Yohan shuddered, cracking the joints of his left hand as a dark unease crept through his bones, his right fist clenching at his side.
Nothing around him was familiar. In his entire life, as far back as he could remember, he had never been to a shore — let alone anything resembling a mountain like this. Not once, for any reason.
Which made him start questioning the part of the text that had claimed this world would be a reflection built from one's own experience in the real world.
Did I misunderstand that part...?
There's not even a trace of any living thing...
Yohan stood there for several minutes, silently studying his surroundings and steadying his thoughts.
There were only two options before him — ascend or descend the slope.
Both directions carried the same harrowing dread. Just looking at that tenebrous trail filled him with a dull, instinctive horror, yet he chose to climb.
Maybe it was intuition or simple human stupidity.
Either way, Yohan stepped forward and began moving upward.
He waded barefoot through the warm, sombre liquid flowing along the path.
The warmth should have been comforting.
Instead, stirred a repugnant nausea in him.
There was something repulsive about it—something his body disliked before his mind could explain why.
He tried not to think about what it might be and kept walking.
Yohan exhaled slowly and looked ahead again.
There wasn't even a trace of life.
No birds crossing the sky. No insects in the pale ground. No distant sounds. No footprints. No houses. No human presence.
Nothing.
Yohan kept climbing and climbing and climbing...
Minutes stretched into hours and exhaustion began settling into his bones, yet the throat-like passage enclosed by unsettling trees dusted in something white and powder-fine showed no sign of ending.
***
Eventually, Yohan lost all sense of time.
He couldn't tell whether he had been climbing for hours or for days.
Walk. Breathe. Climb. Fall. Get up. Walk again... That was all that remained.
All he knew was that he had been walking, just walking, for longer than he could measure. He had fallen and stumbled countless times from sheer fatigue and kept going anyway, until his legs reached a point where lifting one foot ahead of the other felt genuinely beyond him.
His legs felt hollow while his lungs burned.
And it wasn't just the exhaustion. He was ravenous to an extreme — hungry enough that he could almost feel his stomach pressing against his spine.
But to his despair there was no slight change in the route, no end in sight, not a single living thing beside those enclosed trees that stood dead and still and somehow more sinister than any living monster he could have imagined right now, though he had precious little energy left to imagine anything at all.
SPLASH!
Yohan collapsed into the puddle and sprawled out flat.
Just...when will this be over? When will I die—
His dulled eyes flickered for a moment.
Die?!
Yeah... why didn't I think of that before?
A dry, humorless chuckle echoed in his head.
Can't I just die and return to reality? I don't have to suffer through this and waste away here, enduring this slow, grinding pain.
Without moving or lifting his head, he reached along his waist and pulled out a knife — clipped near the large pocket of his trousers. The kitchen knife he had brought with him, kept within the triangle alongside his clothes.
Though he wasn't entirely sure why they had carried over — whether it was because of the triangle, or because they had been in contact with his body.
Whether they were real here or simply some peculiar projections of themselves in this dream-like world, or something more cryptic than either explanation.
Clenching his teeth and straining his eyes, Yohan brought the tip of the knife to his chest where the heart would be and gulped.
Come on, come on... It'll only be for a few seconds, then I'll wake up. That's all. You can do this... please.
He held the tip there for a few seconds, breathing shallowly, and closed his listless eyes.
What am I afraid of?
Just do it... it's not like you'll actually die, right? So why can't you?
And even if you do... then what? You wanted to die eventually anyway.
He pressed the tip harder against his chest, feeling a sharp pricking pain — but he couldn't bring himself to go further. Couldn't make himself do any real harm, let alone drive it through.
SHFFK—
He forced himself into a sitting position, his head swimming, plunging the knife beside him.
"...shi..." His voice cracked under his breath.
I have to overcome this... I-I have to—
With wavering hands he brought the knife's edge to his wrist and stared at it for a moment, then moved it to his carotid artery, which he could locate just by running his fingers along the strained, sunken side of his neck.
He gulped and drew out an exhausted breath.
CHK—SQUELCH!!!
I... can't.
I can't—
He flung the knife to his side into the puddle and buried his face in his palm, a hysterical smile cracking across his mouth beneath it.
I can't, I can't...can't, can't, can't!!
I...
He grimaced under his palm, grinding his teeth with whatever strength he had left in him.
...can never.
I can't kill myself this way. I still haven't overcome it. I...am a loser, I have always been one.
***
Unfortunately, Yohan had a fear, a phobia.
One greater than death itself, he claimed to accept to his self.
Fear of blood.
Not in the ordinary way people flinched at injuries or winced at pain, but something far more irrational, invasive, and humiliating—a fear that felt less like disgust and more like psychological collapse.
Yohan feared blood, not the pain that often accompanied its loss. Just blood...
The sight of blood leaving a living body, especially through ruptured skin, torn veins, a slit wrist, a pierced chest, the pulse of an opened artery—something about it shattered his composure in a way he could never properly explain.
He didn't know when or how it had taken hold — whether he had developed it or simply been born with it.
Maybe it was inherited, though no one in his family seemed to carry anything similar.
Some fears were like that—rootless, unreasonable, yet absolute.
At one point, his aversion had become so severe that he had nearly turned vegetarian, avoiding meat simply because the sight of it made something uneasy stir inside him.
But as he grew older he managed to work through certain aspects of it and gradually returned to eating meat.
In an attempt to understand the fear more precisely he had even forced himself through gore documentaries and graphic films, and what he found was that it wasn't blood in the abstract that undid him — it was something specific about it, something that surfaced only under certain conditions he himself couldn't fully articulate.
One thing remained constant regardless: he could not stand the sight of his own blood leaving his body.
If he had to describe what it felt like in as few words as possible — it was like losing yourself. Like your mind coming untethered, your head wobbling, and splitting into two segments, unable to process anything straight, a deep shudder moving through your entire body without permission, and several other insidious sensations.
This was why, even when he had attempted suicide, he had chosen to hang himself. So, he wouldn't have to see the blood.
***
Beneath his palm, two streams of tears slid down simultaneously.
Screw it!
He tried to push himself up but couldn't stand, feeling utterly hazy and drained of any strength to even keep his eyes open.
He had lost track of how long he had been walking, pushing himself well past his limits, without sleep or food — existing inside a world devoid of anything living, let alone anything edible or drinkable.
At one point he had nearly convinced himself to taste the eerie warm liquid flowing beneath him to relieve his parched throat and cracked, bleeding raspy lips. But no matter how desperate the urge his body made — something stopped him each time, a quiet persistence that told him this would end soon, that it wasn't real anyway, that it was just an agonising nightmare that would end at any moment.
Yet no hint of that reassurance bearing fruit had come, even now. He was no closer to an end than when he had started, stuck in what felt like an impasse with no visible exit.
Yohan stared upward with hollow eyes.
Then, with something between conviction and pure stubborn hatred, he forced every bone and muscle in his body, and began crawling upward through the wet puddle rather than standing, driving the knife into the ground ahead of him as a wedge to haul himself forward — like a climber working a rock face.
A pathetic, starving creature dragging itself forward through sheer refusal to stop.
Because maybe—
Just maybe—
The end was near of this perpetual despair and who knew he was already close to the brim of this seemingly eternal channel.
I've done enough... I want to rest now. Can I?
That's for you to decide.
But I think...
You gravely slipped something indispensable through your memory when you decided to take this step...
He blinked.
Ah, I just remembered—
He stretched his hand forward, drove the knife into the ground, and hauled himself another inch upward. The words left him in a voice so low they barely qualified as sound.
"Always be cautious of what you wish for…"
...but be far more cautious of whom you wish it from.
To his misery, Nothing visibly changed despite the meagre distance he had covered with such immense struggle.
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the barely visible void of the sky, and began waiting for something inevitable to envelope him.
And...
Humans and monsters are not the only ones that can wear masks.
Even truths can. Even lies can.
And so the world you see, hear and feel can.
Yohan's listless eyes widened — subtly, though it felt more pronounced than it appeared as if a sudden epiphany had been bestowed upon him.
He slowly reached his hand to the left pocket of his trousers.
How did I forget this!
And pulled out a matchbox. He sluggishly opened it and took out a single matchstick.
What if this world is real and I'm being tricked into killing myself?
He gazed at it for a couple of seconds, then scraped it repeatedly against the box, lighting it, and sighed after watching its flame for a couple of moments.
What a fool I am to entertain such absurdity.
He let his arms drop into the puddle.
It definitely is a drea— no, I dunno, I don't know a thing. Where am I, what is this place, what is real and what's happening?
That text had certain rules, one of them told me to keep a match box with me, which could help distinguish whether the world around you is real or something beyond reality and comprehension
If the flame burned steadily without flickering or consuming the stick continuously until blown out, it meant I wasn't in the real world. If it behaved otherwise, I was.
That was how it described telling the two apart. It didn't say why.
I assumed there must be a reason — to prevent the performer from killing himself in the real world by mistake, trying to escape back into it out of some false belief or misunderstanding...
Wait... I dunno whether the ritual wants me dead or not. At one point it's giving me precautions to prevent me from dying, and at the same time it's killing me slowly here if I don't resort to self-sabotage.
For an instant, I almost believed this place was real, but the flame suggests it isn't. And honestly, I refuse to believe a place like this can exist in the real world anyway.
With these thoughts settling over him, he finally gave in, closing his eyes and accepting whatever came next, knowing there was nothing more he could do but... right at that moment a sudden icy wave tore through him like countless razor-sharp daggers driving through his torso from behind.
His eyes flew open, buzzing with dizziness on a flat, expressionless face, a violent quivering tearing through every inch of his body and flooding his skin with cold dread.
'What are you doing? What...are...you...doing....?!!!'
A heavy, oppressive, cacophonous voice skewerd through his skull and simultaneously Yohan felt two eerie shadowy hands protruding through the earth from opposite sides of his head — one gradually wrapping around his eyes and darkening his vision, the other sealing over his mouth entirely. Yohan lay still, not resisting in the slightest.
'Have you forgotten your promise? Have...you... forgotten...your...promise...'
The shuddering intensified, travelling all the way up into his skull and erupting into a fury of distortion, and he managed only a low, moaned utterance.
pRoMisE?
'To kill... you've to kill... we've to kill...all of ours... all of yours... all of theirs... You— '
But before he could grasp anything more, he snatched the knife from beside him and without a moment of reluctance stabbed it through his heart and...died.