Inside the decaying bones of the house, Taejun lay sprawled upon the warped wooden floor, his body trembling with exhaustion, his breath stuttering through clenched teeth as he tried to push himself upright.
Slivers of rotted timber had embedded themselves in both palms, blood threading down his wrists like red thread unraveling from a puppet's hand.
Every muscle in his frame shivered with the strain of simply staying conscious, and his eyes, wide, glassy, desperate, darted from corner to corner in search of salvation.
Perhaps he was looking for a window, though none remained intact; maybe he only sought a crack in the world, some fracture in this nightmare where light might seep in.
But the house gave him none.
Then it came, the sound he'd begun to fear even more than silence, a single footstep, echoing from the far left corner where no light ever reached, a place so deeply claimed by shadow it seemed to drink in even the memory of illumination.
The footfall was deliberate, heavy with a weight that suggested not just mass, but memory, as though each step crushed down the recollection of countless others who had fallen here before him.
Then the voice followed, oozing from the dark with a gentleness that felt more obscene than any scream: "Ah… welcome, at last. It's taken you so long to come. I trust the road was difficult, good. Only the worthy arrive winded."
There was a rustle of something not quite cloth, not quite flesh, and the figure, still concealed entirely in gloom, raised an arm, extending it with the theatrical grace of a host unveiling a long-sealed tomb.
The hallway behind him yawned open, not with invitation, but inevitability.
"Please, do come in," the voice continued, as though this were a parlor and not a house that breathed. "Mind the threshold, it remembers things... especially those who hesitate."
Taejun's nails scraped helplessly against the grain of the floor as he tried to move away, but his limbs betrayed him, too weak from whatever unseen thing had already taken hold.
The figure took a step closer, the floor beneath him creaking not with age, but with something almost alive, like a spine shifting under skin.
Then he leaned forward, or perhaps merely let his presence advance, until his breath brushed against Taejun's cheek, cold and fragrant with mildew and old meat.
"You must be hungry," he whispered, and though his voice remained soft, no louder than the flutter of moth wings against a lampshade, it wormed into the ear and settled there like larvae. "The house has already begun preparing you."
Somewhere deep within the walls, there was the distant clatter of dishes, though they rang not with hospitality but with ritual, and the house, ever attentive, sighed as if pleased.
Taejun, broken and breathless, dared not speak.
His mouth had gone dry with horror, and yet his tongue still tasted salt, either from his blood or the tears he hadn't realized were spilling down his face.
"Wait…" The word barely escaped Taejun's lips, a hoarse whisper drowned in the cold stillness of the house.
It was not a plea, it was a thought breaking loose, rising like bile as something inside him began to stir, something deeper than fear.
His breath caught, his chest tightening as though the air had turned to iron.
A memory, murky and half-formed, struck him with the force of a wave smashing through glass, and he blinked rapidly, trying to dispel it, but it came anyway, uninvited, undeniable.
Richard Langford.
The name fell into his mind like a stone dropped into a well, vanishing into a depth he had tried not to acknowledge.
Taejun's face drained of color as his body went cold, a clammy frost crawling down his spine as if something had reached through his skin and turned his blood to ice.
"Richard...?" he whispered, barely audible, his voice faltering in disbelief.
Then he saw it.
His pupils contracted, his breath faltered again, and his eyes widened with a sickening clarity that twisted his stomach.
In the gloom where no light had dared to linger, the figure shifted forward, and Taejun's gaze locked onto it, not with recognition of features, for it had none, but with the bone-deep knowledge of shape, of presence.
The height, the posture, the quiet, parasitic way it stood with patience that was never human, it was the same.
It was the very thing that had followed him at the crossroad just days before, trailing behind the mist with impossible stillness, never getting closer but never falling behind.
He had thought he'd imagined it, he had prayed he had, but now, here, in this place that reeked of damp sorrow and time out of joint, he could no longer pretend.
The thing had followed him. It had waited.
And it had entered the house long before he ever did.
His heart thundered against his ribs as he began to crawl backward, palms slapping against the rough wood despite the agony of splinters digging deeper with each desperate motion.
His legs flailed, trying to find grip, trying to rise, to run, to escape, but they wouldn't move.
His knees quivered, his muscles locked in place with the stiffness of nightmare paralysis, and the more he fought, the more the sensation crept up him like vines tightening around a drowning man.
"Please…" he muttered through gritted teeth, gasping, eyes locked on the shifting figure as it took one deliberate step closer, the sound of it reverberating like a bone breaking under weight.
He tried to scream, but his throat tightened.
He tried to stand, but his body only twitched and collapsed again.
His vision swam with panic, and yet he could not look away.
The thing in the corner had no face, no eyes, and yet Taejun knew he was being watched, intimately, hungrily, as one might observe a long-lost photograph, or the final movement of a captured animal.
It felt like the air was turning inside out, folding into a shape his mind was never meant to comprehend.
It stepped closer again.
Not rushing, not lunging, only approaching, with the inevitability of gravity or death.
And still, in its hand, it held something dark and soft and wet, sagging with the weight of ink and time, a letter.
Taejun whimpered, unable to stop himself.
He tried once more to crawl, to reach for anything, a doorframe, a crack in the floor, a shard of hope, but his limbs betrayed him.
His fingers splayed across the wooden boards, raw and bloody, trembling with the useless instinct to flee.
The figure paused, towering now, just a breath away.
Taejun's eyes filled with tears, not of sorrow, but of terror too vast to carry, and through the rising fog of his panic, one final realization took root.
The letter had been addressed to Evelyn, but now, it bore a different name, Shin Taejun.
This time, Taejun truly lost control of himself; whatever boundary had held his panic in check until now ruptured like glass beneath a falling hammer.
His breath snapped into shallow gasps, chest heaving as if the air itself had become poisonous, too thick to swallow.
He scrambled back on his elbows, splinters biting deeper, blood smearing across the floor beneath his palms.
His legs flailed behind him, not in motion but in confusion, trembling and weak as if his very bones had forgotten how to stand.
Something inside him screamed, not just in fear, but in recognition.
His entire being recoiled not from a stranger, but from a name, a name that had burned itself into the walls of his memory long ago.
"No… no, no—" he stammered in a rasping whisper, head shaking in slow, helpless denial.
But it was too late for denial, too late for disbelief.
His eyes widened until they could widen no more as the thing approached, and with every slow step, reality warped around it like candle wax beneath flame.
The figure came forward like something summoned, not walking, but arriving, inevitable and exact.
And as it stepped out from the shadowed womb of the house, shedding darkness like skin, Taejun could no longer lie to himself.
There was no doubt.
That shape, that presence, that aura stitched together from dread and command and a silence more suffocating than screams, he had become him.
He was Kang Hyeonjae.
He emerged with unhurried authority, each motion deliberate and precise, as if the world itself had to pause and make room for his passage.
Layers of black cloaked his body, but they did not hang like fabric; they moved as if alive, as if woven from the breath of tombs, stitched by the fingers of something that had never known sunlight.
The folds swallowed light like a mouth drinking water, letting none escape, and the longer one stared, the more detail seemed to vanish into the void of his outline.
Trailing behind him was a long, ravaged cloak, so tattered at the edges that it appeared more like smoke solidified mid-fall.
Its hem whispered across the floor in hushed hissing, a sound not made by friction, but by memory, like voices murmuring in a language the soul remembered but the brain had forgotten.
Beneath this ghostly drape, a high-collared tunic embraced his frame with elegant severity.
Matte black and reinforced by thin, layered plates, the armor was practical and brutal, as though it had been crafted not by smiths but by circumstance.
It bore no insignia, no decoration, only the silence of someone who needed no introduction.
The collar rose high, framing his face in a darkness that refused to be broken by any light, casting his expression in permanent eclipse.
He wore no emotion.
His shoulders were squared with the quiet power of someone who had survived too much to fear anything that still breathed.
They did not boast, no part of him did; instead, they threatened, promising strength earned not through sport or ritual, but through fire, through suffering.
His arms were clad in articulated gauntlets, slim and elegant yet gouged in places where steel had met steel, or bone.
The scratches were not battle trophies, they were scars, the kind left by something that refused to die.
One gloved hand, ink-black and segmented like an exoskeleton, hovered near the hilt of a sword at his hip.
The blade's scabbard was plain and old, its leather faded and scratched, untouched by vanity or pride.
It radiated violence in the quietest way imaginable, not through flourish, but through certainty.
This was not a blade meant for show, it was a blade that ended things.
Strapped across his waist and thighs were belts layered with cruel precision, each buckle fastened with the finality of ritual.
They bristled with sealed pouches and strange objects whose shapes suggested function but defied naming, needles, vials, perhaps bones.
The kind of implements that spoke of assassins, or alchemists, or worse.
His trousers were dark, reinforced at the knees and joints, seamless in their design for mobility and death.
They tucked into boots that looked forged rather than sewn, black as petrified roots and just as unyielding, each step he took cracking something invisible in the air.
But it wasn't merely his attire, his weapons, his movement that unmade the room, it was the air around him.
It bent, warped, lowered itself in reverence or fear, gravity thickened, time thinned, and for a brief moment, the house felt like it was holding its breath in his presence, afraid to move.
And above it all, his hair, long, white, and wild, flowed behind him like moonlight unspooling into night.
Some of it was bound loosely with thin leather cords, an afterthought of order in the chaos of strands that framed his face like a storm in slow motion.
It was impossible not to look at him, terrifying to keep looking.
And on his face, pale and ethereal, there was only one flaw.
A scar, a single, merciless line running vertically down the bridge of his nose, bisecting the symmetry of his beauty like a sword stroke frozen in time.
In other words, the outfit he wore now was the same as the one he had worn during that nightmarish arrival with Haneul, the very moment when everything had first begun to fracture.
Not a single thread out of place, not a buckle differently fastened, not a stain removed, nor a tear mended.
The cloak still dragged behind him like a dying shadow; the black gauntlets still clutched the air with the same silent threat; and that same sword, plain and grim, still hung at his side like a verdict waiting to fall.
Although Taejun couldn't name him, couldn't summon a single memory that tied this figure to a place or moment with clarity, something deeper than memory recoiled at the sight.
His mind may have fumbled for answers, but his body already knew.
It knew the way prey knows the shadow of a predator, how silence knows the moment before a scream.
Every muscle in him screamed to run, yet no command reached his limbs.
His breath caught in his throat like a swallowed sob, and his heart pounded, not with confusion, but with recognition, without understanding.
This man, this thing, did not need an introduction.
He was danger distilled, death not promised but guaranteed.
Taejun didn't know who he was, but he knew one thing with a clarity sharper than any name: if this figure stepped closer, something inside him would never come back.
Taejun shook now, not from the cold, but from the weight of truth.
Kang Hyeonjae was here.