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### Chapter 1
There was always a distinctive smell lingering in the air of the Western Painting Department's studio at the College of Fine Arts.
The sharp, volatile scent of turpentine and the heavy, slightly fishy aroma of linseed oil. Lee Ji-hoon breathed in those familiar smells as he carefully brought his brush to the canvas.
He held his breath.
The fine detail brush captured the subtle reflection of light in the pupil of the figure's eye. His brushwork was flawless, without the slightest tremor, as precise as that of a sophisticated machine.
"Whoo……."
Only then did Ji-hoon let out the breath he had been holding and take a step back from the easel.
On the enormous 100-ho canvas was the portrait of an old man.
The deep wrinkles on his forehead, the blue veins visible beneath his skin, even the texture of his faded eyes.
The depiction was so hyper-realistic that one could have mistaken it for a photograph.
Ji-hoon carefully examined the painting from top to bottom. There was no distortion in the forms. The gradations of light and shadow were textbook-perfect.
During his art school entrance-exam days, Ji-hoon had been the student who won the grand prize at a nationwide mock practical competition. When it came to "form skills" and "reproduction skills"—the ability to depict objects exactly as they appeared—he prided himself on being second to none among his peers.
With that diligence and technical skill, he had proudly earned admission to K University's College of Fine Arts, a school said to have an acceptance rate as narrow as the eye of a needle.
But the practical studio at university was an entirely different ecosystem from an art academy preparing students for entrance exams.
"All right, everyone, stop what you're doing. Let's start the midterm critique."
The voice was gentle, yet carried a strange sense of authority.
Professor Park, a graduate of a French art school and one of the most closely watched established artists in the contemporary art world, entered the studio.
The students arranged their easels in a semicircle. Holding a tumbler filled with a warm Americano, Professor Park slowly examined the students' works one by one.
His method of critique never involved raising his voice or getting angry. He simply used his calm, measured tone to cut into the deepest part of his students' pride.
"Minsu. The colors are good, but the composition is too ordinary. Don't always try to take the safe route. This isn't an academy."
"Sua, your strokes are more daring than last week. The matière in this section is very good. Keep pushing it like this."
As praise and criticism alternated, Professor Park's footsteps stopped in front of Ji-hoon's canvas.
Ji-hoon unconsciously swallowed. The hand gripping the hem of his paint-stained apron had grown damp with sweat.
Professor Park silently stared at Ji-hoon's portrait.
Ten seconds. Twenty seconds.
The longer the silence lasted, the heavier the atmosphere in the studio became. Eventually, Professor Park set down his tumbler and spoke.
"Ji-hoon."
"Yes, Professor."
"You've drawn it very well. Your descriptive ability is incredible. How many layers of glazing did you apply to get that skin texture? It looks like you painted over it at least ten times. You're really diligent. You must be the student with the heaviest backside in the entire department."
It was a compliment. At least on the surface, it was.
But Ji-hoon's expression gradually stiffened. He knew that Professor Park's "real" evaluation always came afterward.
"But, Ji-hoon."
Professor Park adjusted his glasses and met Ji-hoon's eyes. His calm gaze even seemed to carry a hint of sympathy.
"When I look at your paintings, I feel so frustrated. I don't feel sad, happy, or surprised. I just feel like I'm looking at a perfectly manufactured 'machine part.'"
"……."
"It's been over 180 years since the camera was invented. If you press the camera button on your smartphone just once, you can get an image that's far more accurate and detailed than this painting you've spent an entire month staying up all night to make. So as a painter, shouldn't you put your own 'perspective' onto the canvas—the thing a lens can't capture?"
Ji-hoon's breath caught in his throat.
"There's no you in your painting. It's nothing more and nothing less than a model answer hanging in an art academy for entrance-exam students. It's fine to distort the form a little. It's fine to use color like a madman. Break out of the frame. Do you want to become a painter, or do you want to become a high-performance photocopier?"
Break out of the frame.
It was something Ji-hoon had been sick of hearing throughout his three years since entering university.
He knew. He knew what he lacked.
The sense to boldly combine colors no one else could imagine, the intuition to reinterpret a subject through his own unique perspective. That artistic inspiration people called "talent" was brutally absent from him.
"Let's take a look at Jaehyun's painting."
Professor Park's gaze shifted toward the canvas right beside Ji-hoon's.
Compared to Ji-hoon's, his classmate Yoon Jae-hyun's canvas looked almost unfinished, with a great deal of empty space. A person's back had been roughly scribbled in with a few thick, coarse brushstrokes, while the paint had splattered and mixed together however it pleased across the canvas.
Yet within the collision of those crude colors was a strange, inexplicable sense of tension and sadness.
"This is what painting is. You don't have to draw something perfectly. With nothing more than the trail left by that blue paint as it runs down the canvas, he conveys the emotion of depression completely. Jaehyun knows how to use color. His intuition is excellent."
Ji-hoon lowered his head.
He had believed that anything could be overcome through hard work. While others painted one piece, he painted ten. He copied the collections of famous painters until the art books were worn ragged.
But even though he could improve his mechanical accuracy, that subtle sense—the one tiny difference that breathed life into a canvas—remained beyond his grasp no matter how hard he tried.
"Ji-hoon, you've worked hard. For the next assignment, please try to break free from being a photocopier."
Professor Park's calm voice signaled the end of the critique.
The studio became noisy again, and the students began gathering their belongings.
Ji-hoon stood there blankly, staring at his perfect yet empty portrait.
His eyes burned with tears, but he felt as though he didn't even have the right to cry, so he simply bit his lips tightly.
After the critique ended, Ji-hoon fled the studio as though running away.
Carrying nothing but a sketchbook and a single pencil, he collapsed onto a quiet bench on the outskirts of campus.
The weather was strange. It was a late afternoon in midsummer, and the sun that had been blazing brightly until just moments ago had already disappeared behind dark, black clouds. The air was sticky and heavy. It was a sign that a sudden shower was about to pour down.
Ji-hoon opened his sketchbook on his lap.
A completely blank sheet of paper.
Professor Park's words continued to echo in his ears.
"Break out of the frame. Put your own perspective into it."
Ji-hoon gripped his pencil and glared at the scenery before him. An oak tree swaying in the wind, the old red-brick art museum building, the sky gradually turning gray.
He began drawing lines.
Scratch, scratch.
The texture of the tree, the angle of the leaves, the perspective of the bricks. His hand mechanically transferred the scenery onto the paper according to formulas stored in his head.
"No. This isn't it……!"
Ji-hoon angrily pressed down on the pencil as he drew line after line. Under the force, the paper of the sketchbook tore.
This time, he picked up a mechanical pencil. He wanted to ignore the detailed shape of the tree and try to depict only the feeling of the leaves swaying through thin lines.
But the obsession deeply embedded in his brain—"It has to be accurate"—made his wrist stiff.
The harder he tried to destroy the form, the more crude the lines became. The harder he tried to convey emotion, the more artificial his scribbles looked.
Plop.
At that moment, a single raindrop landed on the pencil lines, as though settling down on a leaf on the paper.
"Haa……."
It had begun to rain.
Drip. Drip-drip.
Heavy raindrops quickly soaked through the sketchbook.
Without even thinking about gathering his belongings, Ji-hoon remained seated on the bench and looked up at the sky. The sky, where dark clouds swirled, looked just like his own crushed heart.
'Am I going to be unable to cross this wall for the rest of my life?'
A fool who could do nothing but draw things accurately. A technician, not an artist.
He loved art, but the god of art had never given him the wings of intuition. That despairing fact weighed heavily on his heart.
Rumble—CRACK!
Thunder sounded in the distance.
The wind blew fiercely, driving the rain down at an angle. His clothes became completely soaked and clung to his skin, but Ji-hoon did not get up. Only his right hand, gripping the mechanical pencil, trembled violently.
'Just once. Even if it's only once.'
Ji-hoon opened his eyes wide and desperately tried to imprint the sight of the pitch-black stormy sky and the deepened colors of the red-brick building soaked by the rain onto his retinas.
'If only I could make this overwhelming scenery, this vivid sensation I can see with my own eyes, come alive and breathe on paper…….'
At that moment.
Crackle—!
The air around him changed strangely. An eerie silence descended, as though every sound in the world had been sucked into a vacuum tube.
The fine hairs on Ji-hoon's forearms all stood on end, as if charged with static electricity. The pungent smell of ozone rushed into his nose.
"Huh……?"
Ji-hoon sensed the danger and was just about to stand up.
FLASH—!!!
A gigantic flash of light, as though all the light in the world had been compressed into a single point, struck Ji-hoon directly above the head.
"……!!"
It was a moment so brief that it did not even allow him to scream.
Tens of thousands of volts of electricity pierced through the crown of his head, boiling his brain tissue, then raced down his spine and tore apart the network of nerves throughout his entire body.
Perhaps because the metal-bodied mechanical pencil in Ji-hoon's hand had acted as a lightning rod, the blood vessels in his right arm swelled as though they were about to burst before quickly subsiding.
BOOOOM—!!!
The explosive sound that seemed to rip the world apart finally struck Ji-hoon's eardrums only after he was flung through the air and slammed into the wet grass.
His consciousness helplessly drifted away.
Even as his vision turned black, the intensely vivid blue afterimage of the lightning striking down remained etched into Ji-hoon's mind in geometric patterns.
That was the final memory of Lee Ji-hoon, the man who had been called an entrance-exam machine.
Whooosh—
Under the cold rain striking his cheeks, Ji-hoon slowly regained his senses.
The taste of damp earth and blood mixed together in his mouth. His fingers twitched faintly.
"Urgh……."
His entire body throbbed as though he had been hit by a massive truck.
Ji-hoon staggeringly raised his upper body. His clothes were covered in mud, and his right hand trembled faintly as though suffering from a seizure.
The fact that he was alive felt like a miracle. Even after being struck by lightning, his heart was still beating.
"Haa, haa……."
Breathing heavily, Ji-hoon lifted his heavy eyelids.
He roughly wiped the rainwater gathered in front of his eyes with the back of his hand. His blurry vision gradually began to come into focus.
And the moment he properly opened his eyes—
"……Huh?"
Ji-hoon's breath stopped.
The world looked completely different to him.
The rainy campus scenery. The old red-brick art museum. The swaying oak tree.
It was the same ordinary scenery he had been sitting on the bench trying to sketch moments ago. But the world entering his eyes now was being broken down into an entirely different dimension of information.
The first thing that caught Ji-hoon's attention was the red bricks, wet with rain.
Under normal circumstances, he would have perceived the color simply as dark red. But to Ji-hoon's eyes, that color was being broken apart like a palette of paints and directly driven into his mind.
Burnt sienna 55% + alizarin crimson 30% + ivory black 15%
It was as though transparent holographic text had appeared before his eyes, presenting the precise color composition contained within the wet brick as numerical values inside his mind.
That wasn't all.
The subtle reflections of light created on the brick's surface as rainwater flowed down it could be clearly read as a glazing mixture of titanium white 80% + cerulean blue 20%.
"What…… what the hell is this?"
Ji-hoon turned his head with a dazed expression.
This time, he saw the oak tree swaying in the wind.
The moment he looked at the shape of the tree, thin, razor-sharp fluorescent lines spread through the air before his eyes, drawing geometric guidelines.
The world approached him like a gigantic blueprint of mathematics and color.
These were no longer the eyes he had possessed in the past, eyes that saw only the outer shell of things. He could now perceive the proportions that made up an object, and feel the very essence of the particles of light and color from which it was composed.
Ji-hoon looked down at his trembling hands.
Across his palms, he could feel with painful clarity the movement of his bones and muscles, as well as the perfect complementary contrast between the blue running through his veins and the apricot color of his skin.
The supernatural shock of the lightning had completely rearranged the neural network of his brain.
'I can see it. No, I can feel it.'
The narrow field of vision that had been obsessed with mechanically copying forms exactly, under the pressure of art-school entrance exams, had finally been cast aside. That subtle sense of talent he had longed for his entire life—the tiny difference that had always eluded him—had been forcibly implanted into his mind along with the lightning.
Ji-hoon's lips trembled faintly.
And right now, his fingertips itched so badly that it felt as though they were burning with the desire to hold a brush.