Heartbreaker

Creatures on the murals guide me, monsters that look like evils conceived from creation to the present.A marmot with crocodile eyes, a pangolin shell, and cicada wings kept stretching its neck and screaming. I slashed at it, and the dead mouse burrowed into the ground and disappeared.

I am too lazy to make a fuss later, because the structure of the tattoo castle cannot be used as a reference at all.The creatures in the painting follow me like a sunflower disc, as if I am a strange beast.The spiral staircase is like building blocks suspended in mid-air, being swayed back and forth by the invisible magnetic force.I jumped onto the dark blue wooden board that went up and down the first step, and was taken directly to the second floor by it, where the scene was even more incredible.

If the base color of the murals on the first floor of the castle is still earthy brown, the second floor is azure blue like transparent glass. The plankton in the deep sea are like colorful velvet, falling on the swaying algae and hard coral reefs.A huge blue whale spread its two side fins and slowly slid over my head, shaking my scalp numb and blocking the silky shimmer.I stretched out my hand to grab it, and the water surface rippled with silver light on my wrist, like countless fine pearls gushing down.

I recalled the height of the castle, and felt that the next floor was almost the top floor.I was looking for an exit in the vast blue underwater world. Schools of fish and water snakes passed under my armpits and between my legs. Some dried shrimps and oysters were still stuck to my trouser legs, like splashes of mud accidentally splashed.I carried these small shrimps, soldiers and crabs on the bottom of the sea forward, and my body became heavier and heavier, with a fresh fishy smell all over my body.

Finally, at the end of the ocean, I saw a snoring pearl oyster with a pink tongue that looked like a springy bed.I shook off the little creature on my body, kicked the pearl that was half my height away, jumped up, and happily bounced on the clam's tongue!

bang bang!The frightened clam shell suddenly closed, turned a few times, and fell into the wet and sticky sea mud.When the clamshell opened again, I finally reached the third floor of the castle.Satan, the picture on this layer gave me a particularly strong shock. Even if I saw the pig-headed mermaid, I would not be more shocked than I am now.

Because this is an empty studio, the brown floor is covered with a layer of shiny wax, the heavy curtains are like the long skirts of a dancing girl, and a row of gold-tin-colored picture frames is hung on the half-covered wall.The base color of the whole room is a dark pink, with a round table and a few chairs on the left, and a red-glazed vase with a blue mandala on the windowsill on the right, which is unbelievably realistic.

"Welcome to my castle, Your Royal Highness!"

A pompous voice sounded, it sounded like Popolo who drank too much fake wine - the madness was familiar, but the guy in front of him was very different from Popolo's rigid monk appearance.This thin and tall man combed his half-short black hair into a smooth back, and two black mustaches curled up around his lips, bouncing dynamically with the opening and closing of his lips.He was wearing a white undershirt and a black velvet fur fur, but a pair of pumpkin-colored bloomers and pointed boat boots on his lower body—but on closer inspection, you'd see he wasn't wearing anything at all.Those costumes are all painted with paint, which can almost be faked.

What a lunatic.I said with a half-smile, "Oh...the Blood Queen, Mo Lei Ni?"

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!"

The man with the moustache let out a convulsive laugh, like a boar hiccupping, as if for him it wasn't just the mouth that made the laugh, but every cell in the body.

He smiled and shouted, "Morani, come out and let our prince meet you!"

As he spoke, a fluffy puppet emerged from behind him.The man with the mustache raised his left hand that was covered with a hand puppet, imitating the bitch's panting sound in the illusion, and said, "Hi, Your Royal Highness, my dear, I have been waiting for you..."

I said, "I think you fucking want to be cut in half by me."

"Hahahaha, take it easy, dear little prince!" he said, staring into those big, round eyes, "I kid you not, other people do call me 'Blood Queen'. And my real name It's 'Moreney'!"

****

It's hard to describe how I'm feeling with refined words, but if I tried crude slang, it would be "fucking".Who would have thought that the legendary Blood Queen is actually an idiot with eggs.I thought a bluffing Popolo would be a test of my patience, but Crazy Moreni was even better.Most of these guys who firmly believe in a certain belief have a crazy state of madness.

I sat at the table, and Moreni was triumphantly about to show me his great painting.I looked around and saw paintings of luminous forests and wilderness deserts that had once fascinated me.This crazy artist may be more dangerous than I thought, after all, he is the guy entrusted by Elliott to take care of the treasure.

I said, "Why is your nickname 'Blood Queen'?"

"Oh, that was a gorgeous misunderstanding. You know, to an artist, the world is just an egg, and gender is just a symbol. I can change my appearance all I want, and a lot of people don't know what's behind it My true face. I once wore a wine-red wig for a miraculous performance art, skillfully cut small wounds all over my body, and let the blood flow down a certain track, forming a piece of art made of blood. Dress."

I sneered, "Eliot asked you to take care of the crown and the silver knight's armor and holy sword here, and you have these boring nerves all day long?"

Moreney suddenly slapped the table furiously, "Don't mention Elliott to me! He's an idiot, a fool, a hopeless philistine, who can't understand real beauty at all! He wants me to be his subordinate, but I don't want to work for a blind man with no eyes! My power can only be controlled by the real beauty and those who know how to appreciate beauty!"

One of the plants in the painting twitches, and I can hear the slow tearing of its growth. "The artist who gives life and soul to paintings", the lunatic in front of him is indeed worthy of this title, although the more real those paintings are, the more disgusting they are.

I folded my legs, stared at him, and said slowly, "I don't think I'm an extraordinary person who can appreciate your paintings, so why did you ask me to enter the castle?"

Moreney's mustache moved like a spring, he stood up meaningfully, and looked at me meaningfully, making me want to poke his eyes out.

"You may indeed not be able to appreciate the beauty in my writing, Your Royal Highness." He said affectionately, as if he was holding a supreme treasure, "but you are 'beauty' itself."

I felt a twitch in my stomach.Satan, if this lunatic stabs me now, I may not even have the strength to resist.The queen of the ladyboys, Moreni, walked around the room with ballet-like graceful tiptoe steps, and in the blink of an eye, she landed in front of a curtain and pulled down a rope.

"Genius artists are great prophets!" He raised his neck and shouted impassionedly, foaming from his mouth.The curtain, like the skirt of an actor at the end of the curtain, quickly moved to one side, revealing several paintings hanging behind it.

I glanced there for a while, and my fingers immediately froze on the table.The first painting is a child surrounded by poisonous bees, like a dried starfish, with abyss-like despair in his eyes.The second painting is a huge skeleton with its hands and feet upside down, its spine stretching straight to the sky, and the banner of the Wanjiang Empire and howling people are stepped on under its huge claws.

And the third painting is me.I rode a mutilated skeleton horse with a black mane, wearing a ghostly black cloak, showing a pale lower jaw and a smiling bloody mouth, driving towards the picture.Behind me, the dark vortex, like countless entangled ghosts and souls, turned into two giant hands like white mist, gathered on the dark night sky.

On the lower left of the screen, a few lines of short poems are written in bronzing handwriting:

"I know pain is the only nobility,

Neither earth nor hell can corrupt,

To adorn my mystical diadem,

All ages and fields must be collected. "(Note: Baudelaire's "Blessing")

My hands were twisted together stiffly, and the pain of being awakened came back again. I gritted my teeth and said, "You took all the pains to let me see this rubbish?"

Moreni murmured sadly, "Garbage... oh, trash... If an ordinary person said that, I would crush his head and strangle his throat...but it was the beautiful Naxi who said that Seth, only he has the right to say that my great works of art are rubbish... In fact, what I want to show you is not these few paintings, but my latest creation, Narcissus."

This lunatic changed my damn name for me on his own. I suppressed the anger in my heart, and while he was in a trance, I quietly released the black centipede in the horn.

I whispered, "Little boy, go find the old man."

"This is the painting, Narcissus! The painting I have painstakingly worked so hard to take into my grave! Oh, thank the Muse, for letting this supreme beauty be condensed on my mediocre fingertips, so that it can be used in a limited life. Finish it, and I will die with no regrets!" Moreni almost cried himself out, but I crossed my legs, and my heart didn't even fluctuate at all.

Until he cried and pulled back the curtain covering the painting.

****

The red-haired man kept staring at me.

I narrowed my eyes and looked back at the guy in front of me.He had the same flaming red hair as mine, but it was waist-length and tousled by the wind.He was tall and cold, with a bare|naked pale and fit body, and mottled bright red scars were scattered all over his strong muscles.His golden pupils stared at me like snakes, and the corners of his sinister mouth curved into an arc, with the hellish volcanic lava and the bloody sky behind him.

"This is a gift from the Muse when he came to my dream one day..." Moreni shrank back in awe, and almost knelt down in front of the giant oil painting.He looked at me, then at the red-haired man in the painting, and raised his hands tremblingly, "God... the past and the future... the intertwined time and space... the incomparable, suffocating beauty... "

I stepped forward and looked at the man in the painting with a half-smile—or it would be more appropriate to say "me" a few years later.Every scar I have now has left its marks on this strong body, and the smile on his mouth is full of evil and temptation, even better than mine.

"Heh, the future Lemon Bone Spur? You are alive and well, God has no eyes..."

I jokingly pressed my five fingers on the drawing paper, as if pressing into a layer of flowing liquid, the burning sensation on my fingertips spread all over my body.The golden pupils of the man in the painting turned, and he looked at me with a non-smiling smile like an ant, which made me want to chop his head a few times.

I leaned forward, faced his face, stuck out my tongue and poohed a few times, but he leaned over and also stuck out that coquettish bloody tongue like a snake letter.The tip of his tongue touched, he rolled my tongue into his mouth and entangled it, narrowed his golden pupils as if enjoying himself, sucked the root of my tongue as hard as he wanted to drain every drop of body fluid, and danced with me chasing and chasing.

At this time, Moreni screamed as if he couldn't keep up, "Ahhh! God, Satan! What a beautiful picture! Let it stay in this moment forever! I want to take this beautiful scene Draw it!"

With a puff, blood splashed on my lips.I narrowed my pupils, bit half of my tongue, and gave a bloody smile to Lemon Bone Spur in the painting.He first looked at the shredded meat bitten between my teeth, then stretched out his hand to caress the broken tongue, sneered, and smiled nonchalantly.

"There can only be one Lemon Bone Spur in the world." I looked at his face and said with a grin, "Go to hell, fake."

I am probably the only one who can still be so calm in the face of the bone knife.I stabbed the bone knife into his throat, and he still looked at me with those indifferent and evil eyes, as if he was looking at a kitten biting his Adam's apple.My blade pierced through his neck, and I heard the sticky sound of squeezed flesh and blood.He stretched out his hand from the drawing paper, held my face and kissed it, fresh blood splashed on my eyelashes.

"With you, my love."

****

"You ruined my paintings, my hard work, my love and my dreams!"

With the death of the red-haired man, the drawing paper withered and withered like a rose in late autumn, shrinking into a scorched paper ball.Moreney yelled at the top of his lungs, and suddenly began to wail loudly, throwing himself on the ground and rolling, as if he had been thrown over coals to fry.All the murals in the castle swam for a while, and those monsters slowly moved towards the highest level of the castle as if they had just crawled out of their mother's body.I saw many tentacle-like coral polyps emerging from the cracks in the floor tiles. They were swaying in the air, and their skins were dotted with spots.

Moreney's skin was covered with wart-like bumps in turn, and his voice was distorted, "You ruined it, trampled on and destroyed the beautiful evil spirit, and I want you to pay for it—"

"Why?" I smiled cruelly, "It's fake."

The mad artist roared in grief, and two eyes fell out with the turbulent tears, and two long worms drilled out of them.His armpits, belly button, and lower body became octopus-like tentacles, and each sucker sprayed out a variety of paints, spraying me like a colorful rainbow bug.

I stared at the artist who had completely turned into a sad tentacle monster, and listened to his muddy voice like a shattering lament, "You have ruined the supreme beauty... my dear love... I want you to pay for it... "

"Okay." I smiled and raised the bloody bone-cutting knife and said, "I accept your anger..."

****

"Lemon!"

A puff of peppery smoke hit my face.I shivered as if I was awake, and found that I was holding a bone-cutting knife facing the empty corridor, and the cold air was around my side like an invisible palm.Chichikov circled around me a few times, narrowed his eyes and said, "Trapped by the illusion?"

The gorgeous murals as far as the eye can see are gone, the dark brown walls are empty, and the wet floor tiles under the feet make the sound of water stains.I took a few steps forward, frowning and stroking the rough wall, and said, "Chichikov, there should have been a long mural here, depicting the rainforest land and all kinds of strange monsters. Going up is the deep sea Murals, blue whales swimming underwater, and clam shells leading to the third floor..."

"What are you talking about?" He looked at me suspiciously, as if he felt that my mind was not normal, "This castle is an uninhabited castle, without any paintings or totems. When you were in a daze, the army came in to check I checked it out. After Marshal Plummer went out, everyone had auditory hallucinations again, and when they were at a loss what to do, they could only follow the instructions of the auditory hallucinations and let you come in to see the situation."

He put the fat centipede into the box, "It's a good thing you still remembered to put the centipede back, this castle is very evil, even if it's empty, you've been trapped for so long..."

"No," I said, "it's not that it's empty."

I stepped forward, picked up a skull from a hidden corner, and handed it to Chichikov, "Look, I probably found the real mastermind behind it."

I flicked the skeleton's hard skull and whistled, "You are amazing, crazy artist, 'Blood Queen' Morani. Chichikov, can your eye see the past of this thing , maybe it is the key to revealing the secret."

I was joking, but Chichikov stared at the thing seriously for a while, and then said suddenly, "I can see it."

"……Oh?"

"His soul has not dissipated, and his obsession resides in his skull, so strong that it is as vivid in death as in life." Chichikov said, "A miserable court painter, because his paintings allude to Eliot's regicide, It was judged as an 'evil heresy' by the Twilight Empire, beheaded here, and used as a tool to guard treasures."

He pressed the skull and said, "It's very hard, about the same as a diamond. It's the most solid object I've ever seen. It's probably capable of smashing metal."

"This is the skull of a great artist." I held it up high and said with a smile, "Take a good look, this is the real 'invincible'!"

The author has something to say: In this chapter, "Big Lemon" showed his face~ I didn't want him to make an official appearance so soon. Since the opportunity is rare, I will write it a little bit, and there will be more important scenes later~+_+

ps. The "Narcissus" that appeared in the article is actually a beautiful boy in Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection in the water~