Paths That Missed
Jihun scoured the labyrinthine alleys near Sinseoldong Station like a madman. His lungs burned with searing pain, and the metallic tang of blood filled his mouth. Each ragged breath scraped his chest with the cold night air, but he couldn't stop. The corroded billboard, the unique color of the sidewalk tiles, and the fleeting glimpse of the station sign reflected in Siyeon's eyes—all the clues pointed right here, to this cold asphalt.
But the evening crowd pouring out of the station numbered in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Amid the expressionless masses in their drab clothes, who could tell which one had traded his wife's soul and body for data in their pocket? Clutching his professional tripod like a cane, Jihun staggered forward, glaring at every man who passed. He fought the urge to rip open their pockets.
"Siyeon! Park Siyeon! If you can hear me, answer! Siyeon!"
Jihun bellowed into every alley with his raw, shredded voice. Pedestrians whispered and sidestepped him like he was a lunatic, but their stares meant nothing to him. A chilling intuition gripped him: his wife might be right there, agonizing in some passerby's pocket, watching him scream. That gut feeling stabbed his heart like a sharpened awl. But all that answered his calls was the city's indifferent noise and the jostling shoulders of the crowd.
At the same time, Jin-seok sat on a rickety plastic chair at a street food stall near Exit 1 of the subway station. He felt the smartphone vibrate in his pocket and casually shoved a bite of tteokbokki into his mouth. Inside the phone screen, Siyeon was screaming. Through the thin 0.5-inch glass barrier, the faint but unmistakable cries of her beloved husband Jihun seeped in.
"Jihun? That's Jihun's voice! I'm here! Please, oppa! Look at me! I'm right here! Right in front of you!"
Siyeon pounded frantically on the screen. The modified latex suit restricted her movements, and her breath caught in her throat, but her husband's voice was the lifeline she clung to on the brink of death. She screamed toward the phone's microphone hole until her throat bled. Her fingertips split against the glass, but she didn't stop. Jin-seok, however, pulled out the phone and savored her desperate, twisted expression like a fascinating documentary, slurping down his fish cake broth. His sleazy grin filled her vision.
"Oh, he chased you all the way here? Not bad for a photographer—sharp eyes. Tougher than I thought, your hubby. But Siyeon, love alone doesn't cut it sometimes. Like the wall of data, for instance."
Jin-seok decided to crush the last flicker of hope blooming before her eyes in the cruelest way possible. To keep her screams from leaking out and to ensure she couldn't reach Jihun, he opened the settings menu and entered a cold system command.
By authority of User (Author), all audio output and external communication for character 'Park Siyeon' is blocked.
'Prison of Silence' protocol activated. No sound can be detected externally.
"Mmph! Mmmph...! Mmmph!"
In an instant, Siyeon's voice sank into the sea of data. She screamed Jihun's name until her lungs tore, but the smartphone remained a silent hunk of metal. Through the pinhole view of the camera lens, she watched Jihun's back as he madly dashed into the opposite alley, searching for her. The world was so vast and free, but her allowed vision was confined to this narrow wide-angle lens. Watching her beloved husband fade away, Siyeon collapsed to the screen floor, shedding bloody tears. Her soul-rending screams echoed hollowly only within the glass walls.
Jin-seok watched Jihun vanish into the far alley and grinned wickedly. To elevate this game further, he maxed out the cloud sync function. He snapped a photo framing Siyeon on the screen with Jihun running off in the distance—a masterpiece to shatter Jihun's mind and plunge him into despair's abyss.
Click!
Moments later, in the middle of Sinseoldong Station plaza, Jihun's laptop and phone in his pocket blared sharp notifications as he gasped for breath. He froze like he'd been struck by lightning and fumbled with trembling hands to check the newly updated cloud file.
◈ Author's Comment: You were so close, but thanks to your incompetent husband, your wife is really suffering, huh?
The photo's composition was flawless. In the foreground, Siyeon's face was in extreme close-up—despair twisting her features, snot and tears smeared across her skin, fingernails broken from clawing the glass. And in the reflection of her tear-filled eyes, far in the distance, Jihun's own pathetic back receded into the wrong direction, small but crystal clear.
"You... you fucking bastard! I'll kill you! Stay right there! Get out here now!"
Jihun roared like a beast and spun back toward the street stall in the photo's background. He ran until his lungs burst, the ripping pain in his leg muscles drowned by raging fury. But when he arrived, only an empty plastic chair and congealed tteokbokki broth remained. The perpetrator's traces had already dissolved into the air. So close, yet too late. Mocking Jihun, the culprit had vanished into the city's vast darkness, Siyeon stuffed deep in his pocket.
Jin-seok returned to his dingy, dimly lit goshiwon room and locked all three deadbolts. He now relished the fact that Jihun was desperately hunting him—it fueled his serialization like nothing else. Watching a real husband's mind crumble in real-time, held hostage by reality, was the ultimate writing thrill. He stripped off his sweat-stained T-shirt and murmured lowly from the bed to the terrified, trembling Siyeon. Madness—not human reason—gleamed in his eyes, the hunger of a bloodthirsty author.
"Hey, Park Siyeon. Your hubby Jihun the photographer—think he'll call pics of his wife getting ruined by a stranger's hands in some dump 'art'? Nah, he'd make the perfect subject. Hell, you already are."
Jin-seok's fingers drifted back to the Author's Note window. This time, to bind not just her mind but her physical sensations completely to his novel's settings—a brutal reprogramming. Baring yellowed teeth, he hammered the keyboard.
Amplify character 'Park Siyeon''s shame sensitivity by 300%.
Nervous System Rewiring - From now on, whenever the character feels shame, intense physical pleasure synchronizes and outputs from brain synapses.
Resistance will begins to drown in the chaos of shame and pleasure. Ego collapse accelerating.
The moment the commands executed, Siyeon's body convulsed violently on the screen. Agony ripped through her as neural circuits were forcibly torn apart and reassembled. But at the end of that pain bloomed an incomprehensible wave of pleasure. Guilt toward Jihun and shame at her plight surged, igniting her body against her will. Her pained groans morphed into sticky, heated breaths.
"Alright, time for the real 'corruption serialization' to begin. Everything so far was just the teaser. Now the episodes that'll have readers hooked."
Jin-seok's ragged breaths and damp gasps filled the cramped, moldy room. Meanwhile, collapsed on the cold streets of Sinseoldong Station, Jihun murmured his wife's name through bloody tears. Self-loathing for his incompetence mixed with murderous rage toward the culprit—he was no longer human. The photos now syncing to his cloud would be thousands of times more hellish and depraved than that near miss.
The night air was frigid, but the madness of two men scorched the city's darkness. One burned his soul to save his wife; the other fed that soul into the flames to pen a devil's tale. Caught between them, Siyeon felt her self dissolving into data fragments as consciousness faded.