The sound was the worst part.
It wasn't the screaming or the howling wind that had turned Manila into a graveyard of white marble.
It was the wet, rhythmic slurp of Kiara's tongue as she licked the blood off her teeth.
Schlick.
Jae-Min lay on the beige tiles of Unit 1418. He was a logistics manager. He was used to inventory—counting boxes, tracking shipments, managing flow.
Now, he was the inventory.
He watched, detached, as his own left bicep was peeled back like the rind of a fruit. There was no pain. The -70°C air had long since turned his nervous system into brittle glass.
Crunch.
Kiara bit down. The sound of his humerus snapping was dull, like a dry branch breaking under a boot.
She didn't look at his face. She only looked at the meat.
"You were always so... organized," Kiara whispered. Her breath came out in a thick plume of white mist, smelling of copper and the last of their peppermint tea.
"You saved all the canned goods. You saved the rice. You even saved that extra blanket for me."
She leaned in closer, her eyes bloodshot and wide with a frantic, animal hunger.
"It's only fair you provide one last time, Jae-Min."
Behind her, the neighbors from Shore Residence waited in a shivering circle. Mr. Bautista from 1402 held a cracked plastic bowl. The college student from 1410 clutched a rusted kitchen knife.
They weren't neighbors anymore. They were scavengers waiting for the alpha to finish.
I'm sorry, Jae-Min thought, his mind drifting away from the butchery of his own body.
He didn't think of Kiara. He thought of his parents. He thought of Ji-Yoo.
He had spent his life being the "responsible" one. The strategist. He had stayed behind to manage the backlog at the warehouse while they flew to Seoul. He had prioritized a career that was now buried under ten feet of snow.
Because of his logic, he had let them die alone in a foreign land. Because of his weakness, he had let his ex-girlfriend back into this apartment when she came knocking, crying about the cold.
He had died a "good man," and in this white hell, a good man was just a soft meal.
One more chance, his soul shrieked, a primal rejection of his own failure.
Give me one more chance, and I'll burn the world to keep them warm.
The kitchen didn't fade. It fractured.
A vertical rift of blinding, ultraviolet light split the darkness of his vision. It felt like being pulled through a needle's eye.
The cold was replaced by a sudden, violent heat.
GASP!
Jae-Min lunged upward, his fingers clawing at his neck. He felt for the holes. He felt for the missing chunks of his arm, the exposed bone, the wetness of his shredded jugular.
Nothing.
He was sitting on a silk duvet. The air was a thick, suffocating 36°C—the honest, sweltering humidity of a Manila summer night.
The ceiling fan whirred—click, click, click—the steady heartbeat of a world that was still alive.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand. His hands shook so violently he almost cracked the screen against the wood.
March 16. 4:47 AM.
Thirty days.
He collapsed against the headboard, his breath coming in ragged, hysterical hitches. Sweat poured down his face, stinging his eyes.
The grief hit him like a physical blow. He began to sob—quiet, ugly sounds that tore at his throat. He could still feel the phantom sensation of Kiara's teeth. He could still hear the silence of his parents' unpicked-up phone calls from the first timeline.
He reached for the glass of water on the nightstand. His throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper.
But his hand stopped six inches short.
He didn't touch the glass.
The air rippled like a heat haze. In a fraction of a second, the glass vanished from the wood. It reappeared gripped firmly in his hand.
Jae-Min froze. The water inside the glass hadn't even sloshed.
"What...?"
He stared at his hand. He hadn't moved. He hadn't reached. He had simply targeted the object, and the universe had adjusted the coordinates for him.
He looked at the digital clock on the wall. He focused on the flickering colon between the hour and the minute.
Stop, he thought, his analytical mind already testing the boundaries of the impossible.
The blinking stopped.
The whirring of the ceiling fan died into a dead silence. A mosquito, frozen mid-flight near the lamp, hung in the air like a speck of dust.
The world had turned grey. He held the moment for five full heartbeats—calculating the drain on his stamina, observing the lack of air resistance—before his lungs burned and he let the universe move again.
Space and Time. He hadn't just brought back memories. He had brought back the catalyst of his own regression.
He walked to the mirror in the master bath and clicked on the light. He pulled the collar of his shirt down, his breath hitching.
A dark, livid bruise was spreading across his left shoulder. It was the perfect, cursed impression of a human jaw.
Kiara's mark. A debt recorded on his flesh.
They had broken up a year ago. She was out of his life. But he knew that in thirty days, the "logistics" of survival would bring her back to his door.
Jae-Min gripped the edges of the sink until his knuckles turned white. The sobbing had stopped. The regret was being processed and filed away, replaced by a cold, industrial resolve.
"Thirty days," he whispered to his reflection.
He walked to the balcony of Unit 1418 and looked down. The moonlight glinted off his White GT-R Nismo and Ji-Yoo's Yellow Nissan Z Nismo.
The manager in him began to run the numbers. Calories. Fuel. Reinforcements. Psychological variables.
He walked toward Ji-Yoo's door. He didn't knock. He stood there for a long time, listening to the sound of her breathing on the other side.
"Seoul is a dead end," he murmured, his eyes reflecting the cold calculation of a man who had already seen the ledger of the dead.
He checked the lock on her door. It was standard. Flimsy.
Everything about their life was flimsy.
He turned back toward his room to grab his laptop. The inventory phase had officially begun.