There was once a man who lived in a dream.
He woke each morning to soft breaths against his skin, to sunlight warming the cheeks of a sleeping woman beside him — her lashes fluttering as their son's laughter echoed down the hallway. There were toys scattered across the floor, half-drunk bottles of formula on the nightstand, and walls lined with tiny scribbles that no one had the heart to erase.
He had everything. Everything people kill for. Everything people die chasing.
Love, wealth, youth. A life without blemish. A wife who smiled even in storms. A child who clung to his finger as if it were the world.
And then, without warning, the dream shattered.
In its place came silence. The kind that stretched endlessly between heartbeats. The kind that wraps around the soul like a noose.
She no longer smiled.
He no longer laughed.
And their child—Their child was gone.
They say grief is a weight, but they are wrong. It is a void. A hunger that devours thought, time, identity. He wandered it barefoot, unseeing. No longer a man, not yet a ghost.
When they found him, he was clutching a blanket as if it were still warm. Whispering a name the wind would not carry.
And so, they locked him away. Sedated him. Cut open his mind and tried to fix what couldn't be stitched.
But monsters are not born in labs or loony bins.
They are carved in sorrow.
Sculpted by madness.
And when Kang Dae-Hyun emerged from that darkness, he no longer believed in dreams.
Only in war.
Against fate. Against death. Against time.
And he would win — not because he deserved to.
But because he had nothing left to lose.