By now, Shade and Priest Augustus had roughly figured out the Relic Oil Painting's basic properties.
The house model in the painting corresponded to the real house, and when someone inside the house directly touched the painting, a puppet corresponding to that person appeared within it.
The puppets possessed an instinctive intelligence of their own and would actively flee from the killer within the model house. Their movements depended on where their real counterparts were. If the real person was inside the house, the puppet could only move through the corresponding rooms within the building; if the real person was outside the house, the puppet was highly likely to move at random.
The Bandage Murder Puppet continuously pursued the other puppets within the painting, and injuries suffered by the puppets were directly reflected on the real people, eventually causing the real person's death. The truth behind Mister Freeman's fatal fall was probably that, after being pursued for half a month, the puppet representing him in the painting had finally been killed by the Bandage Puppet.
Ordinary people who touched the painting forgot everything about it afterward. They would occasionally see phantoms of the Bandage Puppet in reality and suffer mental torment in their dreams, leading to psychological problems.
The only known possible containment method was to make the painting itself leave the house. Mrs. Freeman, an ordinary person, had once managed to do exactly that.
After Mister Freeman died, when there were no corresponding puppets left in the oil painting's house model, the painting could be taken out of the real building. Once it had been removed from the real building, it could no longer fulfill the condition of being touched inside the building and causing puppets to appear in the house model within the painting.
But neither Shade nor