The moment Jisung stepped through the door, a message rang out.
[You Have Entered a New Location]
[Your Awakening Trial Is About To Commence...]
Something about that notification alone made him pause. Last time, there had been nothing like this. No guidance or warning whatsoever. He walked into the darkness all alone and ended up dying at the hands of those vicious creatures.
But this time, he felt less lonely. And above all, it made him feel marginally better about his chances of survival.
The first thing he noticed after stepping through the door... was the cold. It hit all at once like a brick.
’Is it winter? Already?’ he thought, wrapping both arms around himself tightly, as heavy wind blew past his ears.
The wind wasn’t just heavy, it clawed under his collar, down his sleeves and literally found every gap in his clothes. He felt goosebumps and shivered, chattering his teeth.
"C-C-Cold. I’m f-freaking cold." he muttered, arms wrapped so tight around himself.
It was unlike anything he’d felt before. And he could hear it too. It sounded like a long low howl that rose and dropped and rose again. Like the Trial itself was breathing along with him.
He chuckled at the thought of the Trials being alive.
’Maybe this is just an endurance test. This will be easy.’ he smiled, thinking to himself, when a particularly hard gust shoved into him and he landed face first onto the snow.
"...Ugh. Alright, I take it back."
As he got up, his mind suddenly snagged on something. He gasped. "Seojun."
He yanked the strap off his shoulder and dropped to his knees, fumbling the zipper of the bag open with fingers already going stiff.
Inside it was exactly what he remembered. The Jacket. It was bigger that he’d expected and he smiled thankfully. He pulled it over his head so fast he nearly took an ear off with it.
"Yesss!" He sighed feeling relief. "...that’s the stuff."
He looked down, about to zip up the bag when he froze.
’There’s more?’
He went still, eyes catching on what else was tucked inside.
There was a knitted pair of gloves. Then fruit, wrapped carefully so it wouldn’t bruise and something soft and worn at the edges. It was a small stuffed animal he recognized immediately. One Seojun had bought him years ago when he was little for his birthday.
’...Hyung!’ He huffed a laugh, half disbelief, half... touched.
As he grabbed the gloves to put on, a small note fell out and landed on the snow.
"...Huh?"
He picked it up and unfolded it.
’If you’re reading this, I guess you finally found it in the bag. I don’t want to say much cause you’re probably rolling your eyes right now.’
Jisung giggled.
’All I want to say is, you’re stronger than you think. Don’t let what happened in the past affect your future. Let the past be the past, Jisung. Go make me proud. And...’
Jisung sat there for a moment in the cold, re-reading the last sentence as he fought to hold back his tears.
"...come home." he read out quietly. Voice barely above a whisper. Then he smiled.
’I’ll try my best hyung.’
Neatly, he folded the note and hid it well in the bag, pulled out a scarf that was in the bag and wound it around his neck twice, the way Seojun always wore his, and popped one of the snacks into his mouth. He zipped the bag back up, slung it over his shoulder, and pushed himself to his feet and started walking.
Whatever this place wanted from him, staying still wasn’t going to get him through it.
He chuckled lightly, when he remembered a part in the note that mentioned something about his past.
"Hyung probably doesn’t know what happened with Daniel yet." He laughed.
Jisung knew if anyone would be happiest about him kicking Daniel’s ass, it would be Seojun. Although, he’d be completely freaked out and inspecting everywhere on Jisung’s body for any Injuries. He was very older-brother-coded.
As he moved only for few meters, he noticed something else that seemed to be more problematic than the cold.
There was a thick fog that covered everywhere.
It wasn’t like the normal fog. It didn’t drift or thin out in places. It sat still, thick, and unnervingly grey. And it swallowed the path in front of him completely.
He could make out maybe two meters of solid ground before everything dissolved into that flat grey nothingness.
He sighed and squinted into it anyway.
"I was right." He muttered. "This Trial is an endurance test."
It didn’t bother him much because his first Trial before he woke up, had been a forest so pitch black he might as well have been blind. And now, even though it was daytime, the fog was doing the exact same job the darkness had done last time. Hiding and swallowing everything.
"Is there an unspoken fate of me dying by blindness?" He chuckled and kept walking regardless. Mostly to keep his blood moving since the cold was unbreakable, but partly because, well he was scared.
Darkness is creepy and scary even though he was stronger than last time.
Minutes passed. Then more minutes passed, and the fog never lifted or thinned. The cold and wind however, seemed to get worse by the minute.
Jisung frowned. ’If this were really just an endurance test... shouldn’t something have happened by now?’
He had already walked for what felt like forever. No monsters, no traps. Nothing. All he could see was just endless snow.
’Or maybe that was the point.’ He sighed.
He started counting his steps just to have something to focus on, but lost count somewhere past two hundred and gave up.
It was on maybe his three hundredth step, give or take, that he noticed something in the snow.
It was a footprint.
His footprint.
He stopped, stared down at it, then looked behind him into the wall of grey fog he’d just walked out of.
"Huh...? How?" Words couldn’t explain what his eyes was seeing.
He crouched, fingers brushing the edge of the footprint. It was fresh and indeed his. He stood back up slowly, an uneasy little laugh escaping him.
He kept walking. Faster this time. Then he broke into a sprint.
About ten minutes later, he found another one. Then a cluster of them, leading all the way to the path before him.
He stood still, left eye twitching in annoyance.
"No way," he said out loudly in annoyance. "No fucking way man, c’mon!"
He turned in a slow circle, scanning the fog like it might give him an answer, and that was when the irritation started creeping in, hot under all that cold.
"You have got to be joking," he said, voice climbing.
"I’ve been walking in circles. I’ve been walking in freaking circles?!" He kicked at the snow, sending up a little spray of white.
"For how long?! Fuck! Why...?"
He cut himself off when he heard it.
There was a sound of movement from behind him. Something pressed down into the snow instead of just sweeping over it.
He spun around so fast he nearly lost his footing. He couldn’t see anything. Just fog.
But his heart was beating hard against his chest. He stood there, breathing hard, eyes straining against the fog.
"H-hello?" His voice cracked a little going out, and he hated that it did. "Wh-Who’s there?"
All he could hear was his own voice echoing strangely in a distance.
Nothing responded back. The sound came again from behind him and he turned. Still nothing.
Slowly, he began to move backwards. Eyes scanning every direction when he heard a loud sound.
Boom!
It came from the ground beneath his feet.
It was a deep, groaning crack and the ground beneath his boots trembled.
’...oh no.’
Another crack, louder and closer followed and this time he saw it. A line tearing through the snow a few feet to his left, jagged and fast, racing away into the fog like lightning frozen mid-strike.
"Shit. No!"
He ran in the opposite direction.
His boots slamming into snow that was no longer steady beneath him. Every step met with a fresh groan of strain from whatever was breaking apart underneath the whole world. The fog tore past him in streaks, offering him nothing. He couldn’t see any landmark or anything. He was running freaking blind.
He cursed under his breath as he ran.
A crack split open directly in his path and he threw himself sideways, hit the ground hard on his shoulder.
"...Argh!"
But he got up quickly and kept moving before the pain had even finished registering.
’Move.’ he kept telling himself.
Behind him the cracking sound multiplied, a chorus of splitting ice and snow collapsing in on itself, the entire ground giving way in pieces. He could feel it now. The whole world tilting and sinking as the snow beneath his boots started coming apart.
He didn’t see the edge until he was already past it.
There was a half second where his foot came down on nothing, just open air where solid ground should have been, and his stomach dropped somewhere far behind the rest of him.
He was falling.
"Fuckkk! Ahhhhh!"
The fog whipped past him, with no sense of up or down except for the wind screaming in his ears and the sick lurch in his gut that told him this was going to hurt.
He twisted in the air on pure instinct, trying to angle himself into something, anything at all, that wasn’t going to break every bone in his body on impact.
Finally he hit. And heard something crack. The impact knocked every ounce of air out of him at once, his whole body driving down into a thick cushion of snow with a sound like a sack of bricks dropped from a rooftop.
Pain lit up everywhere. His shoulder, his ribs and the side of his face, and for a moment he just lay there, completely unable to move.
’...thank god," he wheezed. ’Thank god it was snow. If that’d been ice or anything else, I’d be a Jisung pancake right now.’
He lay there a while longer, staring straight up into white sky he couldn’t tell apart from the fog around it, just breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Each breath a small, ridiculous victory.
"Okay," he croaked eventually, pulling himself to sit up. He remembered the crack sound he heard when he landed and froze. He checked his ribs first. It was fine. His arm, legs, jaw... all were fine.
’Wait, what cracked then?’ he thought.
His mind pointed to something immediately. He snapped his head up immediately. "The bag."
He zipped open the bag and there it was. One of the snacks had split in half.
"...seriously?" He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. "I thought I broke something."
He let himself laugh, a weak breathless laugh at the absurdity of it all. His ribs hurt as he did but he felt good anyways.
Slowly, he pushed himself up onto his elbows, checking that everything still moved the way it was supposed to. There were definitely bruises, but nothing broken, as far as he could tell.
He sat there a few minutes longer, letting his heartbeat come down out of his throat, before reaching for the bag again. He dug out a snack, unwrapped it with hands that were still trembling slightly, and ate it slowly, staring out at the unchanged wall of fog around him.
He still couldn’t see more than a couple meters in any direction.
"Just perfect." he muttered around a mouthful. "Fell off a cliff, and the view’s exactly the same."
But something had changed, hadn’t it. He was somewhere new now. A different stretch of this place entirely.
So whatever had been chasing him or hadn’t been chasing him was left behind up on that collapsing ledge.
Maybe this was better. Maybe this was the part where things actually started making sense.
He finished the snack, got to his feet, brushed the snow off as best he could, and started walking again. He hadn’t gone more than a few steps when a message rang out.
[Your Awakening Trial Is About To Commence...]
He stopped dead.
"..."
He stared at the notification hovering at the edge of his vision, rereading it like the words might rearrange themselves into something that made more sense.
"...Again?"
He frowned. "Hadn’t it already started?"
No answer.
’Well, what else was i expecting?’
He smacked his forehead gently. As he stood there, a little frustrated and confused, the grey fog around him suddenly began to move. All at once.
He turned in a slow circle, watching the fog peel away from the world in every direction at the same time.
"Whoa!"
In a few minutes, it was gone.
Jisung stood blinking in the sudden brightness of a winter landscape so vast it didn’t seem real. Snow stretched in every direction, all the way out to mountains that climbed high enough to vanish into pale, distant sky. The light was gentle, almost golden, catching every crystal of frost so the whole world seemed to shimmer.
"..."
For one full breath, he just stood there and let himself take it in. The fear, the fall, the cracking ground, all of it felt very far away in that single moment.
Then his eyes drifted lower, toward the open stretch of snow ahead of him, and he saw it.
Twelve meters away, something stood completely still, with both eyes fixed directly on him.
"Shit." He frowned. "You’ve got to be kidding me."
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Author’s Note: If you’re enjoying the novel, don’t forget to add it to your library and show some support. It really helps!
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