Xia Yang sat on the sofa in the red mural, looking back; Gao Ming stood beside the sofa in the real living room, facing the wall.
They looked at each other, flowing red and contorted darkness dividing the scene.
Inside the painting, Xia Yang seemed to have become part of it. He smiled as he always did, his gaze gradually shifting from Gao Ming to his own hands.
What coated those hands was not paint, but blood. Every finger was stained with the blood of his victims.
Gently taking a finger into his mouth, Xia Yang closed his eyes, as though savoring a sensation.
He seemed to find sudden inspiration, then turned and headed upstairs.
"How did he do this?" Gao Ming knew Deadwater had obtained an extremely unusual Black-and-White Posthumous Photo, but he had never actually seen it.
Moving closer to the mural, Gao Ming noticed places in the enormous painting that differed from reality.
On the wall of the real living room was a blood-red mural; on the living room wall inside the mural hung several very blurry paintings.
The harder Gao Ming tried to see them clearly, the blurrier they became. He kept approaching, kept moving forward, as though something were drawing him in.
By the time he came to his senses, everything around him had turned red. At some point, he had walked into the painting.
Looking around, he found that the real living room had vanished. He seemed to be trapped inside the painting.
"I can't sense any shadows. Could the inside of this painting be like my Execution House—a space independent of both the Shadow World and reality?"
The thought had only just entered his mind when a drop of red paint landed on Gao Ming's face. The skin beneath it seemed to slowly