Art Gallery

Chapter 27

She was enormous.

There's always been a massive size gap between humans and birds — which is why a pet bird can be strangled to death by a person, even a child, even a frail woman.

That was the implicit power dynamic between them and this woman now.

'Two little birds!' The woman's hand plunged into the cage. She shattered the window they'd broken open and lunged for them.

At this scale, her hand was anything but delicate — her red nail polish chipped and vivid, like fresh blood.

Zhou Xiangzhe grabbed Shen Wang and pulled him clear of her reach. They bolted out of the room. The living room outside was unrecognizable — sofa and TV both gone, leaving nothing but row after row of birdcages and a hollow staircase.

Creak, creak. Every window bricked up with red mortar began to shudder, and one by one they were shoved inward from outside.

The woman kept tearing out windows and doors with her hands, pressing her eyes to each gap to peer inside.

'There you are. I see you.'

'Little birds, don't run.'

She giggled, hands probing through every opening, trying to grab them.

'You have to hand it to her.' Shen Wang dodged another torn-out window and kept moving alongside Zhou Xiangzhe. 'Three-story house is a three-story cage. Woman has a thing for tormenting birds. The birds bricked up the windows so she wouldn't find them — and the moment she does, she goes after them, gouges out their eyes.'

'What kind of unhinged artistic vision is this.'

What made it worse was that Hundred Eyes' Contamination Talent was exactly Painting Made Real — turning this deranged artistic vision into reality.

They ended up tucked into the gap beneath the staircase, a blind spot that blocked every window. Even her reaching hands couldn't get to them here.

Zhou Xiangzhe found himself at a loss too.

Ten years on the job, more contaminants than he could count. The only oversized one he'd dealt with before was a tree-form: three meters tall, trailing weeping-willow branches all over its body like a possessed tree, every branch able to snatch a person on contact and drag them off for nutrients.

But this woman dwarfed even that. The three-story building barely cleared her knees — it was a birdcage.

The sheer size difference made most attack options useless.

'So what now? Can you take her down?' Shen Wang frowned, watching a hand bigger than he was sweep through the air.

This was genuinely beyond anything he'd anticipated.

'Wide-area weapons might work, but we don't have any. And even if we did, aiming would be the problem.' Zhou Xiangzhe answered. 'She's outside the cage, we're inside it. These windows and doors are the only connection between the two spaces, and they only fit her arm.'

Everyone knows that hitting someone's hand with a rock is nowhere near as effective as hitting their head.

Shen Wang listened to her hands rummaging through the gaps and kept frowning. 'So we just wait here until she gets tired of looking?'

'We could actually split up,' Zhou Xiangzhe said. 'Our advantage is that there are two of us and only one of her.'

'One of us draws her attention and leads her to the other side. The other goes upstairs to look for the portrait — the one that disappeared. It probably has more uses.'

Shen Wang rose to one knee and stood. 'Then let's figure out who's on distraction duty and who goes for the painting.'

Zhou Xiangzhe nodded, but then stopped short, something thoughtful flickering in his golden eyes.

'Why aren't you saying anything?'

'I think we missed something...' Zhou Xiangzhe said. 'Where did the woman go?'

Shen Wang glanced toward the staircase where the giant woman was pressed against the window. 'You mean her?'

'Yes and no.' Zhou Xiangzhe got to his feet too. 'I mean the weak, selfish woman from that story. We've killed her twice and she's come back twice. She even changed into a new outfit before we broke the window and asked us if it looked nice.'

'Where did she go?'

Shen Wang understood what Zhou Xiangzhe meant this time.

After the giant woman appeared, they'd linked the fragile woman inside to the woman outside the cage — because they were the same person. But even so, one lived inside the cage and the other lived outside it.

'The mother plays two roles,' Zhou Xiangzhe thought out loud. 'One is the ruler outside the cage. She decides the fate of the birds inside, takes out all her resentment on them.'

'The other is locked in the cage just like the birds — too weak and powerless to fight back, only able to be hurt. And yet she's the one who locked herself in.'

'She's still in here!'

'Hee hee.'

The woman's eerie laugh rose at exactly that moment. Shen Wang turned — and there she was, standing beside the staircase, the very woman they'd just been talking about.

She still wore that moon-white dress. Her wrists looked thin enough to snap with a touch. She lay draped over the foot of the stairs, watching them with hollow, languid eyes.

'Are you playing hide-and-seek with Mama?'

'Oh, I knew you could never really hate Mama.'

The woman smiled. Her voice was impossibly soft — but in that moment it merged with the voice of the woman outside the cage, the two sounds becoming one.

'Mama found you.'

'Found the little birds!'

A massive hand burst through the window and seized the staircase. Zhou Xiangzhe shot the woman point-blank.

The fragile woman smiled as she went down, collapsing onto the stairs, blood running down the steps. Her smile in those last moments was blissful and wrong — as if her whole purpose in existing was to die.

The staircase was ripped away by the woman outside. The enormous hand came swinging down at them.

They moved again — but the woman inside the cage revived and reappeared in front of them.

That was the point of the endless revival.

'A child must stay with Mama forever!' The woman inside raised her hands, staring at Shen Wang with feverish intensity.

'Child, Mama loves you. We'll live here together!'

'Look — this is the paradise Mama built for you!'

'It's not a cage. It's our home!'

Zhou Xiangzhe shot her again.

'We stick to the plan.' He talked as he moved. 'I'll draw the woman outside. You go up and find the portrait. For some reason the woman inside is fixated on you, so there's a chance the woman outside will follow her after you — watch yourself.'

As he spoke, Zhou Xiangzhe reached into his pocket, pulled out a piece of candy, and pressed it into Shen Wang's hand. 'By the time you finish this one, I'll come find you.'

'No need to go that far.' Shen Wang said, calm as ever. 'She needs time to revive. As long as I kill her the instant she appears and keep moving, it won't be a problem.'

Zhou Xiangzhe listened and nodded. 'Good.'

'I'm more and more convinced you're an exceptional dispatch team member.'

Then Zhou Xiangzhe left, and within seconds Shen Wang heard the woman scream.

After the scream came a sound of pure rage.

One of the birds in the cage had pecked her — a little pet whose life and death she controlled had dared to fight back. So she wanted to punish the bird that had bitten her.

Shen Wang set off too.

He drew his sidearm as he walked, clicked off the safety, and the moment a moon-white shadow appeared in front of him he fired. The bullet punched through the woman's body. She didn't have time for a single word before she hit the floor.

Shen Wang stepped over the spreading bloodstain, expression blank, and headed upstairs.

After putting her down, Shen Wang peeled back the wrapper and put the candy in his mouth. He'd eaten too many sweets without a drop of water and his mouth felt dry and parched, the sweetness cloying in a way that almost stung. He wanted something else — a bite of bitter chocolate, or just some water.

He climbed the stairs to the second floor. The windows up here had all been torn out by the woman outside, but there was no portrait.

Wind drifted in through the empty frames, setting the small hanging birdcages swaying. They knocked together with a clear, bright ring of metal on metal.

And at that moment, every bird in every cage rose from the cage floor. Their eyes were bloody, gaping holes — but every single one was facing Shen Wang's direction.

'Why haven't you turned into a bird?'

'Why are you different? Why do you still get to stand here like that?'

'You have to become like us!'

Each bird let out a ragged, hoarse cry, their voices soaked in resentment. A heavy wave of Contamination rolled off them.

This painting held two contaminants. One was the Mother — ruler outside the cage and self-imprisoned wraith within it. The other was The Caged Birds — creatures that had tried to flee the Mother's cruelty only to have their eyes gouged out and be stuffed back into cages, their overwhelming resentment giving rise to a contaminant no weaker than the Mother herself.

Shen Wang watched the birds. His pupils slowly bled red.

He asked, 'Are you chocolate-flavored?'

'Can I have a taste?'

Thorns erupted from the floorboards in every direction.

These birdcages filled all three floors, and even a Grade S Aberrant like Zhou Xiangzhe would've struggled to clear them all — but Shen Wang was a different matter. The parasitic Contamination of the Blood Thorns far exceeded whatever the cages held.

'You'd better hope you taste like chocolate.'

Shen Wang murmured under his breath, 'Useless to begin with, and on top of that you taste bad? That's just pathetic.'

Blood Thorns wrapped around every cage, their spines driving into the birds' bodies and pinning them to the cage floors — not that it mattered much, since the birds were already dead Aberration contaminants. Leaving them here was more symbolic than anything else, not so different from the roomful of portraits in the first painting.

Nothing that could give him energy.

Shen Wang let out a quiet sigh. Using his Talent had made him hungrier.

Crack. He lost control and bit down on the candy, grinding it apart against his teeth, the sweetness so sharp it made him frown.

And yet even so, he couldn't help wanting more, and more—

He reined in the urge to keep chewing and kept going upstairs.

It was on the third floor that he finally found what he'd come for: the portrait of the woman, still hanging in the living room.

The woman in the painting sat in her chair, same as ever, the cage resting neatly across her knees. The two blurry birds inside were still there too. She smiled at Shen Wang — bright and full — as if the two little birds brought her enormous pleasure.

Shen Wang swallowed the last fragments of candy.

He wondered if this painting was edible. Whether he could take a bite.

Maybe it would taste like chocolate.

/

After devouring the Deer God, Zhou Xiangzhe's approach to killing contaminants had fundamentally changed. He could no longer use Devour to swallow contaminants below his own level outright.

So most of the time Zhou Xiangzhe used the firearms issued by the Anti-Contamination Center. Only occasionally did he need another approach.

Sure, he could draw on fragments of the Deer God's Contamination Talent — but that was a Contamination Talent, which meant it was a contaminant's ability used against humans. Deploy it and it wouldn't just hit the contaminant: teammates would get caught in it too. So he reserved that particular ability for when he was alone, face to face with a contaminant.

His blood also carried the Deer God's Contamination. He kept it under control, but it was a method that cost him nearly as much as it cost the enemy. A bleeding attack wasn't something he should reach for lightly.

At the moment, though, he couldn't see a better option.

Zhou Xiangzhe bit open his finger and let blood drip onto one of the window frames the woman outside had smashed open. Sure enough, once the blood hit, the woman inside stopped trying to reach through that window.

Running upstairs, Zhou Xiangzhe thought: if only his old Talent still worked.

Devour — an ability with no entry in the Science Academy's records until Zhou Xiangzhe awoke it. Once documented, it ranked near the top of Grade S Talents for sheer, absolute elimination.

The Science Academy believed the Talent Zhou Xiangzhe awakened was tied to his mental state at the time.

He'd awakened inside a Grade-S Contamination Source, the agony of losing the orphanage searing through him, and that pain had given birth to this singular ability — one built entirely to counter Contamination. The Science Academy had even launched a large-scale investigation on that basis, ultimately concluding that Aberrants who survived high-level contamination zones or high-level contaminants tended to emerge at higher grades.

Ming Guang had made his thoughts on that conclusion very clear: that sounds like absolute garbage dressed up in academic language.

Anyone who survived a high-level contamination zone or a high-level contaminant was already exceptional to begin with. The reason their grades were higher was simply that everyone weaker didn't make it out!

That's pure survivorship bias!

Zhou Xiangzhe reached the second floor at a run and found neither Shen Wang nor the portrait — just Blood Thorns, wriggling across every surface.

They'd coiled around the birdcages, occasionally letting a small tendril dangle and sway, and they looked, somehow, deeply content.

Zhou Xiangzhe frowned slightly. He didn't have time to deal with the thorns right now — he needed to find Shen Wang.

He wove through the thorns and climbed to the third floor, where he finally found both Shen Wang and the painting.

Shen Wang had his back to him, standing in the middle of the living room. Zhou Xiangzhe could see he was holding the portrait — but the way he was holding it didn't look like he was examining it.

It looked more like... he was about to put it in his mouth.

Hm?!

He moved fast, grabbed Shen Wang from behind before he could bite down, and pressed a hand over his slightly-parted lips.

'You can't eat that.' Zhou Xiangzhe said. 'You can't eat strange things.'

Shen Wang turned and glanced back at him, a faint red seeping into the black of his eyes.

The candy had stopped working. Hunger was spreading through him again, and right in front of him was a contaminant that could take the edge off.

'Not your business.'

'You'll regret it.' Zhou Xiangzhe said. 'No matter how hungry you are, you can't eat a contaminant.'

'The Contamination is the lesser problem. Shen Wang, you're a person. People don't eat things like this.'

Except he wasn't a person. He never had been.

Shen Wang grabbed Zhou Xiangzhe's arm. Zhou Xiangzhe wrestled the painting out of his grip. Shen Wang watched his food disappear in real time — but the next moment, a length of thorn dropped from the ceiling, snatched the painting from Zhou Xiangzhe's hands at terrifying speed, and was gone.

It was the second time those little things had taken something from Zhou Xiangzhe. This time he didn't go after it. All his attention was on Shen Wang.

Shen Wang felt Zhou Xiangzhe's grip and found it almost funny.

'I'll bite you again.'

'Go ahead.' Zhou Xiangzhe answered. 'Human blood is a filthy thing, and I wouldn't normally recommend biting people. But right now I'd say human blood is considerably cleaner than a contaminant. If you really need something to grind your teeth on, bite me — at least I can keep you safe.'

And then Shen Wang actually laughed.

'Are you like this with everyone?'

Zhou Xiangzhe thought: because it's you. My little fifteen.

How could I let you get hurt again.

Shen Wang didn't actually expect an answer. He glanced toward the window beside them — the red bricks over the frame were shifting. The woman outside had pushed the window open, her black eyes pressing against it, watching them.

They'd been spotted.

'Even if my head wasn't on straight, I wouldn't bite a contaminant.' Shen Wang said. 'Disgusting.'

Zhou Xiangzhe didn't let go of him, but he didn't deny anything either.

Shen Wang watched the woman outside, a faint smile on his face — the kind that made him look completely certain of himself.

'I just thought of something.' Shen Wang said. 'Every painting connects to eyes. Every one also connects to something Hundred Eyes lived through.'

'The first painting was a fantasy about the hospital — the one she imagined after losing her eyes in the accident, the place that would treat her so she could paint again. So what's this painting?'

'A weak, controlling mother who only ever took her frustration out on her.' Shen Wang watched the woman outside thread her arm through the window. 'So in this painting, what does painting mean to Hundred Eyes?'

Zhou Xiangzhe answered, quiet and even: 'Purpose.'

'A reason to keep living inside the cage her mother built.'

'Exactly.'

The Blood Thorns dropped from the ceiling and, just as the woman outside tried to grab them, flung the portrait straight into her outstretched hand.

'Painting was the only tool Hundred Eyes had to fight back against her mother's control and this cage.'

In an endless stretch of suffering, under the shadow that her family cast over everything, painting was the only time she was truly herself. It was the one thing that gave her a reason to keep going — the single light in her life.

And only while she was painting could she escape her mother entirely.

The woman outside let out a wretched shriek. The hand that touched the painting began to dissolve. Red nails fell away and scattered on the ground. She tried to pull her arm back, but the whole cage was coming apart — and so, in a panic, she reached for the cage she herself had built, trying to hold it together.

'No!' She kept grabbing for the cage. 'Don't go!'

'Don't disappear!'

'Mama loves you! Mama really loves you!'

'We have to be together forever!'

Outside, the overexposed white light that had been burning beyond the walls finally broke through as the walls and cages collapsed. The glare was so intense Shen Wang shut his eyes on instinct.

The woman's wretched sobbing grew fainter and fainter. She cried so hard — as if she truly were weeping for her own child.

When he opened his eyes again, her weeping still echoed faintly in his mind, but the damp smell of earth around him told Shen Wang: they were out.

Zhou Xiangzhe quietly let out a breath beside his ear.

He released Shen Wang from behind.

'Sorry. I jumped to conclusions about the eating thing.'

Shen Wang glanced at him. 'So would you still let me bite you?'

Zhou Xiangzhe looked at him. A long moment passed before he spoke. 'Why do you have a habit of biting people?'

Shen Wang thought: he didn't have a biting habit. He didn't bite people or anything else — it was just that Zhou Xiangzhe was different. He was a person, but he had a Grade-S contaminant inside him, which was why Shen Wang's episodes came on earlier than they should, and why he couldn't stop himself from wanting to take a bite.

'Didn't you say you trust me a hundred percent? So why does this need a question?'

There was something playful in his tone.

Zhou Xiangzhe went quiet for a moment. He could hardly say: because I genuinely don't know the answer.

'Knowing your teammates is also a captain's job.'

It's just a nibble. Do it enough times and it stops being a big deal.

'Because your face is interesting when you get bitten.' Shen Wang decided to tell a harmless little joke. 'The stoic guardian of Central City — and yet when he gets bitten, he holds back every reflex he has, frowns through it, talks himself down, and then tells me it's fine. Don't you think a person like that is just asking to be messed with?'

Zhou Xiangzhe: ...

What was there to say? He knew Shen Wang was joking...

But somehow he got the distinct feeling he was dealing with a cat — the kind that spots a very patient, very obliging human and immediately bites them and swipes a paw at them just because it can.

And what could the patient, obliging human do? Just let the cat bite.

'Don't bite people in front of others.' That was all Zhou Xiangzhe could say in the end. 'It gets you reported and hauled in for containment screening.'

He added, 'Only mentally unstable Aberrants bite people out of nowhere.'

'Then I'll give you a heads-up next time.' Shen Wang, unbothered as ever. 'A warning in advance means it's not out of nowhere.'

Zhou Xiangzhe, with his mild but persistent distaste for unhygienic things, sighed.

He really wanted to ask: little fifteen, do you have to bite people?

It's really not sanitary.