Chương 5: He Turned It into Gold, but He Still Couldn't Sell It

Kichan left the basil pot behind on the balcony when he headed to work. It kept bothering him. His reflection in the subway door looked like a vague mix of sleep deprivation, anxiety, and a little bit of anticipation. To anyone else, he probably just looked like an office worker who hated Mondays. Which, to be fair, he was. The moment he got to the office, the team leader booked a morning meeting.

"Let's all be a little more careful this week, please." A little more. Kichan hated that phrase. A little more usually meant a lot more. The meeting handouts went around, and everyone's workload increased. Kichan picked up a pen and pretended to take notes. But the letters he wrote on the page kept looking wrong. The black ink spread like roots. The numbers split like tiny leaves. He set the pen down. His fingertips felt hot. This time, it wasn't a dream. He went to the bathroom. He washed his hands at the sink.

Cold water ran over his fingers, but the heat at the tip of his index finger refused to fade. The man in the mirror looked exhausted.

"Do I need to go to a hospital?" The second he said it, he let out a hollow laugh. And what exactly was he supposed to tell them? I saw a weird page in an old bookstore in Italy, got a sprout-shaped mark on my finger, revived dead basil in a dream, and now I think the basil might come back in real life too. The doctor would very kindly refer him to psychiatry. Kichan flicked the water off his hands and went back to his desk. At lunch, Assistant Manager Park tossed a chocolate onto his desk.

"Mr. Han, you look like your blood sugar crashed."

"Thanks." Kichan unwrapped it. The little piece of silver foil brushed his fingertips. And then a strange sensation rose through him. The foil was aluminum. Thin. Light. Spread wide, like it was mostly empty inside. Once folded, the crease stayed. Once crumpled, it kept trying to return to the same broken places. Kichan stopped breathing. He wasn't supposed to know what aluminum felt like.

He'd dumped all the element symbols from chemistry class the moment the exams were over, and his experience with metal pretty much began and ended with guitar strings and spoons. But now his fingertips knew first. The foil's thin structure. The stress along its folds. The direction it wanted to tear. Which part would hold if pressed, and which part would collapse first. Kichan held the foil still. Inside his fingertips, the lines of the Voynich manuscript rose again.

Not plant roots and water channels this time, but the grain of metal. Clumping. Flattening. Compressing. Enduring. A tiny order hidden inside matter.

"Mr. Han?" Assistant Manager Park gave him a strange look. Kichan put the foil down.

"Nothing. Just... this stuff tears really easily."

"It's foil. That's kind of its whole thing." That was a fair point. Kichan put the chocolate in his mouth. It was sweet. The sugar made the world feel a little more real. After work, he didn't go straight home. He stopped by Daiso and bought a small glass cup shaped like a beaker, tweezers, disposable gloves, and a few cheap metal accessories. Then he grabbed a steel scrubber, a pair of tongs, and a pouch with a metal zipper. The cashier didn't look at him strangely.

The world was full of people buying combinations of items weirder than Kichan's. When he got home, he locked his bedroom door. He spread everything out on the desk. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Aluminum foil. A few coins. A cheap ring. Wire. A piece of steel scrubber. An old pouch with a metal zipper. And one old guitar string. Kichan looked at what he was doing and sighed.

"At this rate, I'm actually going to become a crazy person." It felt a little late for that already. He pressed the guitar string first. That metal felt familiar. A hard line registered at his fingertip. Elasticity, tension, tiny grooves. He knew what sound it would make when plucked, and roughly where it would snap if wound too tight. Over that sensation, the lines of the Voynich manuscript overlapped. Plant roots. Metal grain. They were completely different, and somehow read the same way. There were paths.

There were blockages. There were limits to what something could bear. Kichan picked up the aluminum foil. His fingertips traced the structure first. Too thin. It crumpled the second it was touched. It had no body to hold a flow. He pressed carefully. One corner of the foil curled into a little circle, then tore at once.

"Yeah. No. Not this one." If something was too weak, he couldn't get a proper hold on it. He picked up a coin. His fingertips grew hot. He could feel the structure inside it. It wasn't thin, but all that hardness was packed into one solid mass. Unlike the guitar string, it didn't feel long and flowing. It felt like a stubborn round plate with nowhere for pressure to disperse. He tried to push something through it. Nothing happened. Again. Nothing.

On the third try, pain tingled through his fingertips, and the coin slid across the desk. Kichan froze. The edge of the coin had bent very slightly. He swallowed.

"Did that... work?" No answer came. He put the coin back on his fingertips. This time he didn't force more power into it. He only traced the warped edge. What he could do wasn't really transmutation. It was closer to deformation. If he followed the grain, it moved a little. If he forced it, it slipped. In practical terms, that meant: straightening a bent spoon, realigning zipper teeth, shaping thin wire. That kind of thing might come first. Could've at least given me the kind of power that makes gold.

Then again, when he could barely flatten one coin properly, what gold was he talking about? Oddly enough, that thought made him feel better. It didn't feel like the universe had handed him some grand jackpot ability. It felt like it had dumped one annoying, awkward little talent into his lap. Kichan picked up the old pouch. It was the kind of cheap thing whose zipper always caught halfway. The second he touched it, he felt the misalignment in the zipper teeth.

One tooth had been crushed inward, and the one beside it was straining to compensate. He pressed that spot very lightly with his index finger. Click. The zipper ran all the way up in one smooth motion. Kichan blinked.

"Why is this power so aggressively domestic?" Not a miracle. Just repairing a broken zipper. He almost laughed. That it fit him so perfectly only made it more irritating. He picked up a piece of steel scrubber. There were too many strands. One wire, two wires, ten wires. The amount of information flooding through his fingertips made his head throb. He set it down immediately.

"So I can't do too much at once." This time, he picked up the cheap ring. It was painted gold. Obviously it wasn't real gold. The moment his fingertips touched it, he could tell the thin plating from the metal underneath. Shell. Core. Imitation. Kichan closed his eyes. The voice from his dream came back to him. You handled the guitar string fine. Press too hard and the note dies. Too soft and it doesn't sound right. He pressed very carefully on the ring's inner grain. Not forcing. Matching.

Not changing the flow, just making it look like it had always been there. Not flipping the outside and inside at once, but catching the first responding layer and pulling it into place. Heat drained from his fingertips. The ring grew hot. Startled, Kichan snatched his hand back. The ring hit the desk with a tiny clink. Its surface color had changed. Not that cheap fake gold, but a deeper, heavier yellow. Kichan picked it up with tweezers. The weight was different. It felt heavier than before.

He could hear his heartbeat.

"No way." He searched online. How to tell if gold is real. Home gold test. How to spot fake gold. Every result told him to take it to a professional. Kichan obviously could not do that. The moment he walked into a local jewelry store and said, I may have just turned a cheap ring into gold with my fingertips, his life would switch genres. Still, he wanted to know. He placed the ring on his palm. His fingertips read the inside. It wasn't pure gold. The inside and outside didn't match.

It wasn't that he'd covered fake metal with something truly real. It was closer to forcing a layer into something that merely looked real. The interior was still unstable. Given time, it might change again, or peel. And the amount was awkward too. Even if it counted as real gold, it was too little. And if it wasn't fully gold, that was worse. If he tried to sell it, they'd ask where he bought it. They'd ask for a receipt. And if anyone decided to melt it down to test it, he'd be exposed on the spot. Kichan laughed.

"So I can't sell it." It looked like money. It was not, in fact, money. Nothing came easy. He sat there and did the math for a while. Even if he could make a little real gold, if every attempt took this much concentration and burned out his fingertips like this, then it was just labor. And the result was unstable anyway. At that point, he'd be better off straightening the bent tongs in his mother's kitchen, fixing broken zippers, and reviving balcony planters. That made it even more unfair.

If you get a superpower, shouldn't quick riches be one of the first features? Right then, his mother's voice came from outside the door.

"Kichan, what are you doing in there?" He shoved the ring, coin, and wire behind the laptop in one motion.

"Nothing."

"Why is your nothing so loud?"

"Cleaning up."

"The fact that I'm hearing cleaning noises from your room should be a good sign, so why does it sound suspicious?" Kichan held his breath, afraid she might open the door. She didn't.

"I cut some fruit. Come out and eat."

"Okay." He looked at the desk for a moment. The ring that looked like gold. The bent coin. The repaired zipper. His burning fingertips. And the basil pot on the balcony. Then he left his room and sat at the table. His mother had sliced apples. His father was watching TV, and the living room light was warm as always. Kichan took a piece of apple and bit into it. It was crisp. Even after gaining a bizarre power, apples still just tasted good. For some reason, he was grateful for that.

"What did you see on your trip?" his father asked. Kichan paused for a second.

"Books."

"You went all the way to Italy to look at books?"

"Apparently." His mother laughed.

"Our son's gotten classy." Kichan lowered his head and chewed his apple. He was about as far from classy as a person could get. When he went back to his room, the ring was still on the desk. He put it into a small zip bag. He couldn't sell it. But he couldn't throw it away either. If anything, that felt more dangerous. Even after confirming it wouldn't make him money, some part of his mind kept running the numbers. What if he got better later? What if he learned to make it stable? What about metals besides gold?

He hated that train of thought, so he shoved the little zip bag with the ring all the way into the back of his drawer. That night, he didn't dream. Instead, another fine line rose from the sprout-shaped mark on his fingertip. Like a new shoot. Or like a crack spreading through metal. Kichan pretended to sleep, then opened his eyes. In the dark beneath the ceiling, he heard a voice that sounded like Sooyeon. A faint afterimage like a new sprout spread where the voice came from, thin as breath, then disappeared.

"Money's hard, isn't it?" Kichan clenched his teeth.

"Then make it easier." The voice laughed.

"Next is the body." Kichan hugged his pillow.

"Let's maybe not do that one." There was no answer. Which somehow made it worse.