[The Long Walk Home]
The walk back to my house was usually a fifteen-minute stroll, but today, it felt like a pilgrimage through hell. Every step I took sent a sharp, jagged wave of pain shooting up from my ribs, rattling my teeth. My face felt heavy, swollen like a water balloon about to burst. My left eye was swollen shut, reducing my vision to a blurry, half-world tunnel.
Jin walked beside me, carrying my school bag on one shoulder and his own on the other. He was uncharacteristically silent. Usually, Jin would be filling the air with jokes or complaints about homework, but now, his silence was louder than any scream. It was a silence born of guilt and anger.
"Ray..." he started, then stopped, kicking a pebble on the sidewalk. "Are you sure? We can go to the clinic. My uncle works there, he won't ask questions."
"I'm fine," I gritted out, the words tasting like iron. I turned my head and spat a mouthful of blood onto the gray concrete. It was bright red, a stark contrast to the dull pavement. "Mom will freak out if she knows I got into a fight. She worries too much already. I'll just tell her it was a stray ball at the basketball court. Or I fell down the stairs."
"You look like you fell down the stairs, then got run over by a truck, and then the truck backed up to hit you again," Jin muttered, his voice dripping with frustration. "I should have stepped in sooner. I shouldn't have listened to you."
"It's not your fault, Jin." We reached my front gate. The small garden looked peaceful, the flowers blooming in the sunset. It felt like a different world compared to the violence of the school. Jin handed me my bag. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and respect that I hated. I didn't want pity. "Call me if you die," he said, a weak attempt at humor. "See you tomorrow," I managed a crooked smile that probably looked hideous.
[The Sanctuary Breached]
I unlocked the door and slipped inside. The house smelled of lavender and freshly cooked stew—the scent of safety. I tried to move quietly, like a ghost, hoping to sneak into my room before anyone saw me. But I wasn't a ghost. I was a bleeding, limping mess.
"Ray? Is that you?" My mother's voice came from the kitchen. "Yeah, Mom. Just... tired," I called back, my voice rasping.
She walked out, wiping her hands on her apron. "Dinner is almost rea—" She stopped. Her eyes went wide. The ceramic plate she was holding slipped from her fingers. CRASH! The sound of shattering porcelain echoed through the silent house like a gunshot. Shards of white ceramic flew across the wooden floor.
"Oh my God! Ray!" She didn't care about the plate. She rushed toward me, her hands hovering over my face, afraid to touch me. Her face went pale, draining of all color. "Your face... Oh my God, your face! Who did this? Was it a gang? I'm calling the police right now!"
She turned to grab the phone, panic seizing her movements. "No, Mom... no police." I grabbed her wrist. My hand was shaking. "Please. It's not a gang." I tried to smile to reassure her, but the movement split my lip open again, sending a fresh trickle of blood down my chin. The pain was blinding. "I... I tripped. At the gym. I fell onto the bleachers. I'm just clumsy, remember?"
She looked at me, tears welling in her eyes. She knew I was lying. A mother always knows. But she also saw the desperation in my eyes. She didn't press me. "Come," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Let's get you cleaned up."
She led me to the bathroom. I sat on the closed toilet lid while she gathered cotton balls, antiseptic, and bandages. I looked in the mirror above the sink. Whatever confidence I had pretended to have vanished. My face was a ruin. A map of violence. My left cheek was a deep, angry purple. My lip was swollen to twice its size. There was a deep gash above my right eyebrow that was still oozing blood. "This... this is going to leave a scar," my mother whispered, her hands shaking as she dabbed alcohol on the cut.
"Ouch!" I hissed, jerking back. "I'm sorry, baby, I'm sorry," she cried, blowing softly on the wound. "It's deep, Ray. This might need stitches. Maybe we should go to the ER."
"No doctors," I said firmly. "Just bandage it. I'll be fine." She spent an hour cleaning me up. She bandaged my head, put a compress on my eye, and taped my ribs. She fed me soup in my bed, spoon by spoon, as if I were five years old again.
"Sleep," she said, kissing my forehead, right next to the bandage. "The pain will be worse in the morning, but you need to rest." She turned off the light and left the door slightly ajar.
[The Night of Reconstruction]
I lay in the dark. My body was screaming. Every nerve ending was on fire. My ribs throbbed in rhythm with my heartbeat. Thump-pain. Thump-pain. I stared at the ceiling, wishing for unconsciousness. "I'm weak..." I whispered to the empty room. "I'm so weak."
Eventually, exhaustion won. I drifted into a fitful, feverish sleep. But in the middle of the night... something changed.
I didn't wake up, but I wasn't fully asleep either. I was in a state of limbo. The pain, which had been a sharp, stabbing sensation, began to mutate. It turned into an itch. A burning, maddening itch deep beneath my skin. It felt like thousands of tiny, invisible ants were crawling inside my flesh. It wasn't just on the surface. I could feel it in my bones. I could feel it in my muscle fibers.
Heat. An intense heat radiated from my chest, spreading outward to my face and limbs. It wasn't the heat of a fever. It was the heat of a furnace. A machine working at maximum capacity. I tried to move, to scratch the itch, but my body was paralyzed. I was locked in.
Then, I heard it. Not with my ears, but inside my brain. A faint, mechanical hum. Like the sound of a hard drive spinning up, or a server room coming online. And then, the blue text appeared behind my closed eyelids.
[Initiating Bio-Repair Sequence...][Resources Allocated: 100%][Repairing Tissue... Knitting Bone... Flushing Toxins...]
[Progress: 10%...][Progress: 50%...][Progress: 100%...]
The itching stopped abruptly. The heat vanished. I fell into a deep, black void of dreamless sleep.
[The Uncanny Morning]
Beep. Beep. Beep. The alarm clock screamed. My eyes snapped open. I sat up in bed, instinctively bracing myself for the wave of pain that should have come with the movement. I waited for my ribs to ache. I waited for my face to sting.
But there was nothing. Silence. No pain. No stiffness. No ache. It felt... wrong.
I touched my face. I expected to feel swollen, tender flesh. Instead, my fingers met smooth, firm skin. "What the..." I threw the covers off and jumped out of bed. I ran to the mirror on my wardrobe door.
I froze. The reflection staring back at me was me... but it wasn't. The white bandage on my forehead was still there, but it was hanging loose, no longer sticking to any wound. With trembling fingers, I peeled the tape off slowly.
Underneath, where a deep, bleeding gash had been just eight hours ago... there was nothing. Not a scar. Not a scab. Not even a pink line. The skin was perfectly smooth, pale, and unblemished. I touched my cheek. The purple bruise was gone. I poked my ribs. No pain.
My face looked pristine. In fact, it looked better than it did before the fight. My skin was glowing with an unnatural health. My eyes were clear and sharp.
"Impossible..." I whispered, pressing my face close to the glass, looking for a trick of the light. "Did I dream it? Did the fight not happen?" No. The memories were vivid. The blood on the sidewalk. Jin's face. The shattered plate downstairs. I looked at the bandage in my hand. It was stained with dried blood. The blood was real. The injury was real. So... where did it go?
Knock, knock. "Ray? Are you up?" My mother pushed the door open. She was carrying the first-aid kit, her face etched with worry and lack of sleep. "I brought fresh bandages and some painkillers. How is the wou—"
The words died in her throat. The first-aid box slipped from her hand and hit the floor with a dull thud. She stood in the doorway, her mouth slightly open, her eyes wide with shock—and fear. She walked toward me slowly, as if approaching a wild animal. She reached out and grabbed my face, turning it left and right. Her hands were cold.
"Where..." her voice shook. "Where are the bruises?" She touched my eyebrow, rubbing her thumb over the smooth skin where the cut used to be. "Yesterday... your eye was swollen shut. I saw the bone, Ray. I saw the blood."
She looked into my eyes, searching for an answer. I looked back at her, terrified. I didn't know what to say. How do you explain a miracle that feels like a curse? "I... I don't know, Mom. Maybe... maybe it wasn't that deep? Maybe it just looked bad?"
"Ray..." She stepped back, her voice dropping to a whisper. She looked at me not as her son, but as a stranger. "I cleaned your wounds for an hour. I wiped your blood with my own hands. I know what I saw."
She looked at the bloody bandage in my hand, then back at my perfect face. The fear in her eyes was real. It wasn't just confusion. It was the primal fear of seeing something unnatural. Something that defies the laws of nature.
"What is happening to you?" she asked.
In that moment, a chill ran through my entire body. I looked at my reflection again. The face in the mirror was mine, but the eyes... they seemed to hold a secret I wasn't privy to. My body didn't fully belong to me anymore. There was something inside. Something that worked while I slept. Something that fixed me... not to save me, but to prepare me for what was coming next.