"Roben, have you seen Holy Mountain Journey?"
"Y-yes, I have." Roben answered with an awkward laugh, nervously rubbing his foot against the floor.
"Really?" The boy asking the question rolled his eyes slyly and deliberately raised his voice. "You said that pharmacy manager actually survived in the end. That's outrageous!"
"N-no," Roben swallowed. "Didn't that manager turn into a zombie at the end?"
"Tch, so you really did see it. How boring." The boy immediately lost interest and sat back down in front of his drawing board.
"Phew—"
Roben breathed a sigh of relief. He had never seen Holy Mountain Journey. Magic Shadow tickets were too expensive for him to afford, and he was too frail to squeeze his way to the front at the open-air screenings in the square. By the time he left the studio, it was too late anyway. He could only stand behind the trees and watch the ending from an incomplete angle.
"Ahem." The owner of the studio walked in, and the noisy youths immediately fell silent. There was no such thing as a ban on corporal punishment here—if you made a mistake, you really got hit. "Today, you'll be copying this painting."
A decorative painting of a forest was hung at the front.
This was what the apprentices did every day: endlessly copy decorative paintings, then hand them in to be sold together. They fetched quite a bit more than printed pictures, and none of them bore the copyist's name.
After doing this kind of work for a while, the teacher would teach them something real. Then came another long stretch of copying paintings for wages, over and over in an endless cycle.
The teacher watched them for a while before leaving to attend to his own business.
Mass-producing identical paintings was terribly boring.