The shadow didn't have a face, but it had a weight. As it lurched across the marble, the floor tiles groaned under its ink-thick presence. Ji-yeol didn't flinch; he simply exhaled, the breath hitching in a chest that felt increasingly like hollowed wood.
He knelt by his open suitcase, his fingers hovering over a row of glass phials labeled with emotions he no longer possessed. He bypassed Melancholy and Spite, settling instead on a jar filled with shimmering, golden dust: Pure Nostalgia.
"Stay back," he whispered, though whether to the shadow or to the fading remnants of his own sanity, he wasn't sure.
He uncorked the jar. The smell of sun-warmed hay and old library books exploded into the stagnant air of the East Wing. It was a sensory flashbang. The shadow recoiled, its jagged edges softening as it feebly tried to absorb the golden particles.
Ji-yeol used the distraction to lean forward, his eyes narrowing. He wasn't looking at the monster; he was looking at the Red Thread trailing from its heel. It wasn't frayed or snapped. It was braided.
Someone hadn't just let this "Smudge" escape; they had crafted it.
"A staged haunting," Ji-yeol murmured, his voice rasping. He reached out with a gloved hand, pinching the thread.
The moment his fingers made contact, a psychic feedback loop slammed into his skull. He didn't see a memory; he felt a void. It was a cold, calculated emptiness that smelled of sterile porcelain and expensive tea. It smelled like the balcony. It smelled like the man who viewed the world as a gallery of grief.
The cost of the contact hit him instantly.
A sudden numbness washed over his left foot. He looked down, watching as the skin of his boot seemed to turn matte and rigid. He had traded the physical sensation of "Touch" in his left leg just to peek at the thread's origin.
He stood up, swaying as he tested his now-clunky, unfeeling limb. He was literally becoming a statue, one secret at a time.
He reached into his inner pocket, pulling out the Future Portrait. The ink on the canvas was still wet—a feat that should have been impossible. The revolver in the painted Ji-yeol's hand seemed to have moved a fraction of an inch closer to the Goddess's heart.
The city wasn't just a chessboard; it was a countdown. And Ji-yeol realized, with a sinking horror, that he wasn't just a player. He was the ink being used to write the ending.
He closed his suitcase with a heavy thud and turned toward the center of the gallery, his one good leg dragging the silent, porcelain one behind him. He needed to find the source of the braided threads before there was nothing left of him to paint.