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墨書 Inktalez
As dusk crept into the Art Studio, Xiao Ya curled up in her computer chair. She stared at the fluctuating number of likes on her screen, her nails digging deep into the soft flesh of her palm. The red monster she had painted over three days and nights was now going viral on the local forum's "Youth Graffiti" section.
"Ding dong," a new message notification startled her, sending a shiver down her neck. An anonymous user had sent a string of garbled text, and when she opened it, a blurry night vision photo appeared: a hunched figure was reflected in the glass window behind the easel.
She whipped around sharply; the Plaster Statue in the corner of the Art Studio glowed with a ghostly blue-white light in the twilight. The comments section of the forum had already exploded.
"This girl is definitely haunted in the Art Studio!" declared a user with the ID "Midnight Radio." "Look at the bottom right corner of the third painting; there's a figure in mist in the window reflection!"
Others quickly dug up an old news story about an art student who had fallen from a building three years ago, linking Xiao Ya's artwork to supernatural events.
Zhao Qiang slammed his phone down onto the leather seat, while the Longjing tea in his purple clay pot released its third fragrance. The surveillance footage of Xiao Ya focused on her side profile as she painted was now screenshot and paired with the title "Genius Girl's Spiritual Record," garnering 230,000 shares on a short video platform.
He loosened his tie, his Adam's apple bobbing as he said, "Have the tech department bury all the trending posts on that forum."
At 2:17 AM, Xiao Ya discovered that her account had suddenly been banned. The warm messages that had once comforted her were disappearing—"The despair in your painting is too real; sending hugs," and "The red reminds me of the blood my grandmother coughed up before she passed"—replaced by an avalanche of mockery.
"This generation of art exam students has no limits when it comes to publicity stunts," and "I suggest checking if there's a history of mental illness in her family."
When her mother entered with a cup of hot milk, Xiao Ya was staring at the latest top comment, feeling cold all over: "I heard this girl seduced her instructor and got expelled; now she's pretending to be crazy for sympathy."
The shadows of the phoenix tree swayed against Zhao Qiang's office floor-to-ceiling window. He flicked his cigar into the ashtray and watched as several newly registered accounts simultaneously posted: "Breaking news! This girl has been using hallucinogenic drugs for a long time; the so-called 'monster' is merely a hallucination from drug use."
The forum administrator timely pinned a "Debunking Announcement," defining Xiao Ya's artwork as "a product of adolescent imagination."
On a stormy weekend, Xiao Ya huddled in a corner of the library. Suddenly, her phone vibrated; an unfamiliar number sent a video: her Sketchbook that she had thrown into the trash at the Art Studio last week was now being fed into a shredder. The yellowed pages convulsed under the blades, and those repeatedly sketched monster eyes shattered like snowflakes.
She suddenly remembered that three days ago, she had hidden the message "SOS" in Morse code within the starry sky of a certain painting. Reporter Lin noticed that painting while coffee stains were spreading across her keyboard. As the youngest investigative journalist at Urban Evening News, she had just finished an undercover report on Campus Loans.
The moment a notification popped up in the bottom right corner of her screen, her half-cold latte splashed onto the keyboard— the twisted knuckles of the monster in the painting bore an uncanny resemblance to the characteristics of a victim from a missing persons case she had reported on three years ago.
Meanwhile, in an encrypted section of a forum for the deaf and mute, Sign Language teacher Zhou Mo was analyzing the artwork frame by frame. In a detail image magnified twenty times, a string of raised Braille was hidden within the folds of the curtain. As he used a tactile drawing pad to convert the patterns into text, his breath quickened— it was a distress signal built up with Acrylic Paint: "He is watching us."
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