Kim Jisoo had never known what it meant to feel safe.Not as a child. Not as a teenager. Not even now, at twenty-five, standing in his small apartment with the curtains drawn tight and the world outside turning grey.
The silence was eerie. His hands shook slightly as he gripped the curtain edge tighter. He didn't want to look—but he had to. He peeked through the gap. The sunlight was nearly gone. What remained wasn't sunlight at all. It was pale, like bone. Dead light. Not cold. Not warm. Just… wrong.
And Jisoo knew—knew like a gut punch—that something had begun.
But he had felt it coming long before today.
His earliest memory was his father shouting. Always shouting. Never a reason, never a pause. It was just there, like weather in the house. Kim Hyun-tae was the type of man who believed his word was law. His fists backed his law when his voice wasn't enough. He controlled everything—what they ate, when they slept, who they spoke to. His mother, Minji, once smiled like spring, but under her husband's rule, she wilted. Quiet. Thin. Vanishing.
When Jisoo was seven, she gave him a jade pendant. Her hands trembled when she tied the string around his neck.
"Don't take it off, Jisoo," she whispered. "No matter what. It will protect you."
He remembered her face. So close. So scared. And so full of something final.
The next morning, she was gone.
No note. No goodbye. Just gone.
His younger sister, Mina, cried for hours. Jisoo didn't. Not because he didn't feel anything. He just didn't know how to cry. That was part of him—part of what others called strange. Since childhood, Jisoo saw patterns others didn't. Heard tones people ignored. Knew things before they happened. A kind of sharpness that frightened his teachers, annoyed his classmates, and enraged his father.
His father never forgave him for being different.
"You're not normal," the man used to growl. "You're broken. Stop acting like a freak."
But Jisoo wasn't broken. He just wasn't like the others.
He'd later understand the word for it—autistic, they called it. High-functioning. Exceptionally intelligent. But young Jisoo didn't need a diagnosis. He only needed distance. Space to breathe. But he didn't get it.
Not with Hyun-tae stomping through the house like a warden. Not with Mina crying herself to sleep. Not when bruises became routine and hope became a threat.
Years passed. Jisoo buried himself in books and codes, in old survivalist forums and physics journals, in theories about collapse and extinction. He was obsessed with endings—economic crashes, societal breakdowns, solar anomalies.
He wasn't preparing for the future. He was preparing for the end.
People laughed. His professors at university called him a "brilliant outlier" but treated him like a ghost. He had no friends. No one truly saw him. Not even Mina, who had started to pull away once they hit their teens.
She was normal, bright, beautiful. Everything he wasn't. But she loved him in her own way—until she didn't.
On her twentieth birthday, she left. Just like their mother.
No goodbye. Just silence and a vanished toothbrush.
Jisoo understood. The house wasn't home. It was a cage. And she broke out.
Two years later, so did he.
He never spoke to his father again. By then, Hyun-tae had a new wife. New kids. A new life. He didn't care that the first two had left. He had never really seen them as people. Just mistakes that refused to be corrected.
Jisoo was twenty-two when he cut ties with everything—blood, name, the past.
He got a one-room apartment in the quiet part of Seoul. He took freelance work coding networks, building quiet tools for loud companies. He didn't care about fame or climbing the ladder. All he wanted was distance.
And he planned.
While others drank or chased dreams, Jisoo stockpiled gear. Learned how to distill water. Built signal blockers. Stocked sealed containers. He reinforced the walls. Reinforced his mind.
He knew something was coming.
Three days ago, he felt it in his bones.
Like the air was too tight. Like time was running backward. His body locked up. He couldn't eat. Couldn't sleep. Could barely stand.
His instincts screamed louder than ever.
Something terrible was near.
Now, in the dim light of the near-dead sun, he realized his body had known before his brain could explain it.
Those outside… they were already too late.
Jisoo didn't know how he knew. But he did.
The moment the sun dimmed, the world shifted.
And whatever touched that dying light… wouldn't stay human.
He moved back from the window and locked it. Then double-locked it. Then slid the heavy shutters down. He had built them himself, from steel plates and composite board. Sealed to block radiation, signals, and sight.
He moved through the apartment like a ghost. Every motion had been practiced hundreds of times. He shut off the vents. Activated the air filter. Turned on the emergency generator and shut down the main power grid to hide his usage.
No sounds outside now. Just stillness.
He knew it wouldn't last.
Not with what was coming.
He opened the cabinet behind his bed. Pulled out a black device the size of a book. It blinked once—alive.
Inside was a custom AI he'd trained over years. It tracked solar patterns, radiation shifts, EM field activity. It buzzed low with alerts now. Nothing specific. Just "UNKNOWN SPIKE DETECTED."
He stared at it.
The last thing he wanted was to be right.
But he was.
He had seen it in dreams. Since he was a child. The sun dying. People changing. Skin slipping from bone. Eyes turning black.
He never told anyone.
They would've locked him up. Called it madness. Called him delusional.
But it wasn't madness. It was a warning.
And now, it had begun.
Two hours passed. The world outside stayed silent. Not a car. Not a voice. Not even a bird.
Jisoo sat at the table, pendant in his hand. The jade was warm.
It shouldn't be.
He hadn't taken it off since he was seven. Not once. Something told him it mattered.
And now it was glowing.
Soft. Faint. But real.
He held it tighter. His breath slowed. His fear didn't vanish—but it sharpened. Became a blade instead of a storm.
There was still time. Not much. But enough.
He opened the lower drawer. Pulled out a map. Not digital. Paper. He unfolded it carefully.
Marked in red ink were dozens of locations. Remote places. Signal dead zones. Old tunnels. Caves. One of them had to be safe.
He'd planned this.
He'd always planned this.
The moment the world cracked—he would disappear.
But he had never imagined it would start like this.
Not with the sun dimming.
Not with people outside going silent.
He stood up and grabbed the bag he'd packed a year ago.
Time to go.
Then he paused.
A sound. Soft. Barely there.
A knock.
Three slow knocks on the door.
He turned toward it. Every nerve in his body screamed to stay back.
But the knock came again.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
His mouth went dry.
He didn't move.
"Jisoo?" A voice.
Small. Female.
"Mina?" he whispered.
Silence.
Then the voice again. "It's me. Please open the door."
He wanted to believe it. God, he wanted to believe it.
But the air was wrong.
Too still.
The way she said his name—it was close. Almost perfect. But not quite.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
"Please, oppa. It's cold out here."
He took a slow step back.
Something slid under the door.
A shadow.
Too flat. Too long.
Not a foot.
Not human.
He grabbed the switch on the wall.
A silent alarm. No sound. Just a red light blinking near the window. If someone else out there was still human… they'd know this place was still alive.
But he doubted anyone would come.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
He stared at the door.
His instincts—those same instincts that had kept him alive—screamed now.
Don't open the door. Don't listen. Don't look.
Because whatever was outside wasn't his sister.
And it wasn't alone.