After finishing a fantastic meal, Gio threw sausages to the waterfowl and returned to the cabin to rest. Perhaps because he had eaten so much, he didn't feel hungry even when dinner came.
“Scorched rice....”
“Coorr?”
“I can’t eat right now, but let’s cook scorched rice tomorrow. It’ll be delicious.”
“Cooooorororrr.”
Lying on the bed, Seo Gio poked Honey who was lying next to him.
“Coong.”
“Coocoocoong.”
“So soft.”
“Coong!!!”
Honey protested vehemently, but it only made him even cuter.
“This harmless little guy.”
He thought that if it grew just a little bigger, he might even use it as a pillow.
'Would it be possible to create something that feels similar?'
Feeling bad about using a living waterfowl as a pillow, he considered making a soft pillow that wasn’t alive.
Lost in such thoughts, Gio blinked.
He couldn't sleep at all.
“Phew....”
There were times like this occasionally.
“Is this the fate of an artist?”
“...Coong?”
Honey reacted as if to say, 'Stop talking nonsense and just sleep,' but it wasn't that simple.
Rubbing his face a few times against the softness of the blanket stuffed full of feathers, Gio soon got up from his spot.
“Honey, Dad's leaving.”
“Coor.”
“You heartless guy.”
Leaving the tired Honey behind, he headed to his studio full of all kinds of materials.
His severe insomnia was triggered by a sudden interest in something.
“...I'm curious about the view outside the company.”
By pinpointing a location and imagining it as precisely as possible, Gio could visualize the scenery of that place.
At first, he thought it was just his imagination. After all, even if he imagined what the third floor of the ‘Collection’ company might look like, it shouldn't match the actual view. �
However, as he continued to imagine it and gradually completed the painting, he realized something.
'The landscape of the location I imagined is relatively accurate.'
He suspected it might be one of the benefits he gained after becoming a portrait.
“The outside....”
Gio murmured.
“It's probably a dark dawn.”
It wasn't a place he had never seen before, and painting a place he had already seen once wasn't difficult. Gio began to move his brush as he recalled the view he had seen while standing against a wall in an alley.
Soon, a picture frame appeared in a certain alleyway in Seoul.
***
“Haaah....”
In the early morning streets, a woman ruffled her hair.
“Where else should I cling to next?”
The woman with short black hair, Cha Ara, couldn’t hold back her sigh.
'As expected, there is no place that welcomes F-ranks.'
Even as an Awakener, F-ranks were treated as nothing more than porters.
Cha Ara's rank was F. Her main skill was 'Body Reinforcement.' She couldn't afford to learn any other skills, and it was no surprise that she didn't have a profession. She had the typical porter’s status.
Today, after being dismissed from her original team, she sat aimlessly on a bench.
“...Well, who would hire a porter with an injured leg?”
It was due to a leg injury she sustained in the dungeon she visited that afternoon.
With plenty of other F-ranks who wanted to be porters, there was no reason to hire someone who limped.
'I liked that the team was relatively composed of decent people.'
Though they weren't particularly kind, it was a team consisting of people who didn't meddle in each other's business. Even though they treated Cha Ara as invisible due to her being an F-rank porter, the team members themselves were generally indifferent to one another.
Such indifference was hard to find and was one of the virtues of modern people.
“Though that's also why I got fired so easily.”
Having no more usefully, Cha Ara was told they could no longer hire her and was kicked out.
It was a relief that at least they settled her payment before kicking her out. Cha Ara stared at the balance on her account displayed on her phone for a long time.
Altogether, it amounted to about 500,000 won.
It wasn't enough to pay the rent and buy a priest's robe for her youngest sibling.
At that crude remark,
the portrait, buried in the shadows, opened its eyes.
The mouth of the portrait, no longer obscured by the darkness, moved smoothly.
“My apologies.”
It spoke in an aristocratic tone.
When Cha Ara blinked at the overwhelming sense of unease.
The picture frame was nowhere to be seen.
What, woah, what.
'What was that?'
It was only then that Cha Ara realized she had collapsed to the ground.
“...D-d
Someone save me.
Her hand, resting on the snow-covered ground, trembled. Cha Ara knew—and the world knew—that it wasn't simply because of the cold.
Though it was nonsense, deep down, she felt like I wouldn’t be able to keep her composure if she didn't at least ramble such nonsense.
“Crazy....”
Cha Ara realized something without even intending to.
'I almost died.'
Though the situation hadn't been truly that dangerous, Cha Ara knew that the bizarre portrait she had just encountered was an extremely dangerous existence.
Had it been even slightly less polite, enough not to feel the need to say, ‘My apologies’, who might say for sure if Cha Ara couldn't have ended up as a corpse?
“...What, what was that. Seriously, what was that. What did I just see.”
Cha Ara, who was gathering her strength to escape this place, felt something cold and hard brush her hand while fumbling around.
At the small and hard texture, Cha Ara, whose skin crawled all the way to the top of her head, couldn't even scream—her mouth gaped and closed wordlessly.
As she groped around with her hand again, uncontrollably shaking, a cold small object soon entered her hand.
With her heart sinking, she inspected it .....
“...A g, gem?”
It was a black and transparent-coloured gem.
“...What is this...”
She also instinctively knew one thing.
Cha Ara knew that this was a gift from the portrait she had just encountered.
Before they died, her parents had always told her that good deeds would be rewarded.
This entire situation felt like a chilling fairy tale.
***
Meanwhile, another person was just as unsettled.
“Stalking is a bad thing.”
Gio couldn't regain his composure at his own rudeness.
Painting the alley at dawn had been fine. However, after finishing the painting, he saw a woman moving inside the frame and briefly worried whether she might be in danger at such a late hour.
As a result, Gio’s gaze kept following her even without himself realizing ....
“And ended up stalking her.”
He had observed the other person without her consent.
“She must have been surprised.”
He would simply quietly observe the buildings inside Collection or move between frames normally, so he didn't realize. However, through this opportunity, Gio came to know for certain.
'If I fix my gaze on something that moves, the frame in the real world moves along with them.'
That was how the moving portrait incident that followed Cha Ara came about.
“I hope my apology was conveyed well...”
Because he had just been absentmindedly watching the bob-haired woman, he saw her giving her scarf to a poor person and the sight of her being terrified at seeing his frame. Only when the woman turned pale and froze, collapsing with a thud did Gio finally come to his senses.
He felt admiration toward the woman who still seemed to be about a high school student’s age, worried about whether she was okay being alone at this late hour, and guilty for having startled her with his rudeness.
This deep emotion was recognized as an item of trade, and Gio gave a gem to Cha Ara as a gift.
No, wait a moment.
“Did I scare her even more?”
Overwhelmed by his own rudeness and being out of it, he couldn't think straight.
But if he suddenly gave a gift to a high schooler already terrified by a living, moving portrait without saying a word, who would pick it up saying, 'Wow, it's a gem?'
“Ah....”
He should have just given her something like cookies.
'Of all times, I didn't have any baked cookies on hand, so I ended up drawing her a gem instead without realizing it.’
If he had given her some trivial snack, it might have been less frightening. Gio faintly saw the back of the bob-haired student running away in panic through the frame.
“My apologies...”
At that moment, Gio realized something.
Does my personality change sometimes?
It was the moment he became truly aware of himself as the ‘Black Cloak’.