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Chapter 5
As delicately as handling an object that would break with even the slightest pressure.
She had never faced him this closely even once before. Such physical contact was also a first.
As a doctor, he had examined her via Bluetooth, as if he loathed making even the slightest contact with a patient. He was a man who, despite being Pandora’s attending physician, ignored her whenever she said she was in pain or how she felt, acting bluntly and solely tending to his own business.
He avoided approaching her as if disease germs would rub off on him, finishing his consultations and leaving just a minute after entering the room.
A man like that had taken Pandora by her hand.
“I’m sorry.”
“!”
“I was wrong.”
“…”
“So put the medicine in. If you don’t use it, it hurts all day long.”
The overlapping, warm hands pressed the medicine bottle into her palms. Then, he practically bolted from the room as if running away.
For the first time today, Pandora looked straight into the doctor’s eyes.
Violet.
That mysterious shade that could only be created by blending pigments with extreme delicacy on the boundary between red and blue.
It was a violet so pretty it made one envious.
They say people change when their time is near, but since the quack doctor had been neglectful of his patients, perhaps he had been neglectful of his own body, too—meaning his time must be coming.
Pandora absentmindedly fiddled with the medicine bottle left in her hand, then dropped the eye drops into her eyes.
Though her vision was dim due to narrow fields of view, Pandora’s glaucoma had progressed gradually rather than acutely, so it had never actually hurt before. The doctor was a quack.
These eye drops lowered intraocular pressure to protect the optic nerve, but they had absolutely no analgesic effect.
If anything, putting the drops in actually caused a slight sting. The doctor was a quack.
Pandora set the empty bottle down, got off the bed, and took a step without even grabbing her cane.
And then she fell. Knocking over everything on the table—the calendar, clock, water pitcher, and tray—all at once. Loudly.
“Pandora!”
He took the bait. The quack burst the door open and rushed in.
Just as I thought. No wonder I hadn’t heard his footsteps fading away.
Whenever the doctor finished a consultation and walked out the door, the sound of his leather shoes always receded straight away. Always. Without fail.
Yet this fellow, after darting out the door like he was fleeing, hadn’t moved a single step and had stayed completely quiet.
The quack anxiously supported Pandora and checked where she was hurt. The hands wrapping around her shoulders were solicitous.
This man is not a doctor.
This scent. This body heat.
This was the crazy bastard who had kissed the dying Pandora and breathed air into her mouth.
Something has changed.
The struggle she had put up, even drinking poison, hadn’t been in vain. She was still the Pandora of June 9th, but a meaningful change had occurred.
Just where this fellow had popped out from and what he was up to were things she would figure out gradually, but—
The fake playing doctor gently seated Pandora on the bed.
Even if she had fallen on the soft carpet, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt, yet the man looked panicked and anxious as if he had witnessed Pandora tumbling out a second-story window.
Why was he overreacting this much?
“Pandora-ssi. Is your… Is your injury… hurting anywhere?”
“My ankle. It’s throbbing a bit.”
Using feigned illness, Pandora kept the man reined in. Without hesitation, the man knelt down, touched Pandora’s foot, and cautiously examined her ankle.
Whereas the doctor could spot her fake sickness with just a rough glance, this man was so full of worry yet so clueless about how to treat it that his fluster was plain to see, making her conviction that he wasn’t a real doctor even more absolute.
While the man fidgeted nervously, Pandora leisurely observed him.
The fingers fiddling with her ankle were long. And thick.
His shoulders and frame were equally massive, yet his lowered eyelashes were long and delicate.
Pandora tilted her head, observing the man more closely and brazenly. The man’s face was quite striking. Calling him pretty didn’t quite fit, given his prominent brow ridge and high-bridged nose that gave him a masculine look, yet calling him merely handsome felt somehow lacking and inadequate. He was too refined to be chiseled, making “artistic” the exact word that suited his appearance.
Hmm…
Where on earth had a man like this dropped from?
His hair color and style, his voice, the clothes and glasses he had no idea whether he stole or snatched—he had managed to roughly mimic a doctor’s outward appearance, but it gave off a clumsy vibe.
Pandora’s vision was dim, but she was an artist, after all.
Her profession was constantly observing anything and capturing its features.
She hadn’t had the chance to face and explore that prickly doctor this closely, so she didn’t even know what his face looked like, merely recognizing him vaguely as having “two eyes, one nose, and one lips.” Still, identifying a person purely by a basic silhouette was well within her capability.
“The medicine… um, I need to apply the medicine…”
Honestly. Was he planning to keep up the pretense of being a doctor or not?
Pandora fiddled with the man’s black hair.
At that, the pomade-slicked hair plastered to his scalp suddenly fluffed up into a soft cloud and turned white.
It snapped back to black pomade in the blink of an eye, but he couldn’t hide the flustered look on the man’s face as he jerked his head up.
Oh-ho?
Pandora decided to keep this suspicious man tethered by her side until she found out his true identity.
There was no guarantee that this man would appear tomorrow impersonating the doctor instead of the real one, or that he would show up only for today, so she needed to gather as much information as possible.
Keeping the man tied down was very easy.
Normally, if Pandora faked an illness or spouted nonsense, people would just ignore her and brush it off, but this man paid attention to and listened closely to her every word and reaction.
“Doctor. Could you please help me with a bit of support all the way to the studio?”
Pandora nudged the cane sitting beside her with her foot, rolling it underneath the bed.
“I seem to have lost my cane.”
It was utterly shameless, but the man extended his hand to Pandora without a word of complaint.
As they stepped out through the door, Anna was climbing the stairs carrying a tray with breakfast.
“Oh my, Lady. Are you not going to eat?”
“I’ll eat in the studio.”
“Is that so? But why is the doctor…”
“I asked him to support me.”
“Aha.”
Anna naturally followed behind her and the man. Yet Anna possessed hawk-like eyes capable of spotting a inch-worm crawling on a tree a hundred meters away. And yet, she failed to recognize that the doctor had changed.
No matter how she looked at it, he was a completely different person.
Did that mean in Anna’s eyes, this man looked like the “real doctor”…?
“Anna. Have you seen the cat painting that was here?”
Arriving at the studio, while Anna prepared the meal, Pandora sat down in front of the easel with the man’s support.
However, one of her cherished paintings had vanished, leaving behind only an empty canvas.
The missing painting was the very first white cat painting Pandora had ever created in this studio.
She had leaned it against the wall near her chair so even she, with her poor eyesight, could easily see it.
“A cat painting? I’m not quite sure. Paintings don’t grow legs, so it must be somewhere around the studio~ I’ll look for it for you later.”
“No. Find it now.”
Pandora paced restlessly around the surroundings. She completely forgot the fact that she had been wobbling on her ankle all this time while faking an illness with the man, scurrying anxiously about the room.
All other changes were fine, but this one was entirely unwelcome.
“Just what kind of painting is that to me…”
The sense of helplessness that washed over her when she realized she was trapped in a time loop repeating the exact same day.
Every time all her words and actions were undone, and the traces and memories she left behind scattered into thin air like a overnight dream, a sense of emptiness and loneliness seeped deep into her bones.
When she discovered the cat painting remaining unscathed amidst that despair, Pandora had hugged the painting and burst into tears.
Her very first painting, drawn with utmost care. It was the moment when the No. 8 canvas oil painting—which had held merely that level of meaning—transformed into “hope.”
“Anna. Hurry.”
At Pandora’s urging, Anna opened the window and began rummaging through the studio.
Every time they moved and rummaged through the piles of objects and paintings stacked high on bookshelves and the floor, a thick layer of dust fluttered into the air.
Achoo!
At the sound of a sneeze from above, Pandora startled and accidentally let slip a stack of canvases she was lifting, sending them tumbling down with a clatter.
“Ah, right. Doctor.”
Consumed by the painting, she had completely forgotten that she had dragged the man all the way into the studio.
Perhaps finding the dust troublesome to breathe, the man was covering his nose and mouth while coughing. Tears glittered at the corners of his reddened eyes.
You’ll live. You won’t die.
Figuring this was a good opportunity, Pandora roped the man into the search for the painting.
“Doctor, please help out too. The white cat painting.”
The three of them searched around for the painting for quite a long time. Anna stepped out of the studio, saying she would go ask if anyone might have taken the painting outside.
Knowing full well that paintings couldn’t possibly fit into low-tiered shelves compartment by compartment, Pandora still threw open both doors of the cabinet beneath the shelves.
“?”
Inside, a small earthenware jar sat all by its lonesome.
The jar, shaped like a honey pot, had the words “Never Open Under Any Circumstances” prominently inscribed on it.
Never open it?
Then it had to be opened, without a doubt.
Without a single second of hesitation, Pandora reached in and pulled the jar out.
Weren’t the protagonists in stories always total contrarians who stubbornly went where they were told not to go, looked at what they were told not to see, and put into practice the exact actions they were told not to do?
Even if disobedient protagonists could be frustrating, stories only moved forward when characters had that kind of contrarian instinct.
If you do nothing, nothing happens.
Besides, everything in this studio belonged to her, so this jar belonged to her too.
Without missing a beat, Pandora wrenched the lid right open.
