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Botticelli stared at the woman in the painting for a long while, then suddenly smiled. "Do you want me to teach you?"
"You... seem to understand these things?"
"No, Leonardo," he said, turning to face him. "There are some things that cannot be taught with words."
"If you want to understand them, you can only do so through experience."
"Experience?"
"Only after experiencing something can you truly understand and comprehend it," Botticelli's smile became more complex, his gaze tinged with faint nostalgia. "It might be painful, it might keep you tossing and turning."
"When it comes, all you can do is quietly go through it."
It’s something you can’t foresee, something you can’t avoid. All the joy and pain will come like an unavoidable wind.
Da Vinci furrowed his brow as he looked at him, feeling a sense of resistance and agitation.
He liked things that could be precisely calculated and controlled—mechanics, gears, levers...
But these irrational matters were just...
"By the way," Botticelli glanced at him, "your good friend, the clever scholar, the skilled performer, Miss Hedy—she too will fall in love and marry, won’t she?"
"No, she won’t," Da Vinci instinctively denied it.
He simply couldn’t imagine such a scenario.
"Why won’t she?" Botticelli asked in return. "Only God and beasts endure solitude. Do you think she’ll spend the rest of her life in a convent like those nuns?"
"But she rejected those men—"
"That’s only because the right person hasn’t appeared yet," Botticelli interrupted calmly. "You’d better prepare yourself to lose this friend at any moment."
Da Vinci furrowed his brow as he looked at him, once again rejecting the notion.
"You might see her as a beautiful woman, like those noble ladies and young misses."
"But she’s not."
She was strong, intelligent, and had an endless thirst for knowledge about science and mysteries.
She was unlike anyone else.
She was one of a kind.
Da Vinci didn’t want to continue discussing this topic with Botticelli. He shook his head as if to deny something, then turned and walked away quickly.
Botticelli watched his retreating figure, a self-mocking smile playing on his lips. Once Da Vinci had left, he softly spoke.
"I don’t."
Hedy had begun to notice that Da Vinci’s gaze toward her had been strange these past few days.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on what kind of gaze it was—but for the sake of God, he better not mistake her for a witch, turning around and reporting those bizarre thoughts to someone.
The penicillin production workshop had been completed, and the hydro-powered system was indeed very effective. She only needed to hire two or three workers to keep an eye on it.
When Lorenzo returned from Venice, he took a look at the workshop, clearly intrigued.
