Chapter 6
**CHAPTER TITLE: The Color of Emotions**
His eyes were still fixed not on her greeting, but on the gentle, flowing golden and pink auras that lingered softly around her body in the surrounding space.
Upon closer inspection, the golden aura of today appeared noticeably paler and more faint compared to the clearer one he had seen yesterday at the café during their private conversation.
They had crossed paths by chance from a distance and exchanged pleasant smiles, yet he sensed that the reason it felt weaker was because she was accompanied by other friends and stood in the middle of the road, leaving no time for deep conversation.
“Are you heading to class right now?”
“Uh, yeah. I was walking a little faster so I wouldn’t be late. You’re going the same way?”
“Yes, I am.”
Seo-yoon nodded, lightly pointing with her finger toward the gentle uphill path she usually took.
“I’m taking this friend to his lecture hall. He’s my junior.”
Dong-oh turned his head at her introduction and carefully examined the female student standing beside him.
Because their majors differed, it was a completely unfamiliar face.
The girl lowered her head slightly in a polite bow, seemingly intimidated by Dong-oh’s athletic build, and he responded with a quick nod of acknowledgment.
What mattered most was that around the unfamiliar girl’s body, there was nothing—no trace of any color, only a perfect, colorless void.
His gaze shifted back to Seo-yoon. A faint golden light continued to flow gently over her shoulder.
“Alright, go on.”
“Yeah! See you later, senior.”
Seo-yoon smiled with her usual bright, gentle expression and bowed lightly once more.
As she walked off with her friend toward the distant uphill path, the beautiful golden aura surrounding her began to gradually fade in rhythm with their steps, dissolving into the air.
The moment her silhouette vanished completely from Dong-oh’s view came only after the two of them turned the corner at the red brick building at the end of the uphill path and disappeared from sight.
Dong-oh stood motionless in the now-empty stretch of road where they had vanished, staring at the vacant spot for a long while.
A stream of students hurried past his sides in a blur, racing against the clock.
Some laughed heartily and clapped a friend on the back, while others held phones to their ears and spoke in irritable voices.
Yet amid the lively, emotionally charged crowd, not a single spark of color representing emotions could be seen around anyone.
The world remained an ordinary, colorless space filled only with visible light.
“…It was real. All those things I saw yesterday were never hallucinations from faulty eyes.”
Dong-oh clenched his fist tightly around the 100-won coin tucked deep in his pocket.
The cool, metallic edge of the coin pressed sharply against his fingertips, clear and distinct.
He still could not be completely sure that this ordinary coin was the sole cause of the unbelievable phenomenon.
What he knew for certain, however, was that the event he had witnessed at the café—seeing Seo-yoon’s emotions visually—had been no fleeting illusion or lucky coincidence. It was actual reality.
He moved his previously frozen legs and continued his heavy stride toward the Humanities Building.
When he reached the classroom with the old door, only five minutes remained until class began.
Dong-oh set his bag down on the chair in the usual back corner and sat.
The professor soon entered, attendance sheet in hand, and began calling students’ names one by one in a dry voice over the microphone.
Dong-oh pulled a pen from his pocket and opened his notebook.
If it had been his usual self, he would have half-listened to the professor’s boring voice while focusing only on copying the key points from the board to earn his grade.
But today, not even one percent of that monotonous voice reached his ears.
White chalk dust rose as the professor wrote specialized terms on the board, one after another, explaining the review from the previous lecture in exhaustive detail.
Yet in Dong-oh’s mind, the vivid afterimage of Seo-yoon’s beautiful golden aura from the path that morning lingered chaotically.
He placed the tip of his pen on the blank space at the bottom of his notebook and drew a small horizontal line, sinking into deep thought.
When Seo-yoon had walked ahead arm-in-arm with her friend, Dong-oh had stared fixedly at her back.
The distance had been close, the view wide open.
Yet no strange color had bloomed around her body at that moment.
The exact instant the bizarre emotion colors had exploded into view was when Seo-yoon turned and noticed Dong-oh, recognizing him clearly as her senior after hearing her friend’s words.
“…Was it because the observer and the target had to mutually recognize each other?”
Observing someone unilaterally without the other knowing was not enough to trigger the ability, and the target had to realize that an observer existed for the power to activate.
Dong-oh pressed the pen tip firmly to the margin of his notebook and began writing tiny words.
Gold — friendliness, goodwill, or psychological safety toward others?
Pink — joy, amusement, or embarrassment when together?
Purple — disgust, contempt, or caution toward unwanted people?
He paused, pen tip at his lips in thought, then added one important hypothesis at the very bottom of the page.
Trigger condition — direct eye contact between observer and target?
After carefully writing the sentences and analyzing them calmly, they seemed surprisingly plausible, almost like scientific rules.
Yet one exception case remained on his mind.
The situation from yesterday when the rude man had tried to engage Seo-yoon in conversation.
While Seo-yoon had spoken with the oblivious man at the table, she had never once made eye contact with Dong-oh, who sat alone in the far corner.
Her gaze had been fixed entirely on her laptop screen or the man’s face in front of her.
Nevertheless, Dong-oh had seen clearly and vividly the dense purple fog and sharp, needle-like shapes that had enveloped her entire body from a distance.
His pen, moving rapidly across the page, suddenly froze in mid-air.
“…Then is my previous hypothesis about ‘eye contact’ wrong?”
His head spun once more.
If the trigger was not direct eye contact with him, how should he explain the situation from yesterday?
Dong-oh, confused, drew two short lines roughly over the word “joy” he had written next to the pink color.
The fact that the pink aura had appeared only when Seo-yoon smiled at him—never when she smiled with her friend—proved that the ability was likely not merely the joy of others themselves.
“Then what is the actual condition? Why can it be seen by some and not by others?”
Frustrated, he tapped the notebook pointlessly with the pen tip.
The professor’s voice through the speaker had faded into mere white noise.
Dong-oh stared quietly at the many hypothesis sentences he had written in the notebook.
“…Am I supposed to feel genuine curiosity toward the other person’s emotions for it to activate?”
It had been a faint thought that had crossed his mind before falling asleep in the dark bed last night.
Dong-oh raised his head and slowly scanned the classroom, where dozens of students sat packed tightly.
The diligent girl in the front row typed rapidly on her laptop, determined not to miss even one word of the professor’s explanation.
The boy beside her hid his phone screen behind the textbook file, completely absorbed in a mobile game match.
The professor stood on the stage, voice calm as he read the same boring slides year after year, indifferent to whether students paid attention or not.
Dong-oh focused intently on the professor’s blank, expressionless face—the one he had never actually spoken to.
What was this professor feeling right now, standing before dozens of students?
Did he feel deep dissatisfaction and irritation beneath his calm demeanor when he saw students fooling around?
Or was it simply a mechanical task repeated every year, leaving him in a state of perfect emptiness devoid of any emotion?
The moment that thought entered his mind and his eyes locked on the professor’s face, the professor’s sharp gaze suddenly swept across the empty air and locked precisely onto Dong-oh in the back corner.
The two gazes met directly in mid-air, perfectly aligned.
Yet no expected aura of any color appeared.
Around the professor’s face, only the ordinary white fluorescent light of the classroom remained, dry and lifeless.
“There. Lee Dong-oh, sitting in the back corner.”
The speaker suddenly boomed his name in a clear, ringing voice through the quiet classroom.
Dong-oh’s pen, still tapping the notebook, jolted to a stop.
Instantly, dozens of students’ gazes turned toward him, all focusing on the back row.
“According to the explanation given earlier, what possible side effects could excessive government intervention in the market create?”
Dong-oh looked at the professor’s face.
Until moments ago, he had been analyzing the ability’s conditions and had not heard a single word of the professor’s lecture.
Even staring at the complex graphs on the board, he could not guess the answer.
“…I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
The professor glanced at him with mild disappointment.
Disgust and irritation were written plainly on his expression.
Yet in Dong-oh’s eyes, there was not a single trace of purple disgust or spiky irritation.
The world was colorless to a horrifying degree.
“During class, don’t think about random things. Pay attention to the lecture. Sit down.”
“Yes… I’m sorry.”
A few classmates sitting nearby let out soft giggles.
Dong-oh swallowed his embarrassment and lowered his gaze to his notebook.
The professor resumed his explanation as if nothing had happened, gripping the microphone once more.
‘…Simply making eye contact and feeling curiosity is not enough to trigger it.’
Dong-oh drew thick lines over the sentence he had written earlier: Trigger condition — direct eye contact between observer and target?
He had exchanged a clear, prolonged gaze with the professor just moments ago, had thought about what psychological state the professor might be in regarding him, and had felt curious.
Yet nothing had changed.
“Then… is the size of the emotion the other person feels too weak to be visible?”
The professor’s momentary dissatisfaction with a bad student was far lighter and less intense than the disgust and hatred Seo-yoon had felt toward the man.
The emotional waves themselves might simply be too faint to pass through the filter.
But the faint golden and pink auras that had appeared around Seo-yoon this morning also did not seem as intense or grand as the professor’s irritation.
It was not simply the size of the emotion being felt by the target that determined whether it activated or not.
Dong-oh stared at the professor on the stage once more.
He placed a hand on his own chest and asked himself coldly.
Did the professor truly know what he was thinking about him right now?
No. Not at all.
Whether the professor marked him as an idle student or gave him an F grade, it was simply a trivial evaluation of a stranger that would not affect his life much.
The professor’s inner thoughts were nothing more than a ‘test subject’ to verify the conditions of the newly awakened ability in Dong-oh’s eyes.
With a deep realization, Dong-oh wrote the new conclusion in his notebook with a trembling hand.
Trigger condition — the desire to know the other person’s emotions.
He stared at the end of the sentence for a moment, then pressed the pen tip firmly into the most important word in the middle and added it.
“Genuinely.”
Trigger condition — the genuine desire to know the other person’s emotions.
It was, for now, only a hypothesis based on subjective experience.
Yet somehow, Dong-oh felt a powerful certainty that this sentence alone must be the true answer to the condition of the unrealistic ability that had come into his life.
The rest of the day after that passed without any special events—luckily or unluckily, it was impossible to tell.
He attended the remaining major lectures in the afternoon, then took the usual bus from the regular stop and arrived home safely after classes ended.
He had woken at exactly the same time as yesterday, walked the same route, sat in the same lecture room, endured the same boring class, and taken the same bus home. A thoroughly routine day.
After eating a simple dinner and showering, Dong-oh lay stretched out on the bed in his usual comfortable clothes.
Holding his smartphone, he mindlessly swiped through a few meaningless YouTube or community videos, then felt fatigue creep in and turned the screen off completely.
On the darkened LCD, his lonely face reflected faintly like a mirror in the darkness of the empty room.
Dong-oh gently placed the smartphone on his broad chest and stared blankly at the dark ceiling.
It had not taken long to calmly organize the unrealistic events and data that had unfolded before his eyes today.
From the moment he picked up the mysterious 100-won coin from the street and pocketed it, the strange aura phenomenon of human emotions becoming visible to the eye had begun.
In his mind, he carefully derived one clear principle.
“The emotions of others I genuinely want to know become visualized in color.”
He could not yet be 100% certain.
Only two cases had been observed with Seo-yoon over two days, and jumping to a perfect conclusion about the entire ability would be hasty generalization.
Yet this hypothesis was the only one that explained all the mysterious situations he had experienced so far.