CHAPTER 1: THE MARBLE NIGHTMARE AND THE FRAGMENTED REALITY
The world did not just manifest; it exploded into a state of absolute, bone-chilling perfection that felt less like a paradise and more like a beautifully crafted predatory trap. Kaito found himself standing on an infinite, horizon-less plane, his heavy boots resting upon a road crafted from seamless, brilliant white marble. This was not ordinary stone; it was polished to such an impossible, supernatural degree that it mirrored the shifting, psychedelic colors of a sky that resembled liquid opal, swirling with deep hues of violet, neon gold, and a cerulean so bright it burned the retinas.
Surrounding him were architectural marvels that defied every known law of human physics and Euclidean geometry. They were vast, towering structures that looked like a futuristic fusion of the Taj Mahal and alien monoliths. Every ivory dome seemed to breathe with a rhythmic, inner bioluminescence, and the intricate golden carvings etched into the walls pulsed like glowing veins, as if the buildings themselves were massive, silent organisms watching his every move with ancient, stone eyes.
The air Kaito breathed was not oxygen; it was a heavy, intoxicating cocktail of golden sun-dust and the overwhelming, almost suffocating scent of millions of blooming roses. Every inhalation felt like silk, a sensory overload that composed a masterpiece of divine harmony where even the silence had a frequency, like a master musician's final note. For exactly three hundred seconds, the universe held its breath in a state of perfect, terrifying equilibrium.
Then, the first crack appeared—not in the marble, but in the very fabric of existence itself. The sky flickered with the jagged, painful intensity of a dying neon tube, exposing a dark, binary void beneath for a fraction of a millisecond. The golden dust, once warm and inviting, instantly turned into freezing, abrasive black ash. Kaito watched, paralyzed by a primal fear, as a sapphire butterfly mid-flight suddenly froze in time. Its wings didn't just stop; they began to stutter in a hideous digital loop, emitting a high-pitched electronic whine that pierced Kaito's skull before the creature shattered into a thousand jagged, glowing pixels. They didn't fall; they simply evaporated into a mist of raw, corrupted code.
The pristine marble walls began to "bleed" glowing green binary sequences, and the majestic domes started to warp and stretch like melting wax in a furnace. Horror seized Kaito's heart as he looked at a child nearby; the boy's innocent laughter got caught in a localized Audio Loop, the same high-pitched millisecond of sound echoing louder and more distorted, transforming from a giggle into the grinding screech of rusted metal gears.
As the sun was violently swallowed by an absolute, unnatural darkness, the true nightmare began to breathe. Shadows did not just fall; they detached themselves from the ground like sentient, ink-black predators. Kaito watched as the shadows of the citizens rose like demonic entities, their smoky, translucent fingers wrapping with crushing, cold force around the throats of their owners. Kaito turned and sprinted into a narrow, suffocating alleyway, his lungs burning with the sharp, metallic scent of ozone and burnt wires. He hit a dead end, the cold brick wall vibrating against his back as if the building was shivering.
As he turned to face the entrance, his own shadow emerged from the bricks behind him. It didn't just move; it transformed into a heavy, rusted iron chain that coiled with supernatural speed around Kaito's neck. The metal was ice-cold. As his vision fragmented into a mesh of static, he felt his very soul being "Deleted" from the system.
He jolted awake in his dark room, his heart thumping against his ribs like a trapped bird. His bedsheets were drenched in a cold, deathly sweat that carried the phantom stench of roses and electrical fire. Desperate to scrub the terror from his soul, Kaito grabbed a bar of Blue Rose soap, the water running scalding hot as he tried to wash away the invisible sensation of shadow chains. But the nightmare followed him out.
On his way to college, the world began to "lag." He saw a man freeze mid-stride, his entire left arm flickering into a transparent wireframe model, revealing the skeletal code beneath before popping back into flesh. A massive glass skyscraper's middle floors vanished entirely for a heartbeat, leaving the roof hovering in mid-air like a disconnected file before the data re-synced. By the time Kaito reached the college gates, the static in his brain was a roar. When his best friend Ryu stepped out of the crowd and placed a heavy, reassuring hand on his shoulder, the contact triggered a massive High-Voltage Kinetic Discharge. A blinding blue spark erupted between them, a shockwave that sent Ryu flying ten feet backward into the iron fence.
"What the hell, Kaito?!" Ryu roared, clutching his numbed arm. "Is there a literal lightning storm trapped inside your body?" Kaito couldn't find the words; he turned and fled, a corrupted file in a world that had finally reached 100% deletion.