Episode 3: Stranger on the Subway

The next morning, Sadang Station transfer platform on Subway Line 2. The hellish train on the way to work was a huge conveyor belt that swallowed up hundreds of thousands of office workers every morning. The crowd was so dense that shoulder to shoulder was rubbing against each other and their breath was touching each other's cheeks. But none of those countless people looked at the faces of the people next to them. Everyone was wearing expressionless masks, with their eyes focused on the small rectangle of the smartphone screen. Seo Jin-woo was standing on the yellow safety line right in front of the screen door. Was the strange vision I experienced at the crosswalk last night a dream or reality? I rubbed my eyes, but the palm of my right hand was still pulsating with a faint heat sensation that seemed to have been left behind by the flapping of a butterfly's wings. Fellow designers looked at Jinwoo's face when he came to work this morning and whispered, "Where does it hurt?" and "His complexion is strange."

Jinwoo couldn't answer anything. This is because it was obvious that the moment he spoke out about what he saw, he would be treated as insane. 'Even if I get lost in the thick fog,

A butterfly followed by a faint light. The stars in the night sky whisper,

Don't forget that your dreams are yours...' The sound of a train coming in made the floor of the platform vibrate. With a screeching sound, the train stopped and the screen door opened. People poured out like a flood, and just as many people forced their bodies in. Jinwoo was pushed back by the crowd and could not enter the train. The rapid movement of people passed by, leaving a blurry afterimage like a time-lapse video.

Jinwoo alone was left in clear focus, like an island standing still. Absolute solitude in a crowd. The terrible weight of existence, of being surrounded by tens of thousands of other people, yet disconnected from anyone. Jinwoo felt dizzy and leaned his back against the platform pillar. At that time, I saw my own face reflected in the tempered glass of the screen door. Jinwoo's projection is clearly revealed against the background of the dark tunnel. However, his reflection, like a mirror, began to become strangely distorted. Behind Jinwoo's shoulders, translucent wings burning in emerald and golden colors were slowly blooming. It wasn't a hallucination. Every time his heart beat, the wings in the window also flapped as if pulsating. “Is this... me?”

Jinwoo was filled with shock and touched his shoulder with his hand. The only thing that touched my fingertips was the rough fabric of the trench coat, but beyond the glass window, I was clearly taking the shape of a perfect butterfly. The skin turned transparent blue, and the tips of the fingers turned into delicate tentacles, like the agile antennae of a butterfly. No one passing by noticed it. They were only blinded by the commute to work and their smartphones in front of them, and were completely unable to sense the changes in space and time that were happening right next to them. The world shows nothing to those who do not try to see it for themselves.

At that very moment, a woman walked out from the crowd on the other side of the platform. In direct contrast to the crowds rushing by on their way to work, she was approaching Jinwoo with a very slow and graceful gait. An elegant and mysterious woman who appears to be about twenty-seven years old. Her long, jet-black hair was neatly tied up with a silver butterfly-shaped hairpin.

Wearing an elegant ivory cashmere long coat, her clear hazelnut colored eyes were staring straight at Jinwoo. There was a small brass nameplate on her chest. [Metamorphosis Antique Gallery Curator - Yoon Se-ah] Yoon Se-ah stopped three steps away, right in front of Jin-woo. A thin, warm smile spread across her lips. “Do you still think you are just an accessory to the city, Seo Jin-woo?”

Her voice was the same clear voice I heard from the butterfly on my palm last night. Jinwoo’s heart sank. "Do you... know me? How do you say my name..."

Instead of answering, Se-ah took out a small velvet pouch from her coat pocket. Then, he took out an antique glass bottle the size of his palm and held it up in front of Jinwoo. A finely crafted 18th-century French-style crystal glass bottle with stopper. And inside that sealed transparent glass bottle,

A dazzling blue-green butterfly was trapped and desperately flapping its wings. Every time it hit the bottle wall, golden phosphorescent powder scattered like snowflakes inside the glass wall. “What… is this?”

Jinwoo asked in a trembling voice. Se-ah looked down at the butterfly in the glass bottle with sad eyes. “These are fragments of memories you shed in your dreams every night. And... your real soul that you locked away to fit the standards of this gray city.” Se-Ah’s fingertips touched the cap of the glass bottle. “Jinwoo, are you a person who is dreaming right now?”

“Or is it just a butterfly dreaming of humanity?”

Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream. The eternal question posed by the ancient philosopher pierced Jinwoo's heart like a dagger on a busy subway platform in 21st century Seoul. A sharp horn sounded, signaling the arrival of a train. Just as the screen door was about to close, Se-Ah placed the glass bottle in Jin-Woo's arms and whispered softly. “Come to the Maze of the Foggy Night. Before you can cross the River of Oblivion, you must get your wings back.”

And she put herself inside the train door. Until the moment the doors close and the train speeds away into the darkness,

Se-ah's mysterious smile was deeply engraved like an indelible brand on Jin-woo's retina. In Jinwoo's arms, left alone on the platform, the butterfly in the crystal vial began to flutter loudly like a heart. The subway platform on the way to work was the most devastating scene of alienation created by modern society. Thousands of humans were breathing the same air in the same space, but an insurmountable glass wall was erected between them. Other people were not objects of empathy and solidarity, but were merely potential competitors and obstacles that took my seat on a crowded subway and caused me discomfort.

The expressions of people with their faces buried in the blue light of their smartphone screens looked like a procession of ghosts who had lost their souls. Jinwoo was completely out of breath as he was swept away by the expressionless waves. I was one of those ghosts until just a few days ago. A helpless accessory, walking like a zombie through the transfer passage at Sadang Station at 8 a.m., worrying only about today's meeting materials and the manager's mood. But when I looked in the mirror at the transparent emerald wings sticking out behind my shoulders,

He knew he could no longer return to being part of the gray crowd. And the woman who appeared through the whirlpool of the crowd, Yoon Se-ah. The ivory coat she wore was the only warm color of life on the gray platform. An antique crystal glass bottle in her hand. The sight of a butterfly flapping its wings and emitting blue light inside a bottle was the very ‘untamed wild soul’ that all humans in modern society had secretly locked away in their hearts. The deep sadness and understanding contained in SeAh’s eyes. She had already been walking the path of a lonely sentinel for a long time, watching over the lost souls of this city and finding their wings.

As always, the platform at Yeoksam Station on Subway Line 2 was filled with modern people with expressionless faces. The heat of the outdoor air conditioner unit, the damp dust in the basement, and hundreds of silhouettes with their heads bowed looking down at the smartphone screen. Jinwoo stood in front of the screen door in the center of the platform and looked down at his palms. Even after time stopped at the crosswalk, the silver-blue powder on my fingertips was still emitting a subtle glow. Even if I wiped it off with a wet tissue or washed my hands, the scale powder did not come off as if it had seeped into the dermal layer of the skin.

Kugugoogung—

A train was coming through the darkness on the other side of the tracks. A strong wind blew, shaking people's hair and clothes. The headlights at the front of the train flashed harshly against the dark tunnel wall. People took a step forward, and the heels of their shoes lined up on the yellow safety line of the screen door. While Jinwoo was waiting for the train among the crowd, he suddenly looked at the platform across from him. The platform on the other side was relatively quiet as no trains had arrived. Behind the pillar, in the dark shadows, a woman stood quietly.

The woman had a calmness that did not match the surrounding scenery at all. An elegant ivory-colored cashmere coat that went down to her ankles, her long, ebony-like hair neatly combed, and most of all, what really caught Jinwoo's attention was the jewelry in her hair. A silver butterfly-shaped hairpin that sparkles coldly as if bathed in moonlight. At the tips of the wings of the hairpin were chalcedony pieces the size of a little fingernail, scattering blue light under the fluorescent light of the station. Jinwoo’s heart sank. It was the woman I saw in the crosswalk stopped in time a little while ago.

‘Wake up… … 'The image in the illusion that whispered. The woman was staring straight at Jinwoo. Breaking through the indifferent gaze of the crowd, her jet-black eyes collided directly with Jinwoo’s gaze. Her eyes were cool and extremely deep, as if she was looking into a deep valley below a cliff a thousand miles away. And there was something in the woman's hands. It was not a modern object. An old cylindrical glass bottle rimmed with an elaborate brass frame. There was a small dry twig stuck inside the bottle, and on top of the twig... … The same turquoise butterfly that had been at Jinwoo's fingertips a moment ago was trapped with its wings folded.

The butterfly was fluttering its wings and flying blue powder inside the glass bottle. “That woman…!”

The moment Jinwoo unconsciously tried to take his steps, a train made a loud noise and blocked Jinwoo's path. The screen door opened and people on their way home from work poured out. In the midst of the waves of people bumping shoulders, Jinwoo roughly turned and ran towards the stairs. “Get out of the way! Just a moment!”

People's complaints poured out behind him, but Jinwoo heard nothing. I ran up the stairs three at a time and ran down the transfer passage leading to the platform on the other side. My heart was pounding like it was going to burst, and the hem of my navy blue coat was fluttering wildly. When I jumped down to the platform on the other side, the area around the pillar where the woman was standing was empty. On the floor, only a few dots of blue light glowed softly and then disappeared as if vaporizing into the air. Jinwoo gasped and looked around. Behind the pillar, on the bench, there was an old piece of paper. Jinwoo walked over and picked up the paper. Ink letters neatly written with a brush on thick handmade Korean paper, and a red seal. [Metamorphosis Antique Gallery - Yoon Se-ah]

At the bottom of the paper was a hand-drawn map pointing to the end of an old alley in Bukchon, Seoul. In a corner of the medicine map, there was this written in small letters: ‘The door to the tiger dream has opened. Come and find your lost wings.' The musty wind from Yeoksam Station always had a metallic smell. The smell of fine iron powder ground up by friction between rails and wheels, carbon dioxide exhaled by tens of thousands of passengers, and unidentified groundwater accumulated deep underground. As Jinwoo went to and from this underground space every morning and evening, he could not help but think that he was like a greasy bearing stuck between the gears of a huge mechanical device.

But in the middle of that bleak subway platform, there stood a woman who looked as if she had been cut and pasted from another dimension. Yoon Se-ah. The ivory cashmere coat she was wearing gave off a soft milky aura even under the harsh fluorescent lights of the platform, and her long hair, as dark as obsidian, seemed as if it had been woven from the silence of the deep night. But what caught Jinwoo's attention most intensely was the glass bottle in her hands. It was no ordinary laboratory beaker or modern soda bottle.

It was an antique crystal bottle with elaborate brass threads and delicate embossed patterns that might have been used in a 19th-century French perfume workshop or an alchemist's secret room. Microscopic bubbles were stuck on the surface of the glass like rose petals, and within the transparent curved surface, a blue butterfly was flapping its wings, creating ripples of light. Every time the butterfly flapped its wings, the air in the bottle turned blue, and thin threads of light leaked out through the brass gaps in the bottle cap like unraveling threads and flowed down to the floor of the platform. What was surprising was that none of the dozens of people standing on the opposite platform noticed the woman and the shining glass bottle.

They were either flicking their smartphone screens with their thumbs with their heads down or staring blankly at the track with their earphones on. A miracle was right in front of their eyes, but to the blind crowd it was just an illusion that did not exist. When Jinwoo frantically jumped up the stairs and ran to the platform on the other side, his lungs burned as if they were going to explode. But where the woman was standing, there was only an old piece of Korean paper left on the bench waiting for her. The texture of the paper that touched Jinwoo's fingertips as he picked up the note was surprisingly warm.

It was as if the warmth that had just been taken out of someone's embrace was still there. [Metamorphosis Antique Gallery - Yoon Se-ah]

The letters written in ink were not just ink. The graceful breath of the woman holding the brush and the quiet wait that has endured for hundreds of years were heavily embedded in the thickness and lightness of the strokes. Jinwoo carefully placed the note in his chest pocket. The area around his cold heart began to heat up with a gentle heat. In the human city, the subway was both a blood vessel and a tomb. Every day, millions of souls are sucked into dark tunnels 30 meters underground, crammed into barless carriages, and transported from one end of the city to the other.

In it, humans are no longer individual persons, but are merely a mass of organic matter replaced by statistical figures such as the number of transit passengers and congestion. Jinwoo stood with his back against the cold tile wall of the platform and stared at Yoon Se-ah, the woman on the platform across from him. There was a strange distortion of space around the place where she was standing. When the platform's harsh white fluorescent light reached her surroundings, it refracted into a soft, warm milky white, as if it had hit a wet mist. The silver butterfly hairpin in her hair was not just a jewel, but seemed like a living luminous body that absorbed the light in the air and pulsated on its own.

And that glass bottle she was holding in her hand. Jinwoo used an architect's unique spatial perception to estimate the size and proportions of the glass bottle. Height: 28 centimeters, base diameter: 12 centimeters. The ancient form, which perfectly conforms to the golden ratio (1:1.618), evoked an unknown sense of relief and awe at the same time in the hearts of those who saw it. Every time the blue-green butterfly trapped in the bottle struck its wings against the glass wall, it shook off fine golden powder like snowflakes. Instead of accumulating at the bottom of the bottle, the golden powder vaporized into the air and swirled inside the bottle like a small galaxy.

“Who is that woman, and why is she looking at me?”

Jinwoo's heart was beating irregularly. Her eyes were unfamiliar, but at the same time extremely familiar, like someone I had known since before I was born. It was like the relief of a shipwrecked captain who discovered the lighthouse in his hometown port after a long voyage. When the train roared and blocked the two people, Jinwoo realized that he was at an irreversible crossroads in his fate. Will you board the train like this and return to your daily routine, or will you break common sense and chase after that illusion? Jinwoo's legs were faster than his brain's calculations.

He turned and ran towards the stairs. Every time the sole of my shoe hit the edge of the stairs, a dull cracking sound rang out, and my heart pounded as if it was going to break my ribs. An old Korean paper note left on the platform opposite. The faint scent of juniper on that note was sweeter and deadlier than any price of success he had chased his entire life. The look in Yoon Se-ah's eyes, which I met behind a pillar on the subway platform, was like clear spring water rising from a frozen lake on a deep winter night. Her eyes were deep and pitch-black, but in the center of them there was a single, unquenchable blue flame burning softly.

Jinwoo looked at her through the screen door and couldn't take his steps. Hundreds of people on their way home from work passed between the two like a river, but only her and the antique glass bottle in her hand were clearly imprinted in Jinwoo's field of vision. The glass bottle was not just a relic. The surface of the glass was engraved with minute scratches showing signs of age, and the blue phosphorescence emitted by a butterfly leaked through the scratches, projecting fantastic geometric patterns into the air.

“That butterfly… why is it trapped?”

Jinwoo felt an unknown pity and sadness welling up in his heart. The butterfly was flapping its wings laboriously inside the glass bottle. It was as if I wanted to escape from my narrow prison and fly to the wide sky, and I felt like I was begging for someone to break this cold glass. And the woman, Yoon Se-ah. She didn't look like the Jailer trapping a butterfly. Rather, it was the image of a sacred 'Guardian' holding the bottle with both hands to protect this fragile spark of life from the cruel violence and cold gaze of the world.

The wings of the silver butterfly hairpin on her head glowed coolly under the fluorescent light. Every time the small jade bead hanging at the end of the hairpin slightly shook, the faint sound of wind chime rang in Jinwoo's ears. When the train came roaring in and the wave of passengers forcibly cut off the two people's gaze, Jinwoo instinctively felt it. If he loses that woman, his life will end forever trapped in a cold concrete tomb. he ran While running up the stairs, puddles of rainwater kicked up by the toes of his shoes and splashed in all directions like broken stars.

Even though he was out of breath and his lungs were burning in pain, Jinwoo did not stop. And when he finally found that piece of Korean paper on the bench of the empty platform across from him, Jinwoo realized that he had finally found the exit he had been looking for his whole life. The walls of the underground platform at Yeoksam Station were finished with granite panels, but to Jinwoo, the cold stones looked like the skin of a planet where magma had cooled and hardened thousands of years ago. Humans carve away nature's huge skin, trim it into squares like a checkerboard, paint numbers and route maps on it, and act as if they own the stone.

But the stone is laughing in silence. The time period of a hundred or a thousand years during which human civilization was established and collapsed is nothing more than the blink of an eye compared to the lifespan of granite. The air around the pillar where Yoon Se-ah was standing had been completely purified of the turbid dust that was characteristic of the subway, and was exuding a refreshing phytoncide scent, like a coniferous forest in an alpine area 3,000 meters above sea level. Every time the butterfly in the glass bottle she was holding flapped its wings, its refreshing scent spread like ripples across the platform. A young man passing by sniffed and looked around without understanding what was happening, while an old man in a wheelchair put his hand on his chest and took a deep breath.

“Is that woman not a human, but an elemental who has descended to heal the city’s withered soul?”

Jinwoo thought as he took a step toward her on the opposite platform. Her clothes, her gait, the loving hand with which she holds the glass bottle in her arms. All of them contained a transcendent sacredness that seemed to be a strange mixture of the kindness of the Virgin Mary from Renaissance paintings and the mercy of Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara from Eastern classical paintings. When her long black hair fluttered like a curtain in the night sky due to the gust of wind caused by the train coming in, a ray of blue light came out from her silver butterfly hairpin and pierced Jinwoo's heart. It was not a physical shock. It was a thrill that shook and awakened all the memory cells of his soul that had sunk beneath the river of long forgetfulness. 'Who are you?'

When her eyes silently asked, Jinwoo could not give his name. The name Seo Jin-woo, the title of a 34-year-old architect, and the appearance of a team leader at a large company had no meaning in front of those eyes. He was just a lonely cocoon longing for wings.