Almighty painter

Chapter 1069 Astrological Murder Magic

Hunter Bull shifted his gaze from the walnut pen holder and stared blankly at the framed newspaper page in the picture frame.

His pupils were very light in color, and when he was lost in thought, he would blink very slowly. Coupled with his noticeably downturned nose and cheeks that were wider than his cheekbones, he looked like an owl scrutinizing the food in front of him to see if it was appetizing enough.

"No."

He said.

"Huh?" Ole didn't understand, and stretched out his head in confusion, like a silly nematode.

“Picasso… he wasn’t my teacher.” The demanding owl was critical of his afternoon tea, so he corrected himself, “I only spent a year in his studio.”

"so--"

Ole shrank back, curling up like a nematode.

Hunter Bull remained silent, staring at the French headlines in the newspaper, perhaps reminiscing about those bygone days.

Finally, the owl nodded and swallowed the nematode.

He abandoned the pen holder and grasped the photo frame in his palm.

“But thank you,” Hunter Bull said, unusually expressing his gratitude.

"It's nothing, it's nothing, just a small token of my appreciation."

Ole finally relaxed. It was really difficult to please this kind of old lunatic. It seemed that he had done a decent job this time.

"As long as you like it."

Ole then shifted his gaze to his other colleagues in the large office: his strength and conditioning coach, his enforcers, and his double-flower red sticks. His eyes met each of them, pausing for a moment, as if he wanted to share the confidence he had gained from Hunter Bull with everyone on the team.

At last.

He strode over and turned on the multimedia screen on one side.

"As for everyone... I've also prepared a gift for you all, but I'll tell you what it is after the meeting."

"Please turn off the lights."

……

One by one, the sketches slid rapidly across the multimedia screen. Soon, the audience recognized them as artworks that Gu Weijing had sold through the primary and secondary markets over the past seven years.

Each piece is marked with the time, location, transaction information, artwork price, and current potential owner.

Like a seasoned connoisseur, Ole spent about twenty minutes showing all the paintings by Gu Weijing that he could find, one by one, to all his subordinates.

Until his last work, "The Human Comedy," which is still on display at the Kunstmuseum Zurich, representing the pinnacle of oil painting.

All slides have finished playing.

Ole stood in front of the projection screen with his arms crossed, without saying a word.

"If you don't mind, could you tell me what we're supposed to do?" The head of the buying team raised his hand. "Sorry, this might be a silly question. But... why are we looking at these paintings?"

"It's okay. It's never stupid to figure out the ultimate goal of a mission."

"Ole said."

"What should we do? That's a good question."

“It’s simple—kill!” Ole took out his finger, made a gun shape, pointed it at his temple and made a “piu” sound, then stuck out his tongue.

"We're going to kill Gu Weijing."

Ole's joke made everyone in the conference room chuckle. Hunter Bull, however, didn't laugh; he stared at the slides, lost in thought again.

"Don't laugh."

Mr. Kruger Jr. didn't laugh either. After making that tongue-out face, he immediately resumed his serious expression, looking more solemn than ever since he entered the office.

His smile faded, his lips tightened, and his expression changed so drastically in an instant that it truly resembled that of a deranged killer plotting a murder in a locked room.

"A classic philosophical problem, the trolley dilemma: Five people are lying on one track, and a pedestrian is crossing the other track. Should you choose to let the train run over the five people or change tracks and hit the pedestrian?"

"This question has been debated countless times throughout history, and the answer given by philosopher Ford is not to change the track. She believes this is the difference between 'killing' and 'to die.' If you don't change the track, then it's 'to die,' which means letting those five people die. But if you actively move the train track switch, then your actions will directly lead to the death of that passerby."

"This is Kill."

"It was an undeniable murder—"

Ole imagined what his cousin Anna would do if she were in his position and facing the same situation.

She is so strong and so determined; she will get whatever she wants.

He imagined Anna Elena raising her shotgun in the manor, aiming, and then pulling the trigger.

The double-barreled shotgun spewed out a large amount of smoke from its muzzle.

"Oh!"

Mr. Kruger Jr. almost heard the sound of gunfire in his ears and saw the ribbons of his hunting jacket flutter slightly.

"What we're going to do today is plan a murder."

he said softly.

“Gu Weijing is dying. Of course, everyone dies. In seventy years, in a hundred years, everyone will die. Everyone in this room will die. Gu Weijing will too,” Ole said. “But this is ‘To die,’ not ‘Kill.’ Gu Weijing’s death has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with anyone here. In my definition, exercising every day and waiting for your opponent to die of old age in bed clearly doesn’t count as ‘Kill.’ Only shooting him in the head and splattering his brains counts as ‘Kill.’”

Only then can you get enough of the thrill of revenge.

"—Uh, it's a metaphor, right?"

This time, it was the legal counsel who spoke up.

Everyone present knew that this was just a metaphor from Ole, but perhaps Mr. Kruger Jr.'s expression was a little too serious, a little too perverse.

Instead, everyone felt a little panicked.

"Should be" is just a metaphor, I guess.

"No, I'm serious."

"Ole said."

No one responded; Ole's statement had gone beyond a joke and genuinely frightened people.

As for Huntsman, he... he's always been the same, and no one can really guess what he's thinking.

Ole burst out laughing.

"Of course it was a joke." He spread his hands helplessly. "Just in case anyone is unclear, I'll clarify: that was just a figure of speech. We won't actually use a revolver to solve the problem. Damn it, do I look like some kind of madman?"

Everyone laughed again. "Okay, that can be considered Plan B, at least not now," Ole added.

The laughter stopped.

Mr. Bull, however, seemed to be amused by the scene and chuckled.

After telling Anna-style lame jokes, Ole finally got to the real topic.

"In this murder case, the target we're going to kill isn't the real Gu Weijing, but a fictional Gu Weijing—"

Ole paused for a moment, letting everyone present follow his train of thought.

The target in the center wasn't the young man next to his cousin; he wanted to shoot Gu Weijing, like using a deer slingshot to kill a quail, not at the person Gu Weijing would be, but at the very concept of Gu Weijing.

It is Gu Weijing's influence in the art industry, and the confidence that collectors and critics have in him.

“When we open the news in the industry, what can we see? We can see a huge amount of discussion about what happened at the Zurich Museum of Fine Arts, and we can see public opinion about Gu Weijing. People are starting to question why Gu Weijing sells for such a high price and why he has such a high status.”

"Isn't he just an ordinary person who is a little luckier than others?"

"This is an excellent start."

“Gu Weijing is dying,” Ole said again. “The aura surrounding Gu Weijing, that of a golden boy whose paintings are worth a thousand pieces of gold, is dissipating and fading.”

“That’s fine. But this has nothing to do with anyone here except Hunter, nothing to do with me, and nothing to do with you.” He casually pointed to a few colleagues.

"This is not good."

"To us, we are just bystanders watching the train roar past; it's about dying, not killing."

“Imagine this,” Ole said. “There are two railway tracks in front of us. One track is tied to the Oil Painting magazine, the livelihood of many people here. I don’t need to remind you, but if Gu Weijing and the Elena family became the masters here, what would they do to you?”

"So, things are always very simple."

“We must take the initiative to do something; we must take control of our own destiny. If we find that the train is heading towards the Oil Painting magazine office, we will switch the tracks and steer the train in the other direction. If we find that the train is heading towards Gu Weijing, then we will slam on the gas.”

“OK?” he asked.

Hunter Bull raised his hand to indicate that he had a problem.

“Of course, Mr. Bull.”

"Don't step on the gas," he said.

"what?"

"Trains don't have throttles. Old-fashioned trains used levers to control the speed at which workers shovel coal and the pressure of steam valves. Modern trains use levers... Hmm!"

Hunter Bull appears to be a train enthusiast.

Have you ever ridden the Thomas the Tank Engine?

He mimicked the way a driver in an old movie would sound the horn, pursing his lips into an "O" shape: "Woo—" It actually looked quite cute.

wdnm!
The damn train had no throttle; anyone present would dare ask such a stupid question in this situation. Ole had already smashed the safe next to him on the head, telling the guy to go home and play with his toy trains.

But this is Hunter Boole.

Ole could only endure it.

"Thank you for reminding me, that's very thorough!"

He gave Mr. Bull a thumbs-up and made a whistle-blowing gesture.

“So—To kill, not to die.” Mr. Kruger Jr. didn’t give the audience time to ask questions and summarized directly: “Our goal is that simple.”

He took out a marker and wrote the word "KILL" in big letters on the whiteboard.

"Kill Gu Weijing."

Ole drew another circle around the word and then drew a question mark next to it.

“We know what we need to do—the next crucial question is, how should we do it? How can we kill a fictitious concept?”

"How can a tangible bullet kill an intangible concept?"

"Ole asked."

"In Victorian novels, there is a hitman who wants to assassinate science, believing that it disrupts social order. His method is to plant bombs at the Greenwich Observatory. He believes that by destroying the observatory where humans observe the stars, he can destroy the concept of science."

"A very interesting idea."

"So, if we want to kill the value of 'art,' kill the concept of Gu Weijing, and turn the 'Gu Weijing' pieces held by collectors into worthless pieces of paper, how should we do it?"

Ole asked again.

After a few seconds.

Then someone spoke up, tentatively saying, "Smear dog poop on it!"

"genius!"

Ole let out a small cheer.

"Awesome."

“Shooting Gu Weijing in the chest is unlikely to destroy his market value. On the contrary, if someone did that, the price of his works might increase significantly again tomorrow. The person who shot Andy Warhol and the gunman who killed John Lennon have already proven this point with their life imprisonment without parole.”

Ole leaned against the whiteboard.

"Very well. This approach failed, so there's no need for us to try it again."

"And another path has already been proven successful. The person who just accomplished this is sitting right among us."

Ole turned his gaze toward Mr. Bull.

Everyone present turned their attention to Mr. Bull.

Hunter Bull silently picked his nose.

Gu Weijing is not the kind of humorous toilet humor artist; his works are genuinely smeared with "dog poop." Whether it's real dog poop or imaginary dog ​​poop, it would be extremely detrimental to Gu Weijing's personal artistic value and market price.

“But clearly, our Hunter Bull couldn’t possibly smear every single one of Gu Weijing’s works with dog shit,” Ole explained. “As a master artist, he had more important work to arrange. That’s our job.”

Ole pointed to the multimedia projection screen next to him.

"All of Gu Weijing's works that have been publicly displayed and sold so far, whether through the Hermès Gallery or at auction houses, are now in the electronic document."

“If I want to kill Gu Weijing himself, then I should prepare a revolver. I should find a gunman.” Ole paused.

“If I want to kill the concept of Gu Weijing, what I want to do is kill Gu Weijing’s works. Then, my friends,” Ole opened his arms, “you are my revolver, you are my killers. You are the most lethal superweapon in the world.”

(End of this chapter)