3
### Chapter 3
The sharp smell of alcohol disinfectant stung the tip of his nose.
The regular beeping of a heart monitor.
And the cool air he could feel through the thin blanket.
Ji-hoon was aware of all these sensations beyond his closed eyelids, yet he couldn't bring himself to open his eyes.
'Where am I?'
His consciousness was slowly rising to the surface, but he deliberately furrowed his brow and remained in the darkness.
He was afraid.
He was afraid that the moment he opened his eyes, all those miraculous things he had experienced would collapse like a cruel mirage that had appeared before an art student crushed beneath his own inferiority complex.
The sensation at his fingertips from scraping away at canvases all night was still vivid. The sensual moments of mixing colors as the palette knife crushed the paint, the geometric lines and proportions that had pierced straight through his mind.
He couldn't bear the thought of that overwhelming sense of omnipotence disappearing and returning to the colorless world of his past, where he could do nothing but churn out entrance-exam paintings.
'Please. Please…….'
Feeling as though he were clinging to the edge of a cliff, Ji-hoon desperately prayed inside his head and very slowly lifted his heavy eyelids.
The first thing to reach his retinas was a pure white ceiling.
A hospital.
The light was dazzling. For one fleeting moment, as the fluorescent light faintly filled his vision, Ji-hoon's heart began pounding like crazy.
"Ah……."
A hot sigh escaped through his cracked lips.
Titanium white 90% + lemon yellow 5% + cerulean blue 5%.
The cold white light of the fluorescent lights striking the hospital-room ceiling was no longer simply light. It entered his mind directly as a perfect paint mixture ratio.
He turned his gaze.
The moment he looked at the folds of the hospital curtain beside his bed, the gradations of light and shadow created as the stiff fabric folded were broken down into color codes on an infinitesimal, nanometer-like scale, rising before his eyes like a transparent hologram.
And sharp perspective guidelines defining the forms of objects crossing his field of vision.
It was no different from immediately after he had been struck by lightning.
No.
Now that the initial sensory frenzy had subsided and the ability had become completely integrated into his brain, he could break down and read objects even more clearly and calmly.
"Sniff……."
Ji-hoon raised his right hand, which had an IV attached to it, and covered both his eyes.
Hot tears streamed endlessly from beneath his palms, soaking the pillowcase.
It hadn't been a dream.
It wasn't a temporary hallucination.
This miraculous vision and perfect artistic synesthesia were a permanent evolution left behind when the lightning had rearranged the neural network of his brain.
Ji-hoon bit down on the blanket to keep himself from crying aloud and wept silently.
The overwhelming relief and joy of finally possessing the talent he had thirsted for his entire life completely erased the pain radiating through his battered body.
How long did he cry like that without making a sound?
Once his emotions had settled to some degree, Ji-hoon suddenly found himself caught by a question.
'But who found me and brought me to the hospital?'
He had definitely passed out on the floor of the darkened studio.
Someone must have discovered the wrecked studio and his collapsed body that morning.
As that thought occurred to him, Ji-hoon's shoulders stiffened.
What had happened to the four canvases he had painted throughout the night?
Time goes back several hours, to early morning.
The third-year Western Painting studio at the College of Fine Arts.
Yoon Jae-hyun, the talented student who never lost his position at the top of the department and Professor Park's favorite student, opened the studio door first among his classmates as usual.
"……Huh?"
The moment the door opened with a creak, Jae-hyun frowned at the nauseating smell that stabbed his nose.
It wasn't the usual scent of linseed oil.
The studio air was thick with a horrific chemical smell produced by an enormous quantity of paint oxidizing all at once, mixed with a strangely metallic, iron-like odor.
The moment Jae-hyun turned on the lights, hell itself unfolded before his eyes.
"Gasp!"
Jae-hyun swallowed a short scream and staggered backward.
In the middle of the studio, his classmate Lee Ji-hoon, who had always been nothing more than foolishly diligent, was lying face-down on the floor.
The floor surrounding him was splattered with red and blue paint as though it had been hit by a bomb, while Ji-hoon's right hand was covered in blood, his fingernails completely broken.
The mixture of paint and blood looked exactly like a horrific murder scene.
For an instant, fear gripped him.
What was going on?
But—
"Ji, Ji-hoon! Lee Ji-hoon!"
Jae-hyun, his face drained of color, hurriedly pulled out his smartphone and was about to press the 119 emergency-call button when he quickly approached the fallen Ji-hoon.
However, his steps abruptly froze in front of Ji-hoon's legs, as though he himself had been struck by lightning.
The hand holding his smartphone trembled violently.
His eyes were not fixed on the fallen Ji-hoon.
Instead, they had become firmly locked onto the four canvases surrounding Ji-hoon's body.
"W-what…… what the hell is this……."
A mutter resembling a groan escaped Jae-hyun's lips.
Among his classmates, Jae-hyun prided himself on having the greatest artistic intuition.
He believed that when it came to reading color clashes others couldn't see and breaking apart forms to contain emotion, there was no one in the department who could match him.
And now, right before his eyes, the ultimate sense he had spent his entire life trying to reach was exploding in its rawest form.
The first thing to steal his gaze was the "portrait of the old man" that Ji-hoon had painted the day before.
Until yesterday, it had been nothing more than a stiflingly precise painting, almost mechanical in its execution.
But now, rough and violent brushstrokes were brutally crushing the previous details beneath them.
And yet something was strange.
The form had been obliterated, but the old man was somehow a hundred times more vivid and alive than he had been yesterday.
The vitality created by shadows of unfathomable Prussian blue intertwined with blood-red carmine.
It looked as though real human skin had been carved away and smeared onto the canvas instead of paint.
"I can't…… breathe."
Jae-hyun forgot even how to breathe as he shifted his gaze to the next canvas.
A red-brick campus caught in a raging storm.
And a flash of light slicing through a blood-red sky.
Crazy.
There were no other words.
There wasn't a single artificial trick on the canvas.
Only rough, thick layers of paint applied as though they had been thrown onto the surface, combined with color combinations that shattered common sense.
Yet from a distance, the composition's perfect golden ratio forcibly sucked the viewer's gaze toward the center of the painting.
Simply standing in front of it made goosebumps rise across his skin, as though he had actually been thrown into the middle of a gigantic storm.
"Lee Ji-hoon…… Lee Ji-hoon painted this?"
He wanted to deny it.
There was no way that his talentless classmate—the one who had hung his head after Professor Park mocked him as a photocopier yesterday—could have created something this monstrous.
But in the corner of the canvas, the initials L.J.H had been scrawled with paint-covered fingertips, vivid as bloodstains.
Thud.
The strength drained from Jae-hyun's legs, and he sank to the floor.
Genius.
Not once had he ever connected that word with Lee Ji-hoon.
But the four canvases lying before him were an overwhelming act of violence by talent, powerful enough to reduce every painting Jae-hyun himself had created until now to pathetic garbage play.
He wasn't even jealous.
It was the pure awe and fear a human being felt when witnessing the power of a god.
Terrified, Jae-hyun stared at Ji-hoon's collapsed body and the monstrous paintings he had poured out throughout the night, then pressed the 119 call button with trembling hands.
Back to the present.
2 p.m.
The campus air was clear and bright, as though the storm had never come.
"Thank you."
Ji-hoon left the university hospital emergency room, pressing down firmly on the bandage attached to his arm.
The doctor had said he was suffering from severe exhaustion and mild electrical shock and recommended that he stay hospitalized for several more days.
But Ji-hoon couldn't stand the thought of lying in a hospital bed.
His mind was a mess.
When he asked a nurse, she told him that Yoon Jae-hyun, a student from the same department, had carried him to the emergency room.
'Jae-hyun saw it.'
Ji-hoon swallowed dryly.
He couldn't even begin to imagine what the things he had poured onto the canvases after losing his sanity throughout the night would look like when viewed by someone in their right mind.
Could they have been nothing more than a madman's scribbles that only looked perfect to his own eyes?
His pace instinctively quickened.
His legs were still trembling, but Ji-hoon hurried toward the College of Fine Arts building, breathing heavily.
'I have to get rid of the paintings. I have to hide them before they dry…….'
The moment he entered the corridor in front of the Western Painting studio on the third floor, Ji-hoon's footsteps stopped.
"……What's going on?"
There wasn't even room to set foot in the corridor.
Not only his third-year classmates, but students from other years and graduate student assistants had also packed the corridor in front of the studio.
Yet despite the enormous crowd, the corridor was eerily silent.
No one dared speak loudly. They simply stared blankly toward the studio, holding their breath as though they were at a funeral or inside a cathedral.
Ji-hoon cautiously approached the back of the crowd.
"Ah……."
"Just look at those insane colors…… Was this really painted by a human hand?"
"Did Lee Ji-hoon awaken or something after one stroke of the brush? This makes no sense."
The restrained speculation and murmurs came from the front of the crowd.
The moment he heard them, Ji-hoon's heart sank.
What they were looking at.
The reason they had been driven into this bizarre silence.
It was obviously the four canvases he had painted throughout the night.
Ji-hoon swallowed dryly and slowly pushed his way forward through the tightly packed crowd.
"Oh, Ji-hoon……?"
"Hey, hey. Lee Ji-hoon's here."
The moment someone spotted Ji-hoon, the crowd parted on both sides as though the Red Sea itself had been divided.
The looks in their eyes were nothing like the ones that had ignored and mocked Ji-hoon the day before.
Shock, jealousy, suspicion, and deep awe were all mixed together in complicated expressions that stung Ji-hoon's cheeks.
When Ji-hoon finally reached the open doorway of the studio—
He spotted a familiar back standing motionless at the very front of the crowd, right in the middle of the room.
"……Professor."
Professor Park, the elegant and cold-tongued critic.
He stood frozen in front of the old man's portrait Ji-hoon had destroyed and the storm landscape.
He couldn't move even a single step.
Professor Park's hair, which was always neatly combed back, was slightly disheveled, and Ji-hoon could clearly see the fingertips of his hands clasped behind his back trembling faintly.
Sensing someone behind him, Professor Park slowly turned his head, like a man whose neck had become stiff.
Professor Park's eyes behind his glasses were bloodshot.
The indifferent gaze that had coldly muttered "Boring" while looking at Ji-hoon's painting yesterday was nowhere to be found.
Instead, his expression was that of someone who had been struck by an enormous shock, as though half his soul had left his body—the face of a man who had been completely overwhelmed.
Professor Park's gaze landed on Ji-hoon's pale face standing in the doorway.
The air around them pulled taut, and even their breathing seemed to stop.
Finally, Professor Park's lips moved.
His voice had lost its usual elegance and was faintly cracked.
"Lee Ji-hoon……."
"……."
"Did you do all of this…… this insane thing?"