Chapter 57 – It Is the Viewer Who Creates the Painting

The cold light of the glass curtain wall seeped into the dissection room amidst the dusk. Shen Mo stared at the silhouette of Su Wangying's face outside the window, a fine sheen of sweat breaking out on the back of his neck.

When his phone vibrated for the third time on the metal workbench, he finally wiped his face with the sleeve of his lab coat, grabbed the phone, and pressed the answer button.

"Forensic Pathologist Shen, this is Dr. Zhou," the psychiatrist consultant's voice sounded as if it had been dipped in ice water. "Have you looked at the EEG report in the anonymous email?"

Shen Mo's thumb unconsciously rubbed the edge of the laboratory mouse sample box. "I haven't."

"You'd better look at it now." Dr. Zhou sent the file directly. "Three volunteers who participated in the 'Silent Exhibition Night' have theta wave residual levels exceeding the normal value by 27%. They said they keep repeating tiptoeing and spinning movements in their dreams recently. This morning, a girl used lipstick as pigment to draw red circles all over her dorm wall—just like the marks on Curator Su's wrist."

Shen Mo's pupils contracted slightly.

He remembered when he was giving Su Wangying a skin test this morning, that pale pink mark glowed faintly under the Wood's lamp, as if branded into the dermis by some kind of pigment.

"You're going to suggest electroconvulsive therapy again."

"This is the safest intervention method." Dr. Zhou's breathing came through the earpiece. "Those residual brainwaves simply don't conform to neuroscientific laws. If we drag this out—"

"Drag it out," Shen Mo interrupted him. "I need time." He turned, pulled open the refrigerator, and took out a sealed bag containing wood shavings from the picture frame. "Electroconvulsive therapy will disrupt the delicate connections of the nerve synapses. What I want is evidence, not a clean brain."

There was silence on the other end of the line for two seconds. "You'd better not regret this."

Before hanging up, Shen Mo heard the sound of pages turning from Dr. Zhou's end, like someone leafing through a medical record.

He ignored it further, turned to call up the museum visitor system, and his fingertips tapped rapidly on the keyboard.

The visitor registration log from the past seven days unfolded on the screen. He marked the names of those showing symptoms one by one, then suddenly paused—next to all the names marked with an asterisk, the duration of stay column all displayed "13:21", "13:47", "13:09".

"Thirteen minutes," he muttered the number, remembering that the original dance drama *Song in the Mirror* had a total duration of exactly 13 minutes and 17 seconds.

The scalpel spun half a circle in his fingertips. He suddenly grabbed his coat and rushed out the door; the hallway draft whipped the hem of his lab coat, making it feel as if something were pushing him along from behind.

Director Lin's editing room was on the basement level of the museum. The door was ajar, and the humming of equipment came from within.

When Shen Mo pushed open the door, he saw Director Lin staring at the computer screen, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

"Captain Shen, look!" Director Lin pressed the projection button, and the light spots of the exhibition hall surveillance footage danced on the wall. "I've superimposed and overlapped the gaze data of all the viewers—"

The image suddenly froze.

It was a dancer's contour composed of countless light spots: the head was the fixation point of high-frequency blinking, the torso was formed by those who lingered for more than 13 minutes, and the limbs were light spots swept by peripheral vision.

The most bizarre thing was that in the center of the contour, there was a blank area the size of an egg, as if someone had precisely hollowed it out.

"This is Xiao Zhou's position," Director Lin's voice trembled. "She didn't look at the painting at all that day; she kept staring at the audience. That's why the data doesn't fit her."

Shen Mo's Adam's apple bobbed.

He recalled how Xiao Zhou looked when signing in sign language, her fingers writing slowly in the air, every single stroke exceedingly slow, exceedingly slow.

"Pull up another set of control experiment data," he said. "Group A knew there was a secret in the painting, while Group B treated it as a regular exhibit."

Three days later, the experimental results lay on the dissection table.

Among the five case files in Group A, the fountain pen handwriting in three began to deviate at the thirteenth character, and the skin on the backs of two showed micro-tremors under specific frequency flashes—completely matching the pigment ring on Su Wangying's wrist and the deposition in the brainstem of the lab mouse.

"The painting isn't picking people," Shen Mo drew an arrow on the white board with a red pen. "The people who 'want to understand' actively opened the door for their obsession."

At this moment, in the museum exhibition hall, Xiao Zhou was standing in front of that group portrait oil painting once again.

She did not look at the painting; instead, she turned to face the audience, her pale fingers slowly signing in front of her chest: "You thought you were watching her... but she was also watching you. Everyone who wants to 'understand' is adding a stroke to the painting."

The overhead lights flashed twice.

The projection on the wall lit up without warning, dense layers of handprint contours overlapping, like countless people touching the void in this exact spot.

A man wearing a duck-bill cap instinctively stepped back, his lower back hitting the display case, and the glass gave a crisp sound—the sound like a fine needle piercing into Shen Mo's nerves.

He rushed into the archive room at one in the morning, the musty smell of old newspapers stinging his eyes so he could hardly open them.

The kraft paper cover of the fire record turned yellow under the desk lamp. When he flipped to the 1987 theater fire scene diagram, his fountain pen dropped onto the desk with a "啪" (snap).

On the audience seating chart, the coordinates of the blank area in the center completely overlapped with the vacant position in Director Lin's data.

The remark column next to it read: "Dance choreography assistant Chen Sui, daily designated observation seat."

"She didn't want to be seen," Shen Mo said to the empty air, his voice hoarse. "She wanted to become 'the one who watches'."

The wind of three o'clock in the morning poured into the dormitory building. When Shen Mo crashed open the door of Su Wangying's dormitory, all the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

The desk lamp was on. In the warm yellow light, Su Wangying was hunched over the desk, furiously painting. Red ink had soaked through three pages of paper as she muttered, "It's my turn to choreograph this time... This time I'll make everyone see clearly..."

He rushed forward to snatch the pen. The moment his fingertips touched her wrist, that pale pink mark suddenly turned blazing red, as if ignited from beneath the skin by something.

The diary was flipped open. On the blank space of the previous page, a line of crooked little words had appeared at some unknown point, written as if with her non-dominant hand: "You've started drawing too, haven't you?"

Su Wangying suddenly looked up, her eyes abnormally bright: "A'mo, look, how obedient these shadows are... As long as I draw, they will move..."

Car horns blared from outside the window, and Shen Mo realized he was trembling.

He grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around her. His phone vibrated in his pocket—a message from the museum's administrative department: "Curator Chen announced a press conference will be held tomorrow at nine o'clock, themed..."

He didn't finish reading, raising his head to look out the window.

The museum's glass curtain wall emitted a cold light in the dark. The dancer's silhouette with Su Wangying's face was raising her right hand, her fingertips pointing vaguely toward the art gallery at the other end of the city—where seven exhibits covered in red cloth in the display cases were waiting for the moment to be unveiled.