A Special Purpose

It was a face disfigured beyond recognition. Gray-black scabs covered its yellowish-brown skin, and the nose and mouth had long since lost their original contours, resembling a lump of grotesque flesh fused into the face.

Just as Li Xian tried to get a closer look, the woman seemed to sense something and abruptly turned her head.

Li Xian's heart jolted, but he stayed crouched where he was without moving.

Her pitch-black eyes lingered in his direction for a while before finally looking away. She reached out and pushed open the door in front of her, then disappeared from his sight.

If he remembered correctly, that was Jiang Yan's room.

Li Xian sighed silently and closed his own door. As he turned around, a piercing scream rang out.

"Aah!!!"

Muffled wails and cries for help followed, then soon fell silent.

The next morning, a corpse with an unrecognizable face lay across the hallway.

Li Xian, Song Qingzhang, and Liang Pei stood before the corpse. The man whose name they didn't know seemed to have left his room before them, and no one knew where he had gone.

The corpse's face had been completely destroyed, but its hair and clothing confirmed that the dead woman was indeed Jiang Yan.

Liang Pei stared at the scene, his face ashen. Although he had survived the night and the number of fingers in his portrait hadn't increased, neither fact eased his mood.

Only one day remained before the exhibition, and only four people were still alive.

There also seemed to be a great deal they still didn't know.

"Who came last night? The Mistress?"

Li Xian shook his head. "A... badly burned woman."

"Burned?" Liang Pei seemed to remember something. "Wasn't the Ms. Du in the newspaper burned too? The Mistress is called Dolly... so was that Du Sha?"

Li Xian didn't answer. Instead, he frowned, pondering something.

He kept feeling that he had overlooked something.

The burns on the woman's face had been conspicuous and impossible to ignore, yet something about her had seemed off.

Li Xian tried hard to recall what he had seen last night, then suddenly thought of something.

"Her hands."

"Hands? What about them?" Song Qingzhang asked, puzzled.

"Her face definitely had obvious burns, but her hands didn't seem to..."

Li Xian had inadvertently glimpsed the back of her hand when she turned the doorknob. But the light had been too dim, and his attention had remained fixed on her face, so he had overlooked that detail. Thinking back now, her hands didn't seem to have had any burn scars.

Song Qingzhang hadn't seen the newspaper and still looked confused, but Liang Pei realized what the problem was.

"The newspaper said, 'Due to the intensity of the fire, Ms. Du suffered extensive burns to her face and body.' Normally, her hands shouldn't have been unscathed!"

Then he asked Li Xian for confirmation. "Are you sure her hands really had no burn scars? What about the rest of her, besides her hands?"

Li Xian shook his head. He had only taken a couple of glances at her last night, so there wasn't much he could confirm.

"Why don't we look for her?"

Song Qingzhang suddenly spoke up.

"Since she appeared, that means she must be somewhere in this building. We just haven't found her yet."

His words stirred Li Xian's memory. Last night, he had also suspected there might be hidden rooms they hadn't found.

The burned woman's appearance could be said to confirm his suspicion.

The three immediately set off, first heading down to the second-floor exhibition hall. To their surprise, the Mistress was there.

She had never come to the second floor before, yet today she was hammering something into place there.

The five picture frames that had been taken away had all been replaced. The Mistress stood beside the wall directly opposite them, her back to the group.

Li Xian approached and discovered that she was driving nails into the wall.

The nails were scattered haphazardly, with no apparent pattern. The Mistress simply kept hammering them in, as though she intended to cover the entire wall.

Noticing Li Xian beside her, she turned around with a smile and spoke to them with unprecedented excitement. "I'll finish setting up the hall tonight. Please look forward to tomorrow's exhibition."

With that, she raised the hammer in her hand again and struck the iron nail she had driven halfway in.

"Then we won't disturb you."

Li Xian stepped back twice, signaled with his eyes to Liang Pei and Song Qingzhang behind him, then left the exhibition hall.

Song Qingzhang swallowed. "What is she planning to do with all those nails?"

"Hang paintings, probably," Li Xian said.

"Paintings?"

"The five frames on the wall are hanging on nails of that same kind, so the nails she's hammering in are probably for hanging paintings too."

"But isn't that a strange arrangement? Only five paintings on one wall, while the other is completely covered..."

Li Xian nodded. The arrangement really did defy common sense, and he still couldn't guess what kind of "art exhibition" the Mistress intended to hold.

"And the numbers don't add up either, do they? Even if we put together every painting we've seen, we couldn't fill that wall... the paintings in the hallway, the ones in the bedrooms, and the human-skin paintings..."

Song Qingzhang muttered through the paintings they had seen so far. When he reached "human-skin paintings," something suddenly occurred to Li Xian.

"Wait."

"What is it?"

"You both heard the footsteps last night, right?"

Liang Pei and Song Qingzhang nodded, unsure why Li Xian had suddenly brought that up.

"Did anything unusual happen in your rooms? Like something suddenly making a noise?"

Liang Pei and Song Qingzhang exchanged a glance, then both shook their heads.

After hearing their answer, Li Xian hurried back to his room and took a human-skin portrait out of his quilt.

"Why did you suddenly come back to your room... wait, man, why did you wrap that thing in your quilt?"

Holding the portrait, Li Xian replied, "After that burned woman appeared last night, they started shaking."

He then opened Jiang Yan's door. After searching her room, he found a human-skin portrait lying in the gap beneath the bedside table.

"She was probably discovered last night because this thing made noise too. The closer a human-skin painting gets to the burned woman, the more violently it shakes, so... I think we could try using it to find her."

His instincts told him that the burned woman, the Mistress's quarters, and the portraits to be exhibited were all in the same place, somewhere they hadn't discovered.

If they found one of them, the remaining clues would soon emerge.

"So that's it!" Liang Pei exclaimed in realization, though he was also a little worried. "But isn't that woman dangerous? Are we really going to seek her out?"

"This is the only option we have now. Whatever happens, we have to try."

So Liang Pei went to the exhibition hall to keep an eye on the Mistress, while Li Xian and Song Qingzhang headed downstairs together.

The moment the two stepped onto the first floor, the portraits in their arms began to tremble faintly.