Chapter Text
The air in Jongwan’s room was a thick, unmoving block, heavy with the scent of stale paper and a low, resonant ennui. It had been days, perhaps weeks, since he had registered the cycle of sun and shadow. A strange, listless emptiness had settled in, quiet and absolute, a feeling that whispered: Somehow today, I feel strangely languid and bored. His mind offered no resistance; the thoughts were slow, thick sludge, and even the flicker of a new idea, the chance for a new lyric, refused to surface. The boredom was a suffocating blanket, and the realization hit him with the force of a sudden, deep breath: My room needs ventilation.
He didn't bother with a plan. Planning required energy, and energy was a myth. He simply stood, a young man of ordinary height and build, and walked toward the door. The moment his fingers brushed the knob, the air pressure seemed to shift, not just in the room, but in his chest. A voice, small and hard, snapped inside him: I will leave before my body suffocates further. It was less a decision and more a visceral, animal need to flee the stagnant air of his own making.
He stepped out of the apartment and into the hallway. The change should have been the dull, beige uniformity of the stairwell, the faint smell of cooking, the drone of city noise. Instead, the hallway was gone. The door slammed shut behind him with a final, echoing thud, and Jongwan found himself standing not on linoleum tile, but on cracked, bleached earth.
The air here was not stale; it was intensely, almost painfully, dry, carrying a fine, pale dust that settled instantly on his skin. He stood amidst a sprawling, alien landscape. Giant, spiky, unsettlingly human-shaped trees clawed at a pale sky that looked too close, too thin, like old canvas stretched tight. There was no transition, no logic, no slow fade. He was just there.
This immediate, impossible transition should have prompted terror, or at least a loud, frantic denial. But the ennui had dulled his initial shock. He felt only a bizarre, cold interest. His mind, starved of stimulus, began to catalogue the impossible. The dirt was the colour of old bone. The air vibrated with a faint, high-pitched hum that seemed to originate not from outside, but from the inside of his skull. "If I walk aimlessly, that guy will appear," he mused. A sentence that repeated in his mind like a ready-made script for the impossible journey he had just entered. He began to walk.
The ground crunched beneath his ordinary sneakers. He walked for what felt like an hour, the twisted arms of the Joshua trees rising like supplicating, forgotten deities. Then, without warning, something cut through the stillness above him.
A bench drifted silently across the pale sky, suspended on invisible currents. It was the kind of wooden bench one might find in a quiet park, yet here it glided as if the air itself had agreed to carry it. On the bench sat a tall, slender man in a neat charcoal suit. His posture was immaculate, his hands folded loosely in his lap. A pair of oversized black specs covered most of his face, the glass reflecting the distorted image of the barren desert below.
Beside him, balanced with eerie precision on the armrest, was a squirrel. Its glossy fur shimmered unnaturally in the pale light, its eyes glinting with a sharp intelligence.
The bench descended slowly, a gentle tilt bringing it to rest on the cracked earth just a few paces from Jongwan. Dust swirled around the man’s polished shoes. He adjusted his spectacles and offered Jongwan a small, precise smile.
This was Junghoon. He was humming a tune Jongwan almost recognized.
"Oh, good. You made it" Junghoon said, his voice flat but carrying a vibrant, underlying energy that seemed to contradict his exhausted appearance. He gave Jongwan a small, easy wave. "The air schedule has already changed three times while I waited. We were just about to discuss the terms of the bet."
Jongwan stopped, the absurdity of the scene finally piercing the fog of his lethargy. "The... what? Where am I? Who are you?"
Junghoon patted the crate beside him. "The usual. You’re precisely where you should be. I'm Junghoon. And this is the Mountain Squirrel. He's proposing a delightful exchange of purpose, or so he says. It's about a bet, naturally. Shall we make a great bet?"
The Squirrel chittered, an accelerated, high-pitched sound that somehow sounded like agreement. Then it spoke, a dry, reedy voice that seemed to scratch the air. "The bet is this: you must locate the warmth that Time sought to steal. You will know it by the pain required to keep it. If you find it, you may keep the pain. If you fail, the memory ends, and you will become frictionless."
Jongwan stared, the words hitting him with a specific, terrible resonance. Time sought to steal... keep the pain... frictionless. It mirrored the inner anguish he carried: the torture to keep the memory from fading. The Squirrel’s riddle wasn’t random Dadaist noise; it was an externalization of the very fear that had driven him out of his room.
"I don't understand the rules" Jongwan managed, his voice sounding rusty.
Junghoon smiled, a flash of genuine, weary amusement. "That’s the beauty of it. The lack of understanding is the first term. The prize is irrelevant. The effort is the currency. Now, before we properly begin, we need a witness and a fighter."
He gestured into the twisted shadows beneath the nearest Joshua tree. A large, unsettling shape sat perfectly still. It was a bear—a teddy bear, in fact, but immense and utterly inert, stuffed with thick, beige fur and wearing a small, misplaced crown made of twigs. He was silent, his bead eyes staring into the middle distance, not moving, not acknowledging their presence. He was the perfect fighter for this forest: a master of profound stillness.
"He's the silent witness" Junghoon explained. "The forest duel is a contest of passive endurance. He is unmatched. Now, let's walk. Unexpected encounters will be waiting for you. Maybe you will meet a ferocious wolf "
Jongwan, unable to process anything, simply followed. The initial terror was replaced by a creeping, deep-seated anxiety, but the presence of Junghoon, tall and slender and so entirely at ease, kept him from breaking down. Junghoon's calmness acted like a strange, perverse grounding point. He treated the Squirrel's existential bet and the massive teddy bear as commonplace, which somehow stabilized Jongwan’s external reality, even as his internal one began to fragment.
As they walked, the silent, Joshua trees began to thin out. The landscape transitioned with the same violent illogic as the beginning. The ground became a pale, concrete expanse, cracked and broken, resembling an abandoned urban sprawl from a bad memory. Here, the first signs of Jongwan’s inner demons began to manifest, visible only to him.
A thick, tar-like substance began to ooze from the fissures in the concrete. It was black and sticky, pooling into shallow, unreflective puddles. Jongwan instinctively avoided it, feeling a cold dread. The smell was acrid, like burnt sugar and forgotten regret.
"Careful of the ground here, it's a bit uneven" Junghoon remarked, stepping over a puddle of the tar as if it were nothing more than rainwater. His expression didn't change.
"You... you see that, right? The black liquid" Jongwan said, his voice strained.
Junghoon glanced down, then back at Jongwan. "See what? The asphalt is quite old here. It’s definitely seen better days. You know, you really should find a way to let go of that suffocating atmosphere you carry. It makes the air heavy."
Jongwan felt a cold spike of panic. Junghoon literally did not see it. The tar was the colour of his own guilt, the heavy burden of the past that he clung to, believing that if he stopped feeling its stickiness, the memory would be gone forever. I am torturing myself… His inner demons were becoming the physical landscape. The torment had begun.
They pressed on, the silence of the Joshua Tree Forest replaced by a constant, low, rhythmic sound: Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock. It was amplified, metallic, and seemed to come from the sky itself. It was the sound of the relentless time's cruel knife, and it drove Jongwan's anxiety to a fever pitch. He knew this was the countdown, the process of erasure that he fought so hard against.
"The clock is very loud" Jongwan whispered, pressing his hands to his ears. "Can you hear it? It’s counting down something."
Junghoon paused, tilting his head with intense concentration. "The clock? Ah. No, I don't hear a clock. I hear a persistent, high-frequency hum. It sounds like an untuned radio station playing the same note, endlessly. I'm afraid your perception of sound might be slightly over-tuned right now, Jongwan." He put a hand lightly on Jongwan's shoulder, his fingers surprisingly firm and warm. "Keep the calm. The noise only gets louder if you focus on the time of it. Focus on the walking.".
Suddenly, the air split with a feral, rasping sound. A pair of figures darted between the cracked concrete slabs. They were humanoid, but clad entirely in long, heavy, black corporate suits. Their faces were obscured by shadows beneath the brims of their hats, and they moved with a jarring, unpredictable speed, a mixture of predatory stalking and panicked retreat.
"Maybe you will meet a ferocious wolf" Jongwan muttered the words Junghoon said to him earlier. These were the wolves, not creatures of tooth and claw, but creatures of insidious threat and anxiety.
"Oh, look" Junghoon said, pointing casually. "Some coyotes. They're always skittish. Don't make any sudden movements."
Jongwan’s vision swam. The figures looked exactly like wolves to him—their limbs elongated, their movements suggesting a snarling hunger, their shadowy faces contorted in a silent, violent snarl. The terror was cold and total.
"Those are... those are wolves" Jongwan insisted, his breath catching. "They’re wolves! They are hunting something."
Junghoon just shrugged, taking a sip from a canteen he had pulled from nowhere. "Coyotes often look like wolves if you’re startled, I suppose. Perhaps I once saw a small coyote as a wolf and fell over in shock." He smiled. "They’re not interested in us. They're only interested in following the rules of their own anxiety. Just keep moving."
The difference in their perceptions was becoming unbearable for Jongwan. His reality was macabre and threatening; Junghoon’s was merely eccentric. The emotional strain of this disconnect, coupled with the relentless Tick-Tock, caused Jongwan’s gaze to fall to a particularly broken piece of sidewalk.
Lying there was a single, perfect lemon. It was impossibly bright yellow against the dull grey concrete. It seemed to pulse with a low, vibrant energy.
He knelt, his hand trembling as he picked it up. It felt cold, dense, and real. He felt the strong urge to give that lemon a bite. The thought was both repulsive and compelling. The acid, the sensory overload, was exactly the kind of pain he craved to confirm his own existence and maintain the memory.
"That's a nice lemon" Junghoon commented, still calm. "But I wouldn't eat the peel, the wax is usually quite tough."
Jongwan ignored him. He lifted the lemon and, with a grim determination born of self-torture, bit down hard.
The shock was total. It was more than sourness. It was a violent, physical assault on his senses. His eyes watered instantly, his mouth was filled with an electric, paralyzing acid, but as he chewed, the promised sensory distortion began.
The ticking sound of the invisible clock became a texture—rough, oily static scraping against his skin. The grey concrete landscape suddenly gained a temperature; it was cold and lonely. The silence of the coyotes was a colour—a sickly, muted indigo that pressed down on his chest.
He had touched the whole world, and the whole world tasted like pain.
The world shattered into a synesthetic mess. He stumbled forward, gasping, the taste of the lemon burning his throat. He looked up, and the sight was terrifying. The sky, which had been pale and thin, was now a roiling mass of rotting teeth. They were yellowed, moss-covered molars and canines, shifting and grinding in a celestial, silent mastication. It was a visceral manifestation of his fear of the world consuming him, erasing him with its indifference.
"Jongwan, you look quite ill" Junghoon said, his voice cutting through the noise. He grabbed Jongwan's arm, his grip surprisingly strong. "It's the dehydration. This desert is tough. Did you know the air tastes like rust today?"
Jongwan looked at Junghoon, then back at the sky. Junghoon saw rust. Jongwan saw millions of decaying teeth.
"The sky... look at the sky!" Jongwan choked out, pointing a shaking finger.
Junghoon squinted upward. "It's a very striking shade of dusty blue-grey. Quite atmospheric. I feel like it could rain ash at any minute. You’re seeing the world through a very aggressive filter right now, Jongwan. You need to breathe."
He forced Jongwan to focus on his own controlled, easy breathing. Junghoon's presence, the simple fact of his indifferent calm, pulled Jongwan back from the edge. The synaesthesia receded, and the sky slowly, sickeningly, reformed into its normal, dusty grey-blue. But the taste of the lemon, the memory of the grotesque teeth, remained.
As they moved on, the concrete gave way to a vast, dark plain of loose gravel and dirt. The tick-tock faded slightly, replaced by an unsettling, almost imperceptible music that seemed to swell up from the earth. The music was a deep, resonant synth sound, fragmented and alien. This was the first true sign of the alien influence, the undercurrent of the strange riddling world.
They reached a wide, stagnant pool. Its surface was unnervingly still, a sheet of glass holding the sky’s reflection too perfectly. Jongwan felt the sheer weight of silence here. Even the thin, high-altitude wind seemed to have abandoned the place, leaving behind only the cold certainty of the sterile air.
Something stirred in the reflection before the surface itself moved. A ripple spread outward though nothing had touched the water. At first there was only distortion, the shimmer of a shape without edges, like heat rising off asphalt on a summer day. Then the distortion hardened into a figure, as if the pool had decided to give birth to an intruder.
The figure that emerged was a man, impossibly clean for the dust and decay of this strange world. His clothing was black, sharply tailored, every seam and fold smooth and untouched, as though spun from cooled shadow. The air around him seemed to actively repel imperfection; dust motes veered away from his jacket, and the wet grit on the ground evaporated instantly beneath his polished shoes. His features were precise, almost unnaturally smooth, carved with an expression of serene, absolute indifference. His eyes were deep and still, reflecting the stagnant pool without a flicker of emotion, as if no thought within them had ever been disturbed. He was the material embodiment of frictionless efficiency.
When he spoke, his lips did not move. The sound came as pressure, a vibration that bypassed Jongwan’s ears and drilled directly into his skull. It felt like words and yet it also felt like memory being forcibly rearranged inside his head.
“You resist the entropy beautifully, little human. The preservation of pain is a fascinating mechanism. But why? Why did you exhaust all your strength on doubt? You cling to the sharp edges of memory, but they wear down. They become grit. I offer the smooth surface. The total peace. The beautiful, quiet oblivion."
The Alien reached out a hand, its gesture utterly calm. The palm was pale, and in the reflection of the still pool, the ghostly image of the mountain squirrel appeared, chittering madly at the Alien, as if in fierce, powerless opposition.
“You made a bet, young one. The terms of the great bet. You try to anchor yourself to an illusion of warmth that no longer exists. Let me show you what you’re fighting to keep.”
The world snapped. The tar-like substance of Jongwan’s guilt, which had been confined to the cracks in the concrete and gravel of the previous landscape, rose and solidified into a glassy, opaque wall behind the Alien. It was a projection screen of absolute nothingness.
“This,” the Alien’s thought-voice resonated, “is the warmth you cherish. It is an emptiness, an absence of record. It has already been forgotten by the universe. Your agony is self-inflicted ritual for a god who never existed. Do you have the small courage and guts to simply let go? To accept the void?”
The mental pressure was not just intense; it was unimaginable. It felt like his own consciousness was being squeezed out of his body, leaving behind only the vacant vessel. The memory of the lost warmth, the source of his current self-torture, was being aggressively scrubbed from his internal catalogue. Jongwan felt moments of pure, terrifying neutrality—brief flickers where he could not recall why he was supposed to be in pain, or who he was trying not to forget. This was the deepest horror: the loss of the reason for his existence.
The Alien intensified its attack, weaponizing the sensory confusion that had begun with the self-inflicted pain of the lemon. The air around Jongwan turned instantaneously cold and lonely—the exact temperature of the sterile concrete he had first experienced. The Alien’s voice became the oily, rough texture of the ticking clock, grating and scraping against his mind.
Then, the grotesque image of the rotting teeth from the sky flooded his vision again, only this time, they weren't in the sky; they were replacing the ground. The smooth, black gravel gave way to a shifting field of decaying, yellowed enamel, forcing Jongwan to stand on a disgusting, unstable foundation. He stumbled, the physical horror momentarily overriding his mental defences.
"Look at your efforts, Jongwan" the Alien pulsed, its voice now laced with mocking finality. "Your pain is worthless. Your grief is inefficient. Time’s cruel knife is already through your heart. I am merely offering you the antidote: the cessation of the futile struggle."
The Alien produced a small, silver object from its unnervingly smooth sleeve. It was highly polished, vibrating with an immense, contained force. It was the object of total freedom.
“I will show you the legendary Dynamite—the explosive realization of your own futility. One touch, and all the residual data—all the pain, all the memory, all the struggle—will vanish. It is the ultimate freedom, an instant of true, total, frictionless zero. It is inevitable. Why not expedite the process?”
The image of the empty, vacant self from his deepest fear flashed across his mind—a version of Jongwan that was calm, quiet, and utterly hollow. This was the Alien’s ultimate temptation: the end of the unbearable trip, purchased with total annihilation of his self-defining pain.
Junghoon stepped forward, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jongwan. He looked at the Alien—or rather, at the place where the Alien was standing and the shimmering horror it projected—with the same quiet indifference he’d applied to the tar and the coyotes.
"I see the light refracting rather oddly off the water today" Junghoon commented, his voice steady. "It creates a curious illusion of depth where there is none. You really should focus, Jongwan. You're losing your footing on the path. You need to keep walking. The feet remember the path even when the mind tries to argue against it."
Junghoon's simple, physical presence, didn't defeat the Alien, but it shielded Jongwan, giving him a moment of essential mental space. Junghoon was forcing Jongwan to look at the world, not into the Alien's logic.
Jongwan took the chance. He focused on the pain in his mouth, the residual burn of the lemon, the self-inflicted torture that proved he was still fighting to keep his memory alive. He looked at the Alien and shook his head, a single, firm movement of defiance.
"I choose the pain" Jongwan said, the words barely a rasp, yet vibrating with his entire, desperate will. "I choose the hurting, because it means the warmth is still worth fighting for."
The Alien’s unnerving smile seemed to widen across the air. Its voice pulsed with a mocking finality.
“A predictable choice for now. But the path ahead is long. And you will find that the sleigh pulled by a long-horned rabbit travels only toward the destination I set. The real test is the endurance of the unbearable. The full story of your own failure.”
The Alien dissipated, the air rippling like a mirage. The unsettling music faded back into the low, pervasive hum. The ground returned from decaying teeth to dark gravel.
Jongwan leaned heavily on Junghoon, catching his breath. His inner world had been laid bare, targeted, and challenged. His physical body was utterly exhausted, but his will was strangely hardened.
"He wants you to believe the journey is pointless" Junghoon said, pulling Jongwan upright. "That the narrative is fixed. He says the sleigh travels only to his destination. He is wrong. He is the ultimate enemy of human guts. Your destination, Jongwan, is determined by the courage to sit still and keep the fighting going, no matter how nonsensical the landscape becomes."
Jongwan looked back at the stagnant pool, now empty of the Alien's disturbing reflection. He understood now. The trip wasn't a search; it was a siege. He was defending the right to his own discomfort.
"What now?" Jongwan asked, the energy of the confrontation leaving him suddenly cold and weak.
"Good. You want to keep moving" Junghoon said, patting his back. "That's all the fighting you need to do. Now, listen. It's time to meet the host. The Squirrel seems to be quite insistent on an appetizer."
They began to walk again, the gravel shifting to smooth, silver sand. The landscape had changed again, transforming into a surreal campsite. A small, meticulously set table sat in the middle of the sand, complete with silverware and tiny, absurd folding chairs. The mountain squirrel sat at the head of the table, holding a miniature whisk.
"Come out, mountain squirrel, I will make you a great meal!" Junghoon said, sitting down as if he were dining at a five-star restaurant. He then looked at Jongwan, his eyes suddenly glinting with a mischievousness Jongwan hadn't seen before.
"The next course is the story" Junghoon said, pulling up a chair for Jongwan. "The Squirrel has prepared 'One Thousand and One True Stories'. You have to listen. It’s a very, very long chapter, and you cannot leave until the sun sets on the wrong horizon. You'll need courage for this one, Jongwan. The courage to sit still and listen to utter nonsense."