Chapter 6: The First Step Toward Friendship
The girl in the painting, who called herself Irene, was locked in a wide-eyed standoff with Yu Sheng. Neither of them blinked, both silently sizing up the other, the tension between them thick enough to cut with a knife. It was clear as day that neither of them trusted the other.
Yu Sheng couldn’t be sure whether this “girl in the painting” was telling the truth or not. She resembled something out of a curse, and her talk of mysterious places like Alice’s Little House and being trapped inside a painting was all too strange. He didn’t believe her for a second when she claimed not to know why she was in the house.
On the other side of things, Irene seemed just as wary of Yu Sheng. Her eyes kept flicking nervously toward his lighter, clearly suspicious that he was plotting to set her on fire.
“I still think you bought the painting yourself, hung it up, and then completely forgot about it,” Irene insisted for what felt like the hundredth time. “Humans do that, you know. You find something strange, think it’s worth collecting, then you buy it and just leave it there to gather dust.”
Her words made Yu Sheng pause. He couldn’t completely dismiss the idea. After all, he had only been living in this house for two months, and much of it was still a mystery to him. He wasn’t just unfamiliar with the house—he was unfamiliar with himself. Who knew what this place had been like before he arrived?
Could there have been another “Yu Sheng” before him?
The thought flashed briefly through his mind but quickly passed. He focused again on the crimson-eyed girl in the painting and shook his head. “That’s impossible,” he said firmly. “Anyone can see at a glance that this painting is expensive. There’s no way I could afford something like this.”
“Well, maybe it was really cheap?” Irene scooted forward, hugging her teddy bear tighter. “These days, there are so many fakes—vases, fans, paintings. Maybe the last owner got me as part of a bulk deal. You know, two and a half yuan per kilogram or something like that. Or maybe the seller didn’t know what I was really worth…”