Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
A heart was beating beyond the golden door.
Pierre looked down at his hand.
The silver key was trembling as if it were alive. He gripped it tightly, but the key kept trying to move toward the golden door.
“Pierre!”
Leonardo shouted.
“Under no circumstances are you to open that door!”
But the exact same voice came from beyond the golden door.
“Pierre. Don’t trust that man.”
Pierre’s gaze wavered.
Leonardo da Vinci was clearly standing right in front of him.
And yet the exact same voice was coming from beyond the door.
“Which one of you is the real Leonardo?”
Pierre shouted.
No one answered.
The shadowless woman stared at the golden door, her smile gone for the first time.
The seven guardians didn’t move either.
Even they, who had been trying to take the key from him moments ago, were afraid when the golden door appeared.
Pierre didn’t miss it.
“You know what’s inside that door too.”
The guardian who had removed his mask answered.
“We do.”
“Then tell me.”
“If you knew, you’d open the door.”
“Why?”
The man looked Pierre straight in the eye.
“Because humans want most to open the doors they’re told not to.”
Pierre couldn’t say a word.
Then a voice came from the true Lisa’s painting hanging on the wall.
“Pierre.”
He looked up.
Lisa was crying.
“Please open the door.”
“Lisa!” Leonardo shouted.
“It’s time to end this.”
“If that door opens, you might disappear too!”
Lisa answered quietly.
“Five hundred years.”
Silence filled the room.
“I’ve lived inside this painting for five hundred years. I watched people look at my face, smile, take pictures, and call me beautiful.”
Tears streamed from her eyes.
“But no one ever heard my voice.”
The key grew hot in Pierre’s hand again.
“My body is inside that door.”
Lisa spoke softly.
“Please let me end this.”
At that moment, the shadowless woman suddenly laughed.
“How moving.”
Everyone turned toward her.
She slowly walked in front of Lisa’s painting.
“I’ve observed humans for five hundred years, but there’s still one thing I don’t understand.”
“Step away.”
Leonardo’s voice was hard.
The woman ignored him.
“Why do humans fear death so much, yet still try to choose it?”
Lisa glared at her.
“Because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“You stole my life.”
The smile vanished from the shadowless woman’s face.
“No.”
She spoke quietly.
“I wasn’t the one who killed you.”
Leonardo’s expression hardened.
Pierre immediately asked, “What does that mean?”
The woman slowly turned her head.
“Ask Leonardo.”
“Shut up!”
Leonardo shouted for the first time.
The woman laughed.
“Why? You still haven’t told Lisa?”
Lisa looked at Leonardo with trembling eyes.
“Told me what?”
Leonardo didn’t answer.
“Leonardo.”
Lisa’s voice dropped.
“What happened on the day I died?”
A long silence followed.
Neither Pierre nor Jean moved.
Finally, Leonardo opened his mouth.
“I was… studying death.”
“I know.”
“No. It began long before what you know.”
Leonardo slowly leaned against the wall.
“I studied the human body my entire life. Muscles and bones, the heart and blood vessels, the brain—I dissected them all. People thought I did it so I could draw the human body more accurately.”
“Wasn’t that the reason?” Pierre asked.
“At first, it was.”
Leonardo continued.
“Then I began to wonder about something.”
He pointed at his own chest.
“When the heart stops, a human being dies. But the heart isn’t what makes us human.”
“Then what is?”
“Memory.”
Leonardo answered.
“The people we loved, the things we feared, the smell of our childhood, our mother’s voice. If all that disappeared, could you still call the body the same person even if it remained alive?”
Pierre listened in silence.
“So I began searching for a way to preserve memories.”
Leonardo looked at the paintings.
“A painting was the perfect vessel.”
Jean said incredulously, “You put memories into paintings?”
“At first, only the smallest emotions.”
Leonardo answered.
“Sadness. Joy. Fear.”
His gaze turned toward the Mona Lisa.
“Then I discovered a way to transfer an entire human memory.”
“And you experimented on Lisa.”
Pierre said it flatly.
Leonardo lowered his head.
“No.”
The shadowless woman answered for him.
“He did something even worse.”
Leonardo glared at her.
But the woman didn’t stop.
“He tried to bring back the dead.”
“Who?” Pierre asked.
An unexpected name left the woman’s lips.
“His mother.”
Leonardo’s face went rigid.
Silence spread through the room.
“Leonardo could never forget his mother.”
The woman continued.
“So he built a device to summon the memories of the dead.”
“Did it work?”
“It worked.”
The woman smiled.
“That’s why I’m here.”
A chill ran down Pierre’s spine.
“You’re… Leonardo’s mother?”
The woman suddenly began to laugh.
“No.”
Her laughter echoed through the basement.
“When he tried to summon her, I came first.”
Pierre’s expression stiffened.
“From where?”
The woman tilted her head.
“I don’t know that myself.”
“You don’t even know what you are?”
“Humans seem to feel safer when something has a name.”
She approached Pierre.
“You can call me a demon, a spirit, or a shadow.”
“Don’t come any closer.”
Pierre clenched the key.
The woman stopped.
“But there is one thing I do know.”
“What?”
“I grow closer every time a human dies.”
At that exact moment, the heartbeat beyond the golden door stopped.
Boom.
Silence.
Everyone stared at the door.
Jean whispered, “It stopped.”
And then—
Bang!
Something slammed into the door from the other side.
Bang!
The golden door shook.
The guardians rose to their feet at once.
The man in the center shouted, “The seal is breaking!”
“We haven’t done anything!” Jean yelled.
The man pointed at Pierre.
“The moment the key entered this place, the seal began to come undone.”
Pierre’s face hardened.
“Then my coming here…”
“It was planned.”
The man spoke the words quietly.
Pierre looked at the shadowless woman.
“You lured me here.”
The woman smiled.
“It wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?”
She pointed at the golden door.
“The person inside.”
Bang!
A crack split the golden door.
“Pierre! Put the key in the door!” Lisa shouted.
“No!” Leonardo yelled.
“Why?” Pierre shouted back. “Whose word am I supposed to trust?”
Leonardo rushed toward Pierre.
“Give me the key!”
At that moment, the shadowless woman stepped in front of Leonardo.
Their hands collided.
Whoosh!
A powerful burst of light exploded.
Leonardo was thrown all the way into the wall.
“Leonardo!” Lisa screamed.
The shadowless woman approached the golden door.
“I’ve waited five hundred years.”
She placed her hand against the door.
“At last, he’s waking up.”
“Who?” Pierre asked.
Just as the woman was about to answer, the center of the golden door split open.
Light leaked through the opening.
It was red.
Then a hand emerged through the gap.
A human hand.
An old leather cord was tied around its wrist.
The moment Pierre saw it, he felt a strange sensation.
He had seen the symbol engraved on the cord somewhere before.
A triangle.
And an eye inside it.
The same symbol as the golden disk that had appeared with the Mona Lisa’s tears.
The hand grabbed the edge of the door.
“Back!” one of the guardians shouted.
The golden door burst open.
Bang!
Pierre fell to the floor.
As the dust settled, he slowly raised his head.
Beyond the door was a vast chamber.
Two beds stood side by side in the center of the room.
A woman lay on the bed to the left.
Lisa.
She had the exact same face as the Mona Lisa in the painting.
Even after five hundred years, her body had not decayed at all.
And the bed on the right.
A man lay there too.
Long hair and a beard.
It was Leonardo da Vinci.
Jean said in a trembling voice, “Then… who’s the man behind us?”
Pierre slowly turned around.
Leonardo, who had been thrown against the wall moments ago, was getting back to his feet.
The same face.
The same height.
And yet there was another Leonardo inside the golden door.
Two Leonardos.
“Which one is real?” Pierre asked.
The shadowless woman laughed.
“They’re both real.”
“What does that mean?”
“One is the body.”
She pointed at the man lying inside the golden door.
“And one is the memory.”
This time, she pointed at Leonardo standing in the room.
Only then did Pierre understand.
Leonardo had preserved his memories in the painting, and those memories had gained a temporary body once more.
“Then if the memory returns to that body…”
The woman finished for him.
“He’ll become a complete Leonardo.”
“It must not happen!” Leonardo shouted.
Pierre stared at him in surprise.
“Why not? It’s your body.”
Fear filled Leonardo’s face.
“There’s a reason I abandoned that body.”
“What reason?”
Leonardo stared into the golden door.
“That body doesn’t contain only me.”
Pierre’s gaze slowly shifted toward the corpse.
At that moment, the Leonardo lying on the bed opened his eyes.
Black eyes.
They were so pitch-black they could hardly be called human.
The smile disappeared from the shadowless woman’s face.
For the first time, she stepped backward.
“No…”
Pierre looked at her.
“What’s wrong?”
The woman didn’t answer.
Instead, she was afraid.
Then the black-eyed Leonardo slowly sat up on the bed.
The sound of bones shifting filled the room.
Crack.
Crack.
He raised his head.
And looked at the shadowless woman.
“Found you.”
The woman’s face turned deathly white.
“You’re dead.”
The man smiled.
“I was.”
His voice was different from the Leonardo’s voice they had heard until now.
It was deeper.
It felt older.
The shadowless woman stepped back.
“Pierre!”
She suddenly shouted, “Close the door!”
Pierre stared at her in disbelief.
“You wanted it opened!”
“I was wrong!”
At that moment, the man on the bed set his feet on the floor.
A black shadow spread beneath them.
But it didn’t belong to just one person.
Two.
Three.
Ten.
Dozens of human shadows reached out from his body.
Lisa screamed.
“He’s back!”
Pierre looked at the silver key.
New writing had appeared on it.
Choose one of the two bodies.
“What does that mean?”
A second sentence appeared beneath it.
Save one, and erase the other forever.
Pierre froze.
Inside the golden door were Lisa’s body and Leonardo’s body.
The key meant it could save only one of them.
“Pierre.”
Lisa in the painting looked at him.
“It’s okay if you don’t choose me.”
“What are you saying?”
“If you can stop that man…”
Lisa closed her eyes.
“I’ve lived long enough already.”
The black-eyed Leonardo laughed.
“How touching.”
He looked at Pierre.
“But there’s no need to choose.”
“Who are you?” Pierre asked.
The man slowly tilted his head.
“Do you really want to know my name?”
“Don’t listen!” the shadowless woman shouted.
But the man was already speaking.
“When Leonardo first met me, he gave me a name.”
His black eyes turned toward Pierre.
“Urbra.”
Every painting in the room shook.
Hundreds of people screamed at once.
“No!”
“Don’t say that name!”
“Run!”
Pierre covered his ears.
The black-eyed man laughed.
“For five hundred years, humans have looked at the Mona Lisa’s smile and asked countless questions.”
He took one step forward.
“Why is she smiling?”
Another step.
“Who is she looking at?”
Then he stopped right in front of Pierre.
“But no one ever asked the most important question.”
“What question?”
The man’s smile deepened.
“What was she smiling at?”
At that moment, an image flashed through Pierre’s mind like lightning.
1503.
A dark studio.
Lisa sitting in a chair.
Leonardo painting in front of her.
And…
A black figure standing behind Leonardo.
Lisa hadn’t been looking at the painter.
She had been looking at something behind him.
That was why she had smiled.
No.
She hadn’t smiled.
Her face had frozen in terror.
Pierre swallowed.
“The Mona Lisa’s smile…”
The black-eyed man whispered.
“It wasn’t a smile.”
Just then, a massive alarm began blaring aboveground at the Louvre Museum.
And the Mona Lisa appeared simultaneously on every monitor in the security control room.
On the camera feeds showing the gallery, the Mona Lisa painting was shaking.
Once.
Twice.
And then suddenly—
The woman in the painting disappeared.
Only the chair remained.
The Mona Lisa had vanished from the world’s most famous painting.
But that wasn’t the end.
A hotel in Paris.
An art museum in Rome.
A private mansion in London.
A museum in New York.
People began disappearing one by one from old portraits hanging all over the world.
And the same sentence appeared on every empty canvas.
The door is open.
Deep beneath the Louvre, Pierre still knew nothing of it.
The black-eyed man was smiling before him.
And a final sentence appeared on the silver key.
Find the true Mona Lisa before sunrise.
Numbers appeared beneath it.
05:59:59
05:59:58
05:59:57
The countdown began.
Pierre clenched the key.
Now he had to choose.
Would he save Lisa, who had been trapped inside a painting for five hundred years?
Would he destroy Leonardo’s true body?
Or would he find the vanished Mona Lisa and seal away once more the mysterious entity that had entered the world?
And then—
An urgent transmission came from aboveground.
“Pierre! Do you read me?”
Pierre picked up his radio.
“What happened?”
The person on the other end was breathing heavily.
“The Mona Lisa…”
“What about the Mona Lisa?”
A brief silence followed.
Then came an unbelievable answer.
“She walked out of the museum.”
Pierre couldn’t say a word.
The final words came through the radio.
“And she wasn’t alone.”
—End of Episode 4—