It always started the same way.
First came the sound. Screams, sharp enough to split eardrums, pouring in from every direction. The sensation of hundreds—thousands—of voices forcing their way inside his body all at once. There was no stopping it. Once the door was opened, it wouldn't close.
Then came the pain.
Thick mud trickled down his cheeks and seeped into his mouth, coating his tongue with something slick and foul. He didn't know when he had collapsed. Something was leaving his body—seeping out from beneath his skin, from between his bones, as if being shredded with every breath. Each time he inhaled the air—damp earth and blood—his ravaged lungs screamed. He didn't have enough strength left to twitch a single finger.
Blood ran hot from his nose and mouth. Through his dimming vision, he could only stare at the cold rain falling as though it had come to watch him die.
He could feel his own heartbeat at his fingertips. So faint it could have stopped at any moment. He shut his eyes, trying to hold on to that pulse, pressing down on his trembling hands. Before any thought of wanting to live, a single name surfaced at the edge of his lips. It never became sound. It dissolved with the blood.
Then a strange shadow fell over the muddy ground.
The rain overhead stopped. No—that wasn't quite right. Something enormous was blocking the sky. He wanted to look up, but his locked neck muscles only screamed in protest, refusing to move. His vision was too far gone to make out any shape. But one detail cut through the darkness: the color of the fabric trailing beneath the shadow. A vivid blue, unmistakable even through the rain.
The shadow moved slowly toward him. Cold drops fell again on his forehead. He rolled his eyes to follow the figure, his neck too stiff to turn. A sensation came over him—the things draining out of his body were gradually slowing. Stopping. Something was forcing the open door shut.
If the world went dark just like this, the dream would finally be complete.
"...Hah."
When he opened his eyes, the mold-stained ceiling of his cramped apartment greeted him. The pain still lingered—real, or the dream's. He couldn't tell.
A persistent image. A cruel prophecy. A curse. He'd long since lost count of how many times this dream had found him. Same scene, every time. Same pain, every time. Gong Ian remembered the agony and the sting of cold rain the instant he woke. And each time, that blue light.
Clinging so desperately to something that doesn't exist.
Gong Ian reached toward the ceiling, then let his arm fall.
Ever since he was four and saw a 'non-human' for the first time, his life had been that way.
At first, it was only a sense of wrongness. In the middle of a bustling street, a strange figure stood frozen—still as a paused frame. The moment Gong Ian, driven by a child's curiosity, stared into those black, hollow eyes, he foamed at the mouth and lost consciousness.
From that day on, his ordinary life derailed completely.
His parents, on the verge of tears, visited every place in the country with a reputation for spiritual power. His childhood memories were cut through with the clang of a famous shaman's gong and the sharp bite of incense smoke. Behind the chaos of those rituals, watching grotesque figures crawl out from the corners, he learned what fear was.
"The kid's clearly unwell, and you're throwing money at shamans? Pathetic."
The relatives' words hit like nails. Arguments became routine. Sometimes it came to blows. His parents endured every kind of humiliation to protect their only son. They carried heartache and bruises everywhere they went, but forced smiles for him.
Looking at those worn, desperate faces was harder than seeing any ghost. So, for the first time in his life, he lied.
"I don't see them anymore. Mom, Dad… I can't see anything."
"Ian… Honey, Ian is…...!"
At those words, his parents burst into tears and pulled Gong Ian into their arms. Beyond their embrace, a woman with no lower body rested her chin on his shoulder and cackled. Gong Ian pressed his small hands over his mouth.
Time passed without mercy.
He went to university like everyone else, moved into his own place—but his daily life only grew more torn apart. Through the gap under the bathroom door of his cramped studio apartment, in the darkness beneath the sink, even inside the ceiling vent—they never stopped watching him. He had lived with ghosts crossing his threshold for so long that fear was no longer the right word. He was simply exhausted by it.
At his part-time job at a convenience store, a child ghost clinging to a customer's back raked the back of his hand with sharp nails. No flesh tore away, but that crawling sensation seemed to carve itself into bone and refused to fade. The man with the broken neck, who had followed him since his first year of university, eventually shoved him down a flight of stairs.
He had never been physically hurt by a ghost before. He hadn't even noticed how much he'd been relying on that fact.
Then, in an instant, it changed.
"Maybe I should've just ended it all back then...."
His classmate Shin Jaeyeon worried every time she saw the dark circles hollowing out his face—worried the way only someone who genuinely cared could. But nothing got better.
Night was no refuge. It was something else entirely—a festival where the worst things crawled up from beneath the surface. The moment he lay down and closed his eyes, wet footsteps rushed in from all directions, as if they'd been waiting. A sticky whisper licked at his eardrums. A sharp, shredding laugh tore through his mind. Gong Ian pressed down on his already-shut eyelids. Grotesque shapes burrowed into the back of his eyes regardless. Even with his ears buried in the pillow, their malice traveled through his bones, arriving intact.
He had finally reached his limit.
With shaking hands, he opened the drawer and grabbed the sleeping pills. He chewed them dry. They tasted like rust and bitter chalk. He wanted to hack away at his own consciousness—anything to end this waking nightmare.
The medication settled over him like a water-soaked sponge. Through his dimming vision, he caught the date marked on the calendar.
One week.
One more week before he could leave this room—thick with its foul, clinging stench—and move into his grandmother's old house. Gong Ian called up the air of that place in his mind. The smell of nothing. The silence where nothing could be heard. That place alone had been the one sanctuary in his life where the noise simply didn't reach. He pressed his face deep into the pillow and repeated the words like a spell.
Just a little longer. Just a little more.
The week that followed passed on a knife's edge.
It wasn't until he finally climbed into the old truck and left Seoul's noise behind him that he could take a real breath. The strange beings, fortunately, could never follow each time he moved. Whether that was their limitation or the new space simply refusing to let them in—it didn't matter. In the quiet that came just after a move, at least a month of silence waited. It was salvation, plain and simple.
But his grandmother's old house was something different altogether. Even the breath of the old, groaning wood felt like comfort.
"Ian, are you sure you'll be alright there? People say it's practically haunted…"
His mother's voice came through the phone, soft and damp with worry, breaking the quiet. With every step he took, the floorboards cried out beneath him—but Gong Ian found the sound oddly reassuring. It was friction. It was real. A million times more human than the mocking laughter of the disembodied dead.
"I'm fine. It's actually much better here."
He breathed in the stale air and pushed his few belongings inside.
This old house his grandmother had left behind had always been treated like an inconvenience—inheritance or burden, no one could quite agree. It had stood empty for years. But the air wasn't stale. Not fresh, exactly—more like a deep stillness, as though even time had stopped. Something between silence and held breath.
The moment he crossed the threshold, the foul odor that had clung to him like a shadow was simply gone. It felt as though a massive ward was blocking out everything wrong with the world. Neither his parents nor his relatives would ever know that this abandoned house was the only place Gong Ian had left.
After unpacking, he moved slowly through the house. A two-story wooden structure set in an old courtyard. The silence here was nothing like Seoul's cold asphalt quiet. This kind of silence, for him, was a welcome.
He climbed to the second floor and went through the rooms one by one. Instinct—checking for anything that might defile the only sanctuary he had. He searched every drawer.
Then Gong Ian's hand stopped, deep inside the wardrobe.
A box, hidden behind a faded quilt. Inside it: a dark red cylinder. The pattern carved into it showed long, trailing leaves, bending as if in mourning. Gong Ian traced the unfamiliar leaves with his fingertips. They were nothing more than carvings in cold wood—but each time he touched them, something tightened at the center of his chest. A dull ache with no name.
He stopped touching it, uneasy, and gave the cylinder a gentle shake. A faint rattling came from inside—it wasn't empty after all. That small, sharp sound rang out through the still room and caught at his nerves.
He reached for the lid.
And then—
A gaze poured over him from behind. Icy cold and burning all at once.
It was unlike anything he had felt before. Dread gripped him from every direction. He couldn't move.
A man stepped out of the darkness and studied Gong Ian's body—his shell. His clothes were different. His eyes were different. Different from the man he remembered.
Similar. But not the same.
The man's eyes stirred with something deep. Measuring, suspicious, he began to circle slowly around Gong Ian. With every step, the strange sensation grew stronger. Gong Ian set the cylinder down on the desk—nearly threw it. The heavy cylinder struck the wooden surface with a dull thud. The sensation vanished instantly, like fog clearing.
He shuddered once against the sudden chill, then dropped onto the bed.
That night, for the first time in months, Gong Ian slept deeply without pills. No nightmares. No hands closing around his ankles. None of the faces he could never bring himself to look at directly. None of the voices and laughter that had been tearing through his mind.
For the first time, morning light felt like something worth waking up to.
He went downstairs, his body so light it felt strange. A tune came to him—he didn't know from where. He spread sweet jam on golden-brown toast, breathed in the smell of fresh coffee, and thought:
'This. This is how people are supposed to live.'
"Is that for eating?"
His hand froze midair, toast halfway to his mouth.
Ice-cold dread poured down his spine. Had even moving house stopped working? He frowned and looked around. The corner of the ceiling. Under the dining table. Behind the refrigerator. The places where they usually crouched, watching him.
Nothing.
"What are you looking for?"
Right beside him.
Gong Ian turned on instinct—and caught his breath. A man was crouching under the table, in exactly the same position he'd been in. When their eyes met, the man tilted his head, puzzled.
"Should I help you look?"
His voice was gentle. His eyes were vivid enough that Gong Ian could have mistaken him for someone alive. Long black hair. Translucent skin. Lips a deep, unmistakable red. Beauty, shaped into a human form. There was no smell of rot or decay—only a chill that raised the hairs on the back of Gong Ian's neck, proving the man's existence.
He had seen ghosts his entire life. Ones that clung. Ones that scratched. Ones that shoved. Not a single one had ever tried to hide its malice.
But this one.
This one was beautiful.
Disturbingly so.
"Who… are you?"
Gong Ian's voice shook, barely. Show weakness and it'll consume you. He squared himself into a defensive posture and held the man's gaze. The man studied his face in return.
The face in front of him was clearly a stranger's. And yet—something familiar flickered behind those eyes, catching at the man's nerves like a splinter.
As though confirming that the young man before him was truly the one he had searched for so long, the man drew his slender fingers slowly down along Gong Ian's form. Brushing through his hair. Passing his ear. Coming to rest at the nape of his neck. Gong Ian swallowed. It was unmistakably not the touch of a living person—and yet the place he had touched felt hot.
In that instant, a voice grazed his ear like a shard of broken glass.
Call me. Cheonghyeon.
Without thinking, his lips parted. The name that came out felt like something that had been resting on the tip of his tongue for a very long time. Like it had always been there.
"...Shin Cheonghyeon?"
The moment he said it, something moved deep in the man's eyes.
An age of forgetting so long that even names had been lost. The man had waited for no one but this person. The shell had changed—but that faint pulse, and the scent of that soul, remained painfully, unmistakably the same.
The man smiled, savoring the beat he felt beneath his fingertips.
"It's been a long time. …A very, very long time."
It wasn't clear what he was looking at as he spoke. One could only guess it had something to do with hearing his name called.
"I hope you'll find it to your liking this time."
That low voice brushed against his ear. The strange certainty in the man's gaze closed around Gong Ian. The cool, detached observation had—at some point—become something else. Something ravenous.
Gong Ian held himself still beneath the weight of that stare, and understood, without knowing how:
This was not a ghost he had never seen before.