The Shining Star
"Do you perhaps have a sister?"
"……."
Van Gogh finished writing the letter, crumpled it into careful folds, and slipped it into an envelope.
Then he raised the absinthe to his lips once more and poured it down his throat.
His eyes were murky, half-dissolved in alcohol—and even so, the light in them still shone like a star in the night sky.
I'd love to fudge my way through an answer… but just like on the first floor, I'll end up spilling everything honestly, won't I.
I covered my disgruntled face with both hands and spoke.
Having to dredge up a past I'd rather never touch again, with my own mouth. The worst.
"I had an older brother."
"You had one? Was he hospitalized in a psychiatric ward like me? Or did he breathe his last with a pistol?"
"He died."
"The pistol, then."
"No. That's not—"
The moment Van Gogh jumped to his conclusion, I panicked and waved both hands.
Dying by gunshot, in South Korea, of all places, where owning a pistol is flatly illegal.
Typical Van Gogh—extrapolating from himself toward the most extreme scenario possible.
"I don't know anything. Whether he was in a psychiatric hospital or ended his life with a gun—nothing."
At my words, Van Gogh seemed to find something interesting in them, and his eyebrow twitched.
"He disappeared. One day, just like that. He vanished without anything when I was still a child… so I've lived assuming he's dead."
One day, my brother simply disappeared.
A runaway? An abduction? An unexplained disappearance with no reason anyone could name.
It was around the time I entered middle school and he entered high school.
The police looked at how poor our household was and guessed he'd run away from home.
Truthfully, the house had nothing worth tearing away and taking—hardly convincing grounds for a kidnapping threat.
Either way, with the police determined to pin it all on a runaway, Mother was on the verge of losing her mind.
She didn't, in the end. Not back then, anyway.
"Was his soul withered as well?"
"My brother's?"
My brother's soul.
At Van Gogh's question, I stared up at the night sky with hollow eyes.
The sky was unbearably, dazzlingly ornate—yet the eyes reflecting it were empty.
"I don't know. I was too busy staring at my own soul to see his…. I think I just praised him, over and over."
The versatile genius, master of every art he touched.
The savior of our household—treated, in the end, like a handy rope to cling to.
And I would look at him and marvel, and marvel again… and then I would suffer.
Come to think of it, he wasn't even an adult yet—a student. I treated him far too much like a grown man.
"He was good at everything. Anything he tried. So I assumed he'd be good at enduring, too."
"Did it become too painful, and he left?"
"Maybe. I'll never know what he was thinking, not for the rest of my life."
Did the weight of all the expectations our family heaped on him crush him until he vanished?
Either way, if he wasn't dead, my brother would have landed on his feet somewhere.
He'd be living happily on his own somewhere, without worrying about our parents, unlike me. If he were still alive, that is.
"I see. So that is where your solitude and your sorrow come from."
Honestly, I had lived having long buried him, so the grief over his loss wasn't that vast.
Maybe because he left so early. My memories of him have gone hazy.
I remember what kind of person he was, but no vivid, specific memory surfaces when I reach for one.
Perhaps I simply don't want to dig the memories up and look at them.
If I go back ten years, I might barely, just barely, see my brother again?
Van Gogh held his bottle of absinthe out toward me.
Just like when he'd poured it into my ear earlier, the smell of ferocious alcohol rolled off it.
"Come, have a drink with me."
"Ah—no. I can't drink."
"You cannot manage even one sip of absinthe? Honestly, what a fool!"
Even at company dinners, I'd received veiled jabs from my department head for being unable to hold my liquor.
The faint, unmistakable aura of a stubborn old-timer radiating off Van Gogh drew a thin laugh out of me.
My tolerance was weak to begin with—and with my stamina in this wrecked state, even a single sip would send me straight to the afterlife.
"There, now you laugh."
Van Gogh gestured at the corners of my mouth, and I shrugged.
This museum kept digging up my most tender past—but even so, the conversation wasn't unpleasant.
Was it because I'd so rarely had a sincere talk with an elder? Or because pouring out the story of my dead brother, something I could never tell a soul, had unburdened me?
Or maybe I'm simply drunk on this beautiful painting.
"How about it—will you live here with me?"
I had been gazing blankly at the rippling sky when Van Gogh asked, carefully.
"I'm sorry?"
"Won't you stay and live here with me?"
At his sudden offer, I closed my mouth for a moment and fell into thought.
No—the answer was already decided. I knew this, too, was one of the tower's machinations.
"No, thank you. I have no desire to become data belonging to the tower."
"But if you could live inside this painting?"
"……."
"Paint with me. I will introduce you to the novelists and musicians of this age as well."
I could meet artists of every field from Van Gogh's own era.
And on top of that, Van Gogh—this Van Gogh—was asking a man who could barely hold a brush to paint alongside him.
"Do you love art?"
"Of course I do…! Not just painting—all of it. I love art, and I've always wanted to make it!"
"Then why have you never done it?"
My heart soaring, I had even pushed myself up from the chair, hands braced on the table.
Van Gogh looked up at me and drove in the question like a blade.
At that, my composure cracked, and my lips fidgeted of their own accord.
"That's because—"
Because I had a hopelessly pathetic amount of talent. And so, eventually, I gave up on even trying.
This place was rapturous. Above all—it was the world I had wanted to live in.
Even if I was only the tower's data, if I lived inside this work, maybe I could become beautiful too.
But…
But the stars are still so far away, aren't they.
The stars and moonlight within The Starry Night still hung impossibly distant.
To reach the tenth floor, I would have to walk until I touched that sky.
Smack—!
I slapped my own cheek hard with my palm.
The stinging burn yanked my greed-drifted mind back into place.
"You do have quite a talent for harming yourself, I see."
…Was that a compliment?
I rose fully from the chair and stepped out of the café terrace.
The winding brick road stretched on until its end pressed against the sky.
To get there, I needed to start moving. Now.
"Your paintings are beautiful."
"……."
"And maybe because of that, it hurts—but it's a road I can walk."
Van Gogh seemed to find my words striking, for he clapped his trembling hands together.
Perhaps because I had praised an art that everyone else had scorned. The corners of his eyes went damp and red.
"May fortune be with you."
After a parting bow to Van Gogh, I set off down the road.
I'm glad the system lets me acknowledge and praise Van Gogh's paintings.
For the first time since entering the tower, I felt genuinely glad about this museum.
Which was exactly why I had to hurry and leave—before I fell any deeper under its spell.
Ugh, but how far am I supposed to walk…?
No matter how diligently I walked, the stars and the moon kept drawing farther away from me.
I'd reasoned that a wall painted with sky would eventually appear—but had I guessed wrong?
My vision blurred, and the colors of the scenery around me smeared together in a dizzying swirl.
So this is what the world looked like to Van Gogh.
When Van Gogh said he'd entered my body and found his soul at ease, I'd honestly been a little disappointed.
I know how tormented his mind was—thinking that way was selfish of me.
Was the world before my brother's eyes like Van Gogh's, too?
Even without absinthe clouding his mind, did my brother's world look different from everyone else's?
It must have looked different from mine, at least.
Damn it—I kept thinking about my brother, again and again.
Fzzt—
Fzzt—
The ominous warning tone sounded once more. My Leaflet Ink was probably close to wearing out.
It felt like I'd been walking for hours, at least.
Damn it….
Thud—
In the end, I collapsed onto the ground.
My feet had gone black, my strength drained away entirely, and walking was no longer possible.
Just like the man who'd lost the Rabbit Secretary quest—I would lose all my stamina and become the tower's data.
Darkness swallowed the world before me along with my body, and I could no longer see Van Gogh's painting.
Whether it was my head finally turning, the blackness began to flicker—and then it blazed with light.
The road is long and long—follow the shining star.
Ah.
The shining star.
The haze in my eyes slowly came into focus, and strength returned to my leaden eyelids, enough to lift them at last.
So the light you see when you pass out—that's a star now, is it?
They've house-trained us like total dogs, this goddamn tower.
"Ugh…."
I let out a groan that scraped my throat raw and opened my eyes.
Unlike when I'd collapsed in the Dragon Palace, the surface against my back was incredibly soft.
No—this wasn't a floor. It was a bed, covered in red sheets.
Forcing my overworked, creaking body upright, I looked around. A room with a comfortable, gentle feel to it.
"Huh?"
A startled sound escaped me.
A young man sat curled forward in a chair beside the bed.
Sensing movement at my voice, he lifted the head he'd had bowed deep.
"Are you finally coming back to your senses?"
"Wh-who are you?!"
Maybe it was because I'd nearly died in the Floor 3 Rabbit Secretary quest.
Just like the man swinging the sickle, I couldn't shake the thought that this person might harm me too.
I pressed myself against the headboard and shouted at him.
The only thing I'm carrying is the unusable dagger—what do I do?
The man in the suit rose and straightened his immaculate clothing.
From his narrow, elegant eyes to the last strand of his hair, everything about him was impeccable.
"That's a fine way to treat the benefactor who healed your ear."
"Healed…?"
At his words, my hand drifted instinctively to my left earlobe.
"…!"
I scrambled up and rushed to the mirror hanging on the wall.
My ear in the reflection was… perfectly intact. The severed lobe had returned to its original place.
Only a faint mark remained where it had been rejoined, and there was no pain at all.
I touched the ear carefully—and remarkably, it worked perfectly, healthy in every way.
My body feels lighter, too…. Did my stamina recover as well?
Shalak—
— Current Status: ■■■■■
Just as I suspected. At some point, my ink had been restored in full.
Even my jet-black shoes had returned to their original color.
This wasn't mere treatment—flesh that had flaked away had grown back.
"…How did you do it?"
"I used my Perk. For a first attempt, I'm relieved to say it held together quite well."
A Perk?
He possessed the Healer Trait?
"Though I'm still inexperienced, it seems—so a scar of that much remains."
The man only shrugged, showing no hint of aggression.
Even so, having already been blindsided once before, I couldn't let my guard down.
"Why did you help me? We're enemies either way, aren't we?"
"I could hardly walk past someone drenched in blood, collapsed right before my eyes…. I'm not that kind of scoundrel."
He looked about my age, yet his speech was oddly old-fashioned.
He almost seemed like an NPC—enough to make me suspicious.
Or the tower's system could have healed me as a benefit for reaching Floor 10, and this person is lying about using his Perk for some reason—
Just as I was spinning up a fresh scenario in my head, the man extended his hand toward me.
The man I'd met on Floor 3 had also offered a handshake once—wearing a perfectly benevolent expression.
"I'm Yang Myeonghyeon."
"…Thank you for healing me. I'm Kim Jisan."
Offering his full name and his Perk both at once—he's trying to build trust.
While expressing my gratitude, I kept my distance from him and gave only a slight nod.
When I refused the handshake, the man called Yang Myeonghyeon shrugged yet again.
"You're a wary one, Jisan. Do I really look like the sort who'd kill you?"
"…I'm sorry to say this to someone who helped me, but do you have any proof you're not?"
"Fair enough. After all, we're both people who climbed up here by eliminating our opponents."
Yang Myeonghyeon, too, was a survivor who'd somehow passed every brutal quest up to this point.
Whether through wit, through luck… or through force.
Even as I held my guarded stance, Yang Myeonghyeon didn't budge an inch.
"?!"
Then, Yang Myeonghyeon thrust both hands out toward me.