The city no longer felt like Seoul.
It felt like something wearing Seoul's skin, stitched together from broken neon, bent steel, and shadows that had forgotten how to behave like shadows. The air pulsed like a drumbeat, every vibration synced with Lin's own heart, until he couldn't tell if the world was echoing him or if he was echoing it.
The abyss-born filled the streets in impossible numbers. They weren't attacking. They weren't hunting. They were kneeling—foreheads pressed to cracked concrete, claws scraping in rhythmic devotion. Their bodies writhed with twitching veins of black ichor, but they moved as one, every twitch bending toward Lin like blades of grass bowing to the wind.
And then the sky tore open.
