Arin was not awake yet… or at least, that was how he felt.
The cold morning air pressed against his chest as if it were a solid mass.
The streets around him twisted unnaturally, as if they were conspiring against him.
Every step he took vanished into a terrifying silence, as if the ground itself swallowed his presence.
"Is this a dream?" he murmured to himself.
"Or am I living a reality I can no longer understand?"
The words collided inside his mind, spinning and surging like an endless vortex.
"I've seen a lot… far too much… but this… this is something else."
The streets were strangely familiar, yet even more strange.
He knew every corner, every turn… and yet, he had never felt this emptiness consuming everything around him.
"Where did life go?" he whispered, his voice barely audible.
"Everything is silent… everything is watching me, and everything is waiting for me."
He felt something following him, a presence that could not be seen, with no shadow, no sound.
Just a pressure upon his awareness, pushing him forward as if it wanted something from him… a place he had never seen, yet somehow knew, knew it as he knew himself.
"Why me?" he asked himself internally, as if the question came from the depths of his entire being.
"Why does everything always happen to me?"
"Does the world hate me… or am I the one who has yet to understand it?"
He stopped at the end of a narrow alley, where the light stretched like a silver curtain across the ground, shimmering and sinking into the shadows.
He felt the distance between him and the world shrinking, and the air around him began to swirl into a cold vortex, as if pulling him beyond any place he had ever known.
He saw his reflection on the opposite wall, but it was not merely a reflection.
It stared at him steadily, unmoving, as if saying: "One moment… and everything will change."
"I… I don't understand," Arin muttered, his voice filled with confusion and fear, yet intertwined with a strange sense of curiosity.
"What is this place? What is happening to me? Am I still myself… or is something else about to take my place?"
The questions multiplied in his head like storms, each one giving birth to another, until he felt his mind on the verge of collapse.
All he could feel was the weight of emptiness, the vortex of his dark thoughts pulling him toward a bottomless abyss.
He turned, searching for anything he could hold onto… a shadow… a sound… even the smallest sign that this place had any logic.
He found nothing but silence.
Then suddenly, as if the universe itself took a breath, the darkness split apart.
Light surged forward overwhelmingly, drowning everything in a radiance stronger than the sun.
A scream burst from within him—a scream he did not know where it came from, nor why it emerged.
The beam of light pierced his vision until he could no longer see anything. Everything became white… empty… silent.
"I… am I disappearing?" he whispered to himself, but found no answer but emptiness.
"Where is my body? Where am I? What is this world?"
And in the moment he felt that everything had ended, a strange sensation came—not fear, nor pain, but a kind of deep curiosity…
A curiosity that pushed him forward, toward something he had never known before—something that might change everything he believed to be true, everything he knew about himself… and perhaps the entire world.