Two Days Ago
Two days earlier.
Footsteps echoed from the single door leading into the storage room.
The people who had been exchanging words of encouragement to suppress their anxiety all fell silent at once, waiting for whatever was on the other side to pass.
But the doorknob began to turn slowly, defying their hopes.
Seoyeong gestured frantically, sending the children and elderly toward the corner, then grabbed a folding metal chair that had been left in the room.
With a creak, the door started to push inward.
Seoyeong tightened her grip on the chair with trembling hands and took a step back, watching for an opening.
Just as she swung the chair down at the ash-covered figure that appeared in the doorway, a familiar voice came from the silhouette.
“Seoyeong-imo?”
“…Arin?”
“Mom!”
“Gaeun? How did you get here?!”
While Seoyeong dropped the chair and pulled Gaeun into a tight embrace, Arin brushed the ash from her body and glanced at the people inside.
“Does anyone here know anything about this building or the fire?”
Two days before Arin and Gaeun met the church survivors.
Arin had spent an entire day wandering while avoiding the black figures, struggling with the building’s interior, which had become far larger and more complex than expected.
She had only stopped briefly to test the power that might be either an ability or a curse, otherwise moving without rest.
Since entering, she had only confirmed that the scattered embers neither spread nor went out.
‘At least the fire isn’t spreading and the building isn’t collapsing.’
Her main goal was to find Seoyeong and get out quickly, but if possible, she also wanted to figure out how to resolve the phenomenon for safety’s sake.
She tried pouring water on the embers, knocking on walls, and other experiments.
In the previous world, the solution had been to offer a living person to the Yellow Door.
If you didn’t find the door quickly, safe time and space would shrink, forcing survivors into cruel choices with the malicious wordplay of “a living one.”
This place, however, was just a small building turned into an anomaly, so the conditions were probably different.
“This place is ridiculously huge.”
After poking at the embers rising from the floor with a steel pipe and organizing her thoughts, Arin stood up.
She felt a sudden rush of heat over her shoulder.
Arin threw herself forward and looked back.
A black figure stood only one or two steps behind where she had been.
The figure slowly reached out, then opened its hand a beat later.
While backing away from the slowly approaching figure, Arin noticed something strange and stepped to the right.
The figure turned its head a beat late.
After circling it a few more times, Arin realized the black figure moved extremely slowly, as if time itself were lagging, yet it could still detect her location with eerie accuracy.
“If I let my guard down just because it can’t see me, I’m in trouble.”
The figure’s gaze always followed her direction even as its body moved sluggishly, creating an unsettling mismatch.
Arin frowned and gripped the steel pipe with both hands for one final test.
“Hup!”
With a short shout, she swung the pipe.
The black figure’s head shattered into powder with a dry crunch.
“What? It’s ridiculously weak.”
She muttered as she waved away the rising dust, realizing the figure was literally made of ash.
She tried to smash the rest of the body, then stopped.
From the remaining neck bone, charred branch-like things sprouted and began regenerating the broken parts.
Arin immediately struck again, destroying the upper body.
When the fragments started reforming, she shook her head.
“Shit… I don’t know how many of these things there are, but I need to find her and get out fast—ah.”
A sudden sharp pain pricked her ankle.
She looked down to see a pointed branch extending from the remains touching her skin.
It was only a shallow scratch, not deep enough to draw much blood.
After a while, a single drop of blood welled up.
Arin kicked the remains apart without much concern and took a step down the long hallway.
“Ghk!”
Her vision suddenly dropped.
She tried to lift her foot, thinking she had stepped into a hole, then realized something was wrong.
“Huh…? What?”
There was no hole.
Her leg below the knee had vanished.
Arin soon found the missing limb lying behind her.
The cut surface was charred black, just like the black figure’s body.
At the same time, cracks spread above the knee.
Losing her balance, she reached out to catch herself and slammed her forehead into the floor.
The heat and pain were nothing like the time she had burned her finger as a child.
She tried to scream but only coughed up acrid ash.
Her hands crumbled across the floor.
Bones and muscles blackened as if burned remained barely attached below her shoulders.
Then her vision shattered too.
“Hah! Koff… kuhk!”
Arin revived as always, clutching her chest and coughing.
Her body returned to normal after each death, but the pain and helplessness lingered vividly in her mind for a while.
After a moment, she wiped the drool from her chin with her sleeve and leaned against the wall.
She retraced her memories, confirming how and where she had died, then organizing the information.
“Getting close or touching it only felt hot… maybe any wound is fatal. And this place… it’s different from where I fell asleep. So sleep isn’t the trigger?”
After sorting her thoughts, Arin naturally pulled the steel pipe from her bag again.
At least she had learned one crucial fact: even the smallest wound meant instant death.
It was also a major obstacle and threat to her plan of rescuing Seoyeong.
She didn’t know how many survivors were here, but protecting everyone from even a single tiny wound seemed nearly impossible.
Especially for an ordinary woman like Seoyeong.
“Ha, damn… I miss her—no, I can’t think like that. You idiot.”
She scolded herself for falling for someone just because they were kind, calling herself a delusional loser, and slapped her own cheek.
The blow was too hard; her face stung.
She rubbed her cheek.
“Arin? Is that… Arin… right…?”
“Huh?”
She turned toward a voice coming from the nearby darkness.
A girl with chestnut hair was running toward her, drenched in sweat.
“Why are you here?”
“Hah… shit, haah… I… hff… followed you… hiiik… to save Mom…!”
“Catch your breath first, Gaeun.”
“Ah… no! There were weird black things chasing me from behind…!”
“Those things are dangerous but really slow.”
“I have to run… huh, really?”
At Arin’s words, Gaeun looked behind her, then collapsed to the floor, panting heavily.
Arin stood beside her with the steel pipe ready while Gaeun caught her breath.
Once Gaeun’s breathing steadied, Arin asked,
“By the way, I’m impressed you decided to come in here. What’s the situation outside? Has anyone mentioned rescue teams?”
“Hey, you… rescue teams in just ten minutes?”
“Ten minutes?”
“Y-yeah, shit, five minutes! Happy? I saw you go in and hesitated, so I was late—”
“Wait, hold on. Are you saying you came in right after I did?”
“Yeah, you’re fast… I saw those black bastards the moment I entered and started running, but how did you get so deep—”
Arin raised a hand to cut her off.
When Gaeun looked at her questioningly, Arin answered.
“I’ve been in here for over a day.”
“What the hell… really?”
Gaeun’s awkward smile faded.
She counted on her fingers, calculating the time from when she heard the news until she reached the church, then dragged a hand down her face.
“Then… what? Five minutes became a day… Mom, she’s…?”
“Gaeun.”
“Mom… Mom! Where are you?! Come out, Mom! I’m here!”
“Gaeun.”
“Mom!”
“Sorry about this.”
Arin grabbed Gaeun as she tried to run off searching and slapped her cheek with her left hand.
“Calm down first.”
“Calm down? How can I calm down when we don’t even know how long Mom’s been in here!”
“Exactly. We don’t know how long she’s been here. It might be shorter than we think.”
“Let go, you crazy bitch! Let go!”
Gaeun struggled to escape Arin’s grip.
Her fist connected with Arin’s face, splitting her lip.
Blood ran down Arin’s neck, but she ignored it and asked,
“Gaeun, you learned about anomalies in school, right? What did they say about the rules?”
Arin showed no sign of pain despite the punch.
Gaeun, either overwhelmed or exhausted, lowered her arm and muttered a curse before answering.
“…They said everything—monsters, worlds, whatever—has rules. Break them and you die or can’t escape. Absolute rules.”
Arin inwardly wondered if schools really taught that, then slowly shook her head.
“Actually, those rules can change midway. So between you and me, five minutes equaled a day, but people who entered before us might have been given a longer interval. It’s just a possibility, though.”
“How would you know that? School and the news said the rules don’t change.”
Gaeun warned that if Arin was lying to calm her down, she wouldn’t forgive her.
Arin hesitated for a moment, then continued.
“I never told you anything, did I? Why I couldn’t go home, or even which school I attend.”
Arin spoke to Gaeun, who looked confused by the sudden topic.
“I went into one once and came back out. Into a world that was an anomaly. When I escaped, this place had become somewhere I didn’t exist.”
She gave a brief summary of everything up to now, omitting only that she had originally been male and that this world wasn’t the one she came from, then gave Gaeun time to process.
“So you didn’t say anything because you had no memories?”
“Yeah.”
“School, home, family too? You only remember your name?”
“My name was written here.”
Arin pointed to the blue name tag on the left side of her school uniform.
Gaeun followed her finger and let out a sigh.
“I see… I didn’t know…”
“It’s fine. It’s not really important right now.”
Arin clapped her hands, ending the topic, then picked up the steel pipe.
“Alright, let’s figure out what we’re going to do.”