Moon's eyes snapped open to a sky too blue to be real. He lay sprawled on soft grass, surrounded by countless others hundreds, perhaps thousands of disoriented people scattered across a vast meadow. Everyone was outside, blinking in confusion at the unnaturally vibrant world around them.
"Mom? Dad?" Moon called, his five-year-old voice thin with panic as he scrambled to his feet.
All around him, families were finding each other—mothers clutching their children, fathers calling names, strangers helping the elderly stand. Moon spotted his parents several yards away, his mother's familiar floral dress a beacon among the sea of confused humanity.
"Moon!" His father scooped him up, holding him tight. "Thank goodness." Beside his father, his older brother Jin stood with a concerned expression
"Moon, are you alright?" Jin asked, his voice gentle despite the chaos surrounding them.
By then his mother joined the embrace, tears streaming down her face. "We're all here, we're all—" She froze, pulling back to scan their little group. "Jin? Where's Jin?"
The three of them turned in desperate circles, calling Jin's name, but among the thousands awakening in the meadow, Moon's older brother was nowhere to be found.
"He was right beside me just now!" Moon screamed, confusion overwhelming him.
A strange mark had begun to appear on Jin's chin moments before he vanished—a dark circle encasing five sharp, petal-like blades spiraling inward, resembling a flower frozen mid-bloom with few petals falling but suspended in time. The mark had completed itself, and then... Jin was gone
His family searched frantically among the thousands of people, but they couldn't find him. Beyond the meadow lay a town unlike anything Moon had ever seen—buildings and streets paved with iridescent stone, and trees with leaves that shimmered like polished metal.
"Did he wander off somewhere?" his father wondered aloud, then swallowed hard before adding, "Let's go to that town." Sung tried to sound cheerful, but fear edged his voice.
As they made their way through unfamiliar streets, they eventually rounded a corner to what should have been their street. They stopped in their tracks. Instead of their modest suburban home, there stood an elegant hanok a traditional Korean house with sweeping tile roofs, intricately carved wooden pillars, and a meticulously arranged landscape of strange, luminescent plants.
On the porch stood a family. They looked somehow different yet completely human, their clothes unlike anything from modern society.
"Can I help you?" asked the woman, her voice musical but wary as she noticed Moon's family staring.
"Did you see a kid wandering around here?" Moon's father asked desperately.
The woman's expression softened as she gave a slight bow. "We didn't see any child wandering around here."
"What?" Moon's father asked, surprised by the calmness of her response.
"Please," Moon's mother stepped forward. "He's just ten years old, black hair, his name is Jin..."
"He could be anywhere in this unfamiliar environment," the woman replied bluntly.
Then a scream suddenly cut through their conversation high-pitched and terrified from somewhere nearby. Then another. And another
As more screams erupted, closer now, people began running past their street, terror evident on their faces.
Unable to resist looking, Moon turned toward the commotion. In the middle of the street, a woman had fallen to her knees. On her chin, a dark mark was appearing—a black circle containing five blade-like petals spiraling inward, resembling a flower caught mid-bloom, similar to the mark Moon had seen on Jin, but somehow different.
As the mark completed its formation, her normal skin began to tighten unnaturally, pulling over her bones like wet silk. It hardened, fusing with a living red fabric that spread across her body like a parasite.
The skin and fabric became indistinguishable, forming a blood-red, seam-wrapped body textured like dried muscle and ceremonial silk. Her face flattened as nose and lips dissolved into smooth flesh.
In place of her face, a white, expressionless cloth with the red sigil fused directly to the front of her skull, stitched into her nerves. Her head elongated, pulling upward like melted wax, her flesh twisting into a tall, spiraled hood, almost cone-shaped and ceremonial in form.
A floating red halo ignited above the tip. Suddenly and a false baby appeared in her arms not alive but pulsing with eldritch energy her left arm wrapped protectively around it
The sound she made was inhuman a gurgling, chittering sound that raised the hairs on Moon's arms.
"Inside," the man on the porch commanded his own family sharply.
"What is happening here?" Moon's mother whispered to Sung.
Further down the street, a man underwent a different but equally terrifying transformation. His mark appeared, and his body liquefied partially, reforming into something reptilian with too many limbs. His skin became translucent, revealing pulsing internal organs that glowed with sickly yellow light. Two more eyes opened in his face, scanning independently of the others.
A third person, a teenage boy, screamed as his mark appeared, but rather than transforming, he simply... vanished. One moment standing there in terror, the next gone without a trace, not even disturbing the air where he'd stood.
Looking at all the terror around them, Moon's father commanded, "Inside, NOW!" He snatched Moon up, and they rushed into the house as the creatures outside began to attack those still in the streets.
Through a crack in the window shutters, Moon watched in horror as those creatures tore through the crowd. The woman moved with impossible speed, snatching up an elderly man. The false baby in her arms somehow consumed the elderly man alive.
Each creature was unique transformations yielded different monsters. Some retained vague humanoid shapes while others became utterly alien. Some moved with fluid grace, others with jerky, unsettling motions. Their only common traits were the mark that preceded their transformation and the aura of wrongness they emanated a visual distortion that hurt to look at directly.
"Why is this happening?" Moon's mother sobbed, clutching him close.
Moon buried his face against his mother's shoulder, unable to watch anymore. One thought consumed him: Jin was out there somewhere, alone. Had the mark appeared on him too? Had his brother become one of those... things?
Creatures tore through human bodies like paper. The street was painted in blood and torn flesh.
---
"Four years," Moon said quietly, running a whetstone along the edge of his practice blade. "Four years since the Convergence."
Now nine years old, Moon sat on the veranda of the Tensura Clan compound, overlooking training grounds where dozens of children and adults practiced forms with wooden weapons. His long black hair was pulled back in a topknot, and his dark red eyes a feature that had intensified since arriving in the Dream World reflected the afternoon light.
"Time surely passes fast as i don't even feel like we've lived here for the past four years now," he mused to himself.
The incident that happened four years ago was now known throughout the Dream World, referred to by many names. Moon's preferred term was "The Heirs of Uhazari." As the name suggested, the Old Ones had attributed the mysterious mark to an new one's " The mark Uhazari"
The New Ones those like Moon and his family who had suddenly appeared in this world were initially feared and hated throughout the Dream World. Because of what happened that day, the dream world had seen an immeasurable amount of death, that day the whole dream world was practically painted in innocent blood
In the last four years, the New Ones (Earth humans) had made dramatic progress forming their own society. They had established the Tensura Clan to fit into this world a clan made entirely of New Ones, formed out of necessity in those chaotic first days as the transformed creatures rampaged. The native inhabitants, who called themselves the Old Ones and had lived in the Dream World for generations, had mobilized to contain the threat. Now, the people of the Dream World had given those creatures a name: they called them Dream Eaters.
"Moon! What are you doing up there?" a voice called out
A little girl appeared to be the same age as Moon, lazily swinging her practice blade around
"Come down here! Let's practice some more," she insisted.
"Haaa, wait for a while... the sun looks beautiful today," Moon replied, not moving from his spot
The young girl walked up to join him on the veranda "Are you still thinking about that incident?"
"Naah, I've already forgotten about it, All in the past now. What would I get holding onto the past?" Moon answered cheerfully
But I'm his heart he knew all of this were Lies all of it was lies moon had answered cheerfully, but inside he was still trapped in that day that incident had taken too much from him to be forgotten. His brother Jin's face still haunted him every night when he closed his eyes, along with the question that never left him were is Jin what had happened to him ?