Prologue
When I opened my eyes, I was in the world of a novel.
One that I had written myself.
“Damn it.”
Damn it. Yes. It’s damnation.
To be a bit more precise, add one more character to the front.
This was a world destined for destruction.
And I was the only one who knew how to save it.
The problem was, I couldn’t tell this fact to anyone.
I recalled what had happened just moments before.
I opened my eyes.
With a somewhat dazed expression, I looked around my surroundings.
What I saw was a room in complete disarray, as if a storm had passed through.
A room. Can this space even be called a room?
A curtain, torn to shreds, its form barely recognizable, and what were once probably a desk and a bed were now pitifully reduced to greyish powder, scattering here and there in the blowing wind.
Grey, a color reminiscent of a funeral home.
I lightly touched the wall, and it crumbled away, its debris scattering.
I muttered in bewilderment.
Where is this?
My head throbbed dully, perhaps from last night’s heavy drinking.
I was sure I had passed out on my bed in my tiny one-room apartment, barely 15 square meters.
But when I woke up, my surroundings were gloomy and strange, as if a bomb had hit.
After barely calming my confused mind, I thought of several possible scenarios.
Among them, the most rational one.
“Kidnapping?”
But I immediately dismissed it.
Putting aside the purpose of kidnapping me, if I were kidnapped, wouldn’t it be normal to be restrained in some way?
Or for the kidnapper to at least be present.
After considering a few more possibilities, I eventually gave up.
None of them were realistic.
To the point where believing I had fallen into the prologue of a novel I wrote seemed more plausible.
I decided to first get out of this room-that-wasn’t-really-a-room.
I thought I’d soon be choking on all this dust.
Well, if I go out and look around, I’ll figure it out, right?
I grabbed the door handle to go outside.
Immediately, with a crumbly sound, the handle broke apart.
“ā¦ā¦”
I just kicked the door a few times, and a hole large enough for a person to pass through appeared.
I tried to head outside without much thought, but then froze on the spot.
Because the scenery outside was surreally horrific.
The building I was in, including this room, was already half-destroyed, clearly revealing the outside.
Under a black sky, mask-like specters, belching black clouds, covered the entire earth and sky. No one could call this realistic.
An inexplicable chill made my body shrink involuntarily, and a strange sense of dĆ©jĆ vu swept over me.
As if I had experienced this before, sometime.
It was only natural to be filled with questions.
It was a hellish landscape, no different from hell, with skeletons walking about and specters filling the sky like stars.
Something that should be billions of light-years away from an ordinary Korean citizen like me.
Wondering if it was a dream, I slapped my own cheeks, but all that came back was a stinging pain.
I stood there blankly, unable to do anything.
I just couldn’t bring myself to move.
How much time had passed?
The black sky roared and split open with a *riiip*, vomiting something out.
Something.
Yes. Even though I called it ‘something’, it was an eye.
A giant eyeball.
A pupil.
The amber-colored eye, sunk in gloom, was so enormous it covered the entire horizon as far as I could see.
It was quite a feat to instantly identify it as the form of an eyeball.
And then.
Soon after.
It looked.
At me.
I lost consciousness.
