The Pull of the Black Thread
Urk… Blech….
The mind that had been utterly enslaved by hunger and spinning like a madman just moments ago snapped awake the instant it registered that shocking visual, as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over it.
You’re telling me to eat that biochemical weapon right now?
Sure, one bite might take the edge off the immediate starvation. But what came after that?
The second I swallowed something like that, I’d almost certainly catch some nightmarish infectious disease, spend the next week coughing up blood, and take a one-way trip across the Jordan River…!
My inner store of modern medical knowledge was screaming at me to run for my life. I shot to my feet.
“S-sorry! I just remembered I left something behind! I’ll be going first!”
“Huh? Vita, you’re leaving already? At least eat before you—”
“What’s gotten into her?”
I hadn’t exactly been expecting a feast…! But that was way over the line!!
In the end I shook off the siblings’ bewildered stares and fled in a hurry.
Haah. Haah.
I clutched my head in utter despair. What the hell was I supposed to do now?
My brain understood perfectly. I absolutely could not eat that bread that looked like a direct express ticket to cholera.
But this cursed body had apparently registered even that revolting clump of filth as food, and it was howling at me to shove it down my throat immediately.
Well, this body had lived its entire life here. Maybe it had developed a miraculous immune system capable of handling that kind of garbage without consequence.
Still, I only had one life. I couldn’t bet it all on an untested stomach lining and swallow a writhing ball of bacteria. If I actually got sick in this primitive world with zero antibiotics, the only outcome would be a pathetic, irreversible death.
So what the hell was I supposed to do to survive?
If I didn’t extinguish the urgent fire of hunger raging in my gut right now, I would starve to death.
Right. There was only one option left.
Just like that guy who’d been getting the shit kicked out of him on the street earlier…
I just had to steal.
Yes. Theft.
Born and raised in 21st-century South Korea, I had lived a perfectly clean life up to this point—never once laying a finger on anyone else’s property.
I was an ordinary, law-abiding citizen who had never even come close to the threshold of a police station.
And yet here I was, standing at the edge of a cliff, forced to make a choice.
Would I throw away the meager morality I had clung to my entire life and step onto the path of a criminal? Or would I crawl back into that stinking house and beg on the floor for the chance to lick up whatever bread crumbs the siblings might have left?
In the end, I chose theft.
First, I needed to scout an easy target.
A stall selling food I could eat immediately, located next to a maze of alleys perfect for hiding. Most importantly, the owner had to be someone slow or elderly—someone who couldn’t chase me down quickly if I ran. That would be ideal.
Once I let go of the last thread of conscience, criminal plans flooded my mind like water bursting through a broken dam.
But finding a target that met all those perfect conditions in this beggar-infested slum was harder than finding a needle in a desert. The wall of reality I had to overcome was impossibly high.
First problem: the appalling quality of the food. The stuff strewn across the stalls looked no better than that bread from earlier.
I wasn’t about to commit theft just to eat that garbage.
Second problem: the limits of this pathetic body. No matter how fast these short, frail legs could run, an adult could catch up in two strides, grab me by the neck, and slam me into the ground.
Third problem: the merciless violence that spared no one, not even children. This was the most chilling issue. The people here showed no mercy to the weak.
I had just witnessed a scrawny girl begging on the other side of the street get slapped so hard she collapsed after accidentally brushing against a passerby.
Smack!
With a sickening sound, the child crumpled and lost consciousness. But the real horror came immediately after.
Instead of helping the fallen girl, the surrounding crowd swarmed her like a pack of vultures, stripping away every scrap she had collected from begging all day before vanishing.
It was a scene that shattered both my common sense and my faith in humanity.
Yet the truly sad and skin-crawling part was something else. While watching that hellish spectacle, even as anger and pity for the child rose inside me, I also spotted an opportunity.
Yes. In that brief instant when the dull thud of the slap rang out, every eye on the street—including the vendors who should have been watching their goods—had locked onto the fallen child.
Exactly. That single moment when everyone’s attention converged on one point was the only gap through which this weak, worthless body could successfully commit theft.
So. What now?
Should I crouch in the corner of an alley and hold my breath, waiting for another random tragedy where someone gets brutally trampled?
Or should I risk my life to create a distraction that would pull everyone’s eyes away?
Either option was pure insanity.
I licked my cracked lips and stared at the chunks of meat sizzling on the stall’s brazier.
Rat meat skewered on a stick, dripping grease, each piece about the size of a palm. Compared to the rotting, unidentifiable filth on the neighboring stall, this was practically the most intact “food” available.
Gulp.
Driven by hunger so intense it threatened to erase my sanity, I stared at that rat meat without blinking, calculating the perfect moment to steal it.
How many minutes had passed?
My vision had grown blurry, my eyeballs dry, tears beginning to form.
…Huh?
Suddenly, a strange dissonance pierced the center of my sight.
Over the rat meat dangling in my blurring vision, something bizarre—something that seemed to violate the physical laws of the world—began to overlap.
It was a line.
An extremely thin, ominously vivid black line.
I rubbed my eyes, but instead of disappearing, the black line only grew clearer, wrapping the rat meat’s shadow in precise geometric patterns.
No, to be exact, it wasn’t a physical phenomenon registered by my retinas.
This wasn’t normal vision transmitted through light and optic nerves. It was a blade-like sensation that sliced directly into the deepest part of my consciousness, carving a line into my mind.
Not something I saw, but something I felt directly in my brain—yet it registered as sight. A bizarre sensation.
Even if I shut my eyes tight, the image clung like an afterimage in the center of my skull, too vivid and repulsive to erase. It felt as if the blood vessels inside my eyeballs were sizzling and burning.
Something was fundamentally wrong. And the most disturbing part of this skin-crawling dissonance was the vague but overwhelming intuition that I could move those jet-black lines floating in the air—or inside my head—at will.
There was no evidence. It was simply a natural, ominous certainty, like knowing how to breathe from the moment of birth.
Almost in a trance, I reached out toward one of the black lines etched into my vision.
Not with my hand. Only in my mind, I imagined hooking a finger around a taut spider thread and yanking it hard. No—it wasn’t imagination.
I truly pulled it with my mind.
Thud—!
In that instant, the rat meat grilling on the brazier fell as if an invisible hand had snatched it, tumbling onto the dirt floor.
“Ugh…!”
At the same time, excruciating pain like two sharp awls being driven deep into my eyeballs slammed into my skull.
I squeezed my eyes shut and swallowed a scream. It was an extreme, never-before-experienced agony, as if the optic nerves behind my eyes were burning pitch black.
“Tsk, ahem. Hem-hem.”
Through tear-blurred red vision, I saw the furry stall owner glancing around in irritation.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he snatched the fallen rat meat off the ground. He wiped the dirt off with his grimy hands, then shamelessly placed it back on the grill and continued cooking as if nothing had happened.
Clutching my throbbing eyes, I replayed what had just occurred.
What the hell just happened?
There had been no wind. The owner hadn’t touched it. I had simply pulled that bizarre line inside my head—and the perfectly skewered meat had moved on its own and fallen.
It was too vivid to dismiss as coincidence. The terrible sensation that had pierced my eyeballs still lingered, skin-crawlingly real.
This wasn’t my imagination. It definitely wasn’t a coincidence.
I had been the one who knocked that meat to the floor.
I rubbed my eyes furiously with my dirty sleeve until the burning pain that felt like it would pop my eyeballs subsided.
My vision was still bloodshot and flickering red, but my mind had grown cold and sharp, as if doused with midwinter ice water.
The man I had seen on the street earlier, casually carrying a boulder the size of a dump truck.
The faint hope I had felt when I first witnessed that scene now surged through my veins as absolute conviction.
Yes. This world truly had magic. And more importantly, I could use that miraculous power too!
A frail slum brat who would collapse from a stiff breeze.
All I possessed was a smelly rag and a weak body. The absolute bottom of the food chain.
But now I had power.
A strange, chilling thrill that made me forget my hunger for a moment raced up my spine.
Forcing down the smile of ecstasy that kept trying to break across my face, I swallowed hard. Crouched in the shadows of the back alley, I carefully reached out once more—toward the perfectly grilling rat meat.