The world ended quietly.
Not with screams. Not with fire. Not with the thunder of war. Not with a single divine trumpet. Only silence.
And yet, when he awoke, it felt louder than any noise he had ever known.
Han Joon-seo opened his eyes to a city draped in ruin. The streets were empty. Cars sat rusting in frozen mid-motion. Streetlights swayed lazily, tired of the weight of centuries. Skyscrapers, their glass facades shattered, reflected a sky bleeding violet and indigo, as if reality itself had been wounded. The air smelled faintly of dust and metal, heavy with the echoes of a humanity long vanished.
He did not remember falling asleep. He did not remember anything. Not his name, not his birth, not his family. He could not remember the warmth of sunlight or the caress of a breeze.
All he knew was emptiness—and a faint, constant hum beneath his skull, like glass being brushed by an unseen fingertip.
The first step was agony. His legs felt like lead, unresponsive, as if the ground itself wished to claim him. Dust swirled at his feet, whispering secrets he could not yet hear. Broken signs hung like tombstones: "Welcome to Seoul", "Do Not Enter", their paint peeling into illegibility.
And yet, among the rot and ruin, something shimmered faintly in the shadows—a spark that did not belong to the sun, the moon, or the stars.
Something watched.
He tried to speak. Nothing came out. Not a word, not a sound, not even a scream. The city consumed his voice. Silence pressed against him, cold and expectant.
And yet, in that silence, he felt… something stir.
A pulse. Not in his chest, but beneath his skin. Somewhere older. Somewhere vast. Something that remembered.
He staggered forward, unsure if he walked or if the city dragged him along like a stone in a river of shadow.
The first sign of life—or unlife—was subtle. A newspaper fluttered in a broken window, pages turning with a wind that carried no sound. Among the headlines, he saw the words: "The Great Silence". The ink was smudged, barely legible. His fingers brushed the paper, and a cold shiver ran up his spine.
The city whispered his name, though he did not recognize it.
Then the shadows shifted.
From an alleyway, a figure emerged. Not human, yet not entirely other. Its form flickered, as if reality refused to hold it. Limbs bent at impossible angles; its skin reflected the night sky, fissures glowing faintly with light that seemed alive. Its eyes—if they could be called eyes—were pools of black, absorbing all light around them.
Joon-seo wanted to run. He wanted to scream. He wanted to do anything to stop the terror. But he was rooted to the spot. The city was rooting him, and the creature was only inches away.
Then it tilted its head. And he felt it: not his fear, but something older. Something deeper. Ancient. The fear that had fed gods, monsters, and nightmares before humans ever existed.
Instinct—or something far older—flared inside him. His hands shook, but he clenched them anyway. A small light—tiny, almost imperceptible—bloomed in his palm. Weak. Pathetic. But the first miracle he had ever performed.
The creature hissed, recoiling, then lunged.
The light in his hand erupted. Not fire. Not energy. Something else. Something part of him but not of him. The creature screamed—not human, but a tearing of reality itself—and evaporated into shards of black crystal, scattering across the street. Each shard pulsed faintly, leaving echoes in his mind, whispers he could not yet understand, but somehow… remember.
He fell to his knees. The shards called to him. One floated into his palm, tiny and warm, like a heartbeat. When he touched it, it dissolved, sinking into him with a jolt of power and pain.
Visions flared in his mind: abandoned temples, broken altars, mutating monsters, cities that had once thrived—flashes of human life, fading prayers, screams, laughter.
They were not his memories. They belonged to the world.
The sky cracked. Not with clouds, not storms, but with light. Jagged ribbons of divine energy tore through the night like shattered glass. In their glow, he saw shapes that were not meant to exist. Shadows of colossal beings drifted through the broken city—gods abandoned, starving, their forms incomplete, trembling. They noticed him. Some stopped. Some drifted closer.
And all whispered:
You are not meant to be here.
The city groaned. Buildings shifted as if awakening. Streets stretched and bent. Joon-seo realized with a shiver that he was not walking on solid ground anymore. The alley he had come from had dissolved, replaced by an infinite corridor of fractured reality.
A voice—calm, omniscient, impossibly deep—spoke inside his head:
Child of nothing. God of nothing. You are a seed in a garden that has long since died. Survive. Learn. Become. Or vanish.
He did not understand fully. But he understood the meaning.
A noise came from above—a soft, metallic clinking. He looked up and froze. The sky was no longer a sky. It was a ceiling of darkness, fractured with glowing lines of blue and violet. Something moved along them. Something enormous. Something that remembered humanity and hated it.
He had no name. No domain. No past. No believers. No temple. Nothing.
And yet, for the first time, he felt… alive.
The shards on the ground trembled. One rose slowly, hovering before him, and another whispered:
Follow me.
Instinctively, he reached for it. Pain shot through his chest. The shard dissolved into him, burning, awakening, claiming him. And with it, something awoke inside the Silent City—a force with no name, no story, no origin.
Something that should not exist. Something that would change everything.
The wind whispered again. Faint footsteps echoed through streets where no feet could possibly tread. Muted, distant, endless.
He took the first step forward.
The city waited.
The world waited.
And the Great Silence was watching.