Chapter 713: Tenants of the Red Building

Unlike abstractionism or idealism, Zhu Li's two drawings were starkly realistic. They were simple pencil sketches, yet rendered with the clarity of high-resolution photographs.

That was precisely what made them so unsettling.

The mere thought that something so twisted and morbid existed right in the middle of our everyday lives made my scalp prickle.

"Did you make these two drawings up, or did you sketch them from something real?" I asked, my brows furrowed and my gaze heavier than ever.

"Some things in this world cannot be captured by a camera lens. You can only see them with your own eyes, under very specific circumstances." Zhu Li looked deeply satisfied with his artwork, his eyes so webbed with bloodshot veins they looked ready to burst. "I saw them, and I used my hands to recreate their true forms."

An intoxicated look crept over his face as he brushed the back of his hand across the lines on the paper, gentle as a man caressing a lover's cheek. "Have you ever seen people like this? They are natural-born art—stripped of their filthy flesh, walking the world as pure souls."

"A human soul would never be this ugly." I studied Zhu Li's drawings. Whether it was the short, scrawny figure covered in bite marks and scars, or the fat one with its internal organs hanging outside its body, both of these "things" overturned everything I knew about souls. The reason was simple: they were hideous, far uglier than any of the vengeful spirits or malicious ghosts I had ever encountered.

"Denying it changes nothing. They grow straight out of the human heart—they are the purest form of art." Zhu Li's voice shifted as he shot me a glance. "You wouldn't understand. You only see the surface, with no idea what it actually means. Skull goblets, human-skin lampshades, and all those other things hailed as the pinnacle of cruelty don't even begin to compare to them."

"Art is supposed to bring people beauty and comfort. What you're talking about is just a sickness." I couldn't stomach another word from Zhu Li. The more he talked, the further over the line he went, and I worried that if I kept listening, he might actually twist my own thinking. Honestly, from the very first moment I laid eyes on him, I thought a psychiatric hospital was the only place he belonged.

"What makes something a work of art isn't the special quality it possesses, but how it came to possess that quality in the first place. You only see the ugliness of the souls in my drawings, not the process that made them that way. It is a gradual transformation of human nature—and that is what I want my work to express." Zhu Li set the picture frame down on his drawing board. "You don't understand my pursuit at all. You're far too shallow."

It was the first time anyone had ever called me shallow, though I wasn't angry, nor did I want to waste any more time arguing about it. "I have no interest in your art."

My face remained expressionless, every part of me recoiling from talking to this lunatic. "Just tell me whether the thing you keep talking about looks exactly like the monsters in your drawings, and what weaknesses and habits they have. That's all I want to know."

Cutting Zhu Li off coldly, I let my gaze shift back and forth between him and the drawings.

"I only draw what I see. Whatever else you want to know, you'll have to find out for yourself." He glanced toward the door, a flash of madness glinting in the depths of his eyes. "Tonight is another rainy night. If you're lucky enough, you might just run into them."

Turning around in a pitch-black, eerie hallway only to come face-to-face with someone covered in bite marks or with their internal organs hanging out of their body—just picturing the scene was terrifying.

I shook my head to clear away the stray thoughts. Zhu Li refused to tell me the truth, and I couldn't force him. After a brief pause, I brought up another question that had been bothering me for a long time.

"The locals in Jinghai told me two legends. The first is about the Pig Cage Apartments, and the second is about a woman holding a black umbrella." As I spoke, I kept a close watch on Zhu Li and Bai Ya'er for any change in expression. When I mentioned those two things, Zhu Li kept his usual deadpan coffin face, while Bai Ya'er's expression flickered ever so slightly. "You've lived in Jinghai for so long, so you must have heard the story about that Black Umbrella Woman. Legend has it she has no face, with thick braids hanging down both her front and back..."

"That's your question?" Zhu Li lifted his fingers from the drawing board, bits of pencil lead clinging to his nails. "Every rainy night, a woman holding a black umbrella appears in the alleys, as if she's searching for something. No one knows what she looks like—maybe she doesn't have a face at all. Whenever a grown man spots her, she walks over and invites him to share her umbrella. If you step under her umbrella, she takes both your face and your life. If I remember correctly, that's how the legend goes. A tacky story—nothing worth talking about."

Zhu Li brushed it off, but I didn't see it that way. "Whether the story is true or false doesn't matter. What matters is that I found a wig stuffed inside her pillow—and when I shook it out, it was a long braid."

What I had discovered in Bai Ya'er's bedroom had stuck in my throat like a fishbone. Finding that wig was the exact moment I had gone on high alert.

"You suspect I had someone dress up as that Black Umbrella Woman?" Zhu Li was sharp; the moment I spoke, he knew exactly what I was getting at.

"Didn't you?"

The atmosphere in the room grew tense in an instant. Caught between Zhu Li and me, Bai Ya'er looked at me in a panic, waving her hands repeatedly. "It's not what you think! I heard that legend too when I first came to Jinghai. Since I go downtown a lot and often come back late, I was afraid of running into danger, so I bought that wig specifically to scare off anyone with bad intentions toward me."

Bai Ya'er's excuse was full of holes. Given her personality and her blind worship of Zhu Li, there was no way she would ever do something so unnecessary on her own. I had looked through her phone; in the work "Voyeurism," there were even deliberate records of Bai Ya'er bringing strangers back to her apartment. Her entire life was part of Zhu Li's artwork. With his obsessive fixation on art, Zhu Li would never allow Bai Ya'er to step out of line on her own initiative. He demanded absolute control, the same way a Painter painting a model requires the model to let themselves be posed like a puppet.

'So they won't admit it?'

I didn't believe the wig was Bai Ya'er acting on her own. Besides, where she kept it was deeply suspicious—what normal person hides hair inside their pillow?

The two of them were shrouded in mysteries from head to toe, and I would have to be patient and unravel them bit by bit.

'Before I came to the Red Building, a classmate of the restaurant owner's son vanished deep in an alley. Could he have been abducted by Bai Ya'er? In his artistic creations, Zhu Li uses corpse specimens in many of his photos, and even living people—those people were probably lured over by Bai Ya'er through various means.' The more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. When I came over, I hadn't checked the trunk of the car; I had only given it a casual glance and gotten right in after seeing no bloodstains. Thinking back on it now, it was deeply suspicious.

Bai Ya'er disguised herself as the Black Umbrella Woman to help the Painter achieve his goals, the two of them working together and using the Jinghai City Rain Woman Legend to stir up trouble.

Of course, all of this was only my speculation, without a shred of proof.

With Bai Ya'er interrupting like that, the tension between Zhu Li and me eased quite a bit, giving both of us a way to back down.

"You ask too many questions." Zhu Li gave Bai Ya'er a wave of his hand. "Take him out."

"Wait!" I stopped Bai Ya'er and looked Zhu Li dead in the eye. "Right from the start, I asked you for specific information about the tenants in this building, and you've been doing everything you can to change the subject. What exactly are you afraid of me finding out?"

After a brief pause, I hardened my tone. "One last question. Tell me everything you know about the tenants, and I'll leave right after."

"You..." Few people ever spoke to Zhu Li like that. His face darkened, his blood-red eyes bulging from their sockets. In the end, however, he cast a fleeting glance toward the bedroom. Whatever he saw there made him change his mind, and his tone softened. "If you're in such a hurry to die, I'll oblige you. This Red Building is eleven stories tall and divided into four units. Even though everyone lives in the same complex, people barely interact with one another. I've lived here for over half a year, and I've only ever glimpsed a handful of them through the crack of my door."

"Who have you seen? What do they do for a living? And why are they living in the Pig Cage Apartments?" With only a few minutes left before my livestream started, I pressed him eagerly.

"I'm not sure about the other units; I only know about Unit 1. Nobody lives on the first floor of the Red Building. A blind old woman lives on the second floor. She's probably lived in this building longer than anyone else. By all rights, she should have died a long time ago. That old thing keeps saying she's waiting for someone, though nobody knows who she's actually waiting for. Oh, right—every new tenant receives her 'gift' on the morning of their second day after moving in." At this, a strange look crossed Zhu Li's face.

"What kind of gift?"

"A vicious tongue-lashing." Zhu Li pointed at the bright red wooden door at the entrance. "She stands outside the door and hurls abuse at the apartment until she wears herself out and leaves. I received that 'gift' when I moved in, and so did Bai Ya'er when she moved in."

"That's quite a special gift." I gestured for Zhu Li to go on.

"The complex's Security Guard and his wife live on the third floor, though come to think of it, I haven't seen his wife step outside in weeks." Zhu Li's mouth twitched into a grin. "All three apartments on the fourth floor are occupied. Besides Bai Ya'er and me, a Doctor lives here too, in the apartment on the far right."

Hearing Zhu Li mention that reminded me of something. When I had dragged Bai Ya'er through the door earlier, someone in the apartment on the far right had been peeking out at us, though I hadn't paid much attention to it at the time.

"How do you know that person is a Doctor? Which hospital in Jinghai does he work at?"

"That I don't know. All I know is that he wears a white lab coat and likes to carry a Scalpel with him wherever he goes—he says blades ward off evil. The fourth floor is the only floor fully occupied by tenants. The higher up you go in the Red Building, the fewer people there are. Not a single person lives on the fifth floor; all three apartments are empty. A child lives on the sixth floor. There might be other people in his family, too, though I've never seen them." Zhu Li licked his cracked lips. "That kid is very cute. If you get the chance, you should go meet him."