Saturday morning, on the outskirts of Arc City.
Sunlight beat straight down on the wild grass covering the hillside.
In the distance, the city's buildings rose in staggered layers of density.
Thin clouds at the top of the sky let through a pure, unbroken white.
Griseo sat on a small folding stool, toes dangling above the ground, her sketchboard propped steadily in front of her and her paint box open, a few wells of color pooled inside.
She'd worn a thin, light-colored jacket today, a small smear of blue on one cuff — clearly from mixing paint a moment ago.
The wind blew past, ruffling the ends of her hair, but she paid it no mind, head bowed, slowly stirring a fresh streak of green into the palette with her brush tip.
Not far away, beneath a big tree, Kosma was living through yet another public execution.
"You missed this exact question last week, and you're getting it wrong again today?"
Daisy slapped the workbook down onto the folding table, the pressure in the air instantly cranked to maximum.
"Kosma, are you actually solving problems, or are you settling some personal vendetta with your pencil against mathematics itself?"
Kosma clutched his head, sliding so far he was about to slip clean off the picnic mat.
"I've tried my best..."
"Your best is visible only to you."
"Here, look at the function graph one more time."
"Daisy, I think my head hurts a little."
"Good. That means the knowledge is starting to knock on the door. If you want Mama Aponia to confiscate your entire allowance next semester to fund the monastery's roof repairs, feel free to lie down and give up right now, Kosma."
Kosma sprawled flat on the grass in a starfish pose, his eyes hollowed out with the pure emptiness of someone freshly ravaged by midterms — he looked like he'd aged twenty years on the spot.
Griseo didn't even look up.
She was used to this by now.
Every exam week, Kosma sank into this same state of looking like he was about to wither away.
The first few times, she'd dragged her little stool over to watch, but she'd since learned that the best thing she could do in moments like this was pretend she hadn't heard a thing.
Sometimes playing deaf and dumb was the wiser choice.
She painted quietly for a while, the brush tip whispering a faint scratching sound against the paper.
Arc City looked lovely today.
Gray-white buildings shot through with warm gold, green fractured into pieces by tree shade between the blocks, and far off, the business district floated with a faint touch of pink and orange.
She wanted to capture all of those living colors on paper.
In a little while, the painting would be finished.
Griseo set down her brush, held the painting a little further away, studied it carefully, exhaled softly, then lowered her head and fished out her phone.
She tapped open the comic backend with practiced ease.
[Current account: Painted World]
The message backlog was full again.
She glanced at the latest stats first, then slowly scrolled down to the comments section.
Sure enough, the comments had piled up like a small mountain, avatars and speech bubbles stacked layer upon layer, enough to make her eyes swim a little.
She'd already finished drawing the Crimson Sakura Arc and the Gratitude Arc for Brother Su Yu, the storylines following The Third Eruption.
The shrine maiden beneath the cherry blossoms, the blade on a snowy night, the shrine bell, the gust of wind in that single instant when Kallen turned back — and that final sentence she never got to finish...
In the early days, the comments were always full of people howling for updates, mixed in with the occasional odd "feed me, Mistress, I'm starving."
Griseo didn't really understand what that meant, but she had a vague sense it wasn't people taking the story seriously.
But things were different now.
The top comment, with the most likes, read:
"I can't believe they used this color palette for Sakura and Kallen's story. I finished it and just sat at my desk completely blank, my brain totally short-circuited."
"The ending of the Gratitude Arc hit like a truck. I thought I could hold it together, but I missed my subway stop crying."
"Who came up with this ultimate tragic fate? Is the adult world really this cruel?"
Griseo read through them one by one, her eyes slowly lighting up.
She loved comments like these — they gave her a strange, sour, swelling sense of accomplishment.
Brother Su Yu's scripts were simply flawless.
All she had to do was follow the story beats and add color.
Fill the panels with high-saturation colors, and the readers would be helplessly drawn in, crying their eyes out, then leaving long, rambling comments afterward.
It made her feel like she was truly helping.
Mama Aponia always said that when someone helps you, you should remember to repay the favor.
It didn't have to be something expensive.
As long as you prepared it with care and gave it with sincerity, that was already enough.
Griseo lifted her head, glanced at the distant city, then lowered her eyes back to her sketch.
Brother Su Yu was probably still in the studio right now, typing away at his keyboard.
He'd been so busy lately.
Whenever he came to the studio to discuss panel layouts with her, he always had either a tablet in hand or a thick stack of documents tucked under his arm.
When he sat down to talk with her, there was always a faint, hard-to-hide weariness lurking behind his eyes.
So this painting — she'd give it to him as a gift, in return.
Just as the thought crossed her mind, her phone buzzed softly again.
It was a message from her mother, Blanka.
Griseo tapped it open.
At the top was a forwarded link, the headline unnervingly long, quoting the comments of a rather famous art critic on her exhibition pieces.
She read it carefully twice, and the more she read, the hotter her ears felt.
"A supreme, divine childlike wonder!"
"An unbelievable imagination leaping levels beyond her peers!"
"An absolute masterpiece no ordinary child could ever touch!"
Griseo quietly slid the phone further away, as if she could cover her ears and pretend not to hear.
She didn't really understand all this exaggerated flattery from grown-ups.
She was just drawing, plain and simple.
And that phrase, "human cub," sounded strange too — like they were describing some kind of animal that had just been born.
Below that was a second message from Blanka.
First she praised how well Griseo had done, then, apologetically, told her that she and Griseo's father probably wouldn't be able to make it back for the exhibition opening after all.
The project on their hands couldn't be left, the situation was tight, and it might need to be pushed back further.
Griseo stared at the message for a while, didn't reply, and slowly let the screen go dark.
The wind blew past, and a leaf curled up near her feet.
She lowered her head, looking at a bit of grass clinging to the toe of her shoe, and the light happiness that had just risen inside her slowly sank back down.
She wasn't really that sad, though.
Everyone outside thought she was wonderful.
So talented, so special, so worth watching.
The exhibition's schedule kept arriving in ever more formal versions, and the setup photos looked like preparations for some sacred ceremony.
The critics, the adults, the media, and all those strangers were waiting for her to produce "the masterpiece a genius child prodigy ought to create."
But only she knew the truth.
The dazzling, spotlight-drenched, pure-hearted genius Griseo everyone talked about was one thing.
But hiding under the covers, sneaking doujinshi by the light of a little night lamp — that was "seasoned veteran Painted World" — and that was another thing entirely.
If by some terrible chance her secret ever got exposed...
If that serious Wang Taidou ever found out that the child prodigy he called "divinely gifted, untouched by earthly dust" was, in fact, the mysterious late-night veteran "Mistress Painted World," who skillfully drew things like "The Untold Story of Two Big Brothers on the Basketball Court"...
Griseo shuddered.
The sheer social mortification of that mental image alone was enough to make her want to chew up her paintbrush and swallow it whole, right then and there.
If her identity as Painted World was ever discovered, she'd probably have to move to a different planet to live.
She raised a hand and gently patted her own face, trying to shake off those chaotic thoughts.
No more thinking about that.
She'd come out today to sketch.
When she'd first agreed to hold the exhibition, all she'd wanted was to make art that could heal people's hearts.
But somewhere along the way, all those expectations had slowly pressed down on her, like an invisible cloth, suffocatingly tight.
Griseo sniffled, sat back up straight, and steadied her sketchboard again.
It's fine.
Finish this painting first.
Paint this beautiful, lively city spread out before her, bathed in sunlight.
It would be the final, centerpiece painting of the exhibition — a gift for Brother Su Yu, in return for everything.
With that thought, she took a deep breath, picked up her brush again, and lifted her head.
Her gaze swept across the grassy slope, past the guardrail, across that entire stretch of city spread out beneath the sun.
The next second—
The expression on her face suddenly went still.
As if someone had pressed pause on time itself.
Griseo's pale violet pupils contracted to their absolute limit in an instant.
Within her special sight — that world built entirely out of countless colors—
something was happening. Something wrong.
The glass curtain walls that had been shimmering gold in the sunlight, the lush green vegetation, the rainbow-neon traffic arteries flowing like veins through the city...
They were dying.
The colors were withering away, spreading rapidly, in a way that defied the laws of physics.
And rising up from somewhere deep in the city, a filthy, blackened red.
That red was absolutely not paint.
It looked more like blood dissolving into murky water, then being cruelly kneaded apart by an even deeper shadow, until it turned into a color that made her stomach churn.
She could even see the "thing."
Its outline unclear, its shape indescribable, like a massive shadow lurking in the sky above the city and in the gaps between the buildings, churning slowly.
It had no face, no limbs, yet it was more terrifying than any monster she could clearly see.
It crouched above the city.
And it was watching her.
Griseo's breathing broke into ragged pieces.
The brush in her hand clattered onto a stone and rolled far away.
She stumbled backward.
Then again.
Her whole body toppled over along with the stool, the sketchboard striking the ground, the paint box flipping over, half a well of blue and a smear of white mixing into the grass, like a sky someone had stomped flat.
She scrambled backward, both hands flailing wildly at the empty air, and fell in a graceless heap onto the slope.
Not far away, beneath the big tree, Kosma's pencil dropped straight out of his hand.
"Griseo?!"
Daisy shot to her feet too, the workbook clattering to the ground in a scatter of pages.
The two of them bolted toward her almost in the same instant.
Kosma ran too fast and nearly tripped over a rock; Daisy, half a step ahead, scrambled up the slope in a few strides and caught the shrinking Griseo by the shoulders.
The little girl was shaking violently.
She clutched her own arms in a death grip, eyes wide open, but as though she could no longer see the person in front of her — her gaze fixed emptily on somewhere very, very far away.
"Griseo!"
Daisy crouched down in a panic, pressing a hand to her thin shoulder.
"Snap out of it! Look at me, what's wrong? Where did you hurt yourself?"
By then Griseo seemed to have lost her hearing entirely.
Her lips had gone white, her breathing ragged, her chest heaving hard. It took several seconds before she managed to force out a broken sound.
"Monsters... they're all monsters..."
"The colors... they're gone..."
"Don't... don't look..."
Daisy's eyes went wide, her voice taut. "Phone — call someone, now! Hurry!"
Kosma fumbled frantically at his pocket.
But Griseo was still shaking uncontrollably, as if she'd fallen into a bottomless pit of ice water.
There was no focus at all in her eyes, and her mouth kept repeating, over and over, just those two words.
"Monsters..."
Meanwhile, elsewhere.
The top floor of Arc City Tower, miHoYo Studio.
The desk in the Director's Office was piled with three drafts of the new update document, two monitors open side by side, their screens full of story flowcharts, event resources, and version milestones.
Su Yu sat at his computer, fingers flying across the keyboard.
The big new-version update loomed right ahead — several events, two main story chapters, a chronicle segment, along with the promotional copy, livestream schedule, and testing feedback all tangled together at once. He was busy enough to wish he could split himself into three people.
He'd just finished revising a section of boss mechanics description, and without thinking, dragged the resource list Ai Hyperion had thrown at him into the to-do column, muttering under his breath the whole time.
"This CG doesn't belong up front, it front-loads the emotional beat too early... Sparxie's livestream copy needs to move back a slot, or the pacing jumps too much... Bronie's server expansion plan still needs one more confirmation tonight..."
Sunlight poured in through the floor-to-ceiling window behind him, falling across the odd-eyed cat Chongchong, who was napping on a pile of documents — the floor beneath him lit with a quiet, peaceful reflection.
The cat didn't have to slog through a work shift, so naturally he slept whenever he pleased.
Buzz—!
The phone on the desk suddenly began to vibrate like mad, startling Chongchong so badly he bolted straight under the sofa.
The caller ID read: Kosma.
Su Yu's hand froze on the keyboard, and his first reaction on seeing the name was almost to laugh.
He figured the brutal midterms had finally driven the poor kid over the edge.
He picked up without thinking twice.
"Hey, Kosma? What, can't handle the tutoring anymore, want me to come pick you up?"
Su Yu answered with a casual, half-teasing tone still in his voice.
The line on the other end was chaos.
There was wind, footsteps, Daisy's voice pressed tight with panic, and Kosma's breathless, stammered repetition of something.
Su Yu's hand, still hovering above the keyboard, froze completely.
"...What did you say?"
His expression went cold in the space of a single second.
Whatever relaxed, stolen-moment ease had been lingering on his face a second ago vanished, like someone had wiped it clean.
"Griseo's in the hospital?"
He stood up so fast the chair slid back half a meter.
"What happened, tell me clearly."
On the other end, Kosma spoke rapid-fire, barely managing to recount the situation on the hillside a moment ago.
Su Yu grabbed the coat off the back of his chair, not even bothering to lock his computer, and strode toward the door.
"Watch her closely. I'm coming right now."
Outside the door.
Nuwa, passing by with some documents in hand, was just about to step in for a signature.
She'd barely raised her hand when the door was slammed open with force, and Su Yu's face — cold enough to be frightening — flashed past her.
"Hey! Su Yu, what the—"
Before Nuwa could finish, he'd already vanished down the hallway, leaving only a chilly gust of wind to tousle her bangs.
Nuwa stood frozen where she was, staring at the still-unlocked computer screen, an inexplicable sense of unease spreading through her fast.
In November, the weather seemed to have turned suddenly cold.
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