The air tasted of rust and rotting meat.
Sector-12. Lowest level of the old capital.
699th year of the Eclipsed Calendar.
Up above—far above—seven sky-rings were said to glow like pale halos.
But down here, no one had ever seen them.
Down here, there was only the unmoving red dusk, the color of blood half-dried beneath a lamp that would never switch off.
Si-Hyun crouched on top of the corpse of a Hollow Saint.
Once human.
Now a thirty-meter mountain of black cartilage and tentacles, collapsed across three ruined blocks.
Its chest cavity had ruptured days ago; dog-sized carrion crows still snapped their beaks over the leftovers.
The sweetness of death lingered—thick, cloying, intimate.
Si-Hyun didn't wear a mask. Masks cost money.
Instead, he wrapped the lower half of his face with the same threadbare black scarf he'd worn since he was nine—oil-stained, frayed, once his mother's.
The only thing he owned darker than the world.
With a bone saw, he cut along the Saint's secondary sternum.
SFX: Krrr—KRRRRRKK.
The tendons here were still elastic; black-market clinics in Sector-11 paid three days' food for ten centimeters of Hollow tendon.
Enough to survive a month.
Enough to continue the search for the thing he had vowed to find before death found him first.
He worked in silence.
Words wasted oxygen.
Oxygen was rationed—even for the living.
The saw screamed again.
SFX: SKREEEE—
And something inside the corpse answered.
SFX: …thump.
Si-Hyun froze.
SFX: thump.
SFX: thump.
Not the crows.
Not wind moving through deflated lungs.
He knew this rhythm.
He had heard it in dreams since childhood—slow, ancient, patient.
The sound of something chewing on the far side of reality.
He should have run.
Every scavenger knew the rule:
If the corpse still beats, you leave it for the Cleaners.
But hunger and curiosity share the same teeth.
He pried the cracked ribcage open with both hands.
Inside the hollow where a heart should have been floated a crystal the size of a child's fist.
Perfectly black.
Perfectly smooth.
Something inside it moved—
twelve wings folded tight,
an eyeless eye,
a lipless smile.
The crystal pulsed.
SFX: (Low hum… WOOOOOM).
The scarf around his neck tightened—fearful.
He reached out.
His fingertips brushed the surface.
And every Stigma in Sector-12 began to bleed.
From the old woman selling rat skewers,
to the gang enforcers gambling on the roof,
to the sleeping babies in their mothers' arms—
every black mark split open and wept dark blood.
A chorus of screams rose into the red dusk.
SFX: AAAAAAAAHHH—!
Si-Hyun didn't scream.
He only watched as the crystal cracked like an egg—
SFX: CRRRK—CRACK!
—and poured itself into his palm, up his wrist, under his skin, racing toward his heart with the hunger of something that had waited seven centuries for this exact moment.
His vision went white.
Then crimson.
Then black.
A voice whispered in his skull.
The voice of his mother, the night she died.
Gentle. Tired. Already saying goodbye.
"…My poor boy… you were supposed to be perfect."
The crystal reached his heart and stopped.
The voice shifted—no longer gentle.
"You rejected me once.
So this time I will use you as a key."
Something inside his chest tore open.
SFX: (MEAT-TEAR) SLLLLCK—!
Pain followed—immediate, blinding, absolute.
Si-Hyun collapsed inside the corpse's ribcage.
Black veins crawled up his neck, across his collarbones, under his scarf.
His left eye bled amber light.
His right eye bled nothing.
The Hollow Saint beneath him shuddered, relieved to finally be empty.
Far above, beyond the poison clouds and fallen steel,
the sixth sky-ring flickered just once—like a dying bulb.
He coughed a mouthful of steaming blood.
SFX: KHFF—PTSSS.
His fingers turned translucent; beneath the skin, tiny wings unfolded and folded again—restless, alive.
His scarf moved.
Not from wind—there was no wind here.
The frayed ends rose like serpents, tasted the air, brushed his cheek with something tender…and settled back around his throat.
Tighter.
Warmer.
Alive.
He stood slowly.
The crows were silent.
Even the monsters hiding in ruined alleys had fled.
Si-Hyun wiped blood from his lip.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet—raw from seventeen years of barely using it.
"…Fine."
He looked up at the place where the real sun had once burned.
"If the world ends anyway…"
His hand pressed against the darkness now living in his chest.
"…then I'll be the one who chooses how."
The scarf rippled—pleased.
Somewhere deep inside him, twelve wings stretched one millimeter wider.
And high above, beyond the broken sky,
the thing sleeping in the hollow sun cracked open its eye.
Only a fraction.
But enough.
SFX: (COSMIC EYE OPENING) VMMMMM—
And the world shuddered.