I’m a restorer of ancient calligraphy and paintings, and somehow I ended up inside a painting myself.
From the start, I stumbled upon the Prince Regent bathing.
He looked at me coldly, as if I were an object. In fact, I was.
His casual question, “Are you satisfied?” made me want to die of embarrassment right there in the painting.
He said I was a painting his late mother had left him, meant to protect and help him.
As if! I can’t even afford three meals a day. How am I supposed to protect anyone?
By day, I hang on the wall. At night, I come alive. I can’t move around freely, let alone escape.
Yet I became his go-to tool: fending off love interests, putting scheming women in their place, and dodging assassins. I even helped him find the woman he’d loved for years, who had supposedly been dead for three.
He held his beloved in his arms and thanked me, while I locked my feelings away inside the painting.
On the day he married her,
my tears soaked the canvas. The colors faded, and I disappeared.
He went mad, learning how to restore paintings and mix colors, calling out to me before the empty canvas for three years.
But he didn’t know that the person from the painting had returned to the modern world.
There was no going back.
