened significantly ever since that frog had poured out its heart to him.
For example, right now, he had woken from an eerie dream that was all kinds of wrong, opened a mysterious locked room, found a speaking oil painting that clearly concealed some sort of malevolent entity, and yet, he remained calm.
He even stepped forward, took the painting off the wall, and examined it closely.
The frame was quite hefty, feeling expensive in his hands. Upon closer inspection, he noticed the jet-black frame was covered with complex and exquisite patterns, resembling some contiguous text penned in succession, yet cleverly interlinked and twisted into vine-like structures, seamlessly merging with the decorative patterns at the edges of the canvas.
Yu Sheng didn't understand art or painting, but he thought this object must be worth a fortune.
The fellow hiding deep within the painting still refused to show itself, merely drawing back the hem of its skirt a little in the corner of the canvas.
Yu Sheng tried to scrutinize the interior of the painting from an angle, but couldn't see anything.
"I know you're in there," he said, shaking the hefty frame at the painting, "hiding like this is deceiving yourself."
A slight rustling came from the corner of the painting, but there was no reply.
Yu Sheng placed the frame on the ground and squatted down, taking out a lighter from his pocket.
He flicked the lighter, bringing the flame close to the frame, expressionless: "I'll count to three, and if you don't come out, I'm going to light this thing up."
Two to three seconds later, a delicate and childish voice came from the painting: "...Mere mortal flames are useless against a mysterious entity."
But Yu Sheng was certain he detected a hint of unease in that voice.
So, he straight-up brought the flame to a corner of the frame, "Oh, let's test that theory then—"
A scream coincided almost exactly with his action to light up: "Stop! You're really going to set it on fire!!"
Instantly, Yu Sheng extinguished the lighter, and right afterward, he saw a figure hurriedly jump out from the thorn and vine-like edges of the painting.
It was a young girl, donned in an elaborate and gorgeous gothic black dress, with a hairpin decorated with white lace on her head, her long hair was pitch-black, her skin white as snow, and her appearance was adorable. However, she had a pair of heterogenized crimson eyes—those eyes were wide open at the moment, staring straight at Yu Sheng as if to confirm whether the human outside the frame would really burn the painting.
Yu Sheng had to admit that he was startled when the girl suddenly jumped into the center of the painting.
While the girl in the painting didn't look scary upon a closer look, and was even quite beautiful, the somber and gloomy background of the painting added to her sudden appearance, anything leaping out would have startled someone, not to mention the girl also had eyes that seemed soaked in blood—she then leaned closer to the front of the painting, her face pressed against the canvas, her eyes almost filling the entire painting, now looking even more sinister.
"Don't light the fire," the voice of the girl came from inside the painting, "this is the only place where I live."
"Back off a little," Yu Sheng instinctively maintained a distance from the painting, for some reason, he always felt that those crimson eyes carried a wicked aura, that shade of red seemed to gradually seep into one's memory and thoughts when staring this way, becoming increasingly hard to erase from one's heart. But to maintain the upper hand in the conversation, he forced himself not to divert his gaze, "I won't set a fire."
"Oh." The girl in the painting was quite reasonable. She seemed not to notice Yu Sheng's momentary distress. She nodded her head and retreated to the center of the painting, sitting down on the thickly padded red velvet chair. Then she bent down to pick up a plush bear she had thrown on the ground earlier and hugged it in her arms, sitting on the chair and staring straight at Yu Sheng's movements.
The gothic girl holding a teddy bear and sitting on a red velvet chair—in a trance, Yu Sheng felt as if he was seeing the "original" "normal" scene of the "oil painting."
And then, he slightly furrowed his brow, noticing something unusual in the painting.
He noted the girl's exposed wrist; it was clearly... a spherical structure.
Human joints couldn't possibly be shaped like that.
It was the way a puppet's would be!
Perhaps the gaze from outside the painting was too discernible, as the girl within the painting twisted her body somewhat unnaturally and frowned at Yu Sheng, "Why are you staring at me?"
Yu Sheng opened his mouth, initially wanting to ask about the other party's wrist joints, but before he could speak, he forcefully halted that question—he knew little about this "world," and rashly asking about matters related to the Extraordinary Domain might reveal his ignorance, so he changed the subject at the last moment: "...Who are you? Why are you here?"
The girl in the painting hesitated for a moment but still answered Yu Sheng's question.
"My name is Erin," she adjusted her sitting position slightly, seemingly to appear more solemn, "I'm from Alice's Cottage, a member of Alice's dolls... but that was a long time ago."
Dolls?
Yu Sheng keenly caught this term, and while subconsciously glancing again at the spherical joint structure on "Erin's" wrist that was obviously different from humans', he quickly turned his attention to two terms she mentioned naturally:
"Alice's Cottage" and "Alice's dolls."
What does that mean? He understood dolls, and with imagination and a broad mind, he could accept talking dolls and lively ones in paintings, but that "Alice"... what is it?
The cottage seemed like a place name or perhaps an organization named after a place, and "Alice's dolls"... seemed to be a collective term for a certain group?
Is the girl in this painting a member of a large group that self-identifies as "Alice's dolls"?
When Yu Sheng's train of thought opened, it instantly went off the rails, his imagination starting to run wild—
Are there many like her? A whole group? Are they all hanging in every household like she does? Occupying people's rooms when real estate is so pricey, locking the door and not letting the owner in while mocking them for not having the key, when in reality, just a lighter can intimidate them...?
...The main purpose of this organization seems a bit mysterious...
Probably because Yu Sheng had been silent for too long, Erin finally couldn't help but speak up, "Why have you suddenly stopped talking... You're not still thinking about lighting a fire, are you?!"
"I want to ask you something," Yu Sheng suddenly looked up, his serious expression startling the girl in the painting.
"Ah... go ahead."
Yu Sheng asked earnestly, "Is that 'Alice's Cottage' you mentioned specifically engaged in rigging real estate prices?"
Erin: "...Ah?"
"Like, someone pays you, and you guys hang yourselves up in their homes, occupying the room, lying on the floor, laughing stealthily at night and locking the door during the day, all to drive down the neighborhood property prices—akin to hanging oneself in front of the property management office to help suppress real estate prices..."
Erin, with eyes wide and red, took nearly half a minute to catch up to Yu Sheng's lunatic train of thought and understand what this man with a lighter was saying, whereupon she suddenly looked annoyed: "You... You can insult me, but you cannot insult the Puppet Progenitor and my sisters! I... We are a very powerful..."
"Then why are you hanging in my house!" Yu Sheng shot back, cutting off the girl in the painting, "And even locking a door! Oh right, and that dream I had, was it also your doing? And that annoying laugh..."
He unleashed a series of questions, driven by anger to appear fierce, but once he finished, he felt somewhat uneasy again. He remembered the frog on that rainy night and had a feeling that the painting before him, which seemed just as bizarre, was equally dangerous. The self-proclaimed "Erin" in the painting now seemed easy to talk to, but who's to say she wouldn't suddenly change her expression and turn aggressive, slashing him down right in front of the painting...
But he quickly dismissed that uneasiness again because he remembered that after the frog cheered him up, nothing terrible had happened—it was just dying once, after all. Could this painting doll, who could be scared by a lighter, actually eat him?
Yu Sheng was now at ease, for the world was already so strange, and having once experienced a delight unto death, he no longer wanted to hold so many concerns. He just wanted to understand what all the weird things around him were about... starting with this painting.
And "Erin" was more agreeable than he expected.
The doll in the painting did not become aggressive, nor did she start hitting Yu Sheng with the plush bear in her arms. Facing his fierce flurry of questions, she just shrank back in her chair, and her face even showed a hint of... guilt.
"I... This is an accidental situation, I wasn't like this originally," she twisted uncomfortably, wringing the plush bear into a different shape, "I encountered an accident a long time ago and was trapped in this painting, losing contact with the other dolls..."
She looked up again, gazing outside the painting at the room.
"As for why I am in your home, that... I don't know either. I'm trapped in a painting and can't decide where I'm hung... Could it be that you bought me one day at an art exhibition and hung me on the wall yourself?"
Yu Sheng: "…"