2
### Chapter 2
He sprinted, kicking off the squelching mud.
His breath rose to the very top of his throat, and his rain-soaked sneakers dragged heavily at his ankles, but Ji-hoon did not stop.
"Haa, haa……."
The entire time he crossed the campus, his vision was going completely berserk.
Streetlamp lights, rain-soaked benches, grass covered in darkness.
The ordinary night scenery he would normally have passed without a second glance was being broken down into hundreds, thousands of color codes and geometric lines that struck his retinas.
An overload of information enough to make his head feel like it was splitting apart.
But it wasn't painful.
Rather, the sensation of all those numbers and proportions being perfectly organized and driven into his mind was intensely intoxicating.
When Ji-hoon reached the art museum building, he roughly shoved the door open and entered.
The sound of his wet footsteps echoed through the corridor.
When he flung open the door to the empty third-year Western Painting studio, the familiar smells of linseed oil and turpentine rushed into his nose.
In the pitch-black studio with the lights off, only the streetlights filtering in through the windows faintly illuminated the easels.
Ji-hoon roughly shook the rainwater dripping from his wet hair with both hands, then switched on the studio lights.
With a crackle, the fluorescent lights came on, revealing his shabby canvas sitting alone in the middle of the studio.
It was the portrait of the old man that Professor Park had harshly criticized earlier that day and mocked as a machine part.
Ji-hoon stared at the portrait for a moment before steadying his breathing and standing before the canvas.
'I thought I'd painted it perfectly. I believed there was nothing left to touch.'
But the moment Ji-hoon faced his own painting with his transformed vision after being struck by lightning, he let out a hollow laugh.
It was disgusting.
Every wrinkle in the skin, every strand of hair had been depicted with photographic precision, but it wasn't worth as much as a dead slab of meat.
The anatomical proportions formed by the figure's bones and muscles were subtly off, while the light and shadow across the forehead and cheekbones were dull beyond belief.
Above all, the color was dead.
The color mixture was like an earthy mud puddle, completely devoid of the warm temperature flowing beneath the skin of a living human being.
"……I have to change it."
His cracked voice echoed through the empty space.
As though possessed, Ji-hoon picked up his palette. If it had been his old self, he would have taken a fine detail brush and gently scraped away or painted over only the incorrect sections.
He would have been terrified that he might ruin the form he had worked so hard to complete.
But instead of a brush, he picked up a broad palette knife.
Cadmium red light + Naples yellow + a little viridian.
A perfect color mixture ratio for bringing the old man's dead skin back to life appeared vividly over his retinas like a hologram.
There wasn't even a second of hesitation.
Ji-hoon squeezed his paint tubes and thickly spread the primary colors across his palette.
Splat.
The knife began crushing and mixing the red, yellow, and the tiniest amount of green paint together.
If it had been the Ji-hoon of the past, he would have mixed the colors cautiously, afraid that they would become muddy. He would have been extremely wary of even the slightest foreign color mixing in.
Scrape, scrape.
But there was no hesitation in his movements now.
He had absolute confidence in the mixing ratios he could see.
After the knife scraped across the palette three or four times, the paints magically blended together and transformed into a warm apricot color that seemed alive and breathing.
A perfect mixture, with neither its value nor saturation diminished.
"Haa……."
A gasp of admiration escaped him.
A color sense he had struggled his entire life to reach had been completed with a single stroke of the knife.
Ji-hoon picked up the thickest hog-bristle brush. He loaded it generously with the paint he had just mixed, then without hesitation dragged the brush down across the face of the meticulously detailed portrait he had spent an entire month working on.
Smear—!
A thick layer of paint decisively crushed the delicate details beneath it as it settled onto the canvas.
The moment the form broke apart.
Yet in Ji-hoon's eyes, golden-ratio guidelines were shining clearly over the figure's head.
He swung the brush like a madman.
Following the curve of the forehead, passing over the sunken eye sockets, then moving toward the sharp line of the protruding jawbone.
Wherever the brush passed, masses of color took the place of the stiflingly precise details of the past—rough and crude, yet overflowing with vivid vitality.
'More. Even darker! Shadows aren't black. Push them in with blue so deep you can't see the bottom!'
Following the commands of intuition pouring through his mind like a waterfall, Ji-hoon roughly mixed ultramarine and burnt sienna with his knife, then stabbed the mixture into the deeply sunken area around the old man's eyes.
The dark areas became infinitely deep, while the areas receiving light became painfully bright.
On the canvas, colors collided with one another as though creating sparks.
The intuition and emotion Professor Park had spoken of were exploding as they merged with the overwhelming computational ability granted to him by the lightning.
Only thirty minutes.
Ji-hoon took a step back, breathing heavily. Thick paint dripped from the tip of the brush in his hand, dirtying the floor.
"This……."
Even after painting it himself, he couldn't believe it.
The old man inside the canvas was no longer a meticulously rendered copy of a photograph.
The form of his skin had been distorted by rough brushstrokes, and half of his face was submerged in deep blue shadows.
But the old man's eyes were alive.
They poured out the remorse and loneliness of a lifetime toward the world beyond the canvas.
A terrifyingly perfect harmony of color and emotional expression dwelling within imperfect forms.
It was the painting of a genius.
The product of exactly the talent Ji-hoon had yearned for his entire life—the ability to seize control of a subject with only a few strokes of the brush.
"I…… I did it."
Hot tears streamed down Ji-hoon's cheeks, which had been frozen from being soaked by the rain.
Joy and liberation sent a thrilling shiver through every cell in his body.
He had finally broken through the wall.
Now he could paint the real paintings he had always wanted to create.
But.
The moment of joy lasted only an instant.
From somewhere in a corner of Ji-hoon's heart, an uneasiness like a serpent's temptation slowly began to creep upward.
'Wait. Is this ability…… really mine?'
His breath caught in his throat.
His gaze turned toward his trembling right hand. The veins on the back of his hand stood out an abnormal blue.
Lightning.
The shock of an extremely high-voltage current caused accidentally by nature.
What if it had temporarily disrupted the neural network in his brain and created this miraculous synesthesia?
'What if…… when I wake up tomorrow morning, all of this has returned to normal?'
What if the golden-ratio lines that had been appearing before his eyes like holograms disappeared, and he could no longer read the color ratios?
What if he returned to the old Lee Ji-hoon, trapped once again within the suffocating confines of entrance-exam art, able to produce nothing but dull colors?
Just imagining it brought a terror so overwhelming that his heart seemed about to stop.
It would be the most horrifying despair imaginable—like someone who had spent their entire life trapped in pitch-black darkness being allowed to see the world for a fleeting moment, only to be thrown back into eternal darkness.
"No."
Ji-hoon hurriedly tore the old man's portrait from the easel and tossed it onto the floor.
Then he frantically dragged one of the 50-ho blank canvases piled in the corner and placed it on the easel.
"I have to paint more. Before it disappears, before it disappears, I have to paint more."
His pupils trembled anxiously.
His lips had turned blue, but Ji-hoon's hands were already twisting open the caps of paint tubes as though in a fit.
Where should he start?
What should he paint?
There wasn't even time to think.
Ji-hoon turned his eyes toward the window. The night sky beneath the pouring rain, and the intense trail of light that had been burned into his retinas at the moment the lightning struck.
I'll paint that.
He had to preserve this overwhelming moment that his brain remembered, imprint at least one more piece of it onto the canvas.
Splat!
The knife scooped up paint and slapped it onto the canvas.
Prussian blue and titanium white mixed together, beginning to form the framework of the night sky.
He had no idea how much time passed.
Ji-hoon refused to sleep.
The hunger that came over him, the chill from his wet clothes, even the pain of the body that had been struck by lightning had all been completely erased long ago.
His world consisted solely of the canvas before his eyes, the tables of color ratios exploding inside his mind, and the madness of creation erupting from his fingertips.
When one canvas became completely filled with a deep-blue storm, he immediately dragged over the next one.
When he ran out of paint, he rummaged through his classmates' drawers and squeezed out whatever paints he could find.
When he no longer had the strength to hold a brush, he plunged his fingers directly into the paint and rubbed them across the canvas as though clawing at it.
Fear became his whip, relentlessly crushing his limits and driving him onward.
'More! Just a little more! Before this color scatters into nothingness!'
Eventually, blood pooled beneath his fingernails, mixing with the paint and leaving red trails, but Ji-hoon did not stop.
And so, throughout the night, the quiet studio echoed only with the harsh sound of canvas cloth being rubbed almost hard enough to tear, along with his controlled breathing, as though he wasn't even breathing at all.
The sound of the rain finally ceased.
A bluish dawn light began filtering through the windows.
The morning of the city after the storm was unbearably quiet.
Clatter.
The knife in Ji-hoon's right hand fell to the floor and rolled away.
It was finally over.
The sensory overload that had been filling his head to the point of seeming ready to explode was gradually subsiding, like the tide receding.
With bloodshot eyes, Ji-hoon turned his neck, creaking like a broken machine, and looked around.
The floor of the studio was a complete mess, covered in the remains of paint.
And surrounding Ji-hoon at the center of it all were four canvases he had completed throughout the night.
The portrait of the old man that had shattered Professor Park's criticism.
The landscape of the campus beneath the raging storm.
A blood-red sky abstractly depicting the moment the lightning struck down toward him.
And finally, an abstract painting that completely destroyed form and conveyed the emotion of fear solely through the thickness of the paint and the collision of colors.
They were perfect.
The forms, perspective, color mixing, texture—all of it.
Not a single one contained even a mathematical error, yet raw emotion seemed to drip from every painting.
These were not studies made by an art student.
They radiated such terrifying energy that they could have been hung right in the middle of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art without being overshadowed.
"Ah……."
Ji-hoon alternated between staring at his blood-covered palms and the miraculous canvases those hands had created.
The golden-ratio lines that had been appearing before his eyes were gradually fading, but they did not disappear.
His brain had perfectly learned and internalized this sense.
And at that moment, he realized.
This ability now belonged to him.
Ah…… thank goodness.
The moment that relief washed over him—
The thread of reason that had been pulled taut finally snapped.
The terrible physical fatigue and pain he had suppressed throughout the night came crashing over him like a tsunami.
Ji-hoon's knees buckled.
His vision spun, then went black.
Thud.
Ji-hoon collapsed onto the dirty floor in front of the storm painting he had completed through the night.
With his cheek pressed against the cold floor filled with the smell of paint, he smiled.
At last, he sank into the deep, peaceful abyss of unconsciousness.
Dawn was breaking.
It was the morning when the photocopier died and a true monster was born.