Ha-eun hated the rain. It always fell sideways in Seoul's labyrinth of alleyways, sneaking under umbrellas and soaking her socks. Today, though, the rain felt like a warning. The antique shop hadn't been here last week—she was sure of it. Yet there it stood, crammed between a fried chicken stall and a boarded-up karaoke bar, its sign flickering: 「The Mind's Eye」.
The owner sat behind a glass counter with rusted keys and cracked porcelain dolls. His face was a blur as if her eyes refused to focus on him. "Looking for something particular?" he asked, voice like gravel underfoot.
"Just looking," Ha-eun lied. She'd come for a birthday gift for her father, but her gaze catched on a small object in the corner—a cube, its surface shifting between matte black and faint starlight. No dust clung to it.
"Ah. The cube," the man said, suddenly beside her. Ha-eun flinched. "it is a very old antique you have to pay 10,000 won young lady."
"That's it?" She frowned. The cube hummed under her fingertips, warm and alive.
"A warning, though." The man's grin showed too many teeth. "It answers questions. But you might not like what it shows."
Ha-eun snorted. She was a broke physics student, not a superstitious ahjumma. She tossed the cash on the counter.
The cube sat on her dorm desk that night, defying the lamplight—no reflection, no shadow. Her father would've called it gwijeong (귀정), "ghostly stillness." She prodded it. "Show me something, then''.
A static charge shot up her arm.
The room was ripped.
Colors inverted. The sound dissolved into a high-pitched scream. Ha-eun's lungs collapsed as the walls peeled away, replaced by a void stitched with fragments of reality: her mother sobbing into a phone ("Ha-eun's missing—"), a version of herself laughing in a sunlit café, a towering thing with too many eyes skittering across a frozen sea.
Then, pain.
Something coiled around her ankle—a tendril of liquid darkness. It yanked her into the abyss. Her scream echoed in a language she didn't know.
When she woke, her skin itched. She scratched her wrist and gasped—beneath her nails glittered stardust, not blood.