The Cursed Painting

Two red candles were nearly burned out.

I had thought someone in the Du family simply liked lighting these things.

I hadn't expected them to be wedding candles-and the kind used in ancient weddings, at that.

In a setting like this, I couldn't help feeling that something was off.

"Be careful..."

The Seventh Master warned us quietly, "There's something very strange about this villa. It's thick with yin energy. Du Yuwei's body should be here."

Hearing that actually eased some of the fear Meng Yifan and I felt.

We had come here for Du Yuwei.

If her body was here, then our trip wouldn't have been for nothing!

We stepped out of the bathroom into the living room on the ground floor.

It was huge, several times bigger than the living room back home.

The furniture and antique ornaments looked incredibly expensive, too. I figured they were worth enough put together to buy a place like mine.

But I didn't have time to marvel at the luxury. I noticed several large, bright red "double happiness" characters pasted on the walls.

Even a child knew what those were for.

If a family put those up, someone was getting married.

So someone really was getting married.

I didn't know much about traditional customs, but my grandfather had told me when I was little that a family who had suffered a death couldn't hold a wedding that same year. It was unlucky, and there were all sorts of taboos.

If this was meant to ward off death with a joyous occasion, this wasn't how it worked.

That custom was for someone on the verge of dying. Usually, when an elderly person was near death, one of the younger family members would hurry to get married, hoping the joy might help the elder live a little longer.

But Du Yuwei was already dead. Could a wedding bring her back to life?

Then I noticed a painting hanging on one of the walls.

The painting... seemed to depict a wedding, but not a Western one. It was a traditional Chinese wedding.

The bride and groom were up on a platform, with the guests below them.

It had been painted in oils, but the lighting was dim, and from that distance I couldn't make out who the groom was.

I hurried closer for a look. The couple were dressed in traditional wedding attire. The woman wore a bright red bridal gown with a red veil over her head, so naturally I couldn't see her face.

The man looked to be in his forties, almost fifty. He wore a groom's outfit with a large red flower pinned to his chest.

I took a closer look at his face and froze.

That face was very familiar. It was the business tycoon, Du Ruhai!

Holy shit, Du Ruhai was the one getting married?

His adopted daughter had only been dead for three months, and he was already rushing to get himself a wife?

I quickly waved Meng Yifan over, then pointed at the painting for him to look.

He recognized the man in it, too, and stared at the painting in astonishment.

In the painting, Du Ruhai and the bride sat upright in wooden chairs on either side of a wooden table. An enormous "double happiness" character adorned the wall behind them.

He was smiling with heartfelt joy, as though his greatest wish in life had come true and he had married the woman he wanted most.

But this painting... the more I looked at it, the stranger it felt.

If it was meant to be a wedding portrait, why not take a photograph instead of having someone paint it?

Even if Du Ruhai liked paintings, shouldn't he have commissioned something a little more pleasing to the eye, considering he'd hung it in such a prominent spot in the living room?

I couldn't see anything pleasing about it. Looking at it in the middle of the night actually gave me the creeps.

Besides, the bride's face wasn't even visible.

Meng Yifan and I kept staring at the painting, becoming almost entranced.

As I stared, I suddenly felt that something wasn't right.

Hadn't we come here to find Du Yuwei's body?

Why was I staring at this painting?

But for some reason, even though I knew I couldn't keep standing there looking at it, I couldn't tear my eyes away. Even my body suddenly stopped obeying me.

The painting seemed to possess some sort of magic that had drawn me deep under its spell. I desperately wanted to glimpse the bride's face beneath her red veil.

I wanted to see what she actually looked like.

Yet the harder I tried to see her clearly, the blurrier my vision became. All sorts of strange images flashed through my mind.

I saw an enclosed room, with red everywhere I looked.

Bright red "double happiness" characters. Bright red curtains.

The bride and groom sat upright in chairs with a square table between them, and another huge "double happiness" character behind them.

The scene was exactly the same as the painting!

Now I was standing below the platform, with guests on either side who had come to congratulate the newlyweds.

But there was something strange about these guests. Though they had come to offer congratulations, their faces were utterly expressionless and deathly pale, like the paper figures in a funeral offerings shop.

The groom on the platform was staring at me. It was Du Ruhai.

He had been smiling, but the moment he saw me, his smile quickly vanished.

Only then did I realize I was standing in the wrong place. All the guests were on either side. What was I doing standing in the middle by myself?

That was rather rude.

Embarrassed, I instinctively moved to join the crowd.

Just as I lifted my foot to walk over, a large hand suddenly covered my eyes.

"Don't look!"

A familiar voice rang out beside my ear.

A shudder ran through me. I instantly recognized the Seventh Master's voice.

"Heavenly soul, return to the body! Awaken at once!"

The Seventh Master's voice rang out again.

The moment he finished speaking, I felt someone slap the back of my head hard.

I stumbled and nearly fell, snapping awake in an instant.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back in the villa's living room. The guests and the bride and groom on the platform were nowhere to be seen.

Meng Yifan and I exchanged a glance. He seemed to have seen those same strange images.

For some inexplicable reason, we both instinctively looked back up at the wall.

"Damn it, you're still looking!"

The Seventh Master grabbed us both by the ears and turned our heads away. "Haven't you seen enough? Have you?"

We stared at him in terror and hurriedly asked what had just happened to us.

"This painting was made with corpse oil mixed with other ingredients. It's a cursed painting."

The Seventh Master glared at us. "If you two had stared any longer, there would've been two more idiots among the guests in that painting. Understand?"

We shivered in fright and quickly told him we'd seen the scene inside the painting, as though it were real.

The Seventh Master said coldly, "You were both bewitched by it. Your heavenly souls had left your bodies. If I hadn't called them back, they would've stayed in that painting forever."

Meng Yifan swallowed. "What happens if we lose our heavenly souls...?"

The Seventh Master said, "The heavenly soul is the principal soul among the three souls. Without it, you end up in a vegetative state. You would've ended up just like those vegetative patients in the hospital."

I nearly pissed myself with fear.

Just looking at a painting had almost left me in a vegetative state.

What the hell was wrong with Du Ruhai, hanging something so sinister in his home?

And the Seventh Master had said it was painted with corpse oil. Whose corpse had that oil come from...?