The outer district greeted them with its usual hospitality.
A wall of wet wind slapped into Juwon the instant the portcullis sealed behind them. The fifty-three rejects staggered into what had once been a great plaza—now a drowned mausoleum of toppled statues and half-collapsed colonnades, all swallowed in knee-high black water reflecting a bruised violet sky.
No stars.
There were never stars in the First Layer.
Above, soldiers lounged on the battlements, laughing, placing bets on how long until the first scream.
Juwon kept his shoulders hunched, hands buried inside the sleeves of the threadbare gray robe every Seed was issued. To anyone watching, he was exactly what they believed: a trembling pretty boy seconds away from cracking.
Inside, his mind ticked like a metronome.
Four hundred thirty-two seconds until the hidden gate opened.
The Nightmare Trial appeared once per batch.
Only to those branded "Zero."
In his first life, it had taken him three years of dying, rewinding, and dying again to learn that condition.
Tonight, he would clear it before the moon shifted an inch.
The burn-scarred girl clung to the sleeve of a middle-aged man who was not her father. A college student in a torn tracksuit hyperventilated. An old woman with prison tattoos whispered in Russian.
No Korean except his.
Perfect.
A howl rolled over the ruins—too deep for a wolf, too wet for anything that should still have lungs.
The ghouls had scented them.
The group tightened instinctively.
Someone broke down crying.
Juwon allowed himself to be pushed toward the outskirts of their formation—closest to the water, farthest from safety.
Exactly where the first strike would land.
Good.
He needed them to let him die.
The first ghoul arrived faster than fear could register.
SFX: SPLASH—CRACK—SKREEEEE.
It erupted from a submerged archway like a torpedo of rotted flesh and iron nails, landing in the center of the rejects with a crimson geyser. Twelve feet tall. Skin dangling in wet ribbons. Railway spikes hammered into its arms as weapons.
The middle-aged man survived 0.8 seconds.
A punch.
A rupture.
A ribcage collapsing like wet cardboard.
The ghoul lifted something pulsing.
Screams detonated.
The rest of the pack surged in—ten, fifteen, twenty. Once-human shapes twisted by the First Layer's curse. Immortal unless their buried sigils were destroyed.
Chaos exploded.
People ran.
People fought.
People died.
Juwon ran too—slow, clumsy, perfectly pathetic. He tripped at the exact step he had calculated.
The fall slammed him face-first into black water. When he rolled over, the burn-scar girl stared from ten meters away, frozen as a ghoul charged her.
Her lips silently formed a single word.
Help.
He met her gaze.
Offered the soft, exhausted smile he had perfected over centuries.
Mouthed one word back:
Sorry.
Then let the nearest ghoul latch onto his ankle and drag him into the dark.
The last thing the survivors saw was the pretty boy vanishing between broken columns, silent.
Not even screaming.
They assumed he was dead.
Perfect.
The ghoul hauled him through flooded streets, over fallen walls, into the hollow carcass of a long-forgotten cathedral. Smaller. Older. A place even the Forgotten God no longer remembered.
It flung him atop a cracked altar like a sacrifice.
Sickly purple "moonlight" dripped through the open roof, staining everything corpse-blue.
The ghoul loomed—no face, only a ravenous black void.
Rot dripping. Breath hissing.
Juwon sat up slowly, brushing wet hair aside.
"Hi."
The word was spoken in the old tongue of the First Layer—
—the tongue only monsters and gods still remembered.
The ghoul froze mid-lunge.
Juwon rose.
The harmless mask slid off his face like water sliding from glass.
SFX: SHLIP—SHRRRRK.
His shadow on the wall suddenly had too many arms.
"You're late."
Soft.
Patient.
Almost fond.
"Seven hundred years ago I died here on schedule. You're thirty-two seconds behind."
The ghoul shrieked—rage and terror braided—and lunged.
Juwon didn't move.
The claw halted an inch from his throat. Trembling.
Because his shadow had already wriggled up the creature's legs and closed spectral fingers around the last tattered shred of its soul.
Black lines spidered across its body like frost.
The sigil in its chest—a glowing red circle—cracked.
SFX: POP.
The ghoul fell apart into a slurry of wet ash.
From the ash, its shadow peeled free—a perfect silhouette of darkness—and knelt.
Juwon patted it like a dog.
"First one of the night."
"Good boy."
The altar split with a thunderous crack.
Stone fractured.
Violet fire roared up, shaping into an archway filled with liquid night.
Ancient letters burned across its crown—letters that punished the act of looking.
[The Night That Remembers Your Name]
Requirement: Be nothing.
Reward: Cursed be the memory of you.
Juwon stepped toward it.
The shadow-ghoul followed, sinking into his own shadow.
One glance back at the distant chaos.
Fifty-three had entered.
Maybe six would live until dawn.
In his first life, he had tried to save them.
This time, he didn't remember their faces.
Progress.
He walked into the violet flames.
SFX: (WARP—REVERSE—THOOM)
The world inverted.
He stood in a mirror cathedral—
—statues hanging upside-down from the floor,
—rain falling upward,
—and at the center, floating above the altar,
a single black feather the size of a man.
The Nightmare Trial had begun.
A voice that wasn't sound vibrated through his bones.
"Zero.
You who were crowned in darkness and dethroned by light.
To reclaim what was stolen, answer in truth… or be unmade."
The feather rotated slowly.
First Question.
"What is the name you abandoned when you became Sovereign?"
Juwon's lips twitched.
A secret he had never shared.
Not with lovers.
Not with enemies.
Not with the gods he mutilated for amusement.
He looked up.
"Lee Tae-shik."
The feather bled black light.
Second Question.
"Who was the first living being you killed with your own hands?"
He had lied about this for seven centuries.
"A nine-year-old girl who showed me kindness," he answered without hesitation.
"Batch 117. Day 4.
I needed her shadow to survive the night."
The cathedral shuddered, offended.
Third Question.
The feather hovered an inch from his eye.
"What do you desire most in this second life?"
For once, something raw cracked through his composure.
Not revenge.
Revenge was a schedule, not a desire.
Finger brushing the feather:
"I want to be looked at the way Cecilia looked at me… before she put a knife through my heart.
Just once more.
And then I want to watch her realize it was me all along."
The feather shattered.
SFX: SHHHHH-KRAAAAAA.
Black fragments poured into him like liquid starvation.
Agony.
Every nerve igniting.
His shadow detonated outward, swallowing the inverted world whole.
When the pain cleared, he was kneeling once more in the real ruined cathedral.
Rain falling.
Ghouls howling.
The world unchanged—
—but him?
Changed entirely.
A new brand burned cold on the back of his left hand.
Not the worthless F-rank Echo.
A perfect circle of absolute black.
Inside it, a single character from the language of the Void:
[Zero]
Beneath it, two lines:
Flaw: If your true name is spoken aloud, you will cease.
Blessing: Until then—no fate may bind you, no prophecy find you, no god perceive you.
He exhaled.
A translucent status window unfolded.
──────────────────
Name: Zero (True Name Sealed)
Aspect: Void Sovereign (Fragment 1/9 Awakened)
Active Ability Unlocked:
[Shadow Extraction — Rank F→E]
You may now extract and store the shadows of those you kill.
Current Shadows: 1 (Ghoul Matriarch)
──────────────────
Juwon rose.
The rain no longer touched him—sliding off an unseen membrane of darkness.
He looked toward the outer district, where the survivors still battled for their lives.
Then he looked deeper into the endless ruins, where the First Layer's true horrors slept.
The gentle, harmless smile returned to his face.
"Fifty minutes until dawn."
"Let's see how many shadows I can farm before someone realizes the trash isn't dead."
His shadow stretched behind him—
long, alive,
grinning with too many teeth.
The Night That Remembers Your Name had ended.
The night that would forget everyone else's
had just begun.