Pain greeted Seojun before thought did.
A dull, relentless pounding—like someone had taken a hammer to his skull and decided *enthusiasm* was part of the job description. A low groan slipped from his throat as consciousness clawed its way back. His tongue tasted foul: stale coffee layered with the bitter, metallic residue of exhaustion.
His eyelids fluttered open.
Nothing.
No—*worse* than nothing.
Absolute, impenetrable black.
For a heartbeat, he simply lay there, blinking stupidly into the void.
…Great, he thought dimly. Another night passed out at the desk. Classic.
He shifted, expecting the familiar creak of his bargain-bin office chair—or the sharp knock of his knee against the cluttered desk.
Instead, his shoulder struck cold, unforgiving ground.
Rough. Uneven. Like cracked concrete… or packed earth.
That jolted him fully awake.
"What the—?"
His voice came out hoarse and died instantly, swallowed whole by the silence.
No echo.
No distant traffic hum bleeding through the walls of his apartment. No comforting whirr of the ancient fridge in the kitchenette. Not even the faint electrical buzz of a city that never truly slept.
Nothing answered him.
Seojun pushed himself up on his elbows, hissing as pain lanced through his skull. His hands flew outward, groping blindly—searching for his laptop, his phone, *anything* familiar.
His fingers scraped over grit. Pebbles. Dust.
No smooth wooden floor.
No scattered papers.
No empty ramen cups.
Panic sparked in his chest—hot, sharp, immediate.
"Okay. Okay," he muttered, forcing the words out because hearing his own voice made this feel marginally less insane. "Power outage. Whole building's out. I must've… tripped. Hit my head."
He reached farther, arms sweeping wide.
Nothing.
No walls.
No furniture.
Just endless, open space.
Standing proved harder than it should have been. His legs trembled, rubbery, and the darkness robbed him of any sense of balance. There were no reference points—no window glow, no streetlight bleed-through. Just black.
He wobbled, arms flailing uselessly.
Seojun took a tentative step.
Then another.
The ground crunched faintly beneath his sneakers.
Gravel?
He shuffled forward, hands outstretched, moving like a zombie in a low-budget horror flick.
*If this is a prank, it's elaborate,* he thought bitterly. *Friends? Right. What friends?*
The only people who knew where he lived were delivery drivers—and they weren't exactly the avant-garde terror type.
Minutes stretched. Or hours. Or something in between.
He walked in what he *hoped* was a straight line, counting steps under his breath to stay sane.
Fifty.
A hundred.
Two hundred.
Nothing changed.
The air was still—cool but not cold. No breeze. No scent beyond faint dust clinging to the back of his throat.
His breathing grew loud in his ears. Too loud. His heart hammered like a drum solo spiraling out of control.
"This isn't right," he whispered. "This can't be—"
He stopped and dropped to his hands and knees.
Crawling felt safer. Lower. Less likely to end with him walking straight off a cliff into whatever nightmare this was.
His palms scraped raw against the rough surface. Fingers dug desperately, searching for *anything*.
A curb.
A root.
A crack that screamed *reality*.
There was nothing.
The panic crested then—crashing over him in a suffocating wave.
His chest seized. Breaths came shallow and fast.
*Congratulations, Seojun,* his inner voice sneered, sharp with desperation. *You finally hit rock bottom. Literal sensory deprivation.*
He swallowed hard.
*Is this what writer's block feels like in four dimensions? No plot. No setting. No characters. Just endless void.*
*A perfect metaphor, really.*
He let out a short, barking laugh that died instantly.
Not funny.
None of this was.
Images assaulted him—uninvited and vivid.
The laptop screen flickering.
Numbers skyrocketing.
Comments glitching into nonsense.
And then—
The sun outside his window.
Gone.
Replaced by a perfect black circle bleeding darkness into the sky.
He'd thought it was a hallucination. Stress. Sleep deprivation. The price of chasing a story no one cared about.
But now…?
Seojun curled his fingers into the dirt—*dirt*—clawing at it as if he could dig his way back to reality.
"Come on," he growled. "Wake up. This is a dream. A really shitty, low-budget dream."
He pinched his arm hard.
Pain flared—sharp, immediate, undeniable.
Not a dream.
His throat burned with thirst. Hunger rumbled faintly, distant but real.
How long had he been here?
Seconds ago, he'd been in his apartment. The blackout had hit right after he uploaded the finale.
But here—time felt stretched. Thin. Meaningless.
He screamed.
"HEY! ANYONE! HELP!"
The sound vanished.
No echo.
No response.
Just silence—vast and indifferent.
Seojun sagged forward, forehead pressing against the cold ground.
Loneliness hit harder than the panic.
His apartment had been quiet, sure. Empty chats. Dead notifications. But there'd been *light*. The glow of the screen. The distant murmur of the city.
Proof the world existed beyond his failures.
Here—
There was nothing.
*No readers,* a treacherous thought whispered. *No one to see your story.*
He snarled and shook his head.
"No. Screw that."
Anger surged—hot, grounding.
He crawled again. Slower. Methodical.
Hand forward.
Sweep.
Knee.
Repeat.
To fill the silence, he began reciting lines from his novel aloud.
"And the protagonist stared into the abyss," he murmured, voice cracking, "the black sun devouring the light…"
A humorless breath escaped him.
"Real original, past me. Prophetic, even."
Sarcasm was armor—thin, but necessary.
Without it, he'd break.
Exhaustion dragged at him. Eventually, he collapsed flat, staring up into nothingness.
He imagined stars.
Imagined the lazy spin of his ceiling fan.
Tried to *write* his way out.
*Let there be light.*
Nothing happened.
…But for the briefest instant, the darkness felt thinner.
Like fabric stretched too tight.
He dismissed it as wishful thinking.
Time dissolved.
He drifted in and out of shallow sleep, jolting awake at phantom whispers—voices that weren't really there.
*Flop.*
*Forgotten.*
*Trash.*
When he woke again—*truly* woke—something had changed.
A glow.
Faint. Distant.
Blue-white. Ethereal.
Like pixels forming on a black screen.
Seojun gasped and scrambled toward it, heart slamming against his ribs.
"Yes—come on—"
The light grew as he approached, resolving into floating symbols.
Letters.
Runes.
They hung in the air, assembling one by one as if typed by an invisible hand.
He stopped a few steps away, panting, his face bathed in cold luminescence.
The words finalized.
---
**Welcome to the Script.**
**The Black Sun has eclipsed the old reality.**
**Stories now bind fate.**
**Survive the Trials.**
**Awaken your Aspect.**
**Or be erased from the narrative.**
**Survive to be written.**
---
Seojun stared.
The glow reflected in his wide eyes—terror, disbelief…
…and beneath it, a spark of dark amusement.
"Oh. Perfect," he muttered hoarsely.
*I got isekai'd into my own rejected manuscript.*
*Truck-kun really took a day off, huh?*
The runes pulsed once.
Waiting.
The void felt less empty now.
But somehow—
Far more terrifying.