The students of the ghost school fled in panic, but where could they possibly run to?
Evasion only delayed the moment of their soul's dissolution. The monsters inside the blood-red city didn't need the ghost school's will—everything was merely nourishment for them to devour.
The ghost school's front gate slammed into the wall. The tall walls on either side of the entrance crumbled under the pressure of black thorns. The man stepped through with his left foot, and the dense crimson fog behind him surged forward like a red tide.
"Easier than I expected."
The thick fog enveloped his body, reducing him to a hazy silhouette. His head turned slowly, and in the end he seemed to be gazing up at the blood-colored mirror overhead.
"Every ghost behind the gate is building hell, and only you are trying to construct heaven." There was a note of mockery in the man's voice. "If you had truly seen heaven, you wouldn't have been abandoned behind the gate."
He raised his foot and pressed onward. Not a single vengeful ghost in the school stepped forward to stop him—not the wandering spirits the school had taken in, nor the red-clothed ghosts born within it.
The mirror in the sky grew more and more cracks. The buildings reflected in it crumbled ceaselessly, and even with Lin Sisi and the others propping it up, nothing could be changed.
"Seems there's no point in holding on any longer." The painter stood on the top floor of the experimental building, watching the eastern and western campuses collapse, and suddenly raised his hand.
His fingertip touched the sky of the two campuses. It was a mirror—a mirror forged from countless memories and wills.
"This still isn't heaven. This is merely one of my paintings—a painting whose name I haven't yet decided on."
His fingertip pierced through the mirror's surface. Countless strands of blood rushed toward the painter, and when his fingers emerged from the other side, they were already stained with gore.
"This painting is ruined. I'll just paint another one. I need a new canvas, and new pigments." His body passed through the mirror, and the painter's coat was drenched entirely in red.
The painter within the two campuses had felt like a dead sea—silent, composed. But the one who stepped out of the mirror gave off an entirely different impression. It was hard to describe; every movement he made made others unwilling to draw near.
After the painter left the two campuses, the mirror in the sky began to shatter in enormous chunks, as though a rain of blood were falling.
"Given up?" The man in the blood fog didn't move forward immediately. He tilted his head toward some corner of the ghost school, as though he had caught a scent of something.
The painter's figure had vanished from the experimental building, yet every shard of mirror drifting down through the air bore his reflection.
The moment the first shard hit the ground of the ghost school, it dissolved into countless fine threads of blood, and the painter's silhouette appeared before the teaching building.
He stood alone in the open space in front of the school's main building. Blood fog crashed against his body, black thorns spread in every direction around him, yet unlike the other vengeful ghosts, he made no effort to dodge.
"The ghost school's will has already split apart. You destroyed your last hope with your own hands. Chang Wenyu has been gravely wounded—how can you alone stand against an entire city?" The man in the blood fog halted his steps. "You could have fled this place just like Chang Wenyu. I know there must be other exits in the ghost school."
"An exit?" The painter's coat had turned red. Blood-thread veins wove across his body and converged over his heart. "Isn't the spot you're standing on the exit of the ghost school?"
Shards of the mirror fell upon the painter, carving bloody lines across him. The distance between heaven and earth had never been as short as it was now—so short that only a single person stood between them.