Official selection for the 2025 Busan International Film Festival Story Market

We are all imperfect for our own reasons.
And yet, finally, I embrace and talk about my own life.

In a future where anyone can roam the universe if they want, humans are divided into two groups: 'Enhancers' who have mechanically enhanced any part of their body they desire, and 'Organics' who live with their natural bodies.
However, since only works created through pure physical means are considered art, artists such as painters and musicians must be organic.
Even in the first-class atmosphere, the genius painter 'Soka' cannot go outside without an oxygen helmet due to a congenital lung disease, and he lives by mocking his imperfect body for that reason.
Lucelle, who suffers from black-and-white syndrome due to an unexpected accident, comes to Sokka's mansion as a cleaner to raise money for enhancer surgery.
Sokka and Lucelle, who each despise their imperfect bodies for their own reasons and even lose their own lives because of it, begin to confront the truth they have been avoiding one by one through a game of 'question-and-answer' that began at some point.

The unique smell of the pool water, which uses special salt water for Soka, has become as familiar as the smell of the paints in the downstairs atelier.
There was one more thing I became accustomed to after spending a month like that: the net of light dancing on the surface of the water.
--- p.48

Around noon, the surface of the water sparkles and ripples gently like a net woven with light, as if the sun had been split into powder and sprinkled on top.
To me, a person with black-and-white vision, the scenery looked like the brilliance of a star cluster encountered during an interstellar journey.
Lorraine said that whenever she saw the view, it was like an hourglass that flowed forever.

--- pp.48-49

In that vast time, the fact that we are together right now is actually a huge probability.
You are lucky.

--- p.49

Sokka explained carefully, as if there was a picture before his eyes.
“If you ask me what it is exactly, I can’t put a name to it.
Because I'm just breaking down what I saw in my dream and recalling it one by one.
But people liked it.
A kaleidoscope of incomprehensible illusions.

--- p.72

“It’s the only outside I can go the furthest.
“The dream.”
--- p.73

In his reality, the outside of the oxygen helmet meant suffering.
If you go a little further from there, the place you will probably reach is death.
Sokka was not the type of person to make up stories that weren't true, rather than remain silent.

--- p.73

Restoring her vision won't bring Lorraine back to life.
In fact, even I don't know exactly why I'm so obsessed with surgery.
“Or do you just want to go back to square one?” Sokka suddenly brought up the subject.
“When you have to do something but don’t know what to do, that’s the only way.
“If the origin is the only direction I know.”
--- p.91

When I opened the studio door to start cleaning at dawn the next day, a strong smell that had been gone for a while came rushing in.
It smelled like paint.
The twenty-first work had finally begun.

--- p.121

Suddenly, Sokka felt strange.
It's not that anything else matters, but that he has a canvas and language to pour himself into.
The courage to face it head on and leave it as a physical property.
As a result of being swept away, it was a completely different way of life from mine, where I only tried to run away and erase things.
--- pp.138-139

Pain is… …like a shard stuck in a place you can’t get out.
And those are very sharp fragments.
--- p.186

In the darkness, beyond the pitch-black skylight, where the reflections of artificial light had been erased, an endless white cluster of stars spread out.
The entire ceiling was densely colored with millions of stars scattered from a distant place, incomparable to the sunlight shattered on the surface of the water before my eyes.
--- p.231

I stared at the scenery for a long time without moving.
Time flows without stopping.
And all the odds that brought me here at this very moment.

--- p.231