Prisoner in Painting

There is a painting shop under the old city wall of Mingzhou. The door is so narrow that only two people can pass by. There is a crooked wooden sign hanging at the door, with three words written in ink on it: Go back. No one knows how many years this shop has been open. The grandmother who sells breakfast nearby said that this shop had been here when she was a child. At that time, it was guarded by an old man. Later, the old man disappeared and was replaced by a young man. The young man's surname is Jiang Chi. He is tall and thin. He always wears a gray shirt that has been washed white. He doesn't talk much. His fingers are always wrapped with band-aids - it is said that they were scratched by a razor blade when repairing paintings. Jiang Chi painted "paintings of heart disease". There are some paintings in this world that cannot be hung. It's not because the painting is not good, it's because there is something hidden in the painting - every stroke and every ink contains a breath that the painter can't swallow. That tone has been accumulated for a long time, and it has become the "shadow" in the painting. The shadows will move, they will imitate the appearance of the people in the paintings, they will step off the paper in the middle of the night, and knock on the doors of living people over and over again. I knocked on the door for no other reason than to ask: Why didn't you want me in the first place? What Jiang Chi did was to take those shadows out of the painting, ask them what they wanted to say, and then send them away and end them. The skill was passed down by the old man. Before he left, the old man said something: "You can see the shadow because you are carrying a painting on your body. The shadow in that painting is more fierce than any other painting you have dealt with. When you can invite it out, you will truly become a master." Jiang Chi asked: "What painting am I memorizing?" The old man didn't answer. The person left the next day, leaving a bowl of cold porridge and a blank rice paper rolled up and tied with red silk on the table. Jiang Chi opened it and looked at it. There was nothing on the paper, but when he stared at it, he always felt that something was moving under the paper, as if something was about to float up from the water. He put the blank painting away at the bottom of the cabinet and never touched it again. The harvest lasts seven years. In the past seven years, he has handled forty-seven paintings of people suffering from mental illness, and the figures in each painting are different - there are old people, children, women, and men, some crying, some laughing, some silent. Jiang Chi asked them clearly where they came from, and handed what they wanted to say to the living person. When the living person swallowed the breath, the shadows in the painting dispersed, and the painting also faded, turning into an ordinary piece of old paper. Some colleagues said that he was a "painting spirit", but Jiang Chi himself didn't think it was that mysterious. Throughout a person's life, there are always a few words that cannot be said and a few strokes that cannot be finished. Those things become shadows in the paintings. All he had to do was find an outlet for them. This is how the late autumn of the seventh year passed. It rained heavily that evening. Just as Jiang Chi was about to close the door, a man ran in from under the eaves. The man was soaked all over, his hair stuck to his face, and his eyebrows could not be distinguished, only a pair of eyes were exposed. Those eyes were very bright, not as bright as a man hiding from the rain in embarrassment, but as if he had come specially to see him. "Boss, do you want to collect the paintings?" The voice was young and breathy, as if he had run a long way. Jiang Chi turned sideways to let him in, pulled a dry towel from under the counter and handed it over: "What painting?" The man wiped his face, revealing a face underneath - a bit too good-looking, with sharp eyebrows and clean jawline. He looked to be in his early twenties at most, but there was an indescribable gravity in his eyes. He took out a scroll from his pocket. The seal was sealed with an old-fashioned wax seal, and nothing was engraved on the seal. "Only you in Mingzhou can take on this painting." The young man said, "My name is Shen Du and I come from Tongcheng." Jiang Chi didn't pick up the painting. He looked at the wax seal, and his heart suddenly tightened, as if something was turning inside his chest. When the old man left, the same wax was used to seal the blank rice paper. It had the same texture, but the same nothing. "Who asked you to come?" Jiang Chi asked. Shen Du looked at him for a while and said, "No one asked me to come. This painting is my own." He placed the scroll on the counter, raised his hand to remove the wax seal, and slowly unfolded it. The moment Jiang Chi's eyes fell on the painting, his pupils suddenly shrank - there were two people in the painting. One is sitting in front of the window, with a thin back and a pen in his hand. The other one stood behind him, leaning closer, as if watching him write. The outlines of the two people were blurred, and their facial features were blurred as if they had been soaked by water, making it difficult to see clearly. But Jiang Chi recognized the sitting figure - it was himself. What made his scalp numb even more was that neither of the two people in the painting had eyes. The blank eyes were staring straight at him, as if waiting for him to fill in the two strokes. "I have carried this painting on my back for nineteen years," Shen Du's voice lowered, "It has been there since the day I was born. I asked someone to look at it, but no one could understand it. They said that you surnamed Jiang can see things in the painting, so I came to find you." Jiang Chi stared at the painting, his throat going dry. He suddenly remembered what the old man said - "The shadows in that painting are more sinister than any other painting I have ever dealt with." It turns out that the painting the old man was talking about was not on the bottom of the cabinet, but on someone else's body. "Put it down," Jiang Chi heard his own voice say, "I'll take over this job." Shen Du breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at him. That smile put Jiang Chi in a daze for a moment, because that angle and arc inexplicably overlapped with a recurring scene in his dream - there was also a person smiling in the dream, but he could never see the person's face clearly. The rain stopped outside the window. The lantern at the door of the shop was swayed by the wind, and the words "Go back" were clearly extinguished in the light after the rain. Jiang Chi lowered his head and looked at the aimless painting on the counter, with the band-aid on his finger slightly raised. He suddenly felt that these seven years of peace were coming to an end tonight. Purpose: Confront obsessions and redeem yourself