Rohan, a young manga-ka, meets a beautiful, mysterious young woman with a dramatic story. She tells him of a cursed 200-year-old painting, created using the blackest ink ever known from a tree the painter had brought down without approval from the Emperor. The painting had been saved from destruction by a curator of the Louvre. Years later he asks the museum about it, but little does he know how violently powerful the curse of it is until he has the museum unearth it from deep within its archival bowels.