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ch 2### Unfortunate Genius — 2
Even so, what Blanche loved most was Adelaide's scent.
She met her through a gap in the door measuring fifteen centimeters in both height and width. That narrow opening was where Adelaide passed her meals through.
Alain's paranoia had become a serious illness. From that point on, Blanche's freedom was restricted to the workshop. He assigned a mute servant to watch her. Since there was a toilet attached to the workshop, that was where she ate, slept, and relieved herself.
Blanche knew that Adelaide loved her.
Blanche loved her too.
The tenderness between them was connected by linen.
Blanche would hand Adelaide linen soaked in oil.
Adelaide would wrap herself in it and sleep, then return it to Blanche in the morning.
Her scent lingered on the linen.
Blanche collected that scent and made a perfume from it.
It smelled exactly like her, so she would apply it and fall asleep.
It felt as though she were sleeping while holding Adelaide in her arms.
In front of Alain and the servant, she hid her feelings for her.
Until she escaped this hell, there was no other choice.
Eventually, she and Adelaide conspired together.
Blanche gave her the sleeping perfume.
When the opportunity came, Adelaide only needed to spray it on Alain and the servant's beds.
A day when Alain became drunk and passed out would be ideal.
After putting them to sleep, Blanche planned to take the essences and expensive fragrance materials and escape to Germany or Italy.
She could speak the languages of those countries.
But.
God was not on Blanche's side.
Adelaide was caught with the sleeping perfume.
Realizing what was happening, Alain ordered the servant to torture her.
Blanche's plan was exposed.
That night, a fire broke out in the workshop.
Blanche sensed the fire while half-asleep, but she couldn't do anything.
Alain, having decided to eliminate the source of his problems, had poured wine spirits around the workshop.
The flames surged upward like a raging wave in an instant.
"Blanche."
She saw Adelaide running toward her, covered in blood.
Taking advantage of the servant's momentary lapse in vigilance, she had desperately freed herself from her restraints.
"No."
Blanche screamed when she saw her through the flames.
Alain was pointing a gun at Adelaide's back.
"No..."
She couldn't say anything more.
Bang.
With a single gunshot, the flower named Adelaide fell.
Meanwhile, the flames in the workshop grew even more ferocious.
Blanche kicked the door with all her strength, but it didn't budge.
It was because Alain had used thick hinges on sturdy wood in case Blanche ever tried to escape.
And because he had fastened an enormous lock from the outside.
Boom, boom.
Now the inside of the workshop was also an ocean of fire.
The oil filling every corner was on the fire's side.
Even the oil spread over glass for the enfleurage process joined the flames.
Inside a fire, even beautiful fragrances became poison.
Tuberose was no exception.
Some potent scents could kill a person after only being inhaled once or twice.
Ah.
Blanche pressed linen over her nose and was forced toward the corner of the workbench.
Beneath the platform was a secret pit.
The pit was deep enough to reach a person's height.
Inside it was Blanche's hope.
The possessions she had secretly collected so she could live happily with Adelaide.
The ambergris, musk, civet, Himalayan cedar, and essential essences covered in beeswax that she had accumulated behind Alain's back...
Come out.
She grabbed the hook used for stirring flowers and shouted.
Toward the blazing flames.
Boom.
The fire answered.
A barrel of spirits in the corner had exploded.
Come out!
Boom.
Another alcohol barrel exploded.
The flames spread to the oil where she had stored the tuberose scent.
This was no longer a perfume workshop.
God or whoever you are, come out!
Amid the thick smoke, Blanche's scream erupted again and again.
But her resentment wasn't directed at a despicable man like Alain.
It was directed at cruel fate.
There was only one thing Blanche wanted from it.
To create beautiful perfumes with her extraordinary sense of smell.
To pick flowers with Adelaide, select them, extract their scents through enfleurage and distillation, and freely create perfumes.
To spray those perfumes and find the meaning of life in the expressions of people who loved them.
Something so simple.
Something so human.
And yet Blanche...
For more than fifteen years, even while creating perfumes at the pinnacle of excellence, she had never been able to achieve it.
The perfumes she created went out under Alain's name, and all she received in return were scraps of bread and goat's milk.
No.
There had been one more thing.
Adelaide.
Smelling her body scent through the narrow gap in the door, holding her hand, and receiving comfort from her.
Adelaide, whose lips Blanche couldn't even touch because of the thickness of the door between them.
Now even her scent had completely withered away, just like her mother's.
Her mother appeared within the flames.
Adelaide was there too.
Amazingly, the two of them were holding hands.
Both possessed the pure appearance of white jasmine.
That only made Blanche angrier.
They had forced her to live amid filth and misery while she was alive, only to make her clean and beautiful after death.
Rage surged within her at the twisted performance of the being called God.
God, you bastard, come out!
When her final rage erupted, a being appeared as if summoned by a lie.
Blanche.
The being was an apparition.
Instead, his scent spoke for him.
A scent in which hundreds of millions of griefs and miseries, despair and divinity were tangled together.
Blanche knew.
He was the god of death.
"......?"
You called for me while denying and cursing me.
"The god of death?"
Yes.
I am the god of death and the god of fate.
You may resent me, but just as you extract the soul called fragrance from flowers, I have come today to extract the soul from your body.
"You can't do that."
Some lives are as short as flowers that bloom for only one day.
You lived for twenty-six years, but it was a life in which you experienced every fragrance on earth.
Do not regret it.
"Twenty-six years?"
Have you forgotten your age?
"You've forgotten."
I have no memory of living my own life.
"......?"
"Everything was Alain Clement's life.
The perfumes I made.
The soaps I made.
The powders I made.
Even the new fragrances I discovered."
"......"
"And yet you're saying I lived for twenty-six years?"
Blanche.
"This is a fraud and a deception.
You gods of death.
If you give someone life, you should at least let them enjoy a minimum amount of freedom.
I even made useless fragrances sing alongside other scents."
Even useless fragrances?
"That's what perfume is.
An accord that carries the emotion that begins with the top note all the way to the last.
The human lives that you gods supposedly govern weren't even as meaningful as my world of perfume."
How arrogant.
I know that you possess an extraordinary sense of smell, but how dare you...
"Arrogant?"
The perfumes you created are nothing more than the futile amusement of humans.
And yet you dare speak of gods?
"Not at all.
My perfumes work on everyone."
Insolent.
Do you think such a trivial amusement would work even on us gods?
Whoosh.
Instead of an answer, what flew through the air was the secret perfume Blanche had created.
The moment its fragrance shimmered through the air, the god's eyes helplessly trembled.
Saaa.
Once more.
This?
The god's nose began to flare.
Blanche knew nothing about the five senses of gods.
But she could tell that the god's emotions were wavering.
"Do you still call that arrogance?"
"......?"
The god shook his head.
No illusion or hallucination could affect them.
That was why they could descend lightly into both the hell of fire and the hell of water.
But.
This perfume was different.
It was penetrating even the olfactory system of a god, fundamentally different from that of a human.
Moreover.
It was maddeningly dreamlike.
As though.
He had fallen under the hypnosis of another absolute being.
"This perfume contains the essence of a hundred flowers representing the four seasons, eight types of trees representing the four directions and four seasons, and the musk, sandalwood, and agarwood used on the altars of gods.
I finished it with the aromatic substance God gave Moses, along with mysterious and sacred wild vetiver and frankincense.
It encompasses even the scents used to communicate with you.
So even the god of death cannot be an exception.
Not when you have descended upon this land."
"......"
"Admit it.
I can create the scent of sunlight.
I can even create the scent of moonlight."
Then are you a perfumer of sunlight and a perfumer of moonlight?
"A perfumer of everything on earth."
Yes.
I admit it.
As a god, I cannot bring myself to lie about this.
The god's eyes trembled slightly.
"But?"
Your body.
It is too late for you to return to life.
The god of death looked at Blanche.
Both her legs were burning.
The flames had already risen to her navel.
Both arms had burned up to the elbows.
Only her face remained.
Let's do this.
"How?"
Your talent is too precious, so I will connect it to your next life.
In other words, I will pass your talent and the glory of your life on to your future self when you are born again.
"Next life?"
I promise.
With the god's response, Blanche's body began to melt.
The flames had invaded her face as well.
Now even her face was on fire.
The only thing that remained clear until the very end was Blanche's nose.
Her nose.
Her nose...
The moment even that nose caught fire, the roof collapsed.
Her mother's wish that she would be loved by everyone like a pure white iris.
The end of her entire life came in an instant.
The god had disappeared as well.
"......"
"......"
Two silences confronted one another.
But Gangto understood.
This shimmering vision before his eyes.
This face that was unfamiliar yet somehow familiar.
This was his past life.
"Do you remember your sense of smell when you were young?"
Blanche's question pierced through his brain.
"......"
Gangto did not answer readily.
Until he was three years old.
Gangto had been a prodigy of smell.
He could tell how close his father was even when he was several meters away from the house.
He could even tell when his grandfather was coming.
What was inside his father's pockets and what was inside his mother's bag were no problem either.
He wasn't as extraordinary as Blanche, but his sense of smell had been exceptionally powerful.
Then, when he turned three, just like a lie.
His sense of smell dropped below average.
It happened when he lost consciousness alongside his uncle, who had been driving, on the day his mother and father died in a traffic accident.
"The impact to the back of the head, combined with the psychological trauma, seems to have caused it."
That was the doctor's diagnosis.
After that, Gangto lived alone with his grandfather, who was a Western-style painter.
"The sense of smell you had at birth was a trace of me.
You are my next life."
"Next life..."
"It was fortunate for me, even though it must have been difficult for you."
"Why?"
"You could call it purity.
If I were to compare it to paper, you're almost like a blank sheet.
That means you can absorb my sense of smell more clearly."
"Is that possible?"
"I've waited two hundred years for that one thing.
You don't know.
Those years...
You don't know how desperate and yearning that wait was."
"Two hundred years."
"More than two hundred years ago, when the perfumery burned down, that was the condition set by God.
When my next life was born, I had to meet them on their twenty-sixth birthday.
If I missed that day, there would be no opportunity.
It couldn't be earlier.
It couldn't be later."
"......"
"My next life."
"......?"
"That's why you came all the way here.
You followed the desperation from my unconscious mind that guided you."
"......"
"Twenty-six.
I died that day, but I will be reborn through your sense of smell.
So that I can become the protagonist of this world through fragrance, something I couldn't accomplish back then."
"......"
"To fill the emptiness inside those who feel hollow through fragrance, and even comfort the pain of the sick."
"......"
"To become the greatest in this world."
"......"
"If you understand, now regulate your breathing.
Twenty-six times, just like your birthday."
"Twenty-six times?"
"When your final breath ends, your sense of smell will react to the scents of all things.
Every scent that exists on earth.
The things I smelled and remembered.
The things you remembered.
And even the new things you will remember in the future.
All of them will exist within you."
Blanche began to overlap with Gangto.
Breaths came in and went out.
There was no pain.
No sense of resistance either.
Whoop.
Gangto began to breathe.
Twenty-six times.
When he finished that final breath,
"Huh?"
The bombardment of scent molecules entering through his nose caused him to lose consciousness.
Even as that happened, a storm of experience crashed into his hippocampus and amygdala.
It was as vast as the sea and as majestic as a tidal wave.
The hippocampus inside his limbic system seemed as though it might overflow from lack of capacity as it filled endlessly.
The final gift is in Grasse.
Go to Grasse and find the workshop that belonged to Alain, the one I showed you earlier.
A lot has changed, but you'll be able to recognize it.
Remember the place where I burned.
Dig there.
It's a gift from my past self to my future self.
It's all yours.
I have only one request.
The world of fragrance that comforted people and gave them courage.
The world I created at the highest level but never got to enjoy.
Tell people about it.
Tell them who the ruler of perfume in this world is.
Blanche Robert.
That's my name.
Blanche Robert.
It was your name too.
"Espèce de connard."
A harsh French curse drifted into his hazy consciousness.
Gangto wasn't good at French.
Aside from perfumery terminology, he had only learned enough survival French for this journey.
"Well, I didn't do anything wrong. This Korean just collapsed on his own."
It seemed the owner was protesting.
It was still French.
Yet it sounded as natural as Korean.
"......?"
Gangto opened his eyes.