The absolute, blinding light of the celestial realm did not fade into a peaceful medical bay. It did not dissolve into the sterile, white-sheeted tents of the Land of Harmony's elite medical core, nor did the soothing, rhythmic hum of restoration arrays greet Kairo's ears. Instead, the smell of damp grass, iron, and celestial elder leaves evaporated instantly, replaced by the suffocatingly mundane scent of synthetic lavender air freshener and over-steeped tea.
Kairo snapped his eyes open.
He wasn't lying on a clean litter in the red garden. He was sinking into the worn, faux-leather cushions of a thoroughly ordinary sofa. The grand, weightless sensation of his emerald mana was completely gone. His chest, which had just been crushed and broken by a cosmic entity, felt light, unburdened, and terrifyingly human. He looked down at his hands—they were smooth, devoid of the deep calluses from holding steel swords, and entirely clean of King Lysander's blood.
He was back. He was in the mortal realm. Specifically, he was sitting in the cramped, cluttered living room of his aunt's house.
Across the room, a cradle rocked with a rhythmic, irritating squeak. His aunt, looking thoroughly exhausted with dark circles weighing down her eyes, was cradling a crying newborn baby. Kairo's internal monologue, still stained with the cold, detached survival instincts of a dark fantasy commander, immediately calculated the energy expenditure required to interact with the situation.
I survived a literal war, Kairo thought, his mind feeling strangely heavy, as if a thick layer of fog was slowly rolling over his recent memories. My body is completely spent from dealing with kings and gods. I don't want to work. I have absolutely zero desire to help her carry groceries or rock a cradle right now.
Slouching deeper into the couch, he pulled his heavy gaming laptop onto his lap. The fans immediately whirred to life with a low, mechanical hum. Flipping through his library, his fingers instinctively clicked on a high-intensity horror game—something with dark corridors, flickering flashlights, and jumpscares. It was a bizarre, ironic attempt to mimic the psychological dread he had just escaped, but in a safe, digitized format.
He played for a while, the clicking of his mouse cutting through the ambient noise of the baby's whimpering.
"Hey... can you help me for a second, dear?" his aunt's voice cracked with fatigue as she balanced a bottle of milk and a mountain of laundry. "Just hold the baby's bottle while I change the sheets?"
Kairo didn't lift his eyes from the screen, his fingers rapidly tapping the WASD keys to guide his avatar away from a digital monster. "Sorry, I'm really busy right now," he mumbled, his voice dropping into a casual, dismissing register. "You can call someone else to help. I'll come over and assist you after a few minutes, okay?"
But minutes in front of a glowing screen have a habit of warping time. Minutes seamlessly turned into hours. The digital sun in his game rose and fell, and by the time Kairo finally shut the laptop lid, the shadows in the living room had grown long and dark. The apathy of his exhausted mind took over.
"Well... I'm going home," Kairo announced, standing up and stretching his stiff limbs. He didn't wait for his aunt to respond. He gave a quick, half-hearted wave to his cousins who were hovering near the kitchen, said his goodbyes, and walked out the door.
The walk back to his own house was a blur of concrete streets, distant traffic, and a creeping, unsettling sensation that his mind was leaking. Every time he tried to remember the name Leonhart or the specific tactical layout of the Gravity Mire spell, the thoughts slipped through his fingers like dry sand. By the time he unlocked his front door, the Land of Lust felt less like a real memory and more like a vivid, hyper-realistic dream he had had during a fever.
He stepped inside, the familiar layout of his home offering a brief sense of grounding. He unbuckled the heavy straps of his backpack, letting the weight of the laptop thud heavily against the floorboards.
"Mother?" Kairo called out, stepping into the kitchen. His eyes immediately found her form. "How is your health after that operation? Are you feeling any pain?"
His mother turned around, a reassuring, gentle smile on her face as she wiped her hands on a dish towel. "Yeah, it's completely fine, my dear. The doctors said the recovery is going exactly as planned. You don't need to worry so much."
"Hmm. Okay, mom," Kairo muttered, a quiet wave of relief washing over his chest. He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling a strange, phantom ache where Seraphina had pinched his ear in that bizarre dreamscape. "I've studied a whole lot today. My brain feels fried. I'm gonna go to my room and play some games to unwind."
His mother sighed, but her tone remained lenient. "As long as you pass the exam, it's no problem to me. But make sure you don't play games all night. You need to take care of your eyes."
"Ok, mom. I will," he replied, turning down the hallway toward his bedroom.
The moment he stepped into his room, a profound, crushing weight hit his eyelids. It wasn't just the normal fatigue of a student; it was a deep, systemic exhaustion that felt like it was pulling his soul straight down into the mattress. His vision began to blur, the edges of his room spinning in a dizzying wheel of static.
"Hmm... I haven't slept at all last night," Kairo muttered to himself, his voice slurring as he collapsed onto the edge of his bed, fully clothed. "I need to take a quick rest... just a short nap... then I'll play this game afterwards..."
He closed his eyes, dropping into a darkness that felt infinitely deeper than sleep.
Gas. The heavy, unmistakable stench of rotting wood and old carpet.
Kairo violently opened his eyes, hacking and coughing as if his lungs were full of dust. He wasn't on his mattress. He wasn't in his bedroom. His fingers weren't touching soft bedsheets; they were pressing into cold, peeling wallpaper that felt damp to the touch.
He stood up rapidly, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The architecture around him was entirely wrong. The ceiling was low, yellowed by years of neglect, and lit by flickering, industrial fluorescent bulbs that buzzed with a maddening, high-pitched frequency.
"Wait... what? Where am I?!" Kairo shouted, his voice echoing flatly down a long, twisting hallway lined with identical wooden doors. "No way... did I just get teleported into a game or something? Is this a joke?!"
"Yoo! What's up, man!"
Kairo spun around, his hand instinctively reaching for a sword hilt that wasn't there. Standing behind him were his cousins, their faces completely relaxed, as if they had just walked into an arcade rather than a terrifying, liminal nightmare. One of them grinned, pointing toward a large, glowing digital display on the wall. "Are you going to guide us through this game, Kairo? You said you knew the layout!"
Kairo blinked, his brain desperately trying to process the sheer absurdity of the scenario. The survival instincts from his forgotten life flaked away, leaving only the bravado of a gamer trying to maintain face. "Yeah... yeah, it's too ez. No need to worry about it," Kairo stammered, though his eyes frantically scanned the shadows at the end of the hall.
But as he looked closer at the peeling walls, the blood-like stains near the floorboards, and the way the shadows seemed to stretch toward them like grasping fingers, his confidence completely shattered.
"Wait... no way," Kairo whispered, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. "Why is it... why is it so much more scary than before? Huh?!"
He forced himself to look at the digital interface hovering near the primary entrance door. The screen showed a lobby format, listing four major player designations, each color-coded with a bright, harsh luminescent ring.
"Ok... so there are four players majorly," Kairo muttered, his tactical mind trying to establish a baseline of rules to keep his panic at bay. "The 1st one is yellow. The 2nd one is blue. The 3rd one is green. The 4th one is red. Hmm... RGB and yellow, huh? Well, okay then. Let's do this. Let's just break the mechanics."
Kairo took a step toward the first massive wooden door at the end of the starter room. He reached his hand out toward the rusted brass doorknob, but the moment his skin made contact with the cold metal, a sudden, horrifying flash of absolute certainty struck his brain.
Through a narrow gap in the door's warped frame, he saw it.
A massive, distorted silhouette was shifting in the absolute darkness of the next room. It wasn't human. Its limbs were elongated, bending at impossible, broken angles, and its face was a blank, terrifying void that seemed to absorb the flickering fluorescent light. It was waiting. It was listening to the sound of their breathing.
Kairo violently yanked his hand back, his face turning entirely pale as he grabbed his cousins by their shirts and pulled them away from the threshold.
"There's a monster right behind there!" Kairo hissed, his voice trembling with a terrifying blend of familiarity and sheer panic. "The exact moment you open that door, he is going to catch you. Don't you dare go anywhere near it! If you touch it, you will die instantly!"
He backed away, his boots scraping against the dirty carpet. "Uhh... I hate this guy. I absolutely hate stealth mechanics like this."
Kairo pressed his back against the opposite wall, clutching his temples as a massive, agonizing throb spiked through his frontal lobe. He tried to remember the enemy's attack patterns. He tried to remember how he knew the exact mechanics of the death-trigger behind that door. He tried to remember why the phrase "you will die instantly" felt so real, so heavily tied to a past where death was a permanent, bloody reality.
But as he searched his mind for the answers, he found nothing but a vast, terrifying void.
"Ok, then... wait a minute," Kairo whispered, his emerald eyes widening in absolute horror as he stared at his trembling hands. "My memory... it's gone. Every single piece of my memory... it has been completely wiped off!"