Episode 1: Turquoise Wings in the Rain

When I woke up from my dream, the wind blew,

Can you see the dawn in the gray days? The flapping wings of a butterfly shake my heart,

Is this reality or a dream? Rainy evenings in the city were always hazy and gloomy, as if watercolor paint had been smeared. In the forest of high-rise buildings on Teheran-ro, Gangnam, Seoul, beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of an architectural design office on the 35th floor, red and blue car headlights were flowing endlessly like a huge river. Seo Jin-woo, a 28-year-old architectural designer, was standing with his forehead leaning against the cold glass window. In his hand was a half-cooled cup of black coffee, and his eyes, covered with deep dark circles, were filled with extreme chronic fatigue and emptiness. “Team Leader Seo, do you know that we have to submit the revised bird’s eye view of the new city’s landmark tower by tomorrow? The client is asking for more emphasis on the curves. I’ll have to work overtime tonight as well.”

Director Kim’s dry voice came through the partition in the back. “Yes, Manager. I will finish and leave work.”

Jinwoo answered mechanically. It was already the third day of vigil. A life where you go to work every morning in a hellish train, struggle with 3D CAD drawings on the monitor all night, and then take the first train in the morning and return to the officetel. In that endlessly repeating treadmill, Jinwoo had long since been unable to tell whether he was a living human being or a sophisticated machine that produced design drawings. The world has always demanded only large and efficient straight lines. Higher floor height, larger area, more expensive sale price. On the vertical line of desire, the romance, freedom, and curve of the wind that Jinwoo dreamed of as a child disappeared without a trace.

A corner of my heart felt cold, like an empty cave. No matter how much expensive coffee I drank or how many nutritional supplements I swallowed, the emptiness seeping from the bottom of my soul could not be filled. The raindrops hitting outside the window flowed down the glass like tears. Jinwoo stared at his face reflected in the glass window. Disheveled black hair, a wrinkled navy blue trench coat, and two tired, unfocused eyes. It was unfamiliar and foreign, as if I was looking into someone else's face.

‘Who on earth am I? 'Where are we running so quickly towards?' It was right then. An unbelievable scene unfolded right outside the window on the 35th floor in the dark, rain pouring down. It was light. A fantastic turquoise light that is a mixture of transparent and brilliant emerald and sapphire colors, completely different from the city's neon signs or car lights. The light was swimming among the raindrops, tracing a gentle path in the air.

“What... is that?”

Without realizing it, Jinwoo put his coffee cup down on the desk and stepped closer to the glass window. The entity of light was a butterfly. But it wasn't a biological insect. The entire body was like a transparent glass crystal emitting blue light on its own, and both wings were sprinkled with brilliant golden powder that looked like the Milky Way swirling in the night sky. A butterfly on the exterior wall of a building, 150 meters above the ground, in strong wind and rain. It was a strange phenomenon that could not be explained by common sense. The butterfly flapped its wings gracefully, without shaking at all, even in the harsh rain and wind. And with the glass window in between, he stopped exactly at Jinwoo’s eye level. Each time the butterfly's two wings slowly folded and unfolded, blue phosphorescence created mysterious ripples on the surface of the glass window. Pot—Pot—

The sound of the wings ringing like a clear bell, not in Jinwoo's ears, but deep in the abyss of his heart. 'The fluttering of a butterfly's wings shakes my heart... Is this reality or a dream?'

Jinwoo’s breathing stopped. The blue butterfly outside was precisely overlapped with my own reflection in the glass window. A hallucination as if huge blue-green wings were sprouting from behind both of one's shoulders. At that moment, before Jinwoo's eyes, the surface of the water shimmered like water and the boundaries of reality began to collapse. The noise of the city faded away, like a distant underwater sound. The sound of the computer fan spinning, the sound of typing, and the manager's nagging all disappeared. Only myself, the butterfly, and the sound of rain hitting the window filled the entire universe.

Jinwoo stretched out his hand as if he were possessed and placed his palm on the cold glass window. Surprisingly, the butterfly also spread its wings on the other side of the glass window and placed its body against Jinwoo's palm. A strange moment when a human and a fantasy butterfly share body heat across a transparent glass plate. A tingling thrill, like a tiny electric current passing through glass, flowed through Jinwoo's fingertips and into his heart. At the same time, unfamiliar images poured into Jinwoo's mind like a waterfall. Endless green fields, a huge Milky Way crossing the night sky,

And a huge ancient tree that pulsated on its own in the light of the stars... It was a world he had never been to, but strangely enough, it was as familiar as his mother's arms, and it evoked a tearful longing. “Team Leader Seo! Team Leader Seo, are you listening to me?!”

Manager Kim’s sudden shout struck Jinwoo’s ears. With the feeling of being crushed, the shackles of reality tightened around Jinwoo's neck again. Jinwoo looked back in shock. “Ah... Yes! I’m sorry, Manager.”

“What are you staring out the window for? Quickly, pull out a drawing!” Jinwoo swallowed dry saliva and looked out the window again. But the butterfly was nowhere to be found. Only thick raindrops were falling mercilessly hitting the glass window. 'Did I see something in vain... Was I seeing something in vain because I was overworked?'

Jinwoo touched his forehead with a trembling hand. However, when he saw that the fine blue phosphorescent powder emitted by the butterfly remained faintly twinkling in the center of his palm,

He sensed that this was not a simple illusion or a product of fatigue. That night, in Seo Jin-woo's boring and dry daily life,

The prelude to a mysterious Phalaenopsis dream that blurs the boundaries between reality and dreams was silently unfolding. Architecture was originally an artificial nest built on the ground by humans to protect themselves from natural wind and rain. However, in the 21st century megacity of Seoul, architecture was no longer a haven for life. The huge concrete towers that showed off the size of the capital and the glass curtain wall buildings that soared into the sky were nothing more than huge artificial rock walls that blocked sunlight and blocked the wind. Jinwoo Seo held the mouse of the design program and stared blankly at the grid on the screen.

Horizontal and vertical lines that do not allow an error of even 0.1 millimeter. For each line he draws, tens of billions of won in construction costs and tens of thousands of pyeong of commercial space are determined. But there was no room for human warmth or soul anywhere in those straight, cold straight lines. When I was young, I saw the cozy round nest made by swallows out of mud and straw that I saw under the eaves of my grandmother's house in the countryside. The memory of that smooth curve was completely castrated in the standards of capitalist urban design.

'Why are we building such a huge prison that confines us?'

Jinwoo clenched his fists as if he was squeezing out his chest. The rain hitting outside the window was like the sky wailing towards modern people trapped in a huge glass prison. That one blue butterfly that appeared in the abyss of hopeless fatigue and disconnection. It was a miracle that turned the impossible into possible at 150 meters above the ground.

It was a thunderbolt of life that struck Jinwoo's dry soul. The trace left by the butterfly's blue wings was not a straight line, but the most perfect and flexible curve of Mother Nature. That curve cracked Jinwoo's frozen heart and was knocking on the door to a forgotten, unknown world. Rainy nights in Seoul always seemed like a city of ghosts trapped behind a transparent curtain. Seo Jin-woo rested his chin on the design desk and looked out the window at the skyscraper. Rainwater flowing down the 34th floor office window refracted the neon signs in the forest of buildings, turning the entire city into one huge liquid tank. The car headlights on Teheran Road became red and white veins and spread across the asphalt, and the noise was filtered through the double-pane glass and pressed down on Jinwoo's temples like a dull heartbeat. “What is reality?”

Jinwoo mumbled quietly and smoothed out the tracing paper on the drawing board with his fingertips. A master plan for a new city complex cultural town that he has been working on for over half a year. A land area of ​​40,000 square meters, a maximum height of 220 meters, and a strict mathematical order created by glass, steel, and concrete. The clients wanted a flashy title, 'city landmark', but in Jinwoo's eyes, it looked like nothing more than a solid concrete prison built by humans to hide the void. All dimensions and tolerances were controlled to the millimeter. The cross section of the column is 800 millimeters, the beam's dance is 650 millimeters, and the aerodynamic curve has undergone wind tunnel testing.

Jinwoo's world has always been governed by clear numbers and the laws of gravity. At least until the 'blue vision' started with that strange headache three weeks ago. At first, I thought it was dry eyes or watery eyes caused by simple fatigue. It was not uncommon for architects to see a faint afterimage in the corner of their eyes when working overtime became frequent. But it took shape day by day. A subtle tremor that passes over the retina every time you blink, a blue-green phosphorescence that appears as if it were at the entrance of a dark alley, and the faint sound of wings that began to linger in your ears at some point.

Rustle—

A sound as if someone was carefully scratching thin Korean paper with the tip of their fingernail. Jinwoo stopped his pen and raised his head. The office was empty. The clock was already past midnight, showing 1:20 a.m., and my colleagues had left long before to catch the last train. Only the Anglepoise stand on his desk was emitting a circular yellow light, illuminating the dust particles in the air. It was then. Beyond the window glass, a dot of blue light rose in the middle of the sky. The empty space of the outer wall 120 meters above the ground with rain pouring down. In that harsh space where strong gusts of wind blew and raindrops poured mercilessly, a blue-green butterfly the size of a palm was soaring. “……It doesn’t make sense.”

A hoarse sound came out of Jinwoo's throat. The butterfly did not get wet in the rain. Gliding as if swimming through the strong fall lines of the heavy rain, the butterfly approached the glass window. With each flap of the butterfly's wings, silver-blue scale powder was scattered in a thin path across the dark night sky, and the light was reflected by each raindrop and sparkled like a brilliant jewel. The butterfly slowly flew up to Jinwoo's eye level and stopped flying right in front of the glass window. Jinwoo got up from his seat like a man possessed and approached the window. Two steps, three steps. When he got close enough to touch his forehead to the cold glass window, he clearly saw the patterns on the butterfly's wings.

It wasn't just the wing veins of an insect. It was an elaborate and mysterious golden geometric pattern, like a maze in an ancient temple or a nebula map of the universe. The butterfly flapped its wings once. At that moment, Jinwoo's own reflection in the window became strangely distorted. Behind his shoulders, where the rain-soaked glass reflected like a mirror, two pairs of huge blue wings were spreading and pulsating like an illusion. It was not a butterfly's wing, but a transparent and brilliant wing of light that seemed to have sprouted from Jinwoo's own back. Jinwoo reflexively touched his shoulder.

All I could feel was the hard cotton fabric of the wet navy blue trench coat at my fingertips. But I couldn't deny the cool, yet indescribably ecstatic warmth spreading along my spine. “Am I…am I dreaming?”

The moment I asked myself, the butterfly turned and began to fly into the darkness of the city. Like a blue meteor cutting through the rain, Jinwoo held his breath and stared at the small trace of light disappearing between the buildings of Teheran Road until the end. It was a terribly beautiful, horrifyingly complete hallucination. When Jinwoo first wanted to become an architect, around the age of 20, his teacher, an old architect, would always say this. “Architecture is the greatest lyrical poem that humans draw between heaven and earth. Walls do not exist only to block the wind; they should be a canvas of silence where light stays.”

However, for Jinwoo, who is now in his thirties, architecture is no longer lyric poetry. It was an intense calculation of floor area ratio and building-to-land ratio, an arrangement of sheer concrete slabs to maximize the sale price per pyeong, and was nothing more than a gigantic deception to disguise the greed of investors with elegant marble panels. Over the past three years, when working overtime had become a daily routine, Jinwoo's fingertips had forgotten the crunch of a pencil. The 3D rendering viewport on the computer monitor was always smooth and perfect. Error-free straight lines, perfectly calculated shadows, and virtual light sources with no physical texture removed. However, every time he looked into that cold virtual space, Jinwoo felt that something inside his heart was slowly falling apart like a sand castle. “What am I building now? Is it a house for people to live in, or a luxurious tomb to confine the soul?”

Jinwoo took a sip of the cooled canned coffee. The bitter and sour liquid went down my throat and irritated my stomach. Outside the window, Tehran Road was still sleepy. A procession of cars wriggling like hundreds of millions of luminous plankton. Do the people heading somewhere amid those countless lights really know where they are going? Could it be that they too, like Jinwoo, are lost in the huge concrete maze they have dug, and are simply being pushed along by the force of inertia? At that very moment, the flapping wings of a butterfly, like blue flames flying in the darkness, completely shook Jinwoo's dry senses.

The butterfly was soaring in the air, 120 meters above the ground, without being intimidated at all in the cruel rain. In entomological terms, when a butterfly's wings get wet with rain, the scales become clogged and they immediately lose the ability to fly and fall to the ground. But the blue butterfly did not avoid the raindrops. Rather, it glided gracefully along the rain line as if kissing a raindrop, embroidering a trail of blue phosphorescence where it passed. Jinwoo leaned his forehead against the cold glass window and looked at the butterfly's wings as if fascinated. The golden pattern engraved on the butterfly's wings... … It was eerily similar to the cross-section of the 'Ideal City' that he had unconsciously scribbled in the corner of an old sketchbook one day, but had erased, believing that it could never be built in reality.

Every time the butterfly folded and opened its wings, a heavy resonance, like a heartbeat, rang in Jinwoo's ears. It wasn't the noise of the city center. It was the pulse of his soul, deep in his bones, dormant since his forgotten childhood. The tragedy of Seoul's night was that no one could remember the original name of the land on which they stood. Jinwoo looked out toward the lower Han River from the window on the 34th floor. During the Joseon Dynasty, the land called Jamsil (蠶室) where silkworms were raised and mulberry trees were cultivated is now covered with the 123-story Lotte World Tower and a huge apartment complex.

Where silkworms used to gnaw on mulberry leaves, spinning thread and spinning cocoons, now millions of humans were trapped in concrete cocoons, spinning out their lives each day like a skein of thread. “We may all be caterpillars who lost a giant mulberry tree forest.”

Jinwoo muttered quietly. Every time the butterfly's blue wings left an afterimage beyond the window glass, an unknown nostalgia welled up in Jinwoo's heart. It was the smell of wild grass that blew from a distant, ancient field, even before he was born. Cities always demand speed from humans. Faster, higher, more efficient. The building's elevator rises vertically at a speed of 600 meters per minute, and optical cables carry tens of gigabytes of financial data per second at the speed of light. However, in the spiral of acceleration, the human soul cannot catch up with the body and falls behind.

The body, deprived of its soul, becomes a helpless shell, relying on tranquilizers and caffeine to get through the day. Jinwoo organized the drafting tools scattered on his desk. Staedtler 0.3 mm holder, Rotring Rapidograph ink pen, blue correction tape, and triangular scale. These small tools have been like Jinwoo's alter ego for the past 10 years. He believed that he was creating and controlling the world by drawing lines with these sharp metal points. But the moment I looked at the blue butterfly outside the window, all the tools felt as fleeting as a child's play, drawing lines in the sand with a stick.

The butterfly swam in the air as if laughing at gravity. In that harsh, windy and windy air, the butterfly never once lost its balance on its wings. It was not a force that resisted the wind. It was the aesthetics of flexible compliance, becoming the wind itself by completely surrendering yourself to the flow of the wind.

“Zhuang Tzu said, ‘He who rides the wind does not see the wind’s flaws’….”

Without realizing it, Jinwoo lifted a passage from a classic onto his lips. The scale powder that the blue butterfly left behind as it grazed the window pane for the last time was not washed away by rainwater, but remained on the window sill for a long time, like a neon sign, giving off a soft blue glow. It was a silent invitation to Jinwoo, a message from the soul that could never be rejected. Hundreds of lives were at stake on a single 0.3 millimeter line on the drawing. Jinwoo stood in front of the drawing board and drew a ruler while holding his breath. Even if the line is crooked by just 0.1 millimeter, the actual construction site will have an error of tens of centimeters, which can lead to pipe collisions or structural cracks. Perfectionism. It was a powerful engine that brought Jinwoo to this position, but it was also a noose slowly strangling his neck. “Team Leader Seo, have you finished work yet?”

Jinwoo raised his head at the sound of a voice suddenly coming from the office door. It was Manager Kim. Traces of chronic fatigue and hangover were evident on his face as he adjusted his coat collar and held his briefcase. “Yes, Manager. We are revising the cross section of the complex to be submitted to the Investment Review Committee by this Friday.”

“Do it in moderation, do it in moderation. Anyway, building owners only look at the construction cost per pyeong. No matter how much philosophy you put into it and drill in a skylight, they are great people who will criticize you by saying, ‘How much would it be if you build a wall here and extract a few more pyeong for sale? Why are you needlessly making people look at the sky?’” Director Kim’s words were deeply imbued with the bitter resignation of an architectural practitioner with 20 years of experience. He, too, was once a promising new talent who went to Europe to study, dreaming of becoming a world-class architect. However, his wings were broken in the face of hundreds of design changes, regulations from licensing authorities, and construction companies' price cuts, and he was now reduced to a seasoned office worker who only met delivery dates. “But… isn’t it a place where people stay? They can breathe only when the light comes in properly.”

At Jinwoo's quiet answer, Manager Kim smiled bitterly and fiddled with the cigarette pack in his pocket. “Breathing? How many people are breathing and living in Seoul? Everyone is holding on to the oxygen respirator just long enough to not suffocate. Anyway, don’t overexert yourself and go in. You know there’s a general manager meeting at 9 a.m. tomorrow, right?” As Manager Kim closed the door and left, the office was once again filled with dead silence. Jinwoo remained alone and pondered the weight of Manager Kim's words. 'Put on an oxygen respirator and hold on just long enough to avoid suffocation... … .'

Those words were precisely referring to Jinwoo's own condition. An unknown thirst and frustration was always rustling like sand in his chest. A thirst in the soul that cannot be quenched no matter how much cold ice water you drink. At that moment, the blue wings began to flap outside the window. A turquoise butterfly soars through the wind and rain in the city. It was the only living breath that flew into the center of the 'suffocating gray city' that Director Kim had spoken of. Every time the butterfly's wings flew through the air, the falling raindrops were no longer cold drops.

It was a feast of light that turned into a blue jewel and exploded in the air. Jinwoo walked to the window and placed his forehead against the glass wall. Beyond the glass window, 120 meters in the air, the butterfly’s compound eyes and Jinwoo’s eyes met in the air. At that moment, Jinwoo heard. The sound of clear, transparent glass beads rolling over the sound of the wind passing by your ears. It was the pure song of life itself, something he had long since forgotten.