chsdbacks Chapter 11: The Little Cabin
Chapter 11: The Little Cabin
Among the circling crows, many black feathers fell to the ground and gathered to form the shape of a slender woman.
The woman wore a red cheongsam, exactly the same red dress worn by the woman in the painting at the time. Her limbs were also slender and long, like withered tree branches, showing signs of mechanical elongation.
The most bizarre thing was that the woman's hands were neatly severed at the wrists, and ink was seeping out of the wounds.
"She's here!!"
"Run!!"
Li Yang let out a scream.
The woman in red tilted her head, a gesture often made by sparrows.
Li Yang had only run two steps when suddenly, like a stroke victim, his body straightened up abruptly, his limbs convulsed, and he collapsed headfirst, foaming at the corners of his mouth.
Several crows tore open his mouth and crawled out.
The whole process took less than ten seconds.
He killed swiftly and decisively, without uttering a single unnecessary word.
Zhang Ze immediately realized this.
This is the ghost he's looking for.
The true owner of the murderous painting, the holder of this door, was also the first red-clad vengeful ghost Zhang Ze encountered.
Just like Lao Zhou said before.
Where crows gather, that's where the woman in red appears.
Xiao Zhou also mentioned that if you spend a lot of time with Xiao Xiong, you will also see the woman in red.
They met these two conditions, and naturally attracted the right person.
"You're running around with Xiao Zhou."
"If you die, you die in reality."
"Run!!"
Old Zhou tossed Little Zhou into Zhang Ze's hands, and the next second, as if making a difficult decision, resolutely blocked the path of the woman in red.
Zhang Ze glanced at the woman in red.
Her eyes, like a crow's, were completely black, with not a trace of white showing. Her porcelain-like face, however, revealed a bloodless, ashen pallor, making her appear more like some kind of bird than a human.
He thought about it seriously for a second.
He felt that Chen Ge's persuasive approach would be useless.
It's all about empty talk.
It should still be used on those who try to reason with them!
"Brother, why are you running?"
"My sister is a good person, she wouldn't hurt me..."
Xiao Zhou wanted to say something, but Zhang Ze didn't give him the chance. Instead, he picked Xiao Zhou up and ran towards the path on the east side of the forest.
……
……
Hanjiang City.
Western suburbs.
Ping An Apartment.
Having just finished talking with Wang Qi, Chen Ge sat on the simple bed in the guest room and typed "Fu'an Apartment" into his phone.
Through his conversation with Wang Qi, Chen Ge learned that Ping An Apartment used to be called Fu An Apartment, and apparently some significant event had occurred there.
A family of four was brutally murdered, and the killer vanished into thin air!
Accident or Murder? What Caused the Fire at Fu'an Apartments?
A corpse hidden inside the building leads to a case within a case!
I checked the information for a while.
Suddenly, an article recommended by another algorithm popped up at the bottom of a news article:
"A sibling duo's offspring are artistic geniuses? What artwork could possibly garner such high praise from art academy professors?"
"A genius dies with a severed hand; the killer faces 16 charges including domestic violence, murder, and abuse!"
Before the trial, the murderer died unexpectedly; the autopsy revealed he died from excessive shock, the cause of which turned out to be a cursed oil painting!
Chen Ge raised an eyebrow.
Out of curiosity, I glanced at it briefly.
This wasn't exactly new news; like the Fu'an Apartments he was looking at, it was old news from Hanjiang City a few years ago.
In a small wooden house in a remote urban village on the western outskirts of Hanjiang City, the older brother in the same family fell in love with his younger sister. The two got married and had a girl born with deformities.
This girl has long, slender limbs, especially her neck, which is so long it's almost frightening. Her fingers are also unusually thin, and she has shown an amazing talent for artistic creation since she was a child.
The girl is just 3 years old. Her kindergarten teacher is a graduate of the art department and teaches her to draw.
The first time she held a paintbrush, it was as if she had been using it for many years, mastering color, perspective, and human anatomy with unparalleled skill.
The kindergarten teacher, seeing this, couldn't believe her eyes and reported it to her art professor...
From then on, the girl's fame grew, and she became an overnight sensation.
Her best skill is painting birds, such as magpies, swallows, and partridges, and she is especially good at painting crows, which are lifelike. When she was 5 years old, her first entry in an competition was praised by the judges as comparable to the Preface to the Pavilion of Prince Teng.
Because of her amazing talent, her father had her paint for people who came to admire her, and each painting could sell for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan.
As time went on.
The girl's talent became increasingly mediocre, and with the fading of her child prodigy status and her growing age, although she was still a vibrant eighteen-year-old, no one asked her to paint anymore.
But her father had long been accustomed to using her to make money.
When this shortcut was lost, the father flew into a rage.
He swung a kitchen knife and chopped off his daughter's hands, blaming her for spending too much time drawing whatever she wanted instead of earning him more money.
She completed her last painting amidst a pool of blood.
By the time they arrived at the hospital, they had already died from excessive blood loss despite all efforts to save them.
Her father was taken away by the police, but strange things began to happen from then on. In the detention center, her father would always mutter to himself, bang his head against the wall, and often say things incoherently, begging for mercy.
Until the day of the trial.
The father was found dead on his bed in the detention center, his face contorted in a grotesque expression. The cause of death was cardiac arrest, and the forensic doctor ultimately determined that excessive shock led to cardiac arrest and death.
From then on, the strange tale about the cursed oil painting spread like wildfire.
In the western suburbs of Hanjiang City, especially near that urban village, almost everyone has heard the story of the female ghost in the painting. Whoever buys that painting will be taken to another world...
"Sigh." Chen Ge sighed. "Evil will be punished, and those who deserve to die will receive their due punishment. It's a pity that the innocent people who died because of this can never be brought back to life."
"Um... wait a minute."
"Wasn't I watching the news about Fu'an Apartments?"
Realizing what had happened, Chen Ge quickly exited the details page, secretly cursing these unscrupulous news outlets for churning out sensational stories that had wasted a precious minute of his time…
……
……
Deep in the forest.
Zhang Ze, leading Xiao Zhou, didn't dare look back the whole way. Eventually, the trees around them became sparser and sparser, and a relatively open area appeared in front of them.
Not far away, you can see a courtyard enclosed by a wooden fence, with two small wooden houses in the middle. One of them looks like a warehouse, with lots of timber piled up inside, and a forklift and a pickup truck parked there.
The other was a small house that was normally inhabited. Two strings of dried corn and chili peppers hung under the eaves, and the "Fu" character pasted on the window had turned white, giving the impression that it had been uninhabited for many years.
"This is Uncle's house," Xiao Zhou said.
"I know, like that tree hollow, at least there's a place to stay," Zhang Ze said. "The monsters are all in the forest, there couldn't possibly be anything in this house."
"Let's hide for a while, lest that woman come after us."