The Portrait That Followed
After a spectacular meal, Ji-oh tossed sausages to the water birds, then returned to the cabin to rest. A feast like that left him full even when evening came.
"Nurungji…"
"Kkureuk?"
"A little heavy for right now. Let's make nurungji rice tomorrow. That stuff is good."
"Kkururururuk."
"……."
Lying on the bed, Seo Ji-oh poked Honey, who was, as always, stretched out beside him.
"Kkung."
"……."
"Kkung-kkung-kkung."
"You're so soft."
"Kkung!!!"
Honey protested with violent thrashing, which only made it cuter.
"You harmless little thing."
A little bigger, he thought, and he could use it as a pillow.
Could I make something with a similar feel?
Using a living water bird as a mattress felt a bit mean, so the idea was to craft a squishy, non-living pillow instead.
Drifting through idle fantasies, Ji-oh blinked.
"……."
Sleep refused to come, stubborn as ever.
"Haa…."
Nights like this happened sometimes.
"An artist's fate, I suppose."
"…Kkung?"
Honey's reaction said something like stop talking nonsense and just sleep, but that was easier said than done.
Ji-oh rubbed his face a few times into the feather-stuffed comforter, then sat up.
"Honey, Dad's heading out."
"Kkureuk."
"Cold-hearted little thing."
Leaving the exhausted bird behind, he made for the workshop, packed with every material imaginable.
"……."
His wretched insomnia always came down to this: some sudden spark of interest catching fire.
"…I've gotten curious about the scenery outside the company."
If he fixed a location as precisely as he could and imagined it, Ji-oh could summon the landscape of that place in his mind.
At first he had assumed it was pure invention. Imagining what the third floor of the Collector's company looked like wouldn't make it identical to the real thing, would it?
But as he kept fleshing out the vision and completing the painting, a realization eventually settled over him.
The scenery of whatever place I'm imagining is relatively true to life.
One of the perks of becoming a portrait, he figured.
"Outside, it's probably…"
Ji-oh muttered to himself.
"…a dark early morning."
It wasn't some place he had never seen. Recreating somewhere he had already been was no great challenge. Recalling the view from a wall in a certain alley, Ji-oh set his brush to work.
And before long, a single picture frame appeared in an alley somewhere in Seoul.
"Haaa…."
On a predawn street, a young woman raked her hands through her hair.
"Where am I supposed to latch onto next."
A woman with jet-black bobbed hair, Cha Ah-ra, could not hold back her sigh.
Figures. Nowhere wants an F-class.
Even among the awakened, F-class never ranked above pack mule.
Cha Ah-ra's rank was F. Her main skill was Body Strengthening. She had never had the means to learn anything else, and of course she had no job class. A textbook porter's status window.
"……."
Today she had been cut from her old team, and now she sat on a bench with nowhere to go.
"…Yeah. Who's going to use a porter with a busted leg."
She had hurt it that afternoon in a dungeon.
F-class hunters desperate for porter work were a dime a dozen. No one had any reason to hire someone who limped.
They were a pretty decent bunch, though.
Not exactly kind, but a team of people who simply did not care much about one another. They had ignored Cha Ah-ra like she wasn't there—just an F-class porter—but the whole team treated each other that way.
That kind of indifference was one of the few remaining virtues of modern people.
"And it got me cut just as easily."
With no further use for her, they had told her they could no longer keep her on and thrown her out.
At least she had been paid everything she was owed before they kicked her to the curb. Cha Ah-ra stared for a long time at the balance on her phone.
All told, roughly five hundred thousand won.
"……."
Not nearly enough to cover rent and buy her little brother's priest robes.
"Rent went up this time, too…."
Ugh.
Cha Ah-ra made a pained sound.
"…What the hell do I do now."
Watching the sky begin to sift down soft flakes of snow, she clicked her tongue.
"This is bullshit."
She was already freezing to death. Why did it have to snow on top of that?
…The terminal buses stopped ages ago. Hyung's still at home, so the little brat should be fine. As long as he isn't out there being a sucker and giving away his own stuff again.
Sniffling at a loneliness she refused to name, Cha Ah-ra stood up from the bench.
"Gotta find somewhere the snow won't hit me, at least."
She cinched the scarf her little brother had knitted tighter around her neck and started walking.
She had meant to just sleep on the bench, but with snow falling she might not open her eyes by morning.
If I could crash near a station or some company building, that would be perfect.
Public facilities with heavy foot traffic, or the areas around companies that made real money, had warming magic laid over them.
If she could sleep near one of those, she wouldn't have to worry about a place to squat—but if she got caught in the wrong spot, the worst case could drop her to 4th-Class Citizen.
I used my hunter ID to buy a few days of city residency rights, but that doesn't mean I can sleep anywhere I want. Get spotted by security and it's a whole mess….
Moments like this, she almost envied her older brother, Cha Eun-hyeok.
"That guy can sleep in his bungeoppang cart if he has to."
Leave a cart unattended in the city and someone would steal it or the authorities would haul it off, so her brother—who sold bungeoppang for a living—was always hauling the cart between the provinces and the city.
"Ugh…."
Which meant Cha Ah-ra could hardly expect to curl up in his cart herself.
After walking aimlessly for a long while, her steps brought her into a dark alley.
"……."
…What is that.
…A portrait?
A portrait of some man, hanging on one wall of the alley.
"…What the hell. Creepy…."
The man in the painting was handsome the way a sculpture or a doll was handsome—but more than the good looks, what reached her skin first was the stillness of him, eyes quietly closed.
An aura as bleak as if someone had painted a corpse. Cha Ah-ra flinched and moved on.
Some crazy bastard hung a painting out here.
Either a lunatic with peculiar tastes or a hunter with some bizarre skill. Cha Ah-ra decided not to care. She had no intention of sleeping here anyway, with snow falling straight onto her head.
A little farther on, she found a woman.
"……."
However long she had been sitting under the cold snow, a soft white heap of it had already settled over her.
From the way the woman was curled into a ball, Cha Ah-ra could tell she was a 4th-Class Citizen living in the city illegally.
"……."
"……."
Her thin body still rose and fell with breath. Not dead yet.
She's pretty far out for one of them.
Usually the poor nested deeper in the alleys.
Cha Ah-ra meant to walk past without a glance—then, only a few steps later, her face twisted with discomfort and she turned back to stand in front of the woman again.
"……."
Asleep or passed out from the cold, the woman was breathing but not conscious. Even with Cha Ah-ra right in front of her, she gave no sign of noticing.
"…Ah, for fuck's sake."
Cha Ah-ra pulled off her own scarf, draped it lightly around the woman's neck, and left at a brisk pace. A faint sound of movement from the woman only made her walk faster.
Shit. This is so embarrassing. Shit, shit….
Her bare neck stung with cold, and somehow that felt unfair.
"Why does she have to sleep looking that pathetic…!"
Something rose hot and sudden in her chest.
The woman looked her age, or younger. Twenty at the absolute oldest.
Someone roughly her own age, sleeping like she was about to die—Cha Ah-ra could not just walk past that.
"Ah, damn it. The little brat knitted this for me… I-sol…."
Wool from livestock and monsters hunted in the village, spun and knitted with difficulty. Her little brother's skill wasn't half bad; it was a solid scarf, and she had been wearing it all winter. To lose it this stupidly….
Shit… I had no right to give Hyung or Cha I-sol a hard time….
Trudging along, Cha Ah-ra's eyes snagged on something strange.
"……."
A portrait of a man.
"…Huh."
She had just seen that.
…What? What is this? I didn't see it here. Did I imagine it? Or are there multiple frames?
Half the frame was buried in shadow, the face hard to make out—but she knew at once it was the same portrait she had just passed.
A chill ran over her skin, the kind that comes from watching a horror movie.
"Uh, uhh…."
F-class or not, an awakened was still an awakened. She could feel instinctive danger well enough.
"Am I fucked?"
At that crude little mutter—
—the portrait buried in shadow opened its eyes.
"……."
"……."
The mouth of the portrait, unobscured by the dark, opened gently.
An aristocratic tone.
Under a crushing sense of wrongness, Cha Ah-ra blinked—
"……."
—and the frame was nowhere to be seen.
"……."
What. What. What.
What the hell.
Only then did Cha Ah-ra realize she had sat down hard on the ground.
"…Sh-shit…."
Somebody help.
The hand she pressed into the snow-covered ground shook violently. It was not the cold alone, and Cha Ah-ra knew it, and the world knew it.
Nonsense, but if she didn't keep spouting nonsense like this, she felt she would never get her head straight again.
"Crazy…."
Without meaning to, Cha Ah-ra understood.
I almost died.
It had not actually been that dangerous a situation—but she knew the uncanny portrait she had just seen was something extremely dangerous.
If that presence had been even a little less polite, a little less inclined to feel the need to say excuse me, who could say whether Cha Ah-ra would be a corpse right now.
"…What. What the hell. What did I just see."
Fumbling to put strength into her body and get out of there, her hand caught on something cold and hard.
The small, solid texture sent a full-body shudder through her. She could not even scream; her mouth only worked soundlessly.
"……."
Trembling, she groped again—and a cold little lump settled into her palm.
With her heart clenched tight, she looked….
"…A g-gem?"
A jewel, black and transparent.
"…What is this…."
Again, something she knew by instinct.
That it was a gift from the portrait she had just seen—Cha Ah-ra understood that much.
"……."
Before they died, her parents had always said that good deeds brought fortune.
The whole situation felt like a chilling fairytale.
And here was another person thoroughly unsettled.
"Stalking is a terrible thing."
Ji-oh could not get his head around his own rudeness.
Painting the predawn alley had been fine. But once the painting was done, he could see a woman moving on the other side of the frame, and he had only meant to worry for a moment—whether she would be safe this late at night.
Before he knew it, his gaze had kept following her….
"And I ended up stalking her."
Watching someone without consent.
"She must have been terrified."
Ordinarily he only watched the buildings inside the Collector's quietly, or used frames to travel, so he had never noticed. This incident made it perfectly clear.
If I fix my gaze on something that's moving, the frame in reality moves with it.
That was the full account of the living-portrait incident that had trailed Cha Ah-ra.
"I hope the apology came across…."
Because he had been staring blankly at the short-haired woman the whole time, he had seen her give her scarf to the poor woman, and he had seen the way she looked at his frame and went white with fear. Only when she froze and crumpled to the ground did Ji-oh come back to himself.
A fondness for this young woman who looked like she was still in high school, worry over whether she was all right alone so late, and guilt for startling her with his own rudeness.
"……."
Those dense emotions were recognized as a single item of trade, and Ji-oh gifted Cha Ah-ra a gem.
"……?"
Wait. Hold on.
"Did that make it worse?"
He had been so rattled by his own discourtesy that he hadn't thought it through.
But for a high-schooler already terrified of a living, moving portrait—to suddenly, wordlessly receive a gift—who in the world would just go, oh, a gem, and pick it up?
"Ah…."
He should have given her cookies or something.
Unfortunately I didn't have any baked, so without thinking I just drew her a gem.
Some trivial snack might have frightened her less. Through the frame, Ji-oh watched the short-haired student's fleeing back with a distant look.
"I'm sorry…."
Around then, Ji-oh realized something.
"……."
Do I… change personality sometimes?
It was the moment he finally began to awaken to himself as the Black Cloak.
(To be continued)