4
### Chapter 4
"Lee Ji-hoon…… Did you do this insane thing?"
Professor Park's voice was unlike his usual self, the end of each word faintly trembling.
Dozens of eyes filling the corridor outside the studio all turned toward Ji-hoon standing in the doorway. Sharp gazes tangled with suspicion, shock, and vicious jealousy.
Ji-hoon swallowed dryly.
Even after receiving an IV, his legs were heavy from the aftereffects of the lightning strike, and traces of red paint that had worked their way beneath his fingernails the night before remained dried there like bloodstains.
But his eyes were deeper and steadier than they had ever been.
Ji-hoon slowly parted his lips.
"Yes. I painted them."
A heavy, calm answer.
The moment those words fell, the tightly stretched air in the studio burst apart with an explosive crack.
"No way. How could Lee Ji-hoon paint those?"
"Hey, does that look like something Lee Ji-hoon could paint? Did he steal someone else's paintings or something?"
"Could someone from outside have gotten in during the night? Shouldn't we check the CCTV right now?"
Open denial and distrust erupted among his classmates.
Their reaction was understandable.
Until yesterday, Ji-hoon had been treated as nothing more than a machine part who could do nothing except copy his subjects exactly.
And now, they were being told that this guy had produced four monstrous masterpieces overnight, as though Picasso's soul had possessed him.
The moment they acknowledged it, it must have felt as though every painting they had created up until now was being thrown straight into the trash.
Professor Park's brows narrowed coldly.
Even he couldn't logically make sense of the situation.
In art, technical skill could improve over a short period of time, but explosive intuition and sensitivity capable of commanding a canvas did not suddenly appear overnight like a bolt of lightning.
Yet Professor Park's sharp eyes had not missed it.
The handwriting of the initials scrawled nervously in the corner of the canvas, along with the tiny habits in the sketches used to establish the forms.
They were unmistakably traces of the photocopier Lee Ji-hoon he had watched for the past three years.
The foundation was Lee Ji-hoon, but the colors and emotions layered on top belonged to a mad genius.
There was only one way to confirm this bizarre contradiction.
"Move."
Professor Park said the word coldly as he picked up the empty wooden palette, a basket of paints, and a metal palette knife lying beside the easel.
He strode over and roughly thrust them toward Ji-hoon's chest.
"Even the rats in this studio can talk."
Ji-hoon reflexively caught the palette and knife.
Professor Park glared into Ji-hoon's eyes as though trying to pierce straight through them.
"If you truly created these miraculous colors with your own hands. If this wasn't a mixture made at someone's direction or something you happened to stumble upon by chance."
Professor Park pointed toward the old man's cheek on the canvas.
"Then mix that bluish shadow color around the old man's eyes exactly the same way, right here in front of me."
It was a cruel test.
Oil paints were rarely applied to a canvas straight from the tube in their original primary colors. Artists mixed numerous colors in minute proportions to create tones unique to themselves.
Especially the bluish, deep, bruise-like shadow around the old man's eyes. It was such a complex and peculiar mixed color that even Professor Park himself would need dozens of attempts to imitate it.
And now he was demanding that Ji-hoon reproduce it perfectly, in a single attempt, with dozens of eyes watching.
It was practically a public execution.
"See? What did I tell you? He didn't paint it himself."
"Professor nailed it. How could Lee Ji-hoon mix that insane color in one go?"
The classmates' mocking whispers began creeping out again like poisonous spiders.
Then—
"Everyone, shut up."
Professor Park's cold, restrained voice sliced through the noise of the studio.
"From this moment on, anyone who makes so much as a sound of breathing gets an F in major practical art this semester. Shut your mouths and watch."
At the icy warning, the studio instantly fell into an eerie silence like a cemetery.
Not even the sound of someone swallowing could be heard.
In the suffocating stillness, only Professor Park's and Ji-hoon's gazes remained tightly intertwined.
"Begin."
Ji-hoon didn't answer.
He simply turned his head and looked at the area around the old man's eyes that Professor Park had pointed out.
If it had been the Ji-hoon of the past, he would have panicked, his hands trembling as he made a miserable face.
He would have mixed this color with that one without knowing what he was doing, eventually producing a muddy color like something dragged out of a sewer, before falling to his knees.
But the Lee Ji-hoon of today was different.
The moment Ji-hoon's gaze touched the canvas, his neural network contracted with an electric jolt, awakening.
Ultramarine blue 45% + burnt umber 30% + titanium white 20% + alizarin crimson 5%.
The strange blue shadow dried onto the canvas was broken down into a perfect paint mixture ratio at the nanometer level, displaying vivid holographic text across Ji-hoon's retinas.
This wasn't an answer he had to squeeze out of his brain through reasoning.
It was simply an intuitive and absolute truth of sensation, as natural as opening his eyes and seeing that the sky was blue.
Ji-hoon withdrew his gaze.
Then, holding the palette in one hand, he rummaged through the basket of paints with the other.
Clink, clink.
In the silent studio, the only strange sound was the metallic noise of Ji-hoon picking up the paint tubes.
Ultramarine. Burnt umber. White. Alizarin crimson.
After selecting the four tubes he needed, Ji-hoon astonishingly did not look at the canvas again.
'He's not looking……?'
Yoon Jae-hyun's pupils trembled wildly as he held his breath.
When mixing colors, the most basic principle was to constantly alternate between looking at the paint being mixed and the color on the canvas, adjusting the value and saturation accordingly.
But Ji-hoon simply stared down at the palette in his hand, squeezing paint from the tubes as though he already had the perfect answer displayed inside his head.
Squeeze. Squirt.
Different primary colors dropped onto the palette in precisely measured quantities.
Ji-hoon adjusted his grip on the steel knife in his right hand.
There wasn't even a second of hesitation or uncertainty.
Scrape, scrape—!
The sharp metal knife roughly scraped across the wooden palette.
The sound was sensual yet eerie, like the prayer of a priest echoing through a silent temple.
Red, deep brown, and cold blue.
Primary colors that seemed completely incompatible were crushed and tangled beneath the blade of the knife, beginning to destroy the boundaries between one another.
Yet as the colors mixed, there was none of the muddy loss of saturation that normally occurred.
Instead, the individual pigments of each paint harmonized wildly, transforming into a blue shadow as deep and sorrowful as an abyss.
Exactly ten seconds after the knife began scraping across the palette—
"……."
Ji-hoon's hand came to an abrupt stop.
He stared at the deep blue paint covering the tip of the knife, the color he had just mixed himself, with an utterly indifferent expression.
Then, without hesitation, he walked toward the easel holding the old man's portrait.
Dozens of students swallowed dryly and leaned forward, stretching their necks toward Ji-hoon's fingertips.
Even Professor Park's breathing stopped for an instant.
Smack.
Ji-hoon casually dabbed the paint from the knife onto the old man's cheek, in the empty space immediately beside the original blue shadow.
"……!!"
Someone covered their own mouth and swallowed a suppressed scream.
Jae-hyun's legs gave out completely. He stumbled backward until his back slammed against the wall.
It was identical.
It wasn't merely similar.
The temperature of the color, the depth of its value, even the saturation contained in the sticky texture unique to oil paint.
The color applied to the canvas the night before and the color Ji-hoon had just mixed in ten seconds without even looking at it were perfectly identical, without a single percent of deviation, as though one had been copied and pasted directly from the other with an eyedropper.
The entire studio sank into a swamp of overwhelming defeat and shock.
No one—not even the classmates who had looked down on Ji-hoon the most—dared open their mouths and voice another word of doubt.
The overwhelming and violent display of talent unfolding before their eyes was so powerful that it burned even the shallow jealousy of ordinary human beings to ash.
Ji-hoon slowly turned his head while holding the palette and knife and looked at Professor Park.
"Is this enough…… to prove it?"
Ji-hoon's voice was calm, yet it radiated a tremendous aura powerful enough to dominate the entire studio.
Professor Park said nothing.
His gaze remained fixed like a pillar on the two identical shades of blue painted on the canvas.
Behind his elegant, flawless glasses, the arrogant eyes that had never wavered even once in his life trembled as though an earthquake were shaking them.
He was experiencing the pain of seeing his judgment thoroughly shattered.
The student he had branded as nothing more than a talentless machine part was standing before him as a genius beyond even his own ability to imitate.
But at the same time, he was witnessing with his own eyes the birth of the true genius he had spent his entire life searching for as an artist.
An indescribable exhilaration shot thrillingly down his spine.
The shame of having his pride stripped away, and the trembling excitement of an artist who had discovered a genius.
Caught in the collision of those grotesquely twisted emotions, Professor Park's hand tightened around the tumbler he was holding until his knuckles turned white.
He was not a man who would easily bow his head in front of students.
But his long silence was already heavier than any miserable declaration of defeat.
"Haa……."
A long, heavy sigh escaped Professor Park's lips.
He bit them tightly.
Forcing his collapsing composure back into place, he met Ji-hoon's eyes with a rigid expression.
There was no hostility.
Only the helpless acknowledgment of someone who had been completely overwhelmed.
"……I completely misjudged your eyes."
That brief sentence.
It was the unbearably heavy and painful declaration of surrender from a dictator who had ruled over his students and had never once reversed his own criticism.
Professor Park could no longer meet Ji-hoon's eyes and turned away.
Click. Click.
Along the long corridor buried in silence, the sound of Professor Park's dress shoes slowly faded into the distance.
Only yesterday, he had been an enormous mountain that seemed impossible to replace.
How tense had Ji-hoon been at the mere sound of that man's footsteps?
But Ji-hoon understood now.
'You're no longer the answer. The world I see with my own eyes will be the answer now.'