It was a fragment of a world on the brink of destruction.
The earth flowed, and the sky collapsed. The air solidified like resin, and the heavens plummeted. Stars that once flickered lost their light, and the microcosm twisted.
The world was a mess, like an amateur painter spilling paint onto a sketch and haphazardly swirling it with a brush.
A world covered in countless corpses. A world where only two people existed.
A five-year-old child. A teenage boy.
Young men in their twenties and thirties.
A man, with a blood-soaked face identical to the lifeless bodies scattered around, slowly approached.
“Shibaek hyung.”
The man’s smile was bright yet distorted as he walked, stepping over bodies with faces identical to his own.
“It’s time to choose.”
He whispered elegantly, spreading his arms wide like a maestro conducting a symphony.
“If you choose me, your precious siblings will die, and this world will perish. But if you choose this world, everyone will survive—everyone.”
Everyone.
As the man uttered the word, his voice twisted playfully. And Kim Shibaek knew.
The “everyone” who would survive would exclude only this man.
The man knew it too. That Kim Shibaek knew this.
With a radiant smile, as if already certain of Kim Shibaek’s answer, the man asked:
“What will you choose, hyung?”
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