Chapter 20: Chapter Twenty: The Figure in the Painting

That happened two weeks ago.

Merely recalling and retelling it made Tianye Zhenyi feel like she could barely breathe; her hands gripped the cushion until it formed a dark vortex, her heartbeat accelerating rapidly.

Finally, she took a deep breath, curled up into a ball, and collapsed onto the sofa, speaking in broken fragments.

Like most high school club activities, the Art Club went on an outdoor sketching trip during summer vacation; nearly everyone went, except Niino Li, the Ghostly Presence member, and a few others stuck with remedial classes.

"I remember now—even though I was stuck in remedial math classes because I failed, my mom eventually let me take the day off and go," Izawa Ayane said, her eyes darting as if struck by sudden realization.

Her passion for Painting was never inferior to anyone else in the Art Club.

Tianye Zhenyi glanced at her, a wry smile tugging at her lips.

The location was Yinjianze City, a rare patch of tranquility amid a noisy, bustling metropolis.

There was only the chirping of cicadas and the sound of flowing water, lush forested mountain paths and clear blue skies with white clouds, like the opening scene of a healing-type movie.

This silence gradually bred loneliness.

After completing their daily assignments from Teacher Ozawa, many hoped to do something in Yinjianze City that would make someone take notice.

As the famous saying goes:

"Youth is a lie, a sin—even if you commit some monstrous crime, they call it a symbol of youth, etching it into memory as a page."

At that time, several girls and two boys from the Art Club organized a thrilling, spine-chilling spirit summoning game.

It was said to be a long-standing local prayer ritual, extremely potent.

As one of the Art Club's top two most beautiful girls, she naturally received an invitation to the ritual.

The procedure wasn't complicated: each person brought one item they used most often in daily life, poured a puddle of clear water in the center of the floor, then arranged the items in a circle around the water, one by one.

Seven people participated; each sat before their own item and silently recited their prayer in their mind, clockwise starting from twelve o'clock.

When the last person finished speaking, the water's surface would, in the same order, reveal the result of their prayer.

Because everyone had come out for sketching, most brought items related to Painting—pencil cases, pencil sharpeners, brushes, and so on.

When the seven prayers ended, the sliding door of the wooden cabin suddenly blew open in the night wind; an icy, chilling aura quietly spread from the puddle of water, and white mist rose in the room.

The cold crept upward—

In a daze, Tianye Zhenyi saw a hazy black figure rise from the mist, dark and unsettling, yet strangely, she heard no one scream.

Utterly silent. Extremely eerie.

"Then what?"

Niino Li, noticing Tianye Zhenyi had stopped, couldn't help asking.

The figure in the mist, the silent cabin—these two elements bore a certain resemblance to her earlier experience in the KTV.

"At first, no one noticed anything strange about the ritual—as if only I saw the mist and that figure; everyone kept chatting and laughing, continuing to sketch," Tianye Zhenyi, lost in a world of terror, trembled violently in the pupils of her eyes.

"Only after returning home and organizing my sketches did I realize something was wrong—every drawing of the town, the forest, the river had suddenly gained one more person!"

"Who was that person?"

"She looked like a Ghostly Presence standing in the rain, drenched all over, her features indistinct. Worse still, after that, strange red lines kept appearing in my practice sketches… no matter how hard I wiped, they wouldn't vanish."

After summoning the courage to recount that terrifying experience, Tianye Zhenyi collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut, limbs limp and hanging over the sofa.

If she could go back in time, she'd rather seek out Niino Li and challenge him than attend the sketching trip.