Chapter 53 - Painting the Skin, Not the Bones

The electronic lock of the museum clicked softly at 2:17 AM.

As Shen Mo’s rubber-soled shoes ground against the floor, the smell of mildew in the temporary storage room mingled with the pungent scent of turpentine, piercing his nostrils.

Carrying his black tool bag, the beam of his flashlight swept precisely across the shelves covered with seal strips—Rack B-12, where a framed painting was wrapped in waterproof cloth beneath a red marker.

This was his third application to inspect *Group Portrait in the Theater Backstage*.

The previous two had been rejected by Curator Chen on the grounds of "disturbing the pigment layer during the restoration period." Consequently, he had checked the surveillance footage of the closed hours, memorized the gap between the security guards' shift changes, and borrowed Su Wangying’s work badge to copy her access permissions.

At this moment, he knelt down to untie the straps. The moment the waterproof cloth was peeled back, the coarse texture characteristic of the canvas gleamed with a cold white under the flashlight.

When he clicked on the portable ultraviolet lamp, his knuckles tightened slightly.

The 355nm wavelength blue light washed over the canvas, and sure enough, a ghostly green fluorescence surfaced in the underlying pigments—in that area always assumed to be shadow, the facial contours of the dancer were slowly rotating.

Shen Mo pulled out a protractor to compare it with the photo he had taken in the laboratory last night: the line connecting the left brow bone and the right zygomatic arch had shifted by 1.2 degrees compared to twenty-four hours ago.

"Seven nights... 8.4 degrees," he murmured the numbers, his Adam's apple bobbing.

When Su Wangying mentioned last Wednesday that she had dreamed of "the back of her neck being scalded by a gaze," it was at this exact angle.

His phone screen lit up. He pulled up the museum's surveillance playback, his finger swiping rapidly across the touchscreen—every time Su Wangying stood before the painting to give her explanation, the temperature sensor value on the right side of the screen would jump.

A sudden drop of 0.7 degrees completely overlapped with the frequency of her fingertips trembling slightly.

"It's not a coincidence." He fished out a fountain pen and scribbled rapidly in his notebook, the nib puncturing half a page of paper.

In the blue light of the ultraviolet lamp, the eye sockets of the dancer in the painting suddenly condensed into a brighter cluster of fluorescence, like something alive writhing beneath the pigment layer.

He jerked his head up. The overhead light in the storage room swayed, and within the cast shadow, the human figure on the painting seemed to have turned half its face.

"Beep—"

The vibration of his phone almost made him knock over the ultraviolet lamp.

It was a photo sent by Su Wangying: on the inside of her snow-white arm, dark red fine lines like dried oil paint outlined a dancing posture of spinning and leaping.

"Just woke up," her message followed closely behind, "Can't wipe it off, it's like it's growing inside my skin."

Shen Mo’s breathing suddenly grew heavier.

He snatched up his tool bag and rushed out of the storage room, knocking over a cleaning cart as he sprinted down the corridor, the metal bucket rolling harshly across the floor.

The door to the anatomy room rattled noisily as he jammed his key into the lock. Mouse brain tissue slices were still stuck to the microscope glass slides—samples taken yesterday from visitors who had come into contact with the painting.

***

Turpentine microcrystals glittered with fine light under the objective lens. When superimposed with the scanning results of Su Wangying's skin residue, his temples throbbed violently.

The volatilization curves of the two substances completely overlapped, like two oscillators pulled by the same string. "Duplication..." he muttered the word repeatedly, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end—not an influence, but a transfer.

Her body was turning into a new medium.

Director Lin's call came through at this moment: "Found Old Gu. He's at the suburban nursing home, says he has something he must tell you face to face."

Old Gu's hands shook even more violently than Elder Cheng's.

When Director Lin helped him sit down on the chair in the anatomy room, the old man's knuckles hooked into the gaps of the wooden chair, his fingertips still stained with yellowish spots of aged turpentine. "It was fifty years ago," he stared at the anatomical chart on the wall, his Adam's apple moving, "We were painting the backstage group portrait, counted out sixteen characters, but every time we mixed the paints, there was one extra."

Shen Mo stopped his pen from recording: "An extra one?"

"That faceless spot." Old Gu fished a yellowed sketch from his breast pocket, the edges curled with burn marks, "The day after it was finished, it blurred, as if someone had wiped it with a damp cloth. I secretly wrote it down on the back of the sketch..." He flipped the paper over, faded pencil words squeezed into the corner: *She doesn't want to be recognized, she only wants to be seen.*

Shen Mo's pupils shrank to pinpricks.

In the sketch, the dancer held a silver dance shoe pendant in her right hand—when Su Wangying described her dream last week, she said that while dancing, "something cool was dangling and swaying" around her ankle.

He pulled out his phone and flipped through Su Wangying's photos. In the profile of the young woman bending over before the display case, there was indeed a very faint silver-white reflection around her ankle, which he had previously dismissed as light refraction.

"Director Chen is going to move the painting to the main exhibition hall," Director Lin interjected suddenly. "The meeting was held this afternoon. He said, 'The value of art lies precisely in carrying pain.'"

Shen Mo's fountain pen snapped in two with a crisp *crack*.

At eleven o'clock that night, he appeared in the temporary storage room once more.

The miniature vibration sensor on the back of the painting frame grew hot beneath his fingertips, its red indicator light flashing every three seconds.

Curator Chen's persistence was like a thorn stuck between his ribs—this stubborn old curator always treated the museum like a church, unaware that what they were worshiping might be a living creature waking up.

At 3:17 AM, the alarm of the sensor pierced the silence.

Shen Mo jolted up from the cot in the anatomy room. On the surveillance screen, the vibration frequency curve was fluctuating at a rhythm of 13.7 Hz.

He pulled up Su Wangying's electroencephalogram records; the theta wave waveforms overlapped perfectly—brain waves that only appeared during deep sleep were now transmitting from the canvas fibers.

What made his blood run even colder was the shape of the waveform.

He traced it on paper with a red pen, the lines spiraling upward and suddenly breaking at the 13th segment—precisely the location where Su Wangying repeatedly said she "couldn't remember the final step."

***

"It's completing itself," he said to the empty air, his voice hoarse.

The shadowless lamp in the anatomy room turned on at four in the morning.

The mouse brain tissue was sliced wafer-thin. The tip of Shen Mo's tweezers hovered above the glass slide, and the scene under the microscope almost made him overturn the culture dish: between the neural synapses, extremely fine pigment deposits were arranging themselves into miniature dancer silhouettes.

The posture of each silhouette was different, yet they all pointed in the same direction—the position of the faceless dancer in the painting.

His phone vibrated on the operation console; it was a video sent by Director Lin.

In the reflection of the museum's exterior glass wall, the faces of all the "audience members" had turned toward the direction of the temporary storage room.

The central dancer silhouette raised its hand, its fingertips pointing vaguely toward the window of Su Wangying's dormitory, casting spiderweb-like cracks upon the glass.

"It's not waiting for an audience..." Shen Mo's voice caught in his throat. He slammed the sample box shut, glass and metal colliding with a crisp sound.

The sky outside the window was beginning to turn pale.

He grabbed his coat and rushed out the door, a scalpel pressing hard against his thigh from inside his pocket.

The light in Su Wangying's dormitory was still on. Through the window, she could be seen sitting on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the oil paint trace on her left arm.

As the morning mist rolled in, he heard the notification chime of a text message on his phone—it was from Dr. Zhou at the municipal hospital: *Wangying's EEG monitoring shows abnormally high-frequency oscillations, suggest considering short-term electroconvulsive intervention...*

Shen Mo's footsteps paused at the top of the stairwell.

The wind fluttered the hem of his white lab coat, revealing the work badge pinned to the inner layer, the metal plate gleaming coldly in the morning mist.

In the distance came the sound of the museum opening its doors, the exclamation of some visitor mingling with the smell of turpentine drifting over: "Look at that painting! The dancer's face seems to have turned around..."

He pulled out his phone, stared at Dr. Zhou's message for three seconds, and then quickly swiped to Su Wangying's chat window.

"Don't come near the storage room tonight" popped into the input box, which he then deleted, changing it to: "Wait for me, I'm bringing breakfast."

The moment the send button was pressed, a crisp sound of shattering glass came from the direction of the anatomy room.

He jerked his head around and saw that on the laboratory window, a dark red trace was oozing downward along the glass, shaped hauntingly like the dance steps on Su Wangying's arm.