The incense on the small,windowless room, had long since burned down to a pile of gray ash ,but it’s cloying, metallic scent lingers in Seul-gi’s throat.
She sits cross-legged on the bare wooden floor her spine perfectly straight, hands resting open on her kneels.
To an outside observer, she might have looked like a woman seeking inner peace.
But inside Seul-gi’s mind,there is no peace .
There is only calculations.
She breathes in deeply,pulling the heavy air into her lungs,letting her consciousness drift away from the physical world.
She transitions.
The transition is not peaceful;it feels like dropping backward into a deep,freezing well.
The ambient noisesof the city outside-the distant hum of traffic,the bark of a stray dog-fades into a suffocating absolute silence
When Seul-gi opens her eyes,she is no longer in her apartment.
She is a cavernous,subterranean dark.
The darkness here did not merely represent the absence of light;it is an active suffocating entity.
It clings to the damp stone walls of the ancient crypt like a layer of living velvet.
It is a creeping shadow that seems to breathe, pressing against Seul-gi’s skin with an icy mocking weight.
The air is thick with the stench of stagnant water, rotting earth, and a sharp copper tang that makes her tongue dry.
Somewhere between the crypt, the dark seems to twist and coil as if waiting for a single moment of weakness to swallow her whole.
It is a terrifying place,a womb of ancient horrors where the sun had never reached, and where human life meant absolutely nothing.
Seul-gi did not falter.
She draws herself up to her full height, her shoulders squaring.
She begins to walk.
Even in the terrifying expanse of the crypt,surrounded by a darkness that could drive a lesser person mad, Seul-gi walks like royalty.
Every step is deliberate, graceful and entirely devoid of fear.
The hem of her long dress sweeps over the uneven stone floor with a soft,rhythmic hiss.
She holds her hair high, her posture commanding and regal.
As if she was a queen inspecting her personal court rather than a mortal trespassing in the realm of the damned.
She belongs her and she knows it.
The darkness seems part slightly for her giving way to her icy, aristocratic composure.
Ahead of her,the true horror of the crypt begins to take shape.
The altar looms out of the shadows, a grotesque monument to a forgotten malice.
It is constructed entirely from misshapen black stones they looks as though it had been pulled directly from the deepest pits of fire.
Dark, crusted stains-remnants of sacrifices spanning generations-swirled across it’s uneven surface like a map of agony.
But it is what waits behind the altar that truly defied reasons.
The entity manifests slowly, bleeding out of the void.
It’s Lord Kanji.
The creature sid not look human, nor did it look entirely solid.
It is shifting, towering mass of crimson energy, shifting like boiling blood trapped under a layer of thin ice.
Where it’s face should had been, there are no features, only two hollow points of intense,burning heat that bored directly into Seul-gi’s soul.
The air around Lord Kanji vibrates with a sickening, low-frequency hum that vibrates inside Seul-gi’s chest,threatening to stop her heart.
Lord Kanji is an ancient demon of unparalleled cruelty,an entity that trades in the currency of human souls,and its very presence makes the stones beneath Seul-gi’s feet tremble with dread.
She reaches the foot of the altar and stops.
Slowly with the elegance of a high priestess making an offering to a god, she lowers herself to her kneels.
She bows deeply,pressing her head against the freezing,stained stone of the floor.
As she lays there in total submission, the heavy silence of the crypt magnifies the terror she keeps locked away in her chest.
She could feel the immense, crushing wait of the demon’s gaze on her back.
The physical pressure is so intense it feels as though the roof is collapsing unto her spine.
Every instinct of her human screams at her to flee,to cry,to beg for mercy.
The terror is a physical claws clutching at her throat,but she forces it down.
She remains perfectly still, her forehead glued to the stones ,proving her absolute obedience.
After a long agonizing minute, Seul-gi slowly raises her head.
The demon looms over her, a towering inferno of silent malice.
“I’ve done what you required.
“Seul-gi says,her voice steady despite the overwhelming horror of the room.” I’ve finally brought my nieces.
They are pure,untainted,and ready.
Now,you must fulfill your promise to me”
The demon did not speak with words.
Instead it laughs.
The laughter is an unspeakable horror.
It is incredibly heavy, a booming,grinding sound that sounds like two tectonic plates crushing together over a chrous weeping voices.
It fills every square inch of the crypt , shaking dust from the ceiling and vibrating violently through Seul-gi’s bones.
The sound presses against her ears until they throb in pain, a manifestation of pure, unadulterated malice.
Yet,within that terrifying sound,there is an agreement.
The demon accepts the trade.
Seul-gi reaches her hand out towards the shifting crimson light,her fingers steady as she sought to seal the blood covenant.
But Lord Kanji did not take her hand.
Instead, the demon’s form flares violently.
Lord Kanji shoots her with a powerful crimsonbolt of pure, raw energy.
The blast erupts from the center of the entity, strikingly Seul-gi directly In the chest.
The strength of the blast is cataclysmic.
It did not knock her backwards;instead it pins her in place,suspending her body in a cage blinding, electrical red light.
The sheer kinetic and spiritual force of the energy tears through her viens like liquid fire, rewriting her very biology.
It is an explosion of agonizing power that shatters her internal defenses , a violent take over of her mortal form by a cosmic terror.
Seul-gi can no longer hold back her agony.
She opens her mouth and let’s out a bone chilling scream.
The scream tore from her lungs , carrying the weight of all her terror,pain,and shattered humanity.
It echoes off the stone walls of the crypt, a high-pitched, desperate wail that sounds like a dying animal.
The sound fills the chamber, drowning out the demon’s heavy laughter,vibrating with a frequency that threatens to cracks the very foundation of the subterranean vault.
It is a sound of complete total violation.In the supernatural realm.
Then just as suddenly as it had begun, the crimson light snaps out.
The blast vanishes.
Once thr scream is done, Seul-gi collapses onto her hand gasping for sir.
The absolute silence of the crypt rushes back in, broken only by her ragged, desperate breathing.
But she is no longer the same.
Her left eye has changed completely.
It now looks entirely possessed-the irs and sclerosis has turned a deep obsidian black ,housing a tiny,flickering of ember crimson light at it’s center.
It is a window into the void, a physical mark of her pact with Lord Kanji.
Seul-gi pants heavily, her chest heaving as she struggles to pull oxygen into her burning lungs.
Slowly, thick lines of dark,hot blood begins tracing out of her eyes.
The blood runs down her pale cheeks in twin tracks, staining her skin and dripping onto the stone floor below.
The pain is blinding, but a terrifying sense of absolute pain now surges through her viens.
Looking down at the blood pooling down on the stone, a dark, twisted smile, spreads across Seul-gi’s face.
She closes her right eye, letting the demon’s vision in her left eye adjust to the dark.
“Thank you lord “she whispers in the dark.