In another universe, in a different branch of the hyperverse, the morning sun began to rise over the city of Seoul. The city slowly awakened as human presence filled the streets and parks, people moving through narrow lanes for workouts, routines, and countless small reasons.
In the midst of the city stood a tall apartment building. Inside one of its units, within a quiet and comfortable room, a tall, lithe figure woke from her bed.
She stretched her arms upward, her long black hair falling forward, its silhouette covering more than half of her face and making her features difficult to perceive.
She rose from the bed and bent slightly as she stretched again, her well-built arms extending with controlled motion. Walking across the room, she reached for a water jar decorated with auspicious floral designs.
She poured water into a mug and drank it, raising the mug steadily to her lips. Afterward, she opened the main window and door and stepped onto the balcony. Standing there, she observed reality itself and incidents unfolding far beyond normal perception.
She scanned vast distances and detected even the slightest subatomic differences in detail. A sudden surge of information rushed through her mind. At the same time, the wind blew across her face, pushing her hair further into shadow.
Her scarred lips parted as she spoke quietly to herself, "Shadows are called. I need to reach up to Manager." She turned away from the balcony, took a towel, and headed into the bathroom.
Water spilled across her skin as she stood unclothed beneath the shower. Her scars were fully visible, spread across her body as the water washed over her lean, lithe physique and defined curves. She began counting rapidly.
"99 times of infinity, hundred…"
She completed the count within seconds.
"As usual, the number of electrons and mesons were just similar."
Her eyes remained fixed and unblinking as she processed the data. When the shower ended, she stepped out wearing a robe, her hair still dripping with water. She shook her head once, and every droplet moved with precision, gathering into a glass and filling it halfway.
She arranged her bed and table, then walked into the kitchen. She reheated the food from the previous night and stirred the meat curry slowly.
Extending her fingers, she reached into reality itself, and the glass she had left in the bedroom appeared instantly in her hand. She poured a single drop of water into the curry, and the boiling reaction intensified violently.
She opened the refrigerator and scanned its contents, that are vegetables, meat, drinks, and other necessities.
"Where did I kept it? I know I placed that in between the space time of cauliflower."
She smiled faintly as she reached forward and grasped the edge of what appeared to be cloth.
Pulling it out sharply, she whipped it open, transforming it into a layered dimensional box. Each higher layer existed on a qualitatively superior ontological level, rendering the lower layers completely flat in comparison. She opened one layer.
"Not this!"
She shut it immediately. Opening another layer, she exposed a massive electron-reducing beam tearing through reality toward her position, though it never reached her.
She closed that layer as well. Opening another, she nodded.
"Ahh yes!"
Grabbing a shirt from within, she pulled out an entire human body, a man of gigantic frame. His eyes were motionless, one torn apart and grotesque.
His body was cold, completely static, and unmistakably dead. A massive hole occupied his right chest where the heart had once been. Without hesitation, she slammed her hand into his left chest and tore out the lungs.
They were dry, stained with a dull crimson.
"Every single real blood is dipped out and what just left is a minor crimson to fool the Bureaus. But…"
She smirked.
"Not me!"
She placed the lungs on the cutting board and looked back at the corpse.
"six feet, two not-five inch taller."
She cut the lungs into six pieces, each slice measured precisely at two and a half inches. She dropped them into the boiling curry, now dark brown and black.
The moment they entered, thick black fumes burst outward, and she was engulfed by an expanding emptiness. She walked through memories of events that had happened, events that could have happened but did not, and every other possible outcome.
The nothingness screamed with infinite variations of dark echoes, realities where much never occurred and much did.
She stumbled upon a familiar memory of a man being chopped apart. She looked at it and screamed,
"Well, this is it, because it is not!"
Infinite layers of emptiness began to collapse as she focused on the memory.
"Argh… it is not what it is, I didn't fail, I just need a day, I can fulfil your wish, just give me the money!"
The man begged frantically as he was held choking by a dark silhouette, more alluring and darker than the emptiness surrounding her.
"Let me… let me!"
The dark silhouette whispered into his ears.
"I can't even leave a crumble of feast when you present me the most delicious memories…"
Fangs emerged as the silhouette reached toward the man's eyes. He screamed as the fangs pierced his body, consuming his eyes along with a grey rat-like entity bound like a thread.
The dark silhouette suddenly turned toward her and screamed,
"You can leave! You insolent agent!"
She was thrown out of the realm. As the dark silhouette lunged toward her, she pulled the curry from nothingness and hurled it forward, drowning the entity in it. The silhouette began forming physical mass.
She froze all her subatomic motion completely, stepped forward once, and blitzed it apart. From the fragments emerged a glowing white sickle. She turned and sliced it cleanly.
She snapped back into her living room. The glass of water toppled toward her, and she dodged instantly. Where the water struck, reality collapsed, leaving only a veil where emptiness echoed, which is non-spatial, non-mental, and completely devoid of time.
"Fuck!" she exhilarated.
She snapped her fingers and appeared in another universe. A tall building filled with advanced technology stood before her.
"Manager. I'm here!"
She entered the building, climbed the stairs, and passed several officers until she reached the floor where Razael stood. Razael was countering a glowing light and turned toward her.
"Soo Jung Un… You fought it. What did you receive?"
Razael took a deep breath and continued speaking.
"So you found the fragment of highly non-possible memories from his dark universe using your rejuvenation of concept of crimson blood and the skreech-water? That's fast! But not fast enough… The moment you wield your sickle, I was there…"
Soo Jung became expressionless. Razael snapped her fingers.
"Hold this creation for me!"
She threw an illuminating incomparability toward Soo Jung, who caught it effortlessly, she is not-holding and holding it simultaneously. In her hands rested an entire creation particle of a universe which decided that universe's fate.
"Why do you think that I wouldn't notice? Nevertheless, you did good, but can be better. And that man who died is a replacement… of official stark where you connected moving information is corrupted…" Razael asserts.
The illuminating creation didn't explode.
It unfastened.
Light peeled away from itself as if it had never been sealed properly, and the universe began to come apart, not violently, not loudly, but incorrectly.
Causality of the universe lost its grip first. Distance followed. Meaning thinned. Soo Jung reacted on instinct, forcing the creation back into coherence, pressing laws together where they no longer wanted to touch.
It held.
For a fraction of a moment.
Then everything stopped.
No sound. No background hum of existence. No informational flow. Her foundational particles locked in place, not frozen, denied motion.
She could not sense time passing because time was no longer addressing her. Reality continued elsewhere, but excluded her completely, like a sentence with its subject erased.
She realized, with a clarity that brought no comfort, that this was not suppression.
It was attention being withdrawn.
Then something noticed the gap.
Reality split, not outward, but inward, like skin parted from the wrong side. The darkness behind it wasn't empty. It had depth. Intention. From within that absence, an eye opened.
It did not look at her.
It recognized her.
The moment their awareness aligned, Soo Jung felt an intrusion far worse than pain: her history began to feel searchable. Not read, indexed.
Her scars, her memories, her permissions, all reduced to accessible structures. She understood then that if the eye completed its focus, she would not be destroyed.
She would be redefined.
Soo Jung tore herself free by snapping reality apart at the seam, severing the gaze before it could finish asking its question. The eye closed, not in retreat, but in satisfaction.
Silence returned.
But it was no longer empty and also empty.
Something had learned she existed.