Kurosaki's eyes lit up as though he had discovered a treasure: "Breaking free from the shackles of existing styles and possessing a distinctive artistic voice of one's own — isn't that exactly what I've been chasing all this time?"
He stared at the handful of manuscript pages on the desk, and just looking at them sent a chill running through his entire body.
An utterly ordinary manga character, yet in this artist's hands, it seemed to possess a soul.
He could peer past the flesh and paint the complexities of the human heart directly.
There were no gory scenes, no hideous or repulsive ghosts. Simply by drawing the people as he saw them, the artist could make the viewer's spine go cold.
"Completely overturns common sense. It's as if he's standing on the ghost's side, dissecting humanity."
Kurosaki had been drawing for over a decade — a seasoned doujinshi master who had spent recent years trying to reinvent himself. He had explored every style, visited numerous well-known manga artists, but not a single one had ever delivered such an overwhelming shock.
"I have to find him! I have to find this artist who's hidden away in a haunted house!"
Kurosaki was a professional. He could recognize the value of these pages at a glance. He wanted to learn from them, and a dark thought even surfaced in his mind — the desire to claim them as his own.
But he quickly chased that impulse away. An artist who deliberately chose to draw inside a haunted house deserved respect. This was a true artist of the soul.
Fear and excitement coexisted inside him; even Kurosaki himself couldn't tell what state he was in.
He finished looking through all the manga pages, offered his professional critique, and gave them the highest praise.
"What a shame — only these few pages. I really want to know what happens next." Kurosaki was completely absorbed. He murmured to himself, and the moment his voice fell, the bottom drawer of the desk slid outward on its own, opening a narrow gap.
This drawer was a different color from the rest of the desk, and its shape didn't match the other drawers either. It gave the impression of having been forced into the desk against its will.
"What a strange drawer?" As if something invisible were guiding him, Kurosaki reached out and pulled the drawer fully open. Inside was a drawer full of drawings and a hand-bound manga volume.
"This many?! How long has he been drawing in that haunted house?" Kurosaki sat cross-legged on the floor, growing more stunned the more he looked. "Every single drawing is at peak quality. Is this guy not too ruthless with himself? But how have I never heard of a master-level artist like this? When did someone like this appear in the art world?"
He flipped through faster and faster, wishing he could take every last drawing home to study at leisure.
"Teacher, it's quiet outside now. Why don't we go take a look?" Xiao Xia, who had only just regained consciousness, woke to find Kurosaki looking as if he had been possessed.
"Not yet — no rush. When the time comes, the boss will come find us. What's that idiom again? Right — wait at ease for the fatigued enemy!"
Kurosaki flipped through the pages at breakneck speed, trying to figure out how many stories these drawings told in total. "Once we get out of here, I'm finding that haunted house boss! If I can't meet the artist in person, then no matter how much these drawings cost, I'm getting my hands on them."
Before he knew it, Kurosaki had reached the very bottom of the drawer. He picked up the last manuscript page.
The paper was yellowed — clearly something from many years ago — yet the ink on it was still wet, as though the drawing had just been completed!
"How did he manage this?"
Kurosaki stared blankly at the drawing. What it depicted was none other than himself.
A completely realistic figure, rendered in a grotesque and uncanny style, and the angle the artist had chosen was bizarrely specific — as though the drawing had been made from inside a drawer.
Kurosaki involuntarily glanced toward the drawer he had pulled open. Inside it was a deathly pale face, staring at him full of anticipation.
"So that's how it is…"
His eyes rolled back, and Kurosaki collapsed stiffly to the floor in a dead faint.