White.
Iron Chen opened his eyes to a crushing, infinite, meaningless white.
Ceiling: white. Walls: white. The hard surface beneath him: white. Even the light—if there was light—dissolved into this featureless, boundless pallor. He lay on his back, wearing a cheap, scratchy blue-and-white striped hospital gown that felt alien against his skin. The fabric whispered of institutional laundry, of countless anonymous bodies.
His memory was a brick wall.
No—not empty. Thick. Smothered. Like watching his own life through frosted glass. He knew his name. Iron Chen. Knew he was—had been—a police captain. Knew the last clear memory: driving across the bridge, rain beating a frantic rhythm against the windshield, a syrupy love song leaking from the radio. Then?
Then this.
He sat up. Not weak. Alarmingly strong, muscles coiled with a vigor he hadn't felt in years. He examined his hands. A cop's hands. Calloused palms, knuckles prominent. The hands of a man who'd spent a decade gripping a service weapon, filing reports, carrying the weight of unsolved cases.
This was not an interrogation room. Not a hospital. Not anywhere.
The room was a perfect cube, maybe five meters across. No seams. No doors. No windows. The air was still, temperature a clinically pleasant cool, but dead. No circulation. Like the inside of a vacuum flask.
No exit.
The conclusion arrived with detached, professional calm. He stood, bare feet on the chill white floor, and began a circuit. Fingertips tracing the wall—smooth, cold, like polished ceramic. He pressed. He knocked. A dull, solid thud. Not hollow. No give.
No guard. No camera. No slot for food. Not even a vent.
So either his captor was an idiot, or…
Or they were so confident they didn't need to provide the basics.
As the thought crystallized, the wall directly before him began to bleed.
Crimson seeped from the center, lines racing outward as if drawn by an invisible, frantic quill. Words formed in stark, blocky characters, the red glistening like fresh blood:
[Rule 1: Enter the room. Explore the dead's memory.]
[Rule 2: Find the one, true cause of death.]
[Rule 3: Leave alive.]
The words set, no longer fluid, but they carried a scent—rust and antiseptic.
Iron's pupils contracted. He didn't retreat. He stepped closer, until he could almost feel the non-physical cold radiating from the text. Dead's memory? True cause? Leave alive?
It sounded like a twisted game. Or something worse.
Before he could dissect it, a pane of translucent, bluish light materialized in the air thirty centimeters from his face. Data streams flickered along its edges. Centered text:
[Current Host: Iron Chen]
[Rooms Explored: 0]
[Total Deaths: 327]
[Memory Integrity: 11%]
[Contamination Index: 89%]
[Mental Stability Threshold: 67% (Minor Fluctuation)]
His breath hitched, just for a microsecond, on the line: Total Deaths: 327.
Three hundred and twenty-seven times.
He had died 327 times? Here? Or was this a system glitch? A scare tactic? The black hole between the bridge and this white room yawned wider.
Memory Integrity 11%... Contamination 89%...
An icy itch crawled up his spine. He turned. Across the room, a section of wall he hadn't consciously noted now stood out—a mirror. Flush with the surface, seamless.
He walked to it.
The glass was pristine, reflecting his own image: gaunt in the ill-fitting gown, dark hair slightly too long, stubble shadowing his jaw. The eyes held a familiar vigilance. It was him.
Then the image wavered.
Like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples distorted his features. They melted, reformed. The gown faded, replaced by a stained beige sweater. Hair lengthened, tangled around slender shoulders. The jaw softened, the face becoming—a woman's.
Pale. Lips bloodless. Eyes wide with terminal terror. And around her slender neck—a vivid, brutal ring of purple-black ligature marks, biting deep into the flesh, dotted with petechial hemorrhages.
The woman in the mirror stared directly at him.
Iron's muscles locked. He stared back, heart hammering against his ribs. This was no illusion. The details were hyper-real—the individual lashes, the faint reflection of this white room in her dilated pupils. He caught a whiff of cheap floral shampoo, undercut by a cloying hint of… decay.
Who was she?
Why was her reflection in his mirror?
Total Deaths 327… was she one of them?
Don't look.
A voice. No—a thought, implanted directly into his consciousness. Metallic, grating, urgent. Not his own.
He squeezed his eyes shut, stumbled back. Opened them. The mirror showed only his own pale, shaken face again. But the phantom imprint of that bruised neck burned behind his eyelids.
He turned his back on the mirror, forcing his detective's mind to engage. Rules. System panel. An impossible phenomenon. He needed data. An assessment. A breach point.
He walked to the room's center, sat cross-legged, and closed his eyes. Sound amplified. Absolute silence. His own heartbeat was intrusive.
Then, touch. The floor… was it cooler than when he woke? A fractional difference.
He held the pose, counting internally—a cop's trained sense of time. Roughly three hundred counts—five minutes—later, he pressed his palm flat.
Colder. Definitively.
The temperature was dropping. Systematically.
This wasn't his imagination. The room was cooling. If Rule 3 was leave alive, then a relentless temperature drop led to hypothermia, coma, death. A time limit.
He opened his eyes, his gaze falling on Total Deaths: 327. An absurd, terrifying deduction solidified: maybe he had died here, 327 times. Each death costing memory (Integrity 11%), accruing some kind of corruption (Contamination 89%). Freezing might be one flavor of death.
He had to move.
Standing up, his purpose was now sharp. He went to the blood-rule wall, raised his right index finger, and dug his short-trimmed nail into the smooth surface.
Skritch—
A faint, grating sound. The wall was hard, but under pressure, his nail left a stark white scar. Good. It could be marked.
He set to work, using his nail as a chisel. Not copying the rules. Marking information for himself—or for whoever might come next. First, that haunting number:
[327]
Large. Deep. Below it, he began sketching—not words, but fragmented lines. Jagged edges like torn film. Radial cracks like explosions. Meaningless, twisted glyphs. Graffiti from the minds of victims or the mentally shattered, representing memory fragmentation, breakdown, inexpressible trauma. He scrawled these around the 327.
A marker. I was here. I saw this. My memory is like these shards.
As he finished the last glyph, his fingertip throbbed. He stepped back, surveying his crude handiwork. In this consuming whiteness, it was a defiant scar.
The room's temperature dipped another noticeable degree. A chill kissed his ankles. Time was running out.
The system panel flickered violently. The blue light stuttered. The metallic voice-in-his-head returned, now laced with static and alarm:
[Warning! Abnormal memory fluctuation detected!]
[Warning! Signal strength exceeds threshold!]
[Error Code: -Kappa-7… Forced Traction Protocol activating…]
[Target memory coordinate locked… Loading… 3…]
Forced load? Into where? The dead's memory?
Iron understood immediately. No more exploration time. Something was interfering, yanking him into the first room.
[2…]
His eyes darted around the barren space. No weapons. No tools. Only the gown.
[1…]
In the final second, half-second, Iron Chen acted. He ducked his head, clenched the sleeve of the gown in his teeth, and ripped. Tearrrk! The sound was obscenely loud. A long strip of pale blue cloth came free. Simultaneously, he shoved his right index finger into his mouth and bit down hard on the pad.
Pain flashed. Blood welled.
Ignoring it, he used the bleeding finger to scrawl four characters on the cloth strip. The script was frantic, the blood dark red against the pale fabric:
[DO NOT TRUST]
The final stroke.
[0. Forced loading commencing.]
The white space convulsed. The world twisted, wrung by an invisible fist. The pallor wasn't background anymore—it was a voracious vortex, swallowing him whole. The last thing he saw was the bloodied cloth fluttering to the floor, beside his carved 327. The last sounds to assault him were a cacophony of layered, inhuman shrieks and whispers, the crackle of flame, the thick splash of a heavy body hitting water, and—distinct, clear—the cry of an infant.
Darkness descended.
No—not darkness. A torrent of color, sound, smell, texture, violently overwhelming the borders of his self, dragging him toward a pre-ordained, death-scented destination.
His first room had begun.