Chapter 54 - Who is this dance for?

The pungent smell of disinfectant from the anatomy room still lingered in his nasal passages, and Shen Mo's white lab coat was chilled by the morning mist.

He stared at the dark red trace on the laboratory window, his Adam's apple bobbing—the arc of that trace matched the concluding stroke of the oil paint on Su Wangying's left arm with absolute precision.

His phone vibrated in his palm, and Dr. Zhou's text message was still glowing: "Late-stage artistic dissociation; electroconvulsive therapy is the most direct intervention."

Clutching his phone, he rushed toward the elevator. The moment the metal doors closed, his knuckles pressed gently against the inner wall of the elevator and trembled slightly.

Dissociation?

Last week, when administering neuropsychological tests to Su Wangying, she had accurately recounted the silk material of *Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival*, the differences in ink tones between Ming Dynasty imitations and the original, and could even recite passages about pine soot ink from the *Tiangong Kaiwu*.

With such clarity of consciousness, how could this possibly be dissociation?

"Dr. Zhou, I need you in my office right now," he pressed the call button, his voice colder than usual. "Bring Su Wangying's electroencephalographic monitoring reports."

The consultation room at the municipal hospital smelled faintly of coffee.

Dr. Zhou pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses and spread out a stack of brainwave graphs. "Look at this high-frequency oscillation. It matches the pre-stage of creative schizophrenia in artists I've seen precisely.

Their brains tend to over-empathize with the medium of creation, until finally..."

"Until they turn themselves into a part of the medium," Shen Mo interrupted, his fingertip tapping against a photocopy of Su Wangying's handwritten notes. "But didn't you notice these?" He pulled out the topmost sheet—a sticky note where Su Wangying recorded the progress of museum artifact restoration. The handwriting was as neat as printed text, yet at the very end, there was an extra counterclockwise arc, as though someone had pulled the pen tip in a half-circle with an invisible hand.

The second sheet, the third sheet... Seven days of notes, and the periods at the end of every single one were elongated into such arcs.

Dr. Zhou leaned in closer, his pupils contracting slightly behind his lenses. "This is..."

"Her writing action has been hijacked." Shen Mo opened his own notebook, which contained a rubbing of the faceless dancer's skirt from the painting. "The curvature is an exact match for this drag mark.

It's not that she's sick; something is borrowing her hand to complete itself." He grabbed his phone and pulled up the surveillance video sent by Director Lin. "Look at this."

Director Lin had slowed the surveillance footage down to 0.25x speed.

Su Wangying walked past the exhibition hall holding a stack of artifact registration logs. The previously static spectators in the painting slowly turned their eyeballs, like marionettes pulled by strings, until her figure completely vanished from the frame, at which point those pupils froze back into a dead, fish-like gray.

Even stranger were the folds of the faceless dancer's skirt—yesterday, Su Wangying had worn a moon-white cheongsam, and the pleats in the painting gained several smooth, cascading folds; the day before, she had worn a plaid shirt-dress, and the creases of the skirt transformed into fine, fragmented plaid shadows.

"It is imitating her." Shen Mo's voice sounded like shattering ice. "The afterimage is not a one-way projection; it's a dynamic copy that requires feedback.

Just like..." He suddenly stopped, his gaze landing on his own reflection in Dr. Zhou's coffee cup—the reflection on the lenses precisely outlined the silhouette of the dancer from the painting.

"Get Xiaozhou," he grabbed his coat abruptly. "The descendant of the deaf-mute student who can read lips."

When Director Lin pushed open the door to the museum's temporary storage room, the smell of turpentine mixed with mold rushed out.

Xiaozhou sat on a wooden stool in front of the painting, wearing an off-white sweater, her fingers unconsciously twisting her cuffs.

A miniature brainwave monitor was attached behind her ear, the wires trailing down her neck into Director Lin's laptop.

Three hours passed, the brainwave curves on the computer screen remaining as flat as a mirror.

Until the slanted light of the setting sun cut across the exhibition hall, illuminating the fingertips of the dancer in the painting, Xiaozhou's fingers suddenly moved.

Her right hand lifted to her jaw, thumb pressed against her index finger, the other three fingers slightly spread—this was the sign language gesture for "look."

After repeating it thirteen times, the final gesture changed: palm facing upward, index finger gently tapping her chest—"substitute."

"She's speaking," Director Lin said, his voice tight. "The lip-reading is 'Look at me,' and then 'Replace me.'"

Shen Mo's breath stalled abruptly.

He rushed into the anatomy room and pulled up the video from Su Wangying's dream recorder, playing the rapid eye movement phase frame by frame: her lips parted and closed in the dark, her Adam's apple vibrating slightly, matching the rhythm of Xiaozhou's gestures down to the smallest detail.

"Linguistic encoding," he grabbed a pen and scribbled wildly on the whiteboard. "The obsession completed its linguistic translation through visual transmission.

That's why Su Wangying couldn't remember the final step, because that step was 'Replace me,' which requires another vessel."

Late at night, Su Wangying's dormitory smelled faintly of rust.

When Shen Mo pushed the door open, he saw Su Wangying standing in front of the dressing room mirror, gripping a tube of red pigment in her left hand while her right arm painted across the mirror surface.

Her movements were as mechanical as a marionette's, every single stroke precisely replicating the thirteenth dance step of the dancer in the painting.

Yet her reflection in the mirror moved half a beat faster than she did, as if another person were dancing pressed tightly against her back.

"Wangying?" he called out softly.

She did not turn back.

The tube of paint slipped from her hand, rolling across the tiles and leaving a red smear.

Shen Mo noticed that her pupils were dilated, her whites webbed with red veins, yet strangely and piercingly bright—as if her senses had been forcibly pried open by something.

"It needs to be understood," he said suddenly.

Director Lin flashed out from behind the door, holding a tape recorder.

Shen Mo took it and pressed play—thirteen different types of applause blended together, sounding like a disturbed swarm of bees.

"Xiaozhou will stand in front of the painting tomorrow," he murmured close to Su Wangying's ear. "She can't hear the applause, so she won't resonate with it.

If 'being seen' is the obsession..."

"You are not allowed to disobey!" Su Wangying suddenly screamed.

Her voice sounded as though it had been abraded by sandpaper, carrying the piercing friction of grinding metal.

The reflection in the mirror continued to dance, while her own body stiffened like a statue, only her eyeballs rolling frantically. "She said... she said the thirteenth movement isn't yet..."

With a sharp *snap*.

The screen of Shen Mo's phone lit up with a message from Lin Yan: "I found my aunt's old diary. Tucked inside was a ticket stub for a dance drama titled *The Unfinished*." When he looked up, he saw the reflection in the mirror raise its hand, fingertips pointing vaguely toward the location of his phone—at the wrist of the reflection, a dark red trace was slowly dripping down the glass, shaped hauntingly like the dance steps on Su Wangying's arm.