5
### Chapter 5
No one in the studio dared to open their mouth until the sound of Professor Park's dress shoes had completely disappeared at the end of the corridor.
Ji-hoon silently turned toward the canvases.
He could feel the gazes of his classmates, frozen like corpses, weighing heavily on his back. If it had been the old Ji-hoon, those blatant stares would have crushed him, making him hunch his shoulders.
But Ji-hoon's mind was strangely calm now.
Their shallow jealousy and shock felt as meaningless as dust before the overwhelming colors of the new world he had only just opened his eyes to.
'I have to take them with me. Before the wet oil paint gets damaged.'
He carefully gathered the four canvases from the easels.
One large 100-ho canvas and three 50-ho canvases. They were bulky and heavy enough to be difficult even for an adult man to carry all at once.
Moreover, the thick layers of oil paint spread across the canvases like the marks of an animal's claws were still wet and alive.
Ji-hoon cleverly gripped only the corners of the wooden frames, making sure the surfaces of the canvases did not touch each other.
The muscles in both his arms screamed, and his finger joints turned white, but he staggered toward the studio door.
"……."
As Ji-hoon approached, the students filling the passageway quietly parted to both sides like the Red Sea.
Beyond the sympathy they had shown him yesterday, their eyes now contained the instinctive fear and alienation one felt toward an unknown monster.
Ji-hoon passed through that suffocating path of silence and left the art museum building.
As he crossed the campus, Ji-hoon's body felt as heavy as a thousand pounds.
Even after receiving an IV, the muscle pain left behind by the lightning strike was cold down to his bones, and because he had spent the night in wet clothes, a faint chill was beginning to creep over him.
But inside, he felt endlessly light, as though gravity had disappeared.
He looked up at the sky.
The late-afternoon red sun broke through the thin clouds, bathing the world in orange.
Cadmium orange 60% + yellow ochre 30% + titanium white 10%.
A perfect chart of the color ratios making up the sunset appeared before his retinas like a hologram.
The evening sky, which had once been nothing more than scattered light, was broken down into perfect mathematical ratios and pigment combinations before pouring into his mind.
Ji-hoon's heart began pounding painfully once again.
He wanted to throw these heavy canvases into the corner of his room right away, pick up his brush, and paint again.
The intense creative thirst to grind and spread that overwhelming sunset color and the geometric angles of light searing into his mind onto a canvas without missing a single detail rose all the way to his throat.
At the same time.
Professor Park's office, Department of Western Painting, College of Fine Arts, Hanseo University.
Clink.
The sound of a round ice cube striking the inside of a premium crystal glass rang sharply through the silent room.
Professor Park, sunk deep into the sofa, downed a single-malt whisky in one gulp with his pale face.
Even the sensation of the strong liquor burning its way down his throat could not erase the immense shock and exhilaration dominating his mind.
"Crazy bastard……."
Professor Park placed the empty glass on the table with a trembling hand.
Even when he closed his eyes, the cruel yet perfect colors created by Ji-hoon pierced his retinas.
'Ten seconds. He perfectly reproduced that complicated cool-toned shadow without looking at the canvas even once. Not a single percent of deviation, as though he'd taken it with an eyedropper.'
It was the student he had spent three years mocking as a photocopier, crushing him by saying he had no soul.
The shame of having his judgment proven completely wrong was brutally shredding the deeply rooted pride he had built as an elite representing the Korean art world.
But shame was merely the shell.
Behind that shallow pride, the lofty instinct of an artist flowing through his veins was writhing like mad.
The afterimage of that violent, overwhelming canvas Ji-hoon had created with a single stroke of the brush gave Professor Park's soul, which had spent his entire life thirsting for the essence of art, an almost maddening pleasure.
'That kind of talent isn't something that can be forgotten after being talked about by professors in this cramped university studio. It needs to see the light of the world. In the most explosive and brutal way possible.'
Professor Park roughly rubbed his face with both hands before picking up the smartphone lying on his desk.
His finger scrolling through the contact list stopped at a name pinned near the very top.
It belonged to the owner of a gallery that handled the most enormous amounts of capital in the Korean art market, a heavyweight with the instincts of a hyena when it came to sniffing out money.
Ring. Ring.
The other person answered before the third ring had even finished.
"—What's going on, Professor Park? Someone as busy preparing for an exhibition as you doesn't usually call at this hour."
A woman's voice—soft, yet as sharp as a snake.
Professor Park swallowed dryly and spoke in a firm voice, desperately suppressing his trembling.
"Director Seo, you know that emerging artist discovery project your gallery is currently running."
"Oh, that? There isn't a single worthwhile prospect, so I was thinking about cutting the budget and scrapping the whole thing. Why? Have you found some promising talent at your university?"
At Director Seo's indifferent response, Professor Park let out a hollow laugh.
"It's more than promising."
"Pardon?"
"I found him. The genuine monster you and I have spent our entire lives wandering the bottom of the art world, thirsting and searching for."
The air on the other end of the phone seemed to turn cold in an instant.
Professor Park's voice fell heavily, filled with certainty.
"Come to Hanseo University right now. I'll stake my professorship on the fact that this kid's brushwork will turn your gallery upside down."
The next morning.
The rooftop room of an old multi-family house where Ji-hoon rented a room behind Hanseo University's back gate.
"Haa……."
Ji-hoon lay spread-eagled across the narrow floor and let out a deep, bitter sigh.
In the corner of the room, the four canvases he had struggled to carry home yesterday occupied the cramped space with an imposing presence.
The faded old linoleum floor and mold-stained wallpaper in the corners created a strangely jarring contrast with the overwhelming artistic aura radiating from the canvases.
The reason Ji-hoon sighed had nothing to do with the weight of the paintings.
His gaze shifted toward the art-supply box lying discarded in one corner of the room.
Empty paint tubes and hog-bristle brushes worn down like tiny stubs of pencils, no longer usable, were scattered miserably across the floor.
The moment he had returned home yesterday, he had wanted to paint the red sunset that had been burned into his mind.
But because he had rummaged through even his classmates' drawers in the studio on the night he was struck by lightning and squeezed out every bit of paint he could find, there wasn't a single drop of usable color left in his art-supply box.
He didn't even have a blank canvas for a new painting.
When he opened his eyes, every object in the world appeared to him through perfect golden-ratio perspective and color percentages.
His fingers wanted to move so badly that it felt as though they could tear through canvas fabric at any moment.
But he had no tools.
Ji-hoon stared blankly at the balance displayed on his banking app.
Balance: 13,450 won
It was a brutally cold dose of reality.
Oil painting was an expensive art form.
A single large 100-ho canvas cost tens of thousands of won, and putting together a set of professional-grade paints with good color development could easily cost hundreds of thousands of won.
No matter how much of a divine sense and perfect perception he had gained, if he didn't have the money to buy the pigments and canvases on which to use them, this ability was nothing more than an illusion confined to his head.
'Should I take a night shift at a logistics center? Or should I swallow my pride and borrow some money from my classmates…….'
Art was a monster that grew by devouring money with merciless efficiency.
Ji-hoon was just about to get up, trying to soothe his bitter thoughts, when—
Knock, knock, knock.
Someone knocked on the rusty metal door of his rooftop room with an extremely polite and steady rhythm.
'Who could it be this early in the morning? The landlord?'
Ji-hoon roughly pushed back his disheveled hair and stood up.
His rent from last month had been several days overdue, so he assumed the landlord had come to demand payment.
With a heavy hand, he opened the creaking metal door.
"Who are yo—"
Ji-hoon's gruff words trailed off.
On the threshold of the cramped and filthy rooftop room stood a person so bizarrely out of place that she didn't fit into the rundown slum-like surroundings by even one percent.
A deep-black suit, perfectly tailored from head to toe without a single wrinkle.
A sharp jawline, cool, elongated eyes, and the heavy yet sensual musk fragrance characteristic of Tom Ford that swept through the air.
"……Who are you?"
When Ji-hoon asked with instinctive caution, the woman didn't answer.
Instead, she looked past his shoulder, toward the space behind him.
Her gaze landed precisely on one spot.
In the corner of the room, visible through the open doorway, the "portrait of the old man" was emitting a cool blue glow under the morning sunlight.
In an instant, the woman's pupils narrowed like those of a snake that had discovered its prey.
Ji-hoon's awakened hypersenses caught the subtle disruption in her previously relaxed breathing.
As though the owner of the room didn't matter at all, she crossed the threshold like someone under a spell and took a large step into the rooftop room.
"Young man."
The woman's sharp gaze finally left the canvas and pierced directly into Ji-hoon's dark eyes.
"You have absolutely no idea what you did last night, do you?"
She withdrew her gaze from the painting she had been staring at so intently and curled her red lips into an alluring smile.
Then she took a smooth silver-foil business card from her handbag.
The business card she suddenly extended toward Ji-hoon's chest bore the unmistakable logo of Luce Gallery, a gallery boasting the highest authority in Korea and wielding enormous power over the art market.
The woman once again stared at the four paintings behind Ji-hoon and smiled coldly.
"Why didn't you sign the paintings?"
"……Pardon?"