Steampunk: Sixth Era Epic-Chapter 359: Oil Painting and Bandage Puppet

"Detective, can’t you open the door? Let me try. George! George! What are you doing? For heaven’s sake, open the door."

Mrs. Freeman tried to find the keys to the room, but with a click, Shard had already unlocked the door.

The clueless little girl followed Mrs. Freeman, Priest Augustus, and Shard as they burst into the boy’s bedroom.

The room was not large, and the thirteen-year-old boy with blonde hair lay on the bed on his side, his back facing the door. Even the noise of strangers bursting into his room didn’t make him stir.

Shard hurried over, but the sorcery "False Immortality" was ineffective, and the boy wasn’t badly hurt. Priest Augustus also approached and only after turning the boy over on the bed, found out that he was merely asleep.

"Child, wake up, come on, wake up!"

The priest called out in a somewhat urgent voice, and even patted the boy’s face lightly a few times, which finally stirred the boy awake.

Yet, as he opened his eyes, they were filled with extreme terror, and he wasn’t even surprised to find strangers in his room:

"There’s something in the house! Mom, I want my mom!"

He cried out incoherently, indifferent to the priest’s calming efforts. It was easy to tell from his words that the boy had just had a peculiar dream, which made him unable to distinguish between the dream and reality after waking up.

"I’m here! Oh, my poor little George! What happened to you?"

The middle-aged woman, also holding the hand of her little daughter, entered the room. Priest Augustus continued to calm the boy, trying to get him to talk about his dream, while Shard walked back to the doorway, looking at the empty living room outside.

The formerly warm home now seemed somewhat terrifying.

"You really can’t feel anything?"

"[Very slight Whisper Element, very slight, even ordinary people wouldn’t be affected unless they lived here for a year. The appearance of the element occurred after you used sorcery to open the door.]"

She whispered in his ear; the murmuring sound always made Shard want to look over his shoulder to see if someone was lurking behind him.

"The appearance of the Whisper Element means it indeed is a relic, but the problem is where the relic is..."

With the mother’s and the Old Cleric’s reassurance, the boy gradually calmed down, but he couldn’t provide detailed information about what had happened in his dream. After waking up, he had almost completely forgotten about the contents of the dream, only vaguely remembering a strange person wrapped in bandages who had tried to kill him.

"Have you seen the missing painting here? It’s one of your father’s relics."

Seeing that they weren’t getting much information, Priest Augustus took a sketchpad from Mrs. Freeman, opened it to a blank page, and asked the boy to recognize it. But the boy shook his head in confusion, indicating he hadn’t touched his father’s relics.

"Brother, didn’t you look through this when we just moved in and were looking for toys?"

The girl holding Mrs. Freeman’s hand suddenly spoke up. She appeared to be about five or six years old, her eyes bright, and she even bit her inflection while speaking. She curiously watched her brother, but the blonde boy shook his head in confusion:

"Did that happen?"

When speaking to his sister, his tone was no longer so brittle.

"Yes, I remember you pulled out a painting, and then… what happened next?"

The little girl tilted her head, thinking hard but unable to provide an answer.

"Child, where would you hide your most treasured possession?"

Priest Augustus asked again, his gentle expression made the reluctantly answering boy avert his gaze, but seeing his mother and sister attentively watching him, he clenched his teeth and spoke out:

"There’s a large cardboard box under the bed."

"Priest, I’ll handle this."

Shard walked over, reached under the boy’s bed, and pulled out the box. Upon opening it, all five of them immediately saw a rolled-up painting.

Upon touching it, Shard immediately confirmed it was the relic. They unrolled the painting, which showed no signs of folding, and, just as Mrs. Freeman had said, the background featured sunlit, fluttering curtains, with a tabletop and miscellaneous items on it.

"Look at this!"

Priest Augustus squinted his eyes, his tone filled with alarm. He pointed straight at the center of the painting, at the wooden model of a three-story building placed on the table.

This was the type of toy that was a high-quality replica of real buildings, scaled down proportionally.

The side facing out of the painting showed a cross-section of the house, revealing the model’s intricately moving furniture, decor, and puppets inside. At that moment, two puppets, one large and one small, could be seen in the house model within the painting, on the second floor. Moreover, the layout of the model building looked just like this three-story rental apartment they were in, and the positions and setups of the rooms where the two puppets were located also resembled the very room the group was standing in.

Watching the two delicately crafted puppets in the painting, Shard looked puzzled, then suddenly his eyes widened:

"Priest, do these two dolls in the painting look like me and this boy?"

"Yes, they indeed look like brothers!"

The little girl was the first to raise her hand and speak.

Priest Augustus also leaned forward: Continue reading at novelbuddy

"Had you not mentioned it, I wouldn’t have noticed, they really do look alike... wait, what is this?"

Due to the angle of the painting, they could only see part of the inside of the model. In the room where the two dolls were located in the painting, it seemed like something was crouching behind the door. However, the painter had not focused on that area, so they could only make out a pair of eyes.

Shard and Priest Augustus simultaneously turned to look outside the real door, but it was wide open with nothing there.

"Oh, look! The painting has changed!"

Mrs. Freeman suddenly exclaimed in a high-pitched voice. Shard looked back at the painting in his hands and indeed, a tall doll wrapped in bandages had somehow moved from outside to inside the room.

None of the five had seen this process.

The doll of Shard and the boy combined was not as tall as the bandaged doll holding a knife.

Under the gaze of five pairs of eyes, the bandaged doll wearing a black hat incredibly began to move within the painting. This terrifying scene made the girl scream, and George, the boy, trembled uncontrollably, clutching his mother’s arm tightly.

The bandaged doll in the painting drew closer to the other two dolls, then lifted the knife and stabbed. The two smaller dolls also began to move to dodge—the smaller doll nearly got stabbed due to not evading in time; the larger doll hurried to help and unfortunately got stabbed in the shoulder.

"Oh!"

Shard gasped, then quickly covered his arm and struggled with his other hand to take off his coat; his left shoulder’s white shirt had been stained red. Although the injury was not as exaggerated as that of the doll in the painting, he was indeed hurt:

"I’m okay."

Without time for healing, he kept his eyes tightly on the painting. Despite being stabbed, the two smaller dolls still couldn’t escape the attack. They were merely moving within one room in the model, never attempting to move through the door to another place:

"Quick, let’s go to another room."

Priest Augustus caught onto something and hurriedly helped Shard walk out. Mrs. Freeman also worriedly took her two children along, and the group moved from the boy’s room to the living room, then left the second floor and ran down the stairs to the first floor.

During this, Shard, with his back to the Freeman family, used "Satiety Food" to treat the inexplicit injury on his body. In the painting in his hands, the two small dolls also finally escaped the room when the real people left, moving to the staircase of the model house in the painting just like them.

The bandaged puppet wearing a black hat and holding a sharp knife was very fast when in the same room with the small dolls but moved very slowly when they were not in the same room, so the two small dolls were temporarily safe as long as they didn’t go upstairs.

"Leave this house!"

Shard said, quickly stepping into the foyer with the priest. They initially thought they wouldn’t be able to leave, but the door opened normally, revealing the Thursday afternoon scene of Tobesk Street outside.

Priest and Shard stepped out together, but the painting Shard was holding suddenly disappeared from his hand the moment he left the house, unraveling and falling to the floor in front of the door.

Soon Mrs. Freeman and the children also came out of the house smoothly, but when Shard looked back at the painting inside the door, he saw the dolls representing him and the boy heading back inside from the doorstep of the model house.

"Mrs. Freeman, did you touch this painting?"

Shard suddenly asked the middle-aged woman beside him who was holding her children’s hands, looking bewildered at the doorstep:

"I might have touched it during the move... but I was wearing gloves! Yes, I always wore gloves when I handled these paintings!"

The somewhat indecisive woman suddenly realized what Shard meant.

"Only those who directly touch the painting with their hands will have dolls corresponding to them appear in the scene. This thing must not be very strong, otherwise, it wouldn’t use such a vague memory approach, allowing only one person to contact it at a time."

Priest Augustus concluded, while Shard, seeing the two small dolls in the painting thinking of going upstairs, immediately re-entered the door. His doll then turned and descended the stairs, standing in the foyer just like the real Shard.

"Kid, you go inside too."

Priest Augustus told the boy, but the boy clung to his mother in terror.

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The palpably frightened middle-aged woman, looking down at her children, gritted her teeth and surprisingly let go of her daughter’s hand, pulling the boy back inside the house. As they stepped through the door, she also trembled but still remembered to say to the old man outside:

"Priest, could you please look after Little Lia for a moment?"

"No problem, but Mrs. Freeman, the danger is not over yet."