The fat man and the man were obediently pressed against the wall, straining their ears to listen.

"But you didn't tell the whole truth last time, did you?" Jiang Cheng's tone suddenly changed. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the sofa, exuding an aura that made the woman's face change slightly.

"Officer," Li Zumei hurriedly explained, "I don't understand what you mean. What I said before may sound strange, but... but it's all true! You must believe me."

"There really is something wrong with Lin Chen's work!"

Jiang Cheng pretended to take notes in his notebook, then looked up, giving the woman a look that urged her to continue.

"Repeat what you said last time." Hua Luo looked at the woman's eyes calmly. "We will compare it with the previous transcript when we get back."

"Okay, okay." The woman casually took a bottle of mineral water from under the table, unscrewed it, and gulped down more than half of it, seemingly stabilizing her emotions a bit.

"Around... around mid-July, I received Lin Chen's submissions, which were all strange tales. She drew them really well." The woman seemed to be getting into the mood, and couldn't help but emphasize, "I've been in this business for 10 years, and it's the first time a work has scared me so much that I don't dare walk home alone at night."

"Do you remember what those strange tales were about?"

"I remember." The woman nodded. "The hunchback, the wig, the shadow you can't look at directly, the crevice, the fingernails in the drawer." She counted on her fingers, ticking them off one by one.

"These are all good, but not enough to scare me. The last one scared me the most," the woman said, her throat bobbing.

"What is it?" Hua Luo couldn't help but ask.

"It's... her own story." The woman's expression became rather strange when she said this, with fear, but more confusion. After a long while, she continued, "I don't know how to describe it to you. Anyway, you... you'll understand when you see it."

"Where is it?"

As soon as Hua Luo finished speaking, Jiang Cheng noticed a change in the woman's eyes. "Weren't the original manuscripts... taken away by your people?" the woman asked suspiciously.

"Heh." Jiang Cheng chuckled, drawing the woman's attention back, and stared at her with a strange look. "Didn't you keep a backup? After all, it's such a wonderful story."

This time, the woman's expression became unnatural.

Jiang Cheng leaned forward, very close to the woman, staring into her eyes. "It's not good for you to keep those things. We're doing this for your own good. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here today."

"I'm sorry, I'll get them for you right away." After apologizing, the woman immediately trotted behind several bookshelves on the other side, rummaged around for a while, and then took out a black plastic bag.

She opened it in front of Jiang Cheng, revealing a brown paper bag. The woman took out some papers from the brown paper bag.

She held them in her hand, and they were quite thick.

"It's all here."

The contents were the same as what Liu Guo had shown, but the woman's copy was clearly a photocopy. After a quick scan, Jiang Cheng picked up the last strange tale.

He didn't open it immediately, but took a deep breath.

Unlike the other strange tales, this one had no name.

The woman explained that it didn't have a name when it came, but she gave it a name, Origin.

"Origin?" Standing behind Jiang Cheng, Wan Yuanning looked at the woman, her brows slightly furrowed. This name gave her a very bad feeling.

More accurately, unease.

Opening the draft and flipping through it page by page, Jiang Cheng quickly understood why the woman called it Origin.

Because... this wasn't a strange tale at all, but the story of a young woman.

The story spanned a long period of time. The earliest page was even two years ago, when the woman had just arrived in this unfamiliar city.

It could be seen that the artist's brushstrokes were still very naive at that time.

Then, the woman met a man who was very good to her. In the artist's drawings, the man was the best person in the world, taking the woman to amusement parks, preparing candlelight dinners for her birthday, and staying by her side when she was sick... The man in the drawings was meticulous, and the man and woman in the drawings were happy and warm.

In this stage, the woman in the artist's drawings was happy.

But soon, the style slowly changed, and the narrative perspective became strange. The original sunshine disappeared, and the background mostly turned into night or rainy days.

The overall tone of the picture was also filled with a gray color.

The man began to become more and more impatient, treating the woman very perfunctorily, coming home later and later, and even not returning at night.

The woman spent most of her time alone.

Against the lonely city background, the artist cleverly used the thick changes in color to create a sense of loneliness for the woman, shrinking her into the corner of the city.

Later, there began to appear scenes of the man drinking and beating the woman. It could be seen that the woman had made up her mind to leave countless times, but the man had retained her by various means.

The man in the paintings understood the woman very well. He knew that she was soft-hearted, and he knew that deep down, she actually loved him.

So he became more and more indulgent. In the pictures, there appeared more and more unspeakable scenes, and the woman seemed to have given up.

The young woman in the paintings devoted all her energy to her work. There was a huge easel in the room, and she could sit in front of the easel and paint all day long, from day to night, from sunset to sunrise.

Her painting skills became more and more proficient, but what was faintly alarming was that her brushstrokes became sharper and sharper, and her composition became bolder and bolder.

The sharp paintbrush was like a knife, cutting the woman's life in the painting into pieces.

Even through the picture, one could feel the despair suppressed in the woman's heart.

Until... the appearance of another man.

At first, the depiction of this man was very perfunctory, and the composition was very simple, as if he had appeared out of thin air.

This man was different from the man who appeared at the beginning. He rarely spoke, and his movements were simple. Most of the time, he just silently accompanied the woman.

And the woman was neither cold nor indifferent to him.

But as time passed, the relationship between the two became closer and closer. The man would very gentlemanly squat down to tidy up her skirt, and when she was sick and unhappy, he would silently accompany her by the bed, thoughtfully feeding her water and cutting fruit for her with a knife.

The original man no longer appeared in the picture, and it almost became the daily life of the woman and this man.

At this time, Jiang Cheng and others had already noticed something strange. The woman in the painting was undoubtedly Lin Chen herself, and the first man who appeared should be Li Maoshen.

Now their focus was on this second man.

He was probably the man in room 808 that Weng Qing was talking about.

But what was strange was that the background in the paintings was all in Lin Chen's room, so how could they have been together for so long without being discovered by Li Maoshen?

Moreover... Jiang Cheng frowned. Seeing this, he clearly felt that the figures in the paintings were gradually shrinking, although it was not obvious.

Soon, he turned to the last few pages.

At this time, a frame appeared on the edge of the painting. It was drawn by Lin Chen and was quite delicate, obviously intentional.

The man was gone, leaving only the woman alone.

The next picture, which was also the last painting, showed the woman sitting quietly in front of the easel, with the man still not appearing.

But what puzzled Jiang Cheng even more was that the style of this painting had also changed. It seemed that Lin Chen was in a state of extreme fear when she painted this painting.

The woman sitting opposite, Li Zumei, had changed her expression. She stretched out her finger and pointed tremblingly at the last painting, "You... look there."

The position she was pointing at was the position of the easel in the painting. The woman in the painting was also painting, but at the same time as she saw the painting clearly, Jiang Cheng's pupils suddenly shrank.

This painting within a painting was exactly the same as the previous painting with a frame.

No.

It was exactly the same picture!

It was just that the close-up was zoomed out.

The previous painting was not only Lin Chen's painting, but also the painting of the woman in the painting under Lin Chen's brush.

Jiang Cheng immediately understood the reason. It turned out that the man who appeared was just an idea or a wish of the woman in the painting.

It was a kind of psychological dependence that grew out of her despair of reality. She fantasized about an almost perfect man to replace the man in reality.

And all the paintings about this man were the woman in Lin Chen's painting, or more precisely, Lin Chen herself, who was metaphorically fantasizing. There was no such person in reality at all!

And the last picture was a realistic picture, which was the real state that Lin Chen had recorded about herself.

She was the only one in the room. The man only existed in the paintings under her brush.

A finger stretched out, pointing to the corner of the last painting. There seemed to be a mirror there. Lin Chen's painting was very realistic, and she had also drawn the reflection of the mirror.

In the mirror, behind Lin Chen in front of the easel, stood a man in a dark windbreaker. The man was holding Lin Chen's wrist and painting on the paper.

But in the painting, there was only Lin Chen alone, holding a paintbrush.

"That man came out of the painting..." Li Zumei said tremblingly.