Introspection
“Sorry. I got held up with some work today. It took longer than I expected.”
I hurried down the stairs, pressed my ID card against the reader, and the door slid open with a soft beep. The laboratory was quiet and dark, with only me standing inside it. I set my bag down, pulled out the lunchbox I’d brought, and slid it through the small feeding port at the base of the glass tube in front of me.
“..........”
“Go on, eat. I prepared fish for you today.”
Something stirred on the other side of the thick glass wall. Then it began wolfing down the lunchbox I had given it.
The interior of the glass chamber was almost impossible to observe clearly with the naked eye. This experiment had only just begun, and even I still lacked sufficient data. Because she might be sensitive to light, I had been raising the brightness of the lamps by tiny increments each day. Temperature, humidity, illumination—I was slowly shaping the environment to match what an ordinary human would need.
In the faint glow, a silhouette moved inside the glass. The shape of a woman with long hair.
“That’s right. You’re doing everything you can to survive.”
I smiled with satisfaction and rested my hand on the tube. Closing my eyes, I felt the fierce pulse of life within that tiny enclosed world, the way a pregnant mother might sense her unborn child’s movements.
“Listen. I’ll probably be gone for about a week.”
“........”
Whether she understood language or not was still unclear, but it didn’t matter. Understanding meant survival. Ignorance meant death.
“The fish in that lunchbox is a week’s worth of food. If you can practice restraint, it should be enough to keep you alive.”
After this visit, I would leave to take charge of the operation to capture the parasite at Seonghoe University. A week was short, but her body was still close to human. Humans supposedly couldn’t last three days without water or food. I wondered if she would manage.
“I hope we’ll be able to see each other again.”
With those final words, I turned and walked out of the dark laboratory.
I woke at dawn.
My body no longer needed much sleep, so I came awake earlier than expected. I had been sleeping on the floor; I lifted my head and checked the bed first. Chae-yun was still asleep, but the person who should have been lying beside her—Seo-hee—was gone.
“...She must have gone home.”
I stood up and moved closer to Chae-yun, examining her condition. Her steady, peaceful breathing suggested that Seo-hee’s emergency treatment had worked better than I’d hoped.
After fixing my hair, I decided to take the usual walk I always did when my thoughts refused to settle. I hadn’t particularly enjoyed walking before, but things were different now. I slipped on some sandals, left the building, and had only taken a few steps when I noticed someone crouched in the distance.
“...You didn’t leave.”
“Nope.”
Seo-hee was crouched low, smoking a cigarette. Come to think of it, the old her had been a smoker too.
“Want one?”
“No, cigarettes aren’t really my thing.”
I politely refused the cigarette she offered from her pack. Even though alcohol no longer affected me, there was no point in adding smoking to the mix.
“Sorry about being so harsh earlier.”
“...No. Everything you said was right.”
The reason Chae-yun had ended up like this was my half-hearted attitude. I’d thought I had considered every angle, but I hadn’t. Not even close.
“Be honest. Did you enjoy what we did together?”
“.....?”
She exhaled smoke and turned to look at me, her expression saying she couldn’t follow the sudden shift in conversation.
“When I first met Chae-yun and she told me I could do whatever I wanted with any woman, I pretended to be reluctant, but honestly… it fucking excited me.”
“...And?”
“I liked doing it with you two. I liked being able to control an entire department full of strangers. I told myself I was trash, that it was fine for trash to act like this, and I kept rationalizing it all away so I could feel comfortable…”
My voice trembled.
“...I was only thinking about what felt good for me.”
“.....”
Seo-hee had already finished one cigarette. She quietly pulled out another and lit it.
“I was running around like a dog chasing pleasure. I knew something like this would happen eventually, but when the problem actually appeared right in front of me… I was terrified.”
I realized it wasn’t just her voice shaking—her whole body was trembling. I grabbed her shoulders with both hands to steady her.
“What about that confident plan you laid out yesterday? Weren’t you scared then?”
“I was.”
I had been scared then too. But the fear of being hunted by someone, somewhere, if I didn’t act was even greater. I wasn’t strong like them. These creatures had every survival instinct engraved into their DNA. They would do anything for their own prosperity.
But not me.
I was just an ordinary person who had planned to live an ordinary life—meet a normal partner, have kids, get a steady job, and collect a paycheck every month. Yet somehow I had been dropped alone into a jungle full of predators.
“...Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
I was so ashamed of myself it bordered on humiliation. I really was just an ordinary person who had fallen into the jungle. Except I hadn’t fallen—I had walked in willingly. I’d heard rumors about delicious fruit growing here, stepped inside with my own two feet, and now I was begging for my life? The realization that this was exactly how pathetic I looked made my face burn.
Why did I have to grovel like this?
No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t find a reason. The human brain learns pleasure faster than anything else and forgets it slowest. I had already tasted ecstasy that ordinary people would never experience. Even if I somehow returned to a normal life, I would only drown in boredom and emptiness again.
I didn’t want to go back to that life, but I didn’t want to die either. It was a selfish thought, but a natural one. What person would willingly choose a hard, painful life and then death?
A comfortable life overflowing with pleasure. At least, that was what I wanted.
“It’s too late now.”
“For what?”
“No one can touch me anymore. No one.”
I had realized it, even if belatedly. I was still so scared I felt like I might die at any moment. But there was no turning back. I had come too far, and even if I returned, I no longer had the confidence to live normally.
Since I couldn’t go forward or backward, I would choose the better path. I couldn’t promise I wouldn’t regret it. Even now, I could still see those black hands reaching for me from behind iron masks.
“I don’t want to die yet.”
The tremor in my voice had stopped. My body was still shaking, though. Seo-hee finished her second cigarette and stood up from her crouched position. She looked at me and spoke.
“Then do it properly.”
Morning. The campus was bustling with people, and I stood once again in front of the white dome of light that still hadn’t disappeared.
“...They really haven’t left.”
Of course a fisherman wouldn’t abandon a spot where he knew the fish were. Still, the scale of this was on another level. I looked around just in case, but the owners of the dome were nowhere to be seen. That didn’t mean they weren’t watching. Even if I couldn’t see them, there were surely eyes monitoring the area from multiple angles.
“This is troublesome.”
If I wasted any more time, I would definitely draw their attention. I quickly stepped forward and pushed my way inside the dome.
I squeezed my eyes shut, just in case. I’d been worried that yesterday’s close call had been nothing but luck, but even after walking for several minutes inside the dome, no pursuers appeared.
“That’s a relief, right?”
“.......”
Chae-yun stood beside me with her arm linked through mine. I had brought her into the dome with me.
Last night.
“She still hasn’t woken up.”
“....”
Even after my long conversation with Seo-hee, Chae-yun had shown no signs of regaining consciousness. I fell into thought for a moment.
“You guys… once you go inside, is it impossible to come back out?”
I had roughly considered the principles behind the dome. My situation and Chae-yun’s were different. The common point was that a parasitic organism had invaded both our brains. The differences were gender, and—most importantly—who held dominion over the body.
The original owner of Chae-yun’s body was already gone. If anything, what was controlling her body wasn’t her brain but an entirely different creature. Of course that same creature existed inside my head too, but in my case, it had been devoured by my brain instead.
That meant the “main body” inside Chae-yun’s head was absent from mine. What if that was the difference between being detected and not being detected?
“They’re sloppier than I thought, the idiots.”
Right now, Chae-yun’s “main body” was with Seo-hee. The Chae-yun standing beside me was like a car with no driver. Even when I spoke to her, she gave no response. Her actions and speech were only possible through my direct commands.
“Do you need to pay attention in class today?”
“......Yes…”
Chae-yun answered in a dazed voice. Bringing her out in this state in the morning had been exhausting. With her main body gone, she couldn’t even walk, speak, or breathe properly without my orders.
“Call me if anything happens.”
To anyone watching from afar we would look like a couple who cared about each other, but the truth was the complete opposite. The irony almost made me laugh. I forced on a fake smile, glanced once more at the dome covering the school, then linked arms with Chae-yun and headed toward the lecture hall.