"Or a sister, perhaps?"
"......."
Gogh finished the letter, folded the paper into tight creases, and slid it into an envelope.
Then he planted the absinthe at his lips again and poured it down his throat.
Eyes gone murky, dissolved in alcohol. And yet, even so, the light in them still burned like the stars overhead.
'I'd like to deflect with something vague.... but just like on the first floor, it'll pry until I've laid everything bare anyway.'
I covered my sour face with both hands and opened my mouth.
Having to speak, myself, of a past I never wanted to touch. The worst.
"I had an older brother."
"Had? Was he committed to an asylum, as I was? Or did he end his breath with a revolver?"
"He died."
"The revolver, then."
"No. That's not it."
At Gogh's easy certainty, I flustered and waved both hands.
A revolver suicide, in South Korea, where handguns are banned outright.
Very like Gogh, to leap to the extreme scenario modeled on himself.
"Whether he was committed, whether it was a revolver — I know none of it."
At that, Gogh's interest seemed to catch; his eyebrows twitched.
"He disappeared. One day. He vanished when I was young, with nothing but the clothes on his back..., so I've lived assuming he's dead."
One day, out of nowhere, my brother disappeared.
A simple runaway, or an abduction? A disappearance whose reason no one ever learned.
It was around the time I entered middle school, and my brother started high school.
'The police took one look at our family's poverty and filed it as a runaway.'
To call it a kidnapping for ransom — well, our house had nothing worth extorting.
Either way, with the police railroading it into a runaway case, my mother nearly lost her mind.
She didn't pass away then, in the end. Not then.
"Was his soul ravaged too?"
"My brother's?"
My brother's soul.
At Gogh's question, I stared up at the night sky with empty eyes.
The sky was so viciously gorgeous, and the eyes reflecting it held nothing at all.
"I don't know. I was too busy watching my own soul. His, I think..., I only ever praised."
A prodigy, gifted in any art he touched.
He was treated as our family's savior — the rope let down from heaven.
And I watched my brother and marveled, and marveled again.... and suffered.
'Looking back — he was a student, not even an adult. We made far too much of an adult of him.'
"He was good at everything. So I assumed he'd be good at enduring, too."
"Did he leave because it was too heavy?"
"I suspect so. His heart, I'll never know — not in this lifetime."
Did the weight of our family's expectations crush him until he vanished?
Either way, if he isn't dead, my brother is the kind of person who'd be living just fine on his own.
Unlike me — living free and happy somewhere, unburdened by worry for our parents. If he's alive at all, that is.
"I see. So that is why solitude and sorrow live in you."
Honestly, I'd lived with my brother mostly forgotten, so the sorrow on his account never ran that deep.
'Maybe because he left so early. My memories of him are blurred, somehow.'
I remember what kind of person he was — but no sharp, particular moments surface.
Or maybe I simply don't want to reach in and pull those memories out.
If I return to ten years ago — might I just barely be in time to see my brother again?
Gogh held his bottle of absinthe out toward me.
Just as when he'd poured it over my ear, the reek of alcohol off it was truly vicious.
"Here. Have a drink."
"Ah — no. I can't drink."
"You cannot manage even one mouthful of absinthe? What a fool!"
Even at company dinners, I'd caught the department head's subtle scorn for barely handling liquor.
At the faint old-man bluster radiating off Gogh, I let out a thin laugh.
Weak to alcohol at the best of times — one swallow in this state, with no health left, and I'd be on the express train to the afterlife.
"At last, you smile."
Gogh gestured at the corners of my mouth, and I shrugged.
This museum kept clawing at the tenderest parts of my past — and yet the conversation itself wasn't unpleasant.
Maybe because I've had so little experience talking honestly with an adult.
Or maybe it was relief — finally telling someone about my dead brother, a thing I'd been able to tell no one.
'Or maybe I'm simply drunk on this beautiful painting.'
"Well then — will you live here, with me?"
I was gazing blankly at the rippling sky when.
Gogh put the question to me, carefully.
"Sorry?"
"Won't you stay and live here, together?"
At Gogh's sudden offer, I closed my mouth and sank into thought.
No — the answer was decided long ago. Because I know this, too, is the tower's game.
"I'll pass. I have no wish to be absorbed as the tower's data."
"But — to live inside this painting?"
"......."
"Paint with me. I shall introduce you to the novelists and musicians of this age as well."
I could meet artists of every field who'd lived in Gogh's own era.
And Gogh had just asked me — a man who can't even hold a brush properly — to paint alongside him.
"Do you love art?"
"Of course...! Not just painting — I love all of it, every art. I want to do it all!"
"Then why have you never done it?"
Carried away, I'd even pushed off the table and risen to my feet.
Gogh looked up at me and threw the question like a blade.
At it, my face slipped its leash; my mouth twitched.
"That's-"
Because I am hopelessly, hideously without talent. So that in the end, I gave up even trying.
This place is rapture. More than anything — it's the world I always wanted to live in.
Tower data or not, if I lived inside this painting, even I could become beautiful.
But....
'But the star is still so far away.'
The stars and moonlight of 'The Starry Night' still hang in the far distance.
To reach the tenth floor, I'll have to walk until I touch that sky.
SMACK-!
I struck my own cheek hard with my palm.
The stinging in my cheek snapped my desire-shaken mind back into place.
"You, too, have a gift for harming yourself, I see."
...Is that a compliment?
I rose fully from the chair and stepped out beyond the café terrace.
The winding brick road ran on until it met the sky at its end.
If I meant to arrive there, I had to get my feet moving now.
"Your paintings are beautiful."
"......."
"Maybe that's why — it hurts, but the walk is bearable."
Gogh clapped his trembling hands, as though my words had struck something in him.
Was it hearing his art praised — the art the world had snubbed? The rims of his eyes went wet and red.
"I wish you luck."
I bowed my farewell to Gogh and set off down the road.
'Even if only through the system — I'm glad I got to honor Gogh's paintings to his face.'
For the first time since entering the tower, I felt glad about this museum.
Which is exactly why I have to leave quickly, before this place intoxicates me any further.
'Urgh — but how far am I supposed to walk...?'
However hard I walked, the stars and moon kept their distance, receding before me.
I'd theorized that if I walked long enough, a wall painted with the sky pattern would appear — was that the wrong answer?
My vision smeared, the colors of the scenery tangling deliriously into one another.
'So this is how the world looks to Gogh.'
When Gogh told me his soul had felt at ease inside my body — honestly, part of me had been sorry to hear it.
Knowing how deeply his mind torments him, that's a selfish thing to feel.
'Did the world in front of my brother's eyes look like van Gogh's too?'
Even without absinthe to muddy his mind — did my brother's world look different from everyone else's?
'Different from mine, at the very least. Surely.'
Damn it. I keep thinking of my brother.
SHRRIP-
SHRRIP-
The ominous warning tone rang out again. The leaflet's ink must be nearly spent.
By my body's count, I'd been walking for hours.
'Damn it....'
Thump-
In the end, I collapsed onto the road.
My feet were staining black, the strength running out of them; walking was impossible.
Just as it had for the man who lost the Byeoljubujeon quest — health spent, I would become the tower's data.
Like my body, my vision was blacking out too; I could no longer see Gogh's painting.
My head must have been going — lights pulsed and burst across my failing eyes.
'The road is long, long indeed — follow thou the shining star.'
Ah.
The shining star.
***
My clouded eyes slowly found their focus, and strength returned to eyelids that had sealed themselves heavy and shut.
So the light you see when you faint — that was the star.
This tower ran me around like a dog chasing its own tail. Rotten, miserable thing.
"Urgh...."
I opened my eyes with a groan cracked ragged from my ruined throat.
Unlike when I'd collapsed in the Dragon Palace, the surface under my back was terribly soft.
No — not a floor. A bed dressed in red sheets.
I hauled my creaking, overworked body upright and looked around. A room with a comfortable, settled air.
"Oh."
A startled, dumb sound escaped me.
A young man sat curled forward in the chair beside the bed.
He must have sensed the stir of my voice — the head he'd bowed low lifted.
"Are your wits about you now?"
"Wh-who — who are you?!"
Maybe it was nearly dying in the third floor's Byeoljubujeon quest.
Like the man who'd swung that sickle, this person too might mean me harm — the thought came unbidden.
I pressed myself flat against the headboard and barked at the man.
'All I'm carrying is an unusable dagger — what do I do?'
The man, dressed in a suit, rose and smoothed his already-immaculate clothes back into place.
From the long, clean line of his eyes to the last strand of his hair — everything about him was orderly.
"That's rather harsh, toward the benefactor who treated your ear."
"Treated...?"
At his words, my hand went of its own accord to my left earlobe.
"...!"
I scrambled up at once and crossed to the mirror on the wall.
The ear in the mirror was..., whole. The severed earlobe had been returned to its place.
Only a faint mark remained along the seam — there was no pain at all.
I touched the ear gingerly: to my amazement, it was perfectly fine, without so much as a twinge.
'My body feels light too.... Did my health recover as well?'
Fwish-
[Leaflet Ink]
-Current Status: [■■■■■]
As I thought. The ink had refilled completely at some point.
Even my blackened shoes had returned to their original color.
Not mere treatment — flesh that had been cut away, restored.
"...How did you do it?"
"I used my perk. For a first attempt, it took surprisingly well."
A perk?
He holds a healing perk, then.
"Though — perhaps because I'm still unpracticed, it did leave a trace of scarring."
The man only shrugged; he showed no sign of attacking.
Still — having been knifed in the back once already, I couldn't afford to lower my suspicion.
"Why did you help me? We'll only end up enemies anyway."
"I am not the sort of ruffian... who could walk past a person collapsed before his eyes, streaming blood."
He looked around my age, yet his manner of speech was oddly antique.
Enough that I half suspected him of being an NPC.
'The tower's system might have healed me as a benefit of reaching the tenth floor. And for reasons of his own, this man could be lying — claiming he used his perk-'
While I was busy scripting new scenarios in my head, the man extended his hand toward me.
The man I'd met on the third floor had offered a handshake too. Wearing that same benevolent face.
"Yang Myeong-hyun."
"...Thank you for treating me. I'm Kim Ji-san."
'Names exchanged, perk laid bare — it all reads like a bid for my trust.'
Even while giving my thanks, I kept my distance from the man and only bowed my head.
When I declined the handshake, the man called Yang Myeong-hyun shrugged once again.
"You are severely on your guard, young Ji-san. What — do you imagine I might kill you?"
"...I'm sorry to say this to the person who helped me, but is there any guarantee you won't?"
"Fair. After all, we are both, in the end, people who erased an opponent to climb this high."
Yang Myeong-hyun, too, was a victor who had passed every one of these merciless quests.
By wits, by luck..., or by force.
Even as I held my guard, Yang Myeong-hyun didn't move an inch from where he stood.
"?!"
Then, Yang Myeong-hyun stretched both hands out toward me.