The outer district greeted them with its usual hospitality.
A wall of wet wind slapped Juwon across the face the moment the portcullis sealed behind the rejects
(SFX: WHUUM—CLANG).
The fifty-three condemned stumbled into what had once been a grand plaza.
Statues toppled like dead kings.
Colonnades half-collapsed.
Everything drowned beneath knee-high black water that reflected the bruised violet sky.
No stars.
There were never stars in the First Layer.
Above them, soldiers leaned over the wall, already laughing—already placing bets on how many minutes until the first scream.
Juwon kept his shoulders hunched, hands hidden inside the threadbare gray robe every Seed received.
He looked exactly like they expected: a shaking, helpless pretty boy seconds away from panic.
Inside, he was counting.
Four hundred and thirty-two seconds until the hidden gate opened.
The Nightmare Trial only revealed itself once per batch.
And only to those officially declared "Zero."
In his first life, he had taken three years of dying and rewinding to discover that condition.
Tonight he'd clear it in under an hour.
The burn-scar girl from earlier clung to the sleeve of a middle-aged man who was definitely not her father.
A college student in a shredded tracksuit hyperventilated.
An old woman with prison tattoos prayed in Russian.
No one spoke Korean except him.
Perfect.
A distant howl rolled across the drowned ruins—too deep for a wolf, too wet for any creature with lungs left intact.
The ghouls had scented them.
The group instinctively huddled together.
Someone began crying again.
Juwon allowed himself to be pushed to the outer edge of the circle—closest to the darkness, farthest from safety.
Exactly where the predator would strike first.
Good.
He needed them to leave him behind.
The first ghoul came faster than fear.
It exploded from a submerged archway like a torpedo of rotting meat and rusted nails, landing among the group with a splash that painted everyone crimson (SFX: SPLAAASH—SKRRRCH).
Twelve feet tall.
Skin hanging in wet ribbons.
Railway spikes driven through its arms like improvised blades.
The middle-aged man lasted 0.8 seconds.
A claw punched through his chest and came out holding something that still beat.
Screams detonated.
The pack followed—ten, then fifteen, then twenty.
Former humans twisted by the First Layer's curse, immortal until someone destroyed the brand sigil hidden somewhere in their flesh.
Chaos erupted.
People ran in every direction.
Some swung broken rebar.
Most died.
Juwon ran too—slowly, clumsily—timing his stumble perfectly.
He went down face-first into the black water (SFX: BLOOSH).
When he rolled over, the burn-scar girl stared at him from ten meters away, frozen as a ghoul lunged toward her.
She mouthed a single word.
Help.
Juwon met her gaze.
Smiled that gentle, exhausted, harmless smile perfected over centuries.
He murmured, barely moving his lips:
"Sorry."
Then he allowed the nearest ghoul to seize his ankle and drag him backward into the dark.
The last thing the survivors saw was the pretty boy disappearing between broken columns—silent, not even screaming.
They assumed he was dead.
Perfect.
The ghoul dragged him thirty meters through flooded streets, over collapsed walls, into the hollow shell of a cathedral older than memory.
It threw him onto the cracked altar like an offering.
Moonlight—or the sickly violet imitation of it—spilled through the broken roof, painting everything corpse-blue.
The ghoul loomed over him, drooling black nothing where a face should be.
Juwon pushed his wet hair from his eyes and murmured in the ancient tongue of the First Layer—the one only monsters and gods still remembered.
"Hi."
The ghoul froze.
Juwon stood.
The harmless mask slid off his face like water sliding off glass.
His shadow stretched behind him—and suddenly had too many arms.
"You're late," he explained, voice quiet. "I died here seven hundred years ago on schedule. You're thirty-two seconds behind."
The ghoul shrieked—rage and terror mixed—then leapt.
Juwon didn't move.
The claw stopped one inch from his throat, trembling violently.
The shadow under Juwon's feet had already crawled up the monster's legs and wrapped cold, thin fingers around the tattered core of its soul.
Black lines spread across the creature's body like frost.
Its brand sigil—a glowing red circle in its chest—cracked.
Pop.
The ghoul collapsed into wet ash.
From the ash rose a perfect silhouette of the creature—pure darkness given shape.
It knelt.
Juwon patted its head like a dog.
"First one of the night. Good boy."
He turned toward the altar.
The moment the ghoul died, the hidden gate revealed itself.
Cracks spider-webbed across the stone.
Violet fire licked upward.
An archway of liquid night formed, humming low (SFX: WUUUUUUM).
Ancient letters burned across the top—letters that hurt to look at.
[The Night That Remembers Your Name]
Requirement: Be nothing.
Reward: Cursed be the memory of you.
Juwon stepped forward.
The shadow-ghoul followed, then dissolved into his own shadow.
He paused at the threshold, glancing back at the distant screams of the outer district.
Fifty-three had entered.
Maybe six would survive until dawn.
In his first life, he had tried to save some.
This time, he didn't even remember their faces.
Progress.
He walked into the violet fire.
The world flipped.
He stood in a perfect mirror of the ruined cathedral—only inverted.
Statues hung upside-down from the floor.
Rain fell upward.
Time drifted sideways like smoke.
And at the center, floating above the altar, was a single black feather the size of a man.
The Nightmare Trial had begun.
A voice that was not a voice echoed through his bones.
"Zero.
You who were crowned in darkness and dethroned by light.
To reclaim what was stolen, answer in truth, or be unmade."
The feather spun.
First question.
"What is the name you abandoned when you became Sovereign?"
Juwon's lips curled.
No one had ever known this.
Not lovers.
Not betrayers.
Not even the gods he tortured.
He looked up and answered:
"faceless sun."
The feather bled black light.
Second question.
"Who was the first living being you killed with your own hands?"
Another secret.
"A nine-year-old girl who looked at me with kindness," he confessed calmly. "Batch 117. Day 4. I needed her shadow to survive the night."
The cathedral trembled as if recoiling from the honesty.
Third and final question.
The feather drifted until it hovered an inch from his eyes.
"What do you desire most in this second life?"
For the first time, something raw flickered across his face.
Not revenge.
Revenge was inevitable.
He touched the feather with one finger and murmured:
"I want… to be looked at the way Cecilia looked at me before she put the knife in my heart. Just once more.
And then I want to watch her realize it was me all along."
The feather shattered—raining a thousand shards of pure night.
They poured into his chest like liquid starvation (SFX: SHHHRK—FWOOM).
Agony.
His shadow erupted outward, swallowing the world whole.
When the pain ended, he knelt again in the real cathedral.
Rain still fell.
Ghouls still howled.
The world was still broken.
But he was not the same.
A new brand burned on the back of his left hand.
Not the fake F-rank Echo.
A perfect circle of absolute black.
Inside it, a single character in the language of the Void:
[Rain]
Beneath it, the Flaw and Blessing:
Flaw: If your true name is spoken aloud, you will cease.
Blessing: Until then, no fate may bind you. No prophecy may find you. No god may see you.
A status window unfolded.
──────────────────
Name: Zero (True Name Sealed)
Aspect: Void Sovereign (Fragment 1/9 Awakened)
Active Ability Unlocked:
[Shadow Extraction – Rank F→E]
Extract and store the shadows of those you kill.
Current Shadows: 1 (Ghoul Matriarch)
──────────────────
Juwon stood.
The rain no longer touched him; it slid off an invisible veil of darkness.
He looked toward the outer district where the survivors still fought.
Then toward the deeper ruins, where the First Layer's true horrors slept.
He smiled that gentle, harmless smile again.
"Fifty minutes until dawn," he announced softly. "Let's see how many shadows I can farm before someone notices the trash isn't dead yet."
His shadow stretched behind him—longer than it should be—grinning with too many teeth.
The Night That Remembers Your Name had ended.
The night that would forget everyone else's…
had only just begun.