Ha-eun woke to the taste of rust in her mouth. Her throat was dry and raw from screaming. The air around her like thick and metallic, the ground beneath her shifting between different textures one moment, it was coarse sand, and the next it felt like spongy moss that oozed warm liquid. Pushing herself up, her hands sank into the unstable ground, and she stared at the impossible landscape.
The sky is more like a shiner. It wasn't the deep indigo of night but a mix of purples and greens, swirling like oil on water. There was no sun and no stars, only a sourceless glow that cast everything in a sickly twilight hue. The horizon stretched endlessly, broken only by pointed pillars of obsidian spearing upward, their surfaces reflecting distorted glimpses of visions.
But Ha Eun cannot distinguish each of them because each vision is a constantly moving scene that she can't catch with her naked eyes, a flicker of a bustling street in Seoul here, a shard of tundra there. Between them floated various debris: a child's bicycle suspended mid-fall, a shattered mirror shining with trapped light, and a doorframe standing upright with no walls to anchor it.
"This isn't real. Where am I?" she muttered, only to feel fear and confusion flowing through her mind.
She had been certain that she was in her dorm just a short while ago, but now she found herself in this unfamiliar place. Her last memory was of touching a mysterious cube carved with a word, and then everything went blank until she arrived here.
"Where is the cube?" She suddenly recalled why she had crashed into this strange world. She looked around, hoping to find a clue about the mysterious cube, but to her surprise, there was nothing around her, only a vast, dark desert glowing eerily in the distance.
She walked. Time doesn't flow here. Her phone was dead, and her watch was frozen at 9:47 PM, the same time she was at the dorm.
"Time doesn't work here. There is no concept of time here," she thought." If I can find that cube, maybe I can get out of this creepy world." She muttered her herself, but no one could hear her answer the question, only silence around her hummed.
Hunger tortured her, but thirst was worse. She licked her lips and tasted salt as if the air was leaching moisture from her body.
The terrain shifted without warning. One moment, her sneakers crunched over gravel that sparkled like crushed glass; the next, she sank her ankle-deep into ash so fine it felt like silk. She passed a staircase floating sideways into the endless sky, its steps strewn with wilted peonies. The flowers' petals bled crimson sap when she brushed them, staining her fingers.
"Hello?!" she shouted, her voice flat and lifeless, as if the void swallowed sound whole. No echo. No reply.
She spotted a crumbling school desk drifting lazily overhead, suspiciously, its wood warped and stained with ink. Ha-eun jumped up and grasped its leg to pull it down. The moment her fingers made contact, the world rippled.
In that moment, she saw another version of herself—not sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat but with her hair in twin braids. A younger, softer version of her mother handed them both tangerines and sighed contentedly, "My two daughters." The other girl grinned, revealing a gap where Ha-eun had chipped her tooth at twelve.
"Unnie, let's trade!" the girl said, offering a candy bracelet.
Ha-eun withdrew her hand from the desk and dropped it.
"I'm an only child", she thought, only bitterness remained in her mouth as the vision vanished into ash.
Exhaustion dragged at Ha-eun's limbs. She collapsed against the rusted husk of a derelict bus, its windows shattered and seats gutted. Inside, shadows pulsed.
She froze as a creature oozed from the wreckage, an outline of liquid smoke, its surface rippling like static. A single glowing fissure split where its face should be, emitting a low, resonant hum. It didn't attack. It watched.
"What… what are you?" she whispered.
The fissure widened, producing a sound reminiscent of a dial-up modem screeching in an unfamiliar language. Ha-eun stumbled back, and when she blinked, the creature vanished. Only a charred handprint remained on the bus seat, far too large to be human.
Days? Weeks? Ha-eun lost count.
She stumbled upon a phantom convenience store suspended in a crater, its fluorescent lights buzzing ominously. Inside, the shelves were lined with unlabeled cans and protein bars wrapped in static-fuzzed plastic. An unmanned cash register rang endlessly in the background.
The first bite of a chocolate bar tasted like burnt hair and soy sauce. She gagged but managed to swallow it down. Thirst forced her to lick the condensation off a crumpled soda can, the metallic tang making her shake.
Her reflection in a shard of mirror glass startled her hollow cheeks, eyes bruised with exhaustion, and hair matted with grime.
A cracked mirror lay half-buried in a field of withered sunflowers. Ha-eun hesitated before touching its frame.
A Ha-eun in a lab coat stood atop a conference stage, her smile strained but triumphant. A banner read: "Dr. Lee Ha-eun: 2043 Quantum Entanglement Breakthrough." Colleagues cheered as she raised a trophy shaped like a Möbius strip.
"This proves consciousness can bridge parallel realities," her double declared.
The crowd erupted, but their faces melted mid-applause, skin sloughing into puddles of wax. The trophy warped into the cube.
Ha-eun shaken her hand back. The mirror shattered. On the second day.
She first saw it at dusk (though there was no sun to set). The cube hovered above a dried-up fountain, its surface now etched with glowing, insect-like hieroglyphs.
"Wait!" she said.
She rushed to where the cube was. When she tried to grab it, the ground collapsed beneath her. She plunged into a river of black sludge, its current dragging her under. It burned not fire, but the ache of freeze burn, numbing her limbs. When she clawed her way out, coughing tar-like liquid, the cube was gone.
"Coward!" she screamed, but only her voice echoed in the void.
She began marking her path: 1, 2, 3… carved into debris with her fingers.
At Mark 17, she found a child's backpack wedged in a tree's hollow. Inside: a waterlogged math textbook (Korean, 1998 edition), a rusted pocketknife, and a Polaroid of a family picnic. The faces were scratched out.
At Mark 29, she discovered a drawing-covered wall suspended sideways. Spray-painted in shaky Hangul.
Don't pay attention… They're listening. After showing that warning her worry makes more worse.
At Mark 41, she heard piano music unlike any she had heard before and followed it to a grand piano, half-buried in the sand. The keys played themselves, coated in algae.
A rotting doorframe stood alone in a desert of black sand. Ha-eun reached for the broken wood with her fingertips. As she turned around, she felt the darkness enveloping her, but then she saw something. In a candlelit room, the antique dealer, appearing younger with his hair still black, knelt before a glowing cube. An open journal lay beside him:
"Day 217: It feeds on regret. I will not be its next meal.
Day 403: I tried to destroy it. Now my wife doesn't recognize me.
Day 612: I sold it to the girl. Forgive me."
He pressed a revolver to his head. The cube pulsed.
BANG.
Ha-eun gasped as the doorframe collapsed into dust.
On Mark 48, she smelled smoke.
A campfire burned long ago in a ring of scorched stones. It had been tended to carefully. Beside it lay a rusted knife engraved with the symbols ΔΣ and a torn page from a textbook stained with blood.
"Time here isn't circular, it's folded. Survival is the only thing I can do now, find the Architect."
The writing was not as good as she had hoped it would be. It was clear that someone had rushed the message, but it filled her with new hope that she was not alone here.
Ha-eun pocketed the knife. Her hands shook was not from fear, but excitement.
"Okay," she told the silence, grinning through cracked lips. "Let's survive."
That night, or what passed for night, she curled up beneath a withered oak tree and hummed her father's favorite song:
My life is like a morning glory…"
Her voice cracked. She swallowed. Then, from the void, something hummed back.