Levitation, and the World Where Blood Droplets Fall
Lee Eunha’s world was one of perfect darkness. The light had not been gone long. Only a few months earlier the pharmacy college campus had been drenched in a blue spring light so vivid it stung the eyes. Then a rare optic nerve disease had stolen her sight without warning. A merciless illness in which the retinal nerve cells died slowly, inexorably. Trapped inside a tunnel of despair that modern medicine could not touch, Eunha’s world had changed from a hazy fog into thick, impenetrable ink.
Once her vision was severed, her remaining senses flared to violent life. Inside a private room on the top floor of a massive hospital in the heart of Seoul, what crushed her was not the darkness. It was the sickening hypocrisy and sticky lust that filled the narrow, controlled space.
“Our Eunha, what are we going to do? Oh, what are we going to do…”
A wet, sniffling sound. Her mother’s voice. Yet at the tail of that sob Eunha caught a strange note of relief, a grotesque satisfaction that her once-brilliant, once-dazzling daughter had now been perfectly broken.
Her mother’s hand patted Eunha’s shoulder. The smell of sweat from the palm mixed with the artificial floral stench of cheap hand cream stabbed into Eunha’s nose. She swallowed dryly and stiffened.
“The seniors will look into everything. Whether there are good hospitals overseas or any new drugs in clinical trials. Don’t worry too much, Eunha.”
The department senior’s voice. The man who had always hovered around her, trying to win her favor. His hot, damp palm covered the back of her pale hand.
Slide.
The sensation of fingers stroking across her skin. A clear sexual assault disguised as comfort. Eunha’s skin, never touched by sunlight, was porcelain-pale and almost translucent. The straight black hair that fell to her waist contrasted against the patient gown, giving her an even colder aura. Her cloudy silver pupils, unfocused and empty, radiated a mysterious, sorrowful beauty.
People pretended to pity the blind girl while greedily licking her fragile, defenseless body with their eyes. The senior’s fingers slid past her wrist, sneaking toward the gap in her sleeve.
“Ah… please let go…”
Eunha weakly pulled her hand away. The senior only tightened his grip. Over the delicate skin where her pulse fluttered, the sticky male body heat coiled like a snake.
“Eunha, I’m just worried about you. Your hands are so cold.”
From the corner of the room came the soft sound of female classmates clicking their tongues.
Hah. As if.
The unspoken mockery drifted through the air. Ever since she had entered the pharmacy program, Eunha had always been an object of jealousy. Her quiet, introverted nature kept her from forming deep friendships, which only made others envy her appearance and her family’s wealth even more. Those who approached her for money, those who saw her as nothing but a pretty trophy; all the shells of pretense had been stripped away the moment she lost her sight. They fed on her misfortune, chewing it with relish and secretly rejoicing.
She’s finally getting divine punishment.
Every breath, every scent, every tiny twitch of muscle screamed that at her.
Rustle.
Then the mattress sank. Near her right thigh. A familiar smell. Her younger brother, now twenty years old.
“Sis, you’re okay, right?”
His voice was gentle. But his large, crude hand crossed the sheet and pressed firmly onto her thigh over the thin patient gown.
Squeeze.
It was not a simple touch. His fingertips dug in, openly tracing the curve of her slender thigh. Eunha’s breath caught. His rough exhalation brushed the nape of her neck. Even blood-related family treated their blind older sister as nothing more than a helpless piece of meat, an object of lust.
Fear spread through her veins. She bit down hard on her trembling lips. She wanted to run. But a blind girl had nowhere to go. The despair of being mocked and toyed with forever inside this pit of terrible pretense and sticky desire clamped around her ankles like cold shackles.
That was when it happened.
Vrrrr.
A strange vibration. The air pressure inside the hospital room suddenly dropped with a heavy whoosh. The pressure was so low her ears felt blocked. The hand gripping her shoulder vanished into thin air. The senior’s damp palm that had been rubbing her hand, the brother’s grip kneading her thigh; every one of them was ripped away into empty space.
“Huh…?”
Someone’s dazed voice.
Swoosh.
Eunha’s body lifted roughly a handspan off the mattress. Weightlessness. The friction of the sheets disappeared, and a bizarre floating sensation enveloped her entire body. She flailed in panic. Her fingertips met only cold hospital air.
“Ack! What is this! Somebody help!”
“Mom! Sis!”
Screams erupted from every direction. But the screams were not beside her; they came from right below the ceiling. Had the people been dragged upward? Eunha thrashed in the air, face pale with confusion.
And in the next instant, the world whose gravity had twisted regained its original laws.
Thud.
Eunha’s light body settled back onto the soft hospital mattress. That was all it was for her; a brief, nauseating moment of rising a single handspan and returning. For the others, it was not.
KWAAAAAANG!
A roar that shook the entire building. A rupture loud enough to tear eardrums slammed into the hospital in the middle of Seoul—no, into the whole world.
Splat!
Crunch!
Riiiiip!
Those were not sounds a human could make. They were the noises of enormous chunks of meat plummeting from dozens, hundreds of meters in the air onto asphalt and concrete roofs. A grotesque series of bursts like ten thousand water balloons exploding at once hammered the eardrums.
Plop. Flop.
Inside the hospital room something heavy was hurled to the floor. From the window came a crack as glass shattered, and immediately afterward a sticky, viscous liquid poured into the room.
Drip. Drip-drop.
The sound of rain. But it was not water. An overwhelming smell of blood. The pungent metallic stench that stabbed the lungs and the foul odor of ruptured intestines instantly swallowed the antiseptic smell of the hospital room.
Eunha tried to inhale and gagged, curling into herself.
“M… Mom?”
She spoke into the empty air with a trembling voice. The mother who had been touching her shoulder and shedding crocodile tears only moments ago. The brother who had been kneading her thigh. The seniors who had been rubbing their sticky palms together. No one answered.
“Is anyone… there? Hello! Senior!”
Silence. A skin-crawling, absolute silence. The hundreds of footsteps, conversations, mechanical beeps that had filled the hospital, even the sound of car engines on the street outside; everything had vanished as if it had never existed. Only the sound of blood pooled on the floor dripping—plop, plop—echoed in her ears.
Eunha reached out with a violently shaking hand and groped for the edge of the bed. She carefully lowered her feet to the floor.
Squelch.
It was not the cold hospital floor. It was hot, slippery, and sticky. Pulverized flesh like tofu and shattered bone fragments soaked her bare feet.
“Aaaaaah!”
A tearing scream burst from Eunha’s throat. She staggered backward, lost her balance, and collapsed onto the floor. Everything her palms touched was blood and meat. A droplet of blood fell from the ceiling onto her face with a wet plop.
She could not comprehend where or how everything had gone so wrong. In this hellish darkness, her mind could not grasp what had happened. She crawled across the blood-soaked floor, screaming desperately into the void. The blind girl’s wail, left utterly alone at the end of the world, echoed hollowly down the now-silent hospital corridor.
---
At the same moment, in a shabby one-room apartment on the outskirts of Seoul.
Grrrrrrr.
A low, thick beastly breath vibrated across the dusty floor. The room was filled with the smell of cheap soju and sour vomit. Taeo, who had been dumped by his girlfriend the night before and had drunk himself senseless with his friends, lifted heavy eyelids from where he lay sprawled on the floor.
Ugh… my head. Fuck, how much did I drink?
Taeo tried to mutter out of habit. But what slipped between his lips was not human language.
KWEOOONG!
A savage wolf’s roar that scraped the vocal cords and seemed to tear space itself. Even Taeo flinched at the enormous sound. The recoil caused his body, which had been trying to push off the floor, to tilt heavily to one side.
Crash!
The dining table in the middle of the studio shattered like paper and flew away. The furniture in the room exploded into pieces as if bombed. Taeo shook his dazed mind and blinked. His vision was wrong. All color had died from the world; instead, outlines and movement stood out with terrifying clarity. Even the scent of microscopic mold spores living on the studio floor rushed into his nose, broken down into individual particles. The sheer volume of olfactory information threatened to burst his brain.
He lowered his head to look at his own body. What entered his field of vision was not a thick padded jacket or jeans. It was stiff, dense black fur that looked as if darkness itself had been condensed. What supported him on the floor was not a callused human hand but a massive, iron-hard forepaw. At the tips gleamed sharp hook-like claws that could easily gouge through concrete.
Grrrr?
Taeo made the sound again in confusion. It was still a dog’s bark. He lay flat on the floor, lifted his head, and looked toward the full-length mirror in the corner of the studio. What reflected back was not the sturdy twenty-something young man named Taeo. It was a single gigantic, ferocious wolf straight out of myth, shoulder height ninety centimeters, weight easily over one hundred kilograms. Its fangs looked ready to pierce its own jawbones, and the muscles across its body writhed as if they might explode at any moment.
If Taeo still possessed purely human reason, he should have been screaming in terror right now. Why did I become a dog? Should I go to a hospital or the police? What was that crashing noise outside just now?
But Taeo’s brain had already perfectly synchronized with the beast’s body. Complicated thoughts or philosophical worries were meaningless in the face of adrenaline and testosterone raging through beast blood.
Taeo stared quietly at his reflection, then lowered his gaze. The most important part to check first upon becoming a beast. Between the hind legs. Inside a thick leather sheath covered in black fur, the beast’s massive reproductive organ displayed a heavy presence. The sheath itself looked thicker than an adult man’s forearm.
Whoa, fuck! Beast body approved!
Inside, the os penis that served as the rigid axis during mating was solidly palpable, and at the base crouched a massive bulbus glandis, the knot meant to burrow into a female’s vaginal walls and lock her in place perfectly. Even in its unaroused state, the overwhelming mass and volume were beyond comparison with the pathetic organ he had possessed as a human.
All lingering attachment to the complicated human world evaporated from Taeo’s mind in a single instant.
Fuck, it’s insanely huge.
An inner exclamation that could not be voiced in human language. Taeo’s ferocious muzzle split into a pleased grin, baring sharp fangs. Job-hunting stress, the girlfriend’s breakup text, the pathetic memories of yesterday; all of it was cleanly healed by the overwhelming weight of male potency he felt between his legs.
Bark!
Grrrr.
Taeo wagged his tail roughly, kicked off the floor, and stood. One scrape of his forepaw and the linoleum split like torn paper, gouging the cement beneath. Overflowing strength. Muscles ready to burst. And the overwhelming superiority of a male.
Well, living as a dog doesn’t seem so bad.
Taeo approached the thin iron door of the studio. Outside, heavy things had been exploding and shattering only moments ago, but now an eerie, deathly silence reigned. The scent of humans vibrated everywhere with the stench of blood, yet not a single living human presence could be felt.
It did not matter.
Taeo raised a heavy forepaw and lightly struck the area around the door handle.
Bang!
Creeeeak!
The lock shattered and the entire iron door was ripped away. A cool wind carrying the smell of blood rushed in. The gigantic, monstrous beast that had once been Taeo took his first step into the world beyond.
Human morality, law, and society had all burst apart. A perfect lawless wilderness. A hellish hunting ground opened wide, with no shackles left to restrain the instincts of a beast in heat. It existed only for Taeo.