There are moments in life that pass by unnoticed, so ordinary they dissolve the moment they happen—like the sound of your own footsteps on pavement, or the feeling of sunlight filtering through leaves that you don't remember choosing to walk under. You don't mark them. You don't name them. They're just… there. Until one of them isn't.
For Jihoon Lee, that moment came on a Tuesday—or maybe a Wednesday; he'd stopped keeping track after the first month of classes. Late afternoon. The kind of light that stretches long and golden across the campus, turning the red bricks of the older buildings into something that almost looked historic, even though most of them had been erected sometime in the last fifty years.
He was walking back from the philosophy building, earbuds in, the soft murmur of a podcast he wasn't really paying attention to filling the silence that had become his constant companion. His backpack was heavy with textbooks he hadn't opened in weeks, and his mind was somewhere between wondering if he could afford instant ramen for dinner and why the hell he'd signed up for an elective on existentialism when he could barely keep up with his core credits.
The path curved gently past the cherry blossom trees that lined the main courtyard—already shedding petals despite it being early spring—and toward the dormitories. He passed a group of students laughing too loudly near the fountain, their voices blending into the background noise of campus life. No one paid him any attention. Why would they? He wasn't important. He wasn't loud or interesting or particularly good at anything. Just another third-year trying not to drown.
And then—
There was a shift.
Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Not the kind of moment you see in movies, where the music swells and the light bends and everything freezes except for the protagonist. No. It was subtler than that. A flicker at the edge of his vision. A pause in the rhythm of his steps. Like the world had taken a single breath—and held it.
One moment, he was walking.
The next…
He wasn't.
There was no flash. No sound. No sensation of falling or flying or even moving. Just—absence. Like someone had reached into the world and pinched reality between two fingers, and then… pulled.
When Jihoon opened his eyes—or rather, when awareness returned to him—he was no longer on the path he knew. The cherry blossoms were gone. The campus was gone. The sky above him was the wrong color. Too purple. Too vast. And the ground beneath his feet… it wasn't asphalt. It wasn't even grass. It was something rough, uneven, covered in tiny glowing crystals that pulsed faintly with an eerie inner light.
He blinked.
Then he stumbled backward, heart hammering in his chest like it had just been yanked out of his ribcage and dropped into a blender.
"What the—" he started, his voice thin, cracking. He turned in a circle, searching for something—anything—familiar. But there was nothing. No buildings. No roads. No people. Just jagged cliffs rising in the distance, a forest of twisted black trees to his left, and a sky that seemed to watch him like it knew something he didn't.
"Okay," he muttered, taking a shaky breath. "Okay. This isn't happening. This isn't real. I hit my head. I fell asleep on the lawn. I—"
But his thoughts faltered as a sound reached him. Distant. Low. Like the growl of something massive moving just beyond the treeline.
His blood turned to ice.
This wasn't a nightmare.
This wasn't a game.
This wasn't Earth.
He was alone. Completely, utterly alone. In a world that defied every law of nature he had ever been taught. A world where the impossible wasn't just possible—it was everyday.
And then, just as despair began to curl its fingers around his throat, something else happened.
A sensation. Deep inside him. Not in his ears, not in his eyes—but somewhere beneath his skin, behind his thoughts, as if reality itself had shifted again, just slightly.
A whisper. Not of sound, but of knowing.
And in that instant, the world changed again.
Not outside of him.
Inside.
To be continued…