The world cracked.
Not with a bang or a flash, but quietly, like a heart that had stopped beating.
Kim Minjun stood amidst the ruins of what was once a bustling lab. Now, only silence and ash reigned. The air was thick, heavy with the scent of ozone and burnt metal. Every breath was painful.
Before him, the Echo pulsed—not a wound, but a gaping heart of the world itself. It called to him, flickering like a memory that couldn't be erased. In every beat, he heard his own fear and guilt.
Minjun closed his eyes. And the darkness immediately responded with a face. Gray-green eyes that once held a hidden light. A smile that could warm even the cold of the barracks. Sohyeon.
Now, only a ghost. Only a bracelet on his wrist, heavy and cold, a reminder: he hadn't saved him. He had failed.
"I should have..." The words were a whisper that dissolved into the hum of the Echo. And, as if in mockery, a distorted echo answered him, as though the rift itself were repeating his pain.
He stepped inside. The light didn't burn him; it tore him apart from the inside. Minjun wasn't looking for a way. He was looking for an end.
In the other world, there was no sun, no hope. Only a lead-colored sky and ash that fell like eternal snow.
Lee Sohyeon sat at the lab table, clutching the ring in his fingers. The small Stella crystal glowed faintly, as if it, too, were tired of this world. It remained the only spark of the one he had lost. Minjun, who had gone in a blaze, while Sohyeon was left alone—with memories and with shadows.
He had long since stopped trusting himself. Hallucinations stirred in the corners of the lab, a voice whispering to him in the dark. Sometimes he felt someone else's breath on his skin.
"Will you come back?" he'd whisper, and the flickering lights seemed to nod in reply.
In that moment, the air trembled. The instruments came to life with a wild shriek, the needles shaking, the light scales blinding. The Stella crystal flared in his hands. Space compressed, and a figure was born within it.
Sohyeon couldn't believe it. His heart was beating too loudly for him to hear anything else.
He knew that face. That look. That scar. Minjun.
But the eyes...
There was no warmth, no hope in them. Only a stranger's pain.
And in that second, Sohyeon didn't know who he was seeing—a love or a ghost.