{ATTENTION! YOUR EXISTENCE COHESION IS CRITICALLY LOW. ESTIMATED TIME BEFORE REDACTION: 10 DAYS.}
It was the text that was glowing out of Jaemun's pale wrist, which was perhaps not ideal, considering the fact he was already shivering and working his poor underdeveloped lungs to their absolute limit.
If after years of hospitalization, Han Jaemun were to die drowing…
Well, at the very least he would be too dead to be embarrassed.
Out of politeness, Jaemun raised his trembling elbow to cover his mouth as he coughed. He wouldn't want the fish to be disgusted by his bodily functions, after all.
He ended up expelling a gross blend of water and dark blood, staining the lush green of the perfectly trimmed grass with inklike fluid.
Ah, it was so hard to breathe. Thank goodness his dormant survival instincts had woken up before his brain could. Lord knows he never learned how to swim.
Jaemun breathed in and coughed again, blood and water and maybe even a few tadpoles. Who knows if he did or not, these things are so tiny.
It took a few seconds of Jaemun's heart beating in his ears and his lungs struggling to return to their standard pattern for Jaemun to safely say he wasn't dead yet. His body was aching and he kept having to clean his throat to breathe through his nose, but he wasn't dead.
Out of the woods, at last. Jaemun allowed his body to collapse on the floor.
Jaemun's limbs felt like sacks of cement, but he managed to push his soggy and heavy bangs up before properly relaxing. The glass and mud were cool and refreshing against his skin, although the friction on his cheek was starting to hurt.
"I so need to go back to the gym." Jae murmured to himself, letting his eyes close.
In a sigh, Jaemun stretched as far as his poor little arms could allow before deeming the pressing matter avoided for long enough. He reluctantly opened his eyes.
"Alright, which one was it again?" Jaemun switched between his pulses, settling on his left arm rest right in front of his face.
As if noticed he was staring at it, his wrist glowed white in three quick pulses. Jaemun vaguely wondered if it was some kind of morse code, but the light turned burning red right after, quickly proving him wrong.
It projected into the air the words Jaemun had just read.
{ATTENTION! YOUR EXISTENCE COHESION IS CRITICALLY LOW. ESTIMATED TIME BEFORE REDACTION: 10 DAYS.}
Huh. So it wasn't a hallucination.
Jaemun tried to touch the floating words, but they fled from his finger vigorously.
He scowled and tried again, and the letters cowered as if he were contagious.
"Little shits." Jaemun huffed in offense, but ended up reluctantly letting it go. It's not like he could hold grudges against inanimate objects, even if they are chanting your death and running away from you. The thought made him pause for a second.
He decided to poke at his wrist instead.
The glow immediately turned yellow to his touch.
There wasn't a lot of room in his scrawny wrist to work with, but turning his finger to the left made the words hit an invisible wall, cluttering on one another. Jaemun hummed before swiping right as if it were a phone.
Thankfully, the projection changed right before his eyes.
{[WELCOME.]
YOU'VE BEEN MIXED…}
There were a lot of words. Jaemun slid to the right again.
{[ⰱⰹⱀⱅⱐ ⱄⰵⱀⱅⰹⱎⰹⰽⰰⱅⰵ] : UNTRANSLATED}
Swip.
{[ⱄⰽⰹⰾⱄ] : UNTRANSLATED}
Quickly going through all the menus, Jaemun counted three more slides before the letters started to scramble at the edge again. Totaling six screens.
To his immediate surprise, they were all color coded, fading faintly into the air as the transparent gel that formed them mingled with the environment.
Jaemun could always appreciate an organized system. Again, even if it is claiming his erasure on a platter, which he's guessing means death.
Ah. Oh yeah, death.
He swiped to the first menu again, finding the familiar words shining bright red in desperate warning.
The zoom motion, ticklish to the thin skin of his pulse, was enough to expand the section into something more readable.
{[CONDITION: CHRONIC GRAFT REJECTION]
YOUR VESSEL IS REJECTING YOUR CORE.
I'M LOOKING INTO IT.
STATUS: CHRONIC / FATAL.
EFFECT: -1 EXISTENCE COHESION PER DAY.
CURRENT EXISTENCE COHESION: CRITICAL.
ESTIMATED TIME BEFORE REDACTION: 10 DAYS.
GAIN EXISTENCE COHESION TO AVOID ERASURE.
DO TRY TO KEEP UP.}
"Goddamnit." Jaemun pinched the bridge of his nose. "Goddamnit!"
His fingers wouldn't stop trembling. Jaemun ignored them with the mastery of years of practice even with the familiar urge to tear his own skin apart fiber by fiber.
Taking a deep and sobering breath, Jaemun slid to the second menu.
The wall of blue text greeted him.
{[WELCOME.]
YOU'VE BEEN MIXED.
I GIVE YOU ALL, MY CHILDREN, A FIRST MISSION:
BRING ME THE CORE OF YOUR SUCCESSES' EPIDEMIC.
DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME.
-I}
"That was helpful." Jaemun said.
Tapping loosely on his heavy and soaking wet clothes to get rid of the loose grass, Jaemun got up. His eyes never shift from the floating text.
Jaemun tested a simple Jamo shift, then tried forming a poem with an acrostic of the first syllable of each word. His mind throbbed trying to understand how those hangul characters could even form, and he made the decision to let it go when creating a numeric key was starting to become a possibility.
It was useless, if not actively harmful seeing he was dying by the second.
Unfortunately, it seemed that whatever being had written the note did so as simply as it could be.
But he wasn't going to test anyone's patience by cursing the lack of depth in such a text. The thing that put it in his wrist was the same that teleported him into the shore of a river. Next time, they might not be so kind and decide to put Jaemun in front of a nurse. Those women were vicious and out for literal blood.
Every other menu was still blocked. Jaemun gave up on messing with his awesome and invisible watch to look around for more physical clues.
Perhaps he-
"Ah."
He gaped in awe, following the structure with his eyes until it disappeared into the sky.
That was one huge tower.
Maybe he should have noticed that sooner. Counting waking up in a swallowed part of the river three centimeters away from the shore and still almost drowning, how many more times is he going to embarrass himself today?
In his defense, the floating letters were perhaps more impressive, seeing that they were physically attached to him and bringing bearing news.
"That's so far away." Jaemun moaned resentfully, already praying for his poor and thin legs to hold on into the journey.
The structure seemed to be made with colorful bricks, although the distance of it made the fog, gigantic mango trees and paper-like clouds mingle the tower into the horizon, creating the silhouette of a seemingly mirage rather than a proper, tangible tower to reach.
To Jaemun, the whole scenario looked eerily close to when he was doped with morphine and started to see stars and pretty shapes in his brother's face. Even the sky seemed to dance as if wrapping and uncrumbling on itself, so claustrophobic close to Earth that it gave the impression that getting on his tiptoes and raising his hand was enough to touch the rough-like texture.
It was only an optical illusion, though. But it's not like he tried to touch the sky. That would be silly. Obviously no one can touch the sky.
"Except maybe that tower." Jaemun retorted himself, tapping his feet on the solid ground to get the mud away from his laces. Consequences of getting on his tiptoes in the middle of the damp shore.
It was clearly a small hill from the river, combining what looked like the sharp sandstone pillars of somewhere cold and misty with the aggressive, wet chaos of a tropical rainforest that had no business being that far up. Roots the size of small walls erupted from the mud at the base of each column, gripping the rock strongly as if they had a symbiotic existence.
The canopy above was so dense it swallowed the light whole, and yet somehow bioluminescent fungi dotted the undergrowth in soft pulses. It vaguely looked as if the forest were breathing, even with the bamboo forest growing out of the trunks and into the floor, making the space left more narrow than otherwise would've been.
Jaemun didn't even know if such a place existed on the planet he knew.
Surprisingly, though, the weather was comfortable, and the scent reminded him of wet grass.
"Cool." He exhaled through his nose and tapped softly on his chest, where his heart seemed to be beating to explode its stitches out. "You better hang in there, buddy."
Beating so loudly wasn't going to stop any predators from feasting on their dark, overoxidized blood anyway.
And regardless of how scary that dark and condensed unfamiliar forest looked, Jaemun didn't have much of a choice.
Han Jaemun really, really didn't want to die anytime soon.