Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Before entering the palace, I first went to the Xie Family Ancestral Tomb.

Liu Quan was pressing me to hurry, so I claimed I needed to retrieve an old brush. While the Imperial Guard watched me, I used my identity as a painter to detour to the south of the city, where I slipped three gold leaves to the tomb keeper.

Xie Wanning’s grave was in the third row of the new section. The soil was still loose, and the fruit offerings before the headstone had not yet rotted. The tomb keeper hunched his shoulders and whispered, “Mr. Shen, opening a grave at night… it damages one’s hidden virtue.”

“If the dead is still in the grave,” I replied, “I will compensate you tenfold.”

He did not dare to advise me further.

When the coffin nails were pried loose, the wind suddenly died down. Snow fell onto the coffin lid without a sound. The tomb keeper held up a lantern, his face trembling as if it had been soaked in water.

The lid was pushed open, and Xie Wanning was indeed lying inside.

Or rather, a corpse wearing Xie Wanning’s burial shroud was lying there.

Her face was gone.

It wasn’t rot, nor had it been gnawed by wild beasts. It looked as if someone had used the thinnest blade to completely peel it away, from the hairline to the jaw. Beneath the skin, dark red flesh was exposed; the eye sockets were empty, and where the lips should have been, there was only a black hole.

The tomb keeper vomited on the spot.

I, however, saw a silver needle on the corpse’s chest. The needle pierced through the shroud, pinning a small scrap of silk. On the silk was a drawing of a closed eye.

I recognized that stroke.

It was my line.

To be precise, it was the final stroke I had placed at the corner of her eye when I painted Xie Wanning’s funerary portrait.

Someone had taken this stroke from my painting and pinned it back onto the corpse, like sealing an empty shell.

I reached out to take it, but the moment my fingertips touched the silver needle, a thin, faint sound of weeping echoed in my ears.

“Sir.”

I whipped my head around.

At the end of the tomb path stood a young girl of sixteen or seventeen. Her clothes were thin, and her face was covered with a white cloth. The cloth was damp from the snow, clinging to the uneven wounds beneath.

She said, “Stop looking for Miss Xie. Miss Xie has gone back to being Miss Xie. I am the one who was supposed to be buried here.”

I approached her step by step. “Who are you?”

The girl raised her hand and peeled back the white cloth.

It was a face that had been flayed. New flesh grew haphazardly, and her features looked as if they had been melted by fire and then carelessly kneaded back together. Yet, she was still alive.

“My name is Liu Ah Ruan,” she said, her voice trembling violently. “Three months ago, someone said the Prime Minister’s Mansion wanted to buy maids, so my mother sent me there. When I woke up, Miss Xie’s corpse was lying beside me. A woman in red asked me if I wanted to become a person of high status.”

“You agreed?”

“I didn’t.” She began to cry. “But they said it was fine even if I didn’t agree. They said the skin would agree regardless.”

She pulled half a wooden tablet from her bosom and pressed it into my hand.

An image of a tower was carved into the wood. The tower’s entrance had no plaque, only a blank face.

“Wuxiang Tower is beneath the East Market Agarwood Shop,” she said. “Sir, your painting is the key to open The Door.”

The sound of galloping hooves suddenly drifted from the distance.

Liu Ah Ruan’s expression shifted, and she pulled the white cloth back over her face. “They’re here. If you still want to save the Grand Princess, do not finish painting her.”

Before I could ask more, she had already stumbled away into the forest of graves.

The torches of the Imperial Guard appeared on the mountain path.

Liu Quan’s voice shrieked at me, “Mr. Shen! If you miss the hour for Her Highness the Grand Princess, how many heads do you have for us to chop off?”

I hid the wooden tablet in my sleeve and cast a final glance at the faceless corpse in the coffin.

In that moment, I finally understood. I wasn’t painting a funerary portrait.

I was painting a life that could be peeled away.