Chapter 2 - Chapter 2: The Author, The Reader, The Fool[2]

The tension in the white void was so thick, it was practically a physical object.

Kim Dokja, stuck in the middle, let out a long, suffering sigh. On his left, Kim Hajin hadn't holstered his Desert Eagle; he'd merely lowered it. The low hum of Aether was still audible. On his right, Klein Moretti's summoned phantoms—the Bizarro Sorcerer and the rather terrifying lady holding four heads—hadn't vanished. They merely waited, their spiritual forms crackling.

"Aish, seriously," Kim Dokja muttered, rubbing his temples. He was the Reader, not a U.N. peacekeeper.

"뭐라고?" (What?) Hajin snapped, his eyes still locked on Klein's projections.

"Tell him," Klein said in crisp Loenese, his gaze on Hajin's gun, "to put away that curious, lethal metal wand. I am merely maintaining a defensive posture."

Klein also noticed that he had Creeping Hunger on. He couldn't understand how is it with him, it was supposed to be left on his body back in Forsaken Land of the Gods.

Kim Dokja's [Star Stream] translator fed him the words. He turned to Hajin. "He says to put your gun away first. He's 'maintaining a defensive posture'."

Hajin scoffed, a sound of pure disbelief.

"Defensive? He summoned a grim reaper and a Halloween reject! He drops his weird ghosts first."

Dokja translated this, simplifying it to: "He requests you dismiss your... companions."

Klein's eyebrow twitched. He and Hajin stared at each other. Kim Dokja, feeling his patience shred, finally clapped his hands.

"Both of you! At the same time! On three! One... two... THREE!"

With visible reluctance, Kim Hajin clicked the safety on his Desert Eagle. The Aether hum died entering his body making him instantly more beautiful, though it didn't really help. Simultaneously, Klein gave a curt nod, and his Historical Projections dissolved into fog of history.

Silence returned. It was awkward.

Kim Hajin, ever the anxious planner, immediately began checking his inventory, his Stigma, and his dead communicator, his brow furrowed. Klein stood straight, adjusting his bowtie, his mind clearly racing, analyzing every detail.

Kim Dokja, overwhelmed by the sheer protagonist-energy in the room, did the only thing that could calm him down.

He pulled out his smartphone.

Kim Hajin's head snapped up.

'A smartphone?'

He didn't recognized the model. It was like an ancient relic made by of some scraps.

'Why does he have that? And how does it have power?' His own, far more advanced, was a useless brick, 'Yoo Yeonha, do you see that?!'

Klein, on the other hand, just stared.

'What is that... Is that a smartphone from modern era? Are they also transmigrators?' he thought, his Spirit Vision active. He saw no spiritual glow. It was a flat, black rectangle of glass and metal. The man in the tattered coat was... rubbing it with his thumb. And it glowed. He hasn't seen the smartphone for so long, that now it was, to him, more alien than the monsters he'd summoned.

Kim Dokja ignored their stares. He frantically scrolled through the 3,149 chapters of Ways of Survival.

'Nothing. Of course, there's nothing. No white room. Why would tls123 write about this? This is a pirated collaboration I never asked for.'

But the act of reading, of scrolling through the familiar, comforting words of his favorite novel, was the only thing that centered his mind.

After a moment, Klein broke the silence.

"We require information," he said in Loenese.

Dokja looked up from his phone, startled. "Ah, yes. Information. Good."

"My 'spiritual' connection to my... home... is being blocked. But I can attempt a divination."

Dokja translated for Hajin. "He says he's going to... uh... do divination. Like, fortune-telling."

Kim Hajin's expression screamed 'Is this guy a quack?' His [Observation and Reading] was still useless, showing only fog and [???]. He had no way to gauge this man's 'settings', and it was driving his anxiety through the roof.

He tried to peek through the walls of this chamber with his Thousand-Mile Eyes. But nothing worked as if his vision stumbled upon a wall. That was the first time something like that happened!

Klein paid Hajin's skepticism no mind. He couldn't ascend above the gray fog, which was his first, and worst, sign. The blockage was absolute. He would have to try a cruder method.

He settled for divination by sleep.

"I will state my question," Klein announced, sitting cross-legged on the pristine white floor—a posture that looked utterly bizarre paired with his formal suit. "Our current location, and the cause of our arrival."

He repeated the statement seven times.

He performed the simple ritual, his eyes closing, his breathing slowing. To Hajin, it looked like he was taking a nap. To Dokja, it looked suspiciously like he was trying to log out.

Klein's consciousness did not fall. It drifted.

He wasn't in a normal dream. He was untethered, floating in the raw, unfiltered Cosmos his spirit had been thrown into.

He saw them. The Outer Deities.

The 'stars' in this void were not stars. They were wounds. They were points of light—worlds, perhaps—being eaten. He saw colossal, formless shadows moving between them, chewing on reality.

A shadow vast and branching, a network of roots and desire, blotted out his vision. The Mother Tree of Desire. He felt its ravenous, maddening hunger, a desire for everything, for life, for procreation, for consumption.

He was pulled deeper, past the Outer Gods, towards a singular point of agonizing, fractured light.

He heard a voice. It was not a god. It was the source. The sound of a universe breaking.

The Original Creator.

It was a whisper of pure, unadulterated agony.

"...I must save... the universe..."

The gaze from his transfer, [■■], suddenly felt closer. The backlash was immediate and absolute. It was the price for looking, even accidentally, at the Primordial.

He remembered one rule.

Do not.

Ever.

Look.

Directly.

At God.

Kim Dokja and Kim Hajin watched.

"Is he just sleeping?" Hajin muttered, annoyed.

As the words left his mouth, Klein's body went rigid. A low, wet gurgle escaped his throat.

"Hey..." Dokja said, taking a step back.

Klein's eyes, still closed, began to bleed.

Dark, crimson blood, mixed with a shimmering, oily spiritual fluid, poured from his eyes, his ears, his nose. His entire body began to convulse violently, his back arching off the floor.

"What the hell?!" Dokja yelled, recognizing the signs of a catastrophic instability, similar to his when he was deported out of the Scenario and his stories were unstable. "Is this Probability backlash?"

Kim Hajin didn't hesitate. He'd seen this before. Or something like it. Magic power overload. A Core overheating. A 'setting' error that was killing the user.

'His 'core' is unstable!'

He lunged forward, pulling a pulsing, pearlescent [Orb of Regeneration] from his Stigma's inventory. He knelt, the sphere slammed against Klein's convulsing chest, and channeled one pure, golden-white streak of healing energy into it.

The effect was instantaneous.

The Orb's light, a power designed and perfected, flared. Klein's convulsions stopped. The bleeding slowed to a trickle. His breathing, which had stopped, hitched and then evened out.

Kim Dokja stared, stunned. He had felt that power. It was... pure. It wasn't a Fable. It wasn't 'magic' as he knew it. It was like a raw, concept of 'healing' had just been applied.

'What... what was that magic?'

His fingers moved on instinct. [Character List]. He aimed it at Hajin again.

This time, his skill glitched.

A single, flickering line of text appeared in his vision:

[Name: Kim Chundong]

Kim Dokja's mind blanked. 'Kim... Chundong? But... he introduced himself as Kim Hajin.'

He muttered the name aloud, lost in his confusion.

"...Kim Chundong?"

The name hit Kim Hajin like a physical blow. A migraine, sharp and blinding, lanced through his skull. The white world flashed. 'No. Don't. Not that name.'

"Don't... call me that," he growled, clutching his head.

As if summoned by the name, his dead communicator flickered. A new message, overriding the "ERROR" from before, burned onto the screen.

[Synchronization Rate: 44%]

Hajin stared at it, his blood running cold. '44%?! It jumped! It was 40% before Orden's attack! What is this place accelerating?!' His anxiety, briefly forgotten, redlined.

At that moment, Klein groaned. He pushed himself into a sitting position, his face a mess of blood, his suit stained. He looked at Dokja, his eyes hollow.

"Did you... see it?" he whispered in Loenese.

"See what?" Dokja replied, baffled. "You just... you..."

Ping.

A sterile, white window, different from any, appeared in the air.

It appeared in front of all three of them.

Hajin's was in Korean. Dokja's was in Korean. Klein's was in Loenese.

The Scenario message this time was more stable, the programming lines fixing and fighting against each other.

Kim Dokja stared at the last line. '...Annihilation of 'Self'?' That wasn't 'death'. That was worse.

Hajin cursed under his breath. 'Compulsory? This is a forced quest! Damn it!'

Klein, still wiping blood from his chin, read the words. His mind, still reeling from the vision of the Cosmos, understood. This white room was a 'sealed world'.

And it had just given them its rules.