Chapter 9
- Sunha's POV -
My hands were dead-cold, rotting under the weight of an invisible, silent decay. The air tasted of frostbitten iron and old blood. It was a predatory winter—the kind that doesn’t merely freeze skin, but creeps into the skull like liquid nitrogen, crystallizing gray matter until it fractures into jagged shards under the heavy, silent strike of a hammer.
My eyes stared, unblinking, at the crow trapped in my hands. A sickening, possessive warmth bloomed in my chest. I had caught it. It belonged to me.
My fingers sank into its smooth plumage, feeling the fragile, frantic heartbeat beneath the feathers, mimicking the texture of a prized, well-groomed black cat. The creature writhed against my palms, its tiny muscles convulsing, claws scratching frantically against my skin in a desperate bid for air.
But it was far too exquisite to ever release. In my head, I was already drafting the blueprints of its prison—a beautiful, golden cage where it would rot just for me.
"So beautiful..." I whispered, utterly transfixed by its terror.
I didn't notice my grip tightening. Affection mutated into a vice, crushing and absolute, like the instinctive, iron-clad grasp of a dying infant refusing to surrender its only toy.
*CRACK*
The sound was disgustingly loud, snapping through the dead silence of the frozen courtyard. Hollow bones splintered beneath my thumbs. It echoed beneath the towering, skeletal tree that loomed over me like a wooden guillotine.
I had snuffed out its life with my tiny hands. How easily a nine-year-old boy could snap the spine of a living thing just because he wanted to own it. My lips pouted in irritation as the crow went entirely slack, turning into a heavy, fluid weight in my palms, its beak dripping a single bead of dark crimson onto my thumb.
I didn't cry. I didn't panic. A cold, flat indifference washed over me. The toy was broken; it no longer had any utility. I began to peel a single glossy feather from its wing, just to see how easily it detached.
"You useless piece of filth! What do you think you're doing?!"
"Are you really trying to mimic that godforsaken bastard?! Hah?!"
The screaming didn't come from a place of maternal anger; it was an administrative lecture. Mother stood on the porcelain porch, her manicured nails catching the winter light. She wasn't looking at me—she was looking through me, as if looking at a stain on a pristine rug.
Upstairs, framed by the wide, oppressive glass of the upper floor, was the rigid silhouette of my older brother, Jitae. His head was bowed so low his neck looked anatomically deformed. Another punishment. Mother’s methods of correction were always beautifully horrific.
The crow slipped from my fingers, hitting the frozen earth with a wet, heavy THUD.
My entire body flinched when—
*SLAP*
The sound of Mother’s hand fracturing the skin across my brother's face tore through the glass. It wasn't a sudden outburst. It was slow. Rhythmic. She slapped him with the steady, calculated cadence of a metronome. Thwack. Silence.
Thwack. Jitae didn't flinch. He had already learned to leave his own body behind.
I averted my eyes, only to freeze.
The atmosphere around the porch didn't just darken; it died. Standing at the threshold of the mansion was a towering male figure. He didn't seem to occupy space the way a human did; rather, the light and the freezing air seemed to actively curve around his silhouette, as if the physical world was recoiling from his existence.
He was a monolithic tear in reality. I couldn't claw back a single facial feature from my memory—the wrongness of his presence smeared his face into an abyssal, shifting static. He was completely silent, yet the sheer gravity of his towering form made the air pressure drop so violently my ears popped. He felt like an ancient, voyeuristic god watching an insect wriggle on a pin.
"Young Master, dinner is served. Return inside immediately."
The dread broke. A servant had materialized beside me—a middle-aged woman bending so low her spine threatened to snap under the weight of her submission. Strangely, I couldn't remember her face either. When I looked at the staff, their features were always smeared, fading away into a gray, featureless blur, like wet charcoal on a canvas.
They weren't people to me. They were background furniture in a house built on blood.
- Time Skip: 10:55 PM -
The television screen held my mind hostage. I had been curled into a tight ball on the floor for three agonizing hours. My eyelids burned, weeping from exhaustion, but a primal force kept my gaze locked to the flickering vacuum tube. The living room was an ocean of pitch-black shadows, starved of light except for the violent, synthetic glow of the screen slowly boring a hole into my retinas, leaving green and purple ghosts in my vision.
"Hey Lily! What did you find?"
"Oh, look! This gem is absolutely breathtaking!"
"Woah... it really is..."
Suddenly, the cheerful colors of the cartoon violently corrupted. A jagged spike of horizontal tracking lines tore across the screen, melting Lily's face into a smeared, unrecognizable trail of digital rot.
*RINGGGGGGGGG*
A high-pitched, deafening screech of pure static exploded from the speakers, a frequency so violent it made my teeth ache and my eardrums throb.
"Ugh, no! Stop it! Don't break! I want to watch it!" I screamed, a manic, childish rage bubbling in my chest.
I threw myself at the television. I hammered my fists against the thick glass over and over, desperately trying to beat the cartoon back into the cathode-ray tube. When that failed, I grabbed my heavy plastic toys and hurled them with full force, battering the glass until the screen flickered into a dull, low-contrast black-and-white.
The vibrant world of Lily was completely gone. In its place was a grainy, clinical nightmare—a cold, fixed camera angle capturing a baseline laboratory experiment. On screen, a pale, emaciated subject was strapped tightly to a cold metal chair in a windowless concrete cell, twitching violently against leather restraints. The background audio emitted a heavy, suffocating mechanical drone that vibrated in my sternum.
Then, the audio tracks broke. A secondary, horrific voice bled out of the speakers. It was deep, wet, and warped by an impossible, cosmic exhaustion, staggering out like a dying man trying to speak through a throat choked with wet gravel:
"PLEASE.. I-I-I I I -I NEED RESTTTTTT..."
The voice didn't sound human. It sounded like an illegal underground broadcast of an atrocity—a soul stripped completely bare, pleading desperately to a god that had long since closed its eyes. The phrase looped, stuttering and glitching over itself, cascading into a layered chorus of mechanized agony.
"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" I shrieked, losing my mind in the strobe-light glare.
In a blind frenzy of pure, unadulterated panic, I raised my fist and slammed it straight into the center of the warped display.
*BANG*
The tube couldn't handle the internal pressure. The television exploded outward with a deafening pop.
Jagged shards of heavy, treated glass and scorching copper wire sprayed into the dark room. A long, razor-sharp fragment sliced directly across my cheek, and another bit deep into my palm.
"Ah!" I gasped, stumbling backward onto the cold hardwood floor.
Warm blood began to pool in my hand, dripping rapidly through my fingers. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. But the physical pain was instantly swallowed by a crushing, paralyzing wave of terror.
The television was shattered. The screen was a black, hollow crater of jagged edges and smoking wires. But the sound hadn't stopped.
From deep within the smoking, broken wreckage, the internal speakers hissed with a foul, distorted power. The mechanical drone was louder now, accompanied by the distinct, wet sound of crackling electricity. Through the smoke, the agonizing voice continued to warp, scratching through the ruined audio tape, mocking my destruction:
"PLEASE... NO MORE... I-I-I NEED RESTTTTTT... PLEASE GOD..."
My breath caught in my throat. Tears of pure horror blurred my vision. It was broken, but it was still talking. It was still screaming.
What have I done? What have I done?
Mother's face flashed in my mind—her cold, elegant, unblinking eyes. If she finds out I ruined her pristine house, if she hears this disgusting, forbidden noise echoing through her halls... she will flay me alive. She will lock me away where the light never reaches. My hands shook so violently I could barely press my bleeding palm against my chest to stop the trembling. I was trapped in the dark with a corpse that refused to die.
. . .
"Aw, look at the pathetic little boy crying. It's alright, my sweet... it isn't your fault."
While the ruined television continued its relentless, glitched chanting—“I-I NEED RESTTTTTT...”—a new voice, dripping with syrupy malice, echoed right inside my ear canal, cold and damp. I whipped my head around, my skin crawling.
A girl was sitting right beside me on the blood-spattered floor. Her face was a shifting, faceless void of shadows, completely devoid of features except for a faint, mocking curve where a mouth should be. She wore tattered, rotting rags that smelled of ancient dust and copper. Before I could move, her frail, skeletal arms snaked around my neck, pulling me into a suffocating embrace until her ice-cold cheek pressed against my fresh, bleeding wound.
"Sweet, fragile little boy... don't weep. Let me kiss the terror right out of you."
Behind her, the smoking television's documentary drone swelled, the agonizing voice on screen screaming over itself in a layered, overlapping frequency of pure suffering.
Her voice was a toxic lullaby, paralyzing my nervous system. Before my brain could process the danger, her mouth pressed against mine. My first kiss. It tasted like ash, decay, and liquid fire, scorching the skin off my lips.
My eyes stretched wide as her form began to distort, twisting into something profoundly grotesque. Those soft, frail hands mutated into jagged, calcified claws. She shoved her fingers deep into my mouth, violently forcing my jaws apart, stretching the skin until the corners of my lips ripped open, the joints popping with a wet snap as she nearly tore my lower jaw from my skull.
And through it all, the broken television didn't stop. It grew louder, a clinical, horrific soundtrack to my desecration, matching the rhythm of the entity crawling down my open mouth. Her impossible, disjointed dimensions folded and compressed to slide down my throat while the smoking speaker hissed: “PLEASE... I NEED RESTTTTT...”
The agony was absolute. Real. Cosmic. I could feel her cold, sharp edges scraping against the interior of my esophagus, tearing the lining as she nested herself deep within my chest, taking my breath away.
The demon entered my body, tearing up my throat.
And then, through the crimson haze of my dying vision, I saw him again. That man. That towering shadow.
He stood at the edge of the darkness, entirely unbothered by the flickering, screaming television wreckage, completely immune to the rules of our reality. The shadows of the room didn't fall on him; they seemed to be pulled toward him, bleeding into his coat.
He was an observer, staring at my desecration with a cold, terrifyingly detached indifference. He didn't look down at me with pity or malice—he simply watched, like a scientist observing an anomaly in a glass jar, while the television experiment tape wailed its final, broken pleas into the dead night. His silence was louder than my screams.
"H... help... please..." I tried to choke out the plea, but my vocal cords had been charred to a crisp by the entity's descent. Only a wet, bloody wheeze escaped.
The world dissolved. My entire vision bled into a distorted nightmare of undulating, crimson waves, like looking through a lens smeared with fresh blood.
