Human Ranch-4614

Human Ranch-4614.

I stared at that name for a long time.

It made my skin crawl. And still my eyes kept going back to it.

It could have been the title of some urban-legend board post. Or a name someone had slapped together as a cheap joke. Turn it just a little and it even looked like the banner for a bottom-shelf adult game.

Just the name alone left room for every kind of imagination.

Women in cow-print bikinis, bells around their necks, sauntering around with deliberately exaggerated poses that pushed out their chests and hips — a cheap, childish fantasy smeared thick with baser urges.

"Wow, fuck... what am I even thinking right now..."

The words slipped out of me.

The moment I pictured it, the absurdity hit. Even with a dimensional list floating in midair, my brain was still working overtime in that direction.

Humans really are something else.

But the laugh didn't last. Twisting it dirty left me unsettled. Taking it as a ghost story left me unsettled too.

The kind of name that was so unpleasant you wanted to press it even more.

Exactly that.

I swallowed dryly.

The Archive was not kind. No safety rating. No description. No warning. It just tossed a world at me and asked if I was going — so matter-of-fact it was almost insulting.

"Just one step...?"

The mutter escaped on its own.

Really just one step. If anything felt wrong, I would pull out immediately.

With that much resolve, I locked my gaze on the name.

The instant I decided to go in, the space in front of me split open lengthwise without a sound.

"Huh?"

A rift.

A long vertical tear began to widen slowly to either side. It grew and grew until it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠finally took the shape of a clean rectangular dimensional gate.

The inside was half-visible, half-not. Whether it was dark or faintly luminous, I couldn't tell — only an unreadable surface.

I instinctively drew a breath through my nose.

No smell. No wind. No change in temperature. No extra Archive text, no environmental data.

As if it would tell me nothing until I actually went through.

I took one short breath and pushed myself into the rectangular tear.

The next moment, the ground under my feet changed.

"......"

I couldn't speak.

The floor was white. An extremely smooth, glossy white like a hospital floor. But it wasn't the clean of a hospital. Too clean — artificially clean.

Only then did the smell hit me.

Something like disinfectant. Underneath it, a clinging fishy reek. A strange smell as if body odor and damp moisture had soaked into everything for a long time.

I held my breath and looked around.

Walls on every side.

More precisely, things that looked like walls.

Tall, smooth white walls. The ceiling was high too — so high that at first I couldn't even gauge the scale. No windows. No doors. Too big to call a room, too stifling to call a hall.

It felt indoor, somehow, but nothing like a place where people lived or worked.

"What the hell is this place."

My voice echoed faintly.

That was when I realized my heart was hammering like crazy. My fingertips had gone cold.

I turned around without thinking. I half expected to see the door of my studio apartment. There was nothing. Just white wall.

"Fuck."

I started to step back and stopped.

It's fine... for now it's just a weird space, right? If I freak out too early I'll only put myself at a disadvantage.

I steadied my breathing and walked slowly. The sound of bare feet on the smooth surface rang out with unnatural clarity in the silence.

Then a blue window flashed briefly at the edge of my vision.

A short line.

It hadn't reacted the moment I arrived. It felt like it had only just reluctantly started working, and that irritated me.

"Oh, so now you get to it?"

Of course there was no answer. And before I could even check, light appeared at the far right edge.

I looked that way on instinct.

Glass.

A massive transparent wall. Extremely thick, extremely wide glass.

At first I thought it was a window. The closer I got, the stranger it felt. Far too large for a window.

It felt like an entire face of the wall had been sealed off in glass — less a window for looking out than a display surface for looking in.

I slowed my steps.

Beyond the glass, something came into view.

At first I couldn't make it out clearly. The space was so vast the sense of distance wouldn't settle.

White floor.

White walls.

Structures placed here and there.

Round cylinders easily taller than a person, metal pillars of some kind, low partitions.

Everything was orderly. And yet it didn't look like any living space humans would build.

It felt like a livestock pen that someone had cleaned to an excessive degree.

Cold sweat ran down the back of my neck.

And then... I saw them.

People.

Far beyond the glass, there were people.

I pressed closer to the glass without thinking.

They were people.

Men and women both. Everyone dressed differently.

Some wore modern clothes. Some had on something like work uniforms. Some looked like they were barely wrapped in scraps of cloth. Their nationalities seemed mixed as well. Skin color, body type, hairstyles — all different.

The problem was that every single one of them looked far too small.

At first I thought it was the distance.

It wasn't.

The scale of the space I was standing in was wrong.

Only then did I reassess the size of the structures beyond the glass.

The round cylinders I had thought were merely taller than a person were actually the size of apartment buildings. The things that had looked like low partitions were as high as stadium walls.

"What the hell..."

My voice leaked out small.

And then I saw a shadow glide past beyond the glass.

I stopped breathing.

A gigantic hand.

It looked like a human hand, but it wasn't. The fingers were far too long, the joints unnatural.

The skin was close to grayish-white, covered in fine wrinkles layered like scales. The nails weren't black, but they weren't clear either — a dull color, like plastic with bone ground into it.

That hand drifted slowly through the middle of the space beyond the glass.

The people scattered.

I froze solid.

My head turned, against my will, following that hand with agonizing slowness.

I saw the owner of the hand.

A colossal form walking closer from far away.

It walked on two legs like a person. But it was far too massive and far too alien to call human.

The head was elongated, the neck unnaturally long. Where eyes should have been, several black hole-like openings were set into the face. The arms were long, the torso lean yet somehow rigid-looking.

As if someone had roughly mixed insect, mammal, and human together and then scaled the whole thing up with no sense of aesthetics.

That giant thing looked down beyond the glass.

No.

It wasn't looking down. It was observing.

Exactly that feeling.

An assessing gaze. No wonder, no fear, no hostility — just the look of someone checking the condition of their property.

My spine went cold.

"......"

My mouth dried out completely.

Only then did I notice it.

Right in front of the glass, very low down.

Around knee height, something like a metal plaque was attached.

I hadn't seen it at first. Semi-transparent material, set almost flush.

Characters I didn't know were written on it.

The moment my eyes touched them, the Archive reacted briefly at the edge of my vision.

Crude Korean overlaid the unknown characters. Not a naturally readable sentence so much as a meaning forced into place.

A real curse tore out of my mouth.

"Holy fucking shit..."

In that instant, my mind lit up.

Human Ranch.

Ranch.

I hadn't come here as an explorer. I wasn't a visitor either.

I had entered under the same classification as the humans over there.

Breeding sector.

Population count.

Stress index.

Specimen.

Livestock.

"Ah, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!"

My voice sped up. My breathing roughened. My heart hammered wildly.

I spun around on reflex.

Only wall.

No door. No exit in sight.

Cold sweat flooded my palms.

Then a red window slammed up hard in the center of my vision.

The texture of the text was different from usual.

Short.

Hard.

And urgent.

It felt like a message that had burst out because it genuinely didn't want to die with me.

I swallowed the curse.

Far away, the giant alien turned its head a fraction.

In this direction.

Whether because of the glass, or the smell, or the temperature, or simply because it had sensed one more thing had been added —

Those black hole-like eyes turned slowly, so slowly, toward me.

In that moment, strangely, my head went clear.

When terror is too large, the mind can become sharp instead. This was exactly that.

Return.

I seized that single word.

I was leaving now. If not now, it would be too late.

A new sentence appeared in the center of my vision.

"Return."

I said it out loud.

Nothing happened.

"Return!"

My voice cracked.

One of the giant alien's hands rose with agonizing slowness. Slow — and yet so large it almost looked fast.

If that thing truly started moving this way, running would be meaningless. That much was obvious at a glance.

It felt like watching a mountain move right in front of my eyes. The difference in scale was that absurd.

I'm going back... now... right now!

The instant I stamped that will down hard, a vertical tear appeared before my eyes.

I hurled myself at that rift like a madman.

The white floor collapsed. The glass tore like paper. The giant alien's form stretched and warped.

My vision flipped as if I were being sucked in.

I felt the ground vanish under me and the sensation of falling.

The next moment.

Thud.

I slammed into the floor of my studio apartment, knees first.

"Ghk."

My breath locked in my throat.

Floor. My room's floor.

Linoleum.

Bed.

Clothes I'd thrown off.

Mirror.

Familiar smells.

I stayed there with my hands planted, gasping roughly for a long time. My hands shook hard. My heart was still thrashing like it wanted out of my chest. The inside of my throat ached. My stomach kept turning over.

I genuinely thought I was going to throw up.

"Haa... haa..."

Only my breathing filled the room.

I survived.

That was the first thought.

And the very next one—

"Crazy bastards..."

I didn't even know who the curse was aimed at. It just came out first.

I dragged one hand down my face. It was soaked with cold sweat. My legs wouldn't take my weight.

Only moments ago the body in the mirror, the better-looking face, the broader shoulders had felt like problems. Now all of that seemed trivial.

What I had entered was a world.

Not a fake. A real world.

And in that world there was something that didn't see humans as people.

At the edge of my vision, the Archive window rose again.

Coordinates saved.

I looked at that line and let out a hollow laugh of pure disbelief.

"Does that mean I can go back?"

A insane feature.

But the laugh died quickly.

Because the faces of the people beyond the glass rose up again.

The way they scattered.

The body language that looked practiced at fleeing.

The way ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠they flinched and shrank when that giant hand passed over.

Those people were still there.

I sat down against the edge of the bed. My legs were still trembling. I ran a hand over my neck and stopped.

My fingertips were shaking.

The Dimensional Archive.

This wasn't some romantic isekai journey. It wasn't a gift that opened a door onto a fantasy world and made me the protagonist.

Step wrong and you became a specimen, or livestock, or simply died in a hole without even leaving a name.

Once I understood that, my head cooled instead.

I regulated my breathing slowly and opened the dimension list again.

I licked my lips once, stepped back, and pressed [List].

The list was the same as before.

It felt completely different from before.

Earlier it had just been a list of strange names.

Not anymore.

Every single name was real. And that realness was more than enough to kill me.

I tore my eyes off Human Ranch ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and slowly lowered them to the next line.

Glass Beach-3227.