"The person who painted this had quite the imagination, creating from the perspective of a corpse." Ma Ying looked at the painting in her hands, seemingly affected by the emotions within it. A trace of discomfort crossed her face.
"I actually find it kind of unsettling. A living person putting themselves in a dead person's shoes — it just feels off." Liu Xianxian glanced at it and lost interest. "I keep feeling like this painting was made for the dead to look at. Maybe it really was painted by a cadaver specimen."
"Stop talking nonsense." Ma Ying set the painting aside and was just about to look at the second one when her fingers brushed against the paper. A small smudge of paint clung to her fingertip. "It hasn't dried yet?"
She froze on the spot, her mind going blank for a moment.
"This painting seems to have been finished recently. Someone else must have come into the storage room. But why would they paint in here? And paint something so… unconventional?"
Ma Ying thought back to what Liu Xianxian had said before they entered the building — that a student passing by the western campus at night had seen someone waving from inside, only to discover it was a severely damaged cadaver after going in.
"Could the painter really be a cadaver specimen?" A terrifying thought surfaced in her mind. Ma Ying couldn't help but take a step back, wanting to put distance between herself and that cabinet. But her curiosity about the remaining paintings pulled at her.
In the end, curiosity won out over fear. Ma Ying stood before the cabinet and looked at the second painting.
It was an oil painting. The colors the artist had chosen were deeply oppressive — a grey sky pressing down overhead, black crows pecking at pale white flesh, and a nearly rotting hand struggling to claw its way out of the ground.
"A bleak and hopeless world, devoid of any color."
Ma Ying moved on to the third painting. It depicted a little girl holding an apple.
This painting was the complete opposite of the last. The girl wore cute, brightly colored clothes and stood beneath neon lights, the apple in her hands gleaming with a tempting luster.
From the background to the clothing, the canvas was bursting with color and light, yet the painting still made her uncomfortable.
The reason lay in the little girl at the center. She was completely out of place against the rest of the scene. The skin visible on her body was an unnatural greyish-white. She held the apple up as though about to take a bite, yet she seemed to know deep down that even if she did, she would never be able to taste it.
On her delicate little face was a simple, raw yearning — she wanted to know what an apple tasted like.
Setting down the third painting, Ma Ying turned to the last one.
It was a realistic painting. The subject was a person whose body had been taken apart.
The image before her — something most ordinary people would find hard to stomach — caused Ma Ying no discomfort whatsoever.
During her very first anatomy class, she had come to understand a truth: the dead and the living were fundamentally different. The dead were merely cold machines — constructs of intricate components that could never be reassembled into something that ran again.
The dismembered figure in the painting was staring at its own body. Perhaps it, too, was contemplating whether it could still be called human.
Ma Ying stared at the portrait in that last painting for a long time. Suddenly, something clicked in her mind.
She pulled out her phone and opened the video her sister had sent before she disappeared. At the twelfth second, she hit pause.
At that exact moment, the camera had been pointed at the window. A woman's hands gripped the windowsill, half her face visible.
Comparing the face in the painting with the one on the screen, Ma Ying suddenly realized — the woman's skin tone was strikingly similar to the coloring of the figures in these paintings!
"How is this possible? One is from a video recording — something that actually exists. The other is just a painting, something fictional."