Aris stood frozen in front of the cold concrete wall. His heart pounded violently, echoing inside his hollow chest. He ran his hand over the surface—it was rough, porous, and real. There were no wooden seams, no keyhole, no hinges. His apartment door wasn't just locked; it had been erased from existence.
He turned around, staring at the living room, which now felt like a luxurious isolation cell. The sulfuric stench that had pierced his senses earlier was now replaced by the sickly sweet aroma of rotten roses.
"This is just a nightmare," Aris muttered, his voice sounding foreign to his own ears. "Wake up, Aris. Wake up!"
He pinched his arm hard. Pain. But the pain didn't wake him. Instead, it triggered something on the monitor, which still glowed red.
A new line appeared beneath Chapter 1:
"That pinch won't wake you, Aris. Because you're not asleep. You're being translated."
Aris flinched. He approached his desk with trembling steps. "Translated? What do you mean?!" he shouted at the monitor.
The cursor moved on its own, deleting the previous sentence and replacing it with larger text:
Aris will realize that to leave this room, he does not need a door. He needs a key. And that key is not made of metal. It is within him.
Look at your left hand, Aris. Count your fingers. Are you sure there are still five?
Aris instinctively raised his left hand in front of his face. One, two, three, four, five. He exhaled in relief. "Still five. You're wrong, you insane manuscript!"
But as he blinked, he saw something impossible. His ring finger began to stretch. Slowly, the skin peeled away, revealing bone as black as charcoal. There was no blood—only thin wisps of smoke seeping from the flesh.
He tried to scream, but his voice got stuck in his throat. The finger kept growing until it touched the floor, then began to branch out like the roots of a rotten tree.
"Do not be afraid," the manuscript wrote. "This is a purification process. The mortal parts of your body must be replaced with something more… eternal. You are an offering to soaxBLOGZ."
Suddenly, his computer speakers emitted a sharp burst of static. Aris covered his ears, but the sound seemed to come from inside his head. Amid the noise, a whisper emerged—a woman's voice, soft yet cold.
"Aris… look at the window…"
He slowly turned his head. Outside the twelfth-floor window, the sky that had once been dark was now blood-red. But that wasn't what froze him. Pressed against the glass were thousands of faces. Faceless faces—no eyes, only deep black voids—staring at him with curiosity.
They were the "Readers."
"Who are you?!" Aris slammed his fist against the glass.
The faces did not respond. They moved in unison, mimicking his every motion. One of them pressed its palm against the window. On it was the same symbol from the PDF manuscript cover: a circle with an inverted star, surrounded by unfamiliar characters.
Aris realized something horrifying: the people outside were watching him like a fish in an aquarium. They were reading his life, enjoying every second of his fear as cheap late-night entertainment.
Aris ran to the kitchen, searching for a knife or anything to end the madness. But when he opened the drawer, he found no utensils—only stacks of paper.
They were chat logs from the soaxBLOGZ forum.
He picked one at random. It was a conversation from three years ago. A user named "DarkRitual666" had asked how to summon an entity through digital media.
Aris read his own reply as a moderator:
"Only fools believe rituals can be performed through a screen. But if you want to try, send your soul as a .pdf file and let the moderator execute it."
His eyes widened. He remembered that conversation. Back then, he was just joking—trying to look cool in front of his forum members.
The text on the monitor shifted again:
Aris, you are not trapped because of that email. You are trapped because you created this door three years ago. You are the architect of your own hell. 'We' are merely fulfilling your request.
"No… that's impossible…"
The floor beneath him began to heat up. The concrete melted into a thick black liquid that smelled like printer ink. Aris tried to run back to the living room, but his legs sank up to his ankles.
The black liquid crept upward, biting at his skin like thousands of fire ants. At the same time, he heard knocking from the concrete wall where the door should have been.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
One knock for every chapter he had passed.
"Open the door, Aris," a heavy voice echoed from behind the wall. "We bring Chapter 3. And you won't like what we have for your ears."
Aris fell, his hands sinking into the black ink flooding the floor. In the final moment before his head submerged, he saw the monitor display one last instruction for this chapter:
"FOR THE READER: Check your room door now. Make sure it is still there. Because if it's not, you have just joined Aris in Chapter 2."
Aris vanished into the darkness of the ink, and the room fell silent, leaving only the monitor flickering—waiting for the next chapter to be written by his pain.