In Tokyo's Shibuya district, the daytime crowds had morphed into a neon night. Just behind the famous scramble crossing, where a river of people flowed, a narrow street led to a third-floor studio apartment in a silent building. This was Kai's prison and his temple.
The thirty-four-year-old artist stood barefoot on the concrete floor before his canvas, staring into the void. His hands trembled; not with the tremor of creativity, but with a deep, bone-deep tremor of lack. The walls were silent witnesses to past successes: abstract expressionist pieces, explosions of color, visual equivalents of emotional storms. But now... nothing for three years. His mind was just an echoing emptiness in the bottomless pit of creativity.
For three years, he hadn't been able to make a single meaningful touch to his canvas. The gallery owner had issued his final warning: "New work, Kai-kun, or the contract." To be at the end of his money was one thing, but to be at the end of his art... that could kill him.
He pulled at his hair and leaned back, closing his eyes. Nothing was working. It was as if the connection between his brain and his hand had been severed. Or worse: his brain itself had fallen silent. "Try again," he said to himself. Breathing exercises. Meditation...
03:17:01
He felt something... And suddenly, everything changed. First, a pressure. Right in the middle of his forehead, an unbearable pressure, as if an invisible hand was trying to split him in two. Then a sound; but not one he heard with his ears, but one he felt with his bones, with the roots of his teeth, a low-frequency hum. A momentary mis-tuning of the universe's fundamental note.
Kai knelt. He wanted to shout, but no sound came out. His eyes rolled back, his consciousness blurred. And then... a flood.
These were not images. They were pure information. Geometric shapes, mathematical ratios, symbols of an ancient and foreign language. They flowed through his mind like a river, pushing aside his thought processes, his logic, even his personality. He was a channel, an antenna, a blank page now.
His eyes opened unconsciously. But he wasn't seeing; at least, not the outside. He was seeing the inside, the storm in his mind. His hands began to move. First on the floor, on the concrete. His fingers reached for the black ink bottle beside him, removed the cap, and began to draw on his canvas, not by pouring, but directly with the mouth of the bottle.
Line. Circle. Triangle. Interlocking spirals.
Ink dripped from the canvas onto the concrete, spreading like a dark stain. Kai didn't stop. He stood up, staggered, knocked something over as he grabbed another canvas. He made his painting and then another. He took a canvas, drew complex, repeating patterns, threw the canvas aside, and took a new one. Some resembled Egyptian hieroglyphs, others looked like circuit diagrams. When the canvases ran out, he turned to the walls. He continued to paint. Each symbol, each picture, was more complex than the last. But in reality, they were all in deep harmony.
"Urasai! Stop making noise!" A voice from the neighbor filtered through the wall. But Kai didn't hear. His world was now made up of these symbols.
For an hour, in a trance, he covered the floor of his studio with canvases. Ink got on the floor, on his t-shirt, on his pants, on his face. Breathless, sweaty, but in a kind of ecstasy. As if everything that had been building up inside him for years, unable to find expression, was gushing out of this channel.
Then, suddenly, it was over.
The pressure disappeared. Kai collapsed where he was, on the ink-stained concrete. His chest rose and fell like he had run a marathon. He slowly opened his eyes. At first, he saw only blurry shapes. Then, he began to perceive the state of the room.
And his breath caught.
The chaos surrounding him was not artistic chaos. It was a language. The symbols, lined up side by side, seemed to mean something. A message. A map. Or a... warning.
He stood up, trembling. He could barely stand. He came to a wall, reached out his finger to the ink lines that had not yet dried. As he touched it, he felt a slight electric shock; he wasn't sure if it was a figment of his imagination or real.
"What... what is this?" he whispered to himself, his voice dry and cracked.
He looked for his phone. The screen was shattered; probably when he dropped it. But it was working. He looked at the time: 04:23. He opened the camera and started taking pictures. He documented every canvas, every detail. He took hundreds of photos.
Then, fatigue brought him back to the ground. He leaned his back against the wall. He closed his eyes, but the symbols continued to dance in his mind. A melody... yes, he heard a melody. It wasn't the sound of the violin from the neighbor. It was something playing inside his mind, like the sound expression of the symbols.
Tick.
A small, metallic sound. Kai opened his eyes. On the easel, in the canvas, one of the most complex symbols he had drawn in ink; a pattern of three interlocking circles; the ink drop in the very center had exploded, creating a small, black crater. As if a pressure from within had burst it.
Kai froze. Could this be just a coincidence? Do such things happen when ink dries?
Tick. Tick. TICK.
Other symbols began to explode. Small black craters, appearing like a star map on each canvas. Each explosion brought a slight smell of ozone. Static electricity.
Kai jumped to his feet in panic. This was real. He was facing not just an artistic expression, but a physical phenomenon. His hands trembling, he began to gather the scattered paper canvases on the floor. The symbols on some of the canvases looked similar. They were even like a continuation of each other. Now he was trying to put them together to form a whole. With a pen in his hand, he tried to combine the ink stains, to complete the missing pieces.
But there were too many missing pieces.
When the canvases he arranged were combined with the large drawings on the wall, a large picture emerged. This was not a picture, it was a map. Not a world map. A time-space map. Layers, transitions, points marked "NEXUS". And on one of these points, in handwriting; in his own handwriting, in a way he didn't remember: Istanbul. CERN. 03:17.
He knew CERN. The Large Hadron Collider. But why had it appeared in his mind, among these symbols?
A soft knock came at his door. Kai flinched. "Kai-kun? Daijoubu desu ka?" It was his neighbor Hana's voice, anxious and soft. "There was a lot of noise... and now you're silent. Are you okay?"
Kai looked around. In the midst of this chaos in ink, he couldn't open the door to anyone. "H-Hai!" he called out, trying to make his voice as normal as possible. "Daijoubu! I'm just... working on a new project. I'm so sorry for the noise."
"Project?" Hana's voice carried a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. "While I was playing my violin... I felt a strange thing. My violin... It resonated with a vibration coming from your room. A weird melody."
Kai's heart raced. Hana was a talented but modest violinist who played in small bars in Shibuya. That she had felt something too...
"Melody?" Kai asked, approaching the door. He remembered the melody he had heard at the end of his trance.
"Yes. Something I've never heard before, but at the same time... familiar." She paused. "I played the melody I heard on my violin. It didn't seem to be from this world. An epic melody..."
Kai unlocked the door, but left the chain on. Through a narrow gap, he saw Hana's worried face. "Actually... maybe," he mumbled. "I want to show you something. But... be prepared."
He removed the chain and opened the door. As soon as Hana stepped inside, her hand went to her mouth. Her eyes scanned the walls, the floor, everywhere, covering the symbols. An expression of shock and curiosity appeared on her face.
"Kai-kun... what are these? Did you draw all of these?"
"Yes. But... I don't remember how I drew them." Kai showed a trembling hand. "Something happened, Hana. At 3 o'clock. A pressure, a sound... and then these."
Hana slowly entered, closed the door. She went to a wall, ran her finger in the air over the symbols, her lips moving slightly. As if she were reading notes.
"This..." she whispered. "This is incredible."
"What?" Kai asked, approaching her.
"These notes..." she pointed to a group of notes drawn among the symbols "They are compatible with my composition. Look." Hana took a small notebook out of her bag and opened a page. On it were musical notes written in handwriting. "Tonight, just now, I composed this. Just like you, as if someone was guiding my hand."
Kai looked at the notes. He wasn't very good at music theory, but he could compare the notes. And she was right.
"My God," Kai mumbled. "This is not a coincidence. We both... felt the same thing. From the same source."
Hana closed the notebook, fixed her eyes on Kai. "What is this source, Kai? Where is it coming from?"
Kai shook his head. "I don't know. But..." He pointed to the wall. "This is a map. And it shows us a place. CERN. And a time: 03:17. The moment we felt."
Hana held her breath. "What about others? If we both felt it, could others have felt it too?"
At that moment, Kai's phone vibrated. It was a message from an unknown number. Just a link and a sentence:
Please respond. Important.
Below the message was a photo taken by someone named Derya: in the ground, in an old excavation site, the same symbols that Kai had drawn on his wall were engraved.
Kai handed the phone to Hana. They both froze. The symbols were not only in their minds. They were in the past too. Hundreds of years ago.
"This... this is impossible," Hana whispered.
Kai looked at the map on the wall, then at the photo on his phone, then at Hana's notebook. The pieces were coming together. But the picture they were forming was something beyond art. This was a call to discovery. Or a warning of danger.
"Maybe it's not impossible," Kai said, his voice no longer trembling, carrying a new determination. "Maybe it's just... bigger than we expected."
The neon lights of Shibuya seeped through the studio window, illuminating the ink symbols in shades of blue, green, and red. In the heart of Tokyo, two lonely souls had met on the threshold of an ancient mystery. And this mystery connected them to strangers on the other side of the world, to other "triggered" ones who had felt the same pain that night.
The artist was no longer just an observer. He was a part. And the puzzle to which this piece belonged extended beyond time and space.