...Against the black curtain, white lights glittered like scattered stars.
When Angel had first seen this painting, he had paid it no mind, assuming it was a midnight starry sky. Among all the oil paintings, there were quite a few depicting night skies and stars, so such a scene was hardly rare.
But when he walked up to this painting and fixed his gaze upon it, Angel immediately noticed something was wrong.
Although the backgrounds of the other starry-sky paintings were dim, the starlight still revealed deeper shades beneath it—dark gray, shadowy blue, and misty yellow.
But this painting was different. Its background was pure black, a black capable of swallowing every bright and dark color alike.
This black did not resemble a starry sky. It was more like a vast, unseen abyss of deep void.
Yet the purity of that darkness was not Angel's main reason for ruling out the possibility that it was a "starry-sky painting." What truly set it apart from the other starry skies was that the "stars" upon it were deeply strange.
To ordinary people without astronomical knowledge, the stars in the sky seemed scattered in disorder. But to astrologers and prophetic wizards, the starry sky was disorderly, yet ordered.
The "starry sky" in this painting was neither disorderly nor disorderly yet ordered. It was simply orderly.
Upon the black curtain, a ribbon of light like the Milky Way stretched from a distant depth all the way to the center of the painting. Though the "points of light" appeared smaller in the distance and larger nearby, that was merely the visual effect created by the painting.
If one imagined the actual scene within the painting, it was like a glowing road in the void, stretching from some unknown distant place all the way beneath one's