Noah fell asleep late that night. The sounds of the neighborhood outside—the barking of stray dogs and the rattling of old carts—seemed to come from the bottom of a deep well, as if the world were already drifting away from him while he was still wearing his faded shirt.

  He closed his eyes and sank into a leaden sleep, dreamless, as though he were fleeing from wakefulness into a small, temporary death.

  At first, nothing broke the monotony of the darkness behind his eyelids. But as the hours passed, his body began to feel something unfamiliar. It wasn’t a nightmare—it was a separation. He felt his pulse withdrawing from his limbs toward his core, as if his consciousness were lagging half a step behind his body’s movement; a terrifying sensation of not being entirely inside one’s own skin.

  He opened his eyes slowly. The darkness was the same, the dampness gnawed at the walls as usual, and the cracked ceiling loomed like an old map of misery. He exhaled in relief, trying to convince himself it was nothing more than a panic episode brought on by accumulated hunger. But the malfunction was too deep to ignore.

  Something in the room’s laws had broken.

  Noah felt the distance between his back and the iron bed slowly increasing, even though he hadn’t moved. He wiggled his fingers and saw them move, but the sensation of heat and touch reached his brain seconds late, as if his nerves now stretched across endless distances of void.

  “No… no, please stop,” he whispered in a fractured voice.

  He jolted upright, his chest pounding with savage, irregular heartbeats. He stared at his hand in the room’s darkness—it was the thin hand he knew, yet it felt foreign, like an artifact seen behind thick glass. He stood up, and when his feet touched the tile floor, he felt its coldness for a brief instant… then the sensation vanished completely, as if the ground beneath him was no longer solid matter, but merely an idea that had dissolved.

  “What is happening?” he screamed, but his voice came out muffled, as if he were underwater.

  Fear crept into him slowly—a fear of losing his mind. He took a step backward and felt his body lift slightly. It wasn’t flight; it was the sensation that reality had withdrawn its acknowledgment of his existence. Gravity abandoned him. Space abandoned him. His breathing quickened, and cold sweat covered his forehead like drops of ice.

  “This is a dream… I’ll wake up… I’ll wake up in the room any moment now!” he repeated it like a magic charm. He tried to grab the edge of the iron bed, but his hand passed through the metal as if it were cold air. He recoiled in terror and slammed into the wall—or should have—but instead slid through brick and cement like a ghost.

  In that moment, terror reached its peak. It wasn’t screaming—it was emotional paralysis. He felt that his identity, “Noah” the insignificant, was no longer anchored in the fabric of time.

  Then he saw it… in the dark corner of the room.

  A shadow, like a hole torn into existence itself. It didn’t move, nor did its shape change, yet Noah felt it watching him with a cold, neutral awareness—like a colossal eye observing a speck of dust. He swallowed bitterly.

  “I don’t want to die… I swear I don’t want anything from this world,” he said in a broken voice, believing death throes had finally come for him.

  The shadow didn’t approach, but the silence grew heavier, as if the room itself were tightening around his lungs. Suddenly, he felt something being recorded deep within his being—an alien awareness that didn’t use words, only images.

  Rapid flashes passed through his mind: stale bread, his mother’s face, the shop owner, his old school notebooks, his friends, and the laughter of people in the street. As if his entire life were being folded up and placed into an old archive.

  Then—suddenly—the thread was cut.

  No up. No down. No right or left. Existence shut off completely. Noah didn’t fall; he was disconnected from consciousness the way power is cut from a burnt-out lamp.

  When sensation returned, it returned with brutal force.

  His body slammed into solid ground painfully, and he gasped violently like a drowning man dragged from the ocean floor at the last second. His body was heavy now—terribly heavy—and real to the point of agony. Every cell screamed in pain.

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  He lifted his head with excruciating slowness, as if his eyelids were weighed down with lead.

  There were no walls. There was no neighborhood.

  The sky above him was not a sky he recognized; it was a dull blue, starless, a boiling void choked with heavy gray clouds. The air was strange—metallic in taste, carrying the scent of lightning and ancient dampness. He was trembling, not from cold, but from the shock of realizing that what he was seeing could not belong to the world he had fled.

  He opened his eyes very slowly, and when his vision finally settled, the blood in his veins froze. The cracked ceiling of his room had been replaced by nightmarish trees, towering like the pillars of a demonic temple, their trunks thick as if skinned from colossal reptiles. High above, their branches were densely interwoven, suffocating the light and casting the forest into a permanent twilight, where nothing could be seen clearly—only shadows shifting with the wind.

  Noah grabbed the soil beneath his hand. It was dark, cold earth, unlike any soil he had ever touched. He looked around in childlike terror, searching for his room’s door, for his bed, for anything that might anchor him to his past—but he found nothing except the solemn silence of this alien forest.

  Deep within him, beneath the rubble of fear, a silent and terrifying sensation began to take shape… as if the world he had ignored for twenty years had finally decided to swallow him whole. He didn’t know where he was, nor why he was here, but he knew one thing: the rules of “survival” he had learned in back alleys might not be enough to endure in this place, a place whose pulse he was beginning to feel beneath his feet.

  He stood up hesitantly and slowly turned his head. Every movement felt unsafe, as though the forest were watching him in silence. The ground beneath his feet was covered in tall, damp grass, swaying slightly with a cold breeze that sent shivers through his body. Without thinking, he murmured, “A forest… I think.”

  Distant, indistinct sounds reached his ears—rustling leaves, the snap of a branch, something moving deep within. Each sound was enough to make his heart pound violently. With every beat, memories flooded his mind mercilessly: news he had heard countless times without caring, short clips on screens, whispered conversations about those who vanished without warning.

  The people who were summoned to another world.

  He remembered the numbers that were always mentioned—cold numbers, spoken without emotion. Out of every hundred people, only five or six returned. The rest were never heard from again. No bodies. No messages. No tales of survival.

  His eyes widened suddenly, his body stiffened, and fear surged violently into his chest. His breathing quickened, his hand began to tremble—but before panic could turn into a scream, before he completely lost control, he felt something else invade his senses.

  Something stronger than fear.

  A strange pressure formed in his chest—slow at first, almost like simple tension. But it didn’t stop. It kept growing, sharpening, turning into a sensation as if something invisible had begun engraving itself inside him. A deep carving—unseen, yet unmistakably felt. He gasped and staggered a step backward.

  “What… what’s happening…?” The words came out broken, his voice weaker than he expected.

  The pain suddenly intensified—not for long, but long enough to make him hunch over and clutch his chest with all his strength, his teeth clenched as he tried to scream without sound. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the sensation vanished completely.

  Time froze for a moment.

  And in that moment, he understood.

  No screen appeared before him. No voice spoke to him. Yet the knowledge settled into his mind with eerie certainty, as if it had always been there—waiting only to be revealed.

  Name: Noah

  Race: Human

  Level: [Mark Formed]

  Skill: Under Evaluation

  “What… what is this? What’s happening? A name? A race? A level? What are these things?! What the hell is happening?!”

  He stood motionless, struggling to comprehend what it meant, while a single thought hammered relentlessly in his head:

  If this world had killed powerful people—those with influence, wealth, and preparation—then how was someone like him, who had owned nothing in his life but exhaustion and failure, supposed to survive even a single day?

  Cold seeped into his limbs.

  Then… everything changed.

  Without any warning, a sharp chill ran through him. A sense of danger—instant and primal—froze him in place, as if his body had detected something his eyes had yet to see. Something lurking, moving within the grass ahead.

  A low sound reached his ears—a muffled scrape, slow, deliberate, carrying a clear threat and an unknown fate.

  “No… no…” he whispered as he took one step back, then another, his heart pounding so violently he could hear it in his ears.

  His eyes darted wildly in every direction, desperately searching for any place to hide, anything that might grant him even an illusion of survival. Then he saw it—a massive tree nearby, its trunk thick, its branches hanging low enough to reach.

  He rushed toward it without thinking, his feet slipping on the damp grass. He climbed the trunk roughly, scraping his hands and arms, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t feel the pain at all. At last, he managed to press himself against the thick trunk, hiding behind it, forcing his body as flat as possible.

  He held his breath.

  The sound drew closer.

  He sensed movement in the grass—something large, crawling slowly. Each passing second increased the pressure in his chest, sweat pouring down his forehead despite the cold air.

  Finally, summoning his courage, he tilted his head ever so slightly and cast a quick glance from behind the tree toward where he had felt the danger.

  And the moment his eyes landed on what was there—

  Everything inside him froze.

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