A night breeze swept by, and Yao Shunyu shivered uncontrollably. He had come to kill someone tonight, yet here he was, standing before a festive bridal chamber. He couldn't help feeling dazed.
He cautiously stepped forward. With little effort, the rotten wooden door creaked open. By the light of his lantern, Yao Shunyu saw that the main hall had been decorated for a wedding ceremony. Festive red drapes hung all around, but there were no ancestral tablets or grand armchairs set out for the elders of the clan. Instead, a landscape painting hung at the front of the hall.
The ink painting depicted a temple amid mountains and woods. Its composition was simple, sketched in only a few strokes, but the artist's touch was vivid. Yao Shunyu recognized it almost at once: this was the temple where the art teacher had vanished the previous night.
The longer he looked, the more uneasy he felt. He stared intently at the painting—more precisely, at the temple gate. At some point, the gate had opened a little, perhaps not even a fifth of the way.
Yao Shunyu came to his senses and shook his head sharply. When he looked at the painting again, terror filled him. He couldn't even be sure whether the temple gate had been closed the first time he saw it, or whether it had already been open like this.
A faint stroke of ink roughly marked the gap between the doors. Yao Shunyu clearly saw nothing, yet a voice inside him kept screaming for him to run, to get as far away as possible.
Running was out of the question. Yao Shunyu forced himself to calm down. He hadn't completed his task for the night. If he left now, he would truly be signing his own death warrant.
Making