Chapter 1: The Blood-Stained Mirror Beneath the Crimson Moon

The sky above Seoul in 2047 was never truly dark. It reflected the glow of synthetic neon billboards humming lazily overhead, while the sleepless boulevards of Gangnam were shrouded in exhaust fumes and the lingering traces of acid rain from the late afternoon.

In a cramped, three-by-three-meter room in a rundown boarding house tucked away in a poor neighborhood, where the air reeked of dampness and old paper, Kang Harin sat motionless, staring at her smartphone screen.

The red numbers in her mobile banking app seemed to flicker mockingly at her.

Her balance wasn't even enough to buy a single roll of convenience-store kimbap. Meanwhile, messages from an unidentified number had been bombarding her phone for three days straight, demanding payment for installment debts that were already overdue.

"Three days."

Harin murmured the words in a hoarse voice. Her whisper was swallowed by the night wind rattling against the cracked window.

"If I died right now, at least I'd finally settle all my tax and debt problems on this planet."

She let out a small laugh, a dry, hollow sound that felt unfamiliar even to her.

At twenty-five, Harin's life had been one continuous series of mathematical failures. She worked twelve hours a day as a temporary digital records clerk in Mapo District, survived on discounted food nearing its expiration date from an underground supermarket, and lived in a cramped room that looked as though it could collapse at any moment.

There was no family who would come looking for her. No lover who would spare her a moment's sympathy.

In the face of Seoul's merciless storm, she was nothing more than a feather swept along by the wind.

Suddenly, the steady hum of the neon sign hanging from the ceiling stopped.

As though every trace of oxygen had been sucked from the room, an absolute, freezing darkness descended in an instant.

Harin blinked and reached toward the wall beside her folding bed, searching for the emergency switch. But before her fingers could touch the cold plastic, a silvery-white light split through the darkness from the corner of the room.

The spot that should have been empty.

The place where she usually kept her old suitcase.

A mirror stood there.

Its frame wasn't made of cheap plywood or aluminum. Instead, it consisted of twisted pieces of jet-black metal that resembled intertwined dead branches, their surfaces shimmering with an eerie, oily sheen.

Rather than reflecting the cluttered room, the mirror's glass revealed something moving beyond a veil of swirling mist.

An ancient forest stretched into the distance, its enormous trees covered in bluish leaves. Above them blazed a sky burning with a terrifying gradient of deep crimson and copper.

Harin slowly backed away until her spine struck the rough concrete wall.

Her heart pounded so violently that her ears began to ring. Blood seemed to surge through her veins with enough force to tear her apart from the inside.

She knew she was losing her mind.

The relentless overtime, chronic exhaustion, and lack of sleep must have finally pushed her brain into producing its most destructive hallucination yet.

But as the mirror's surface rippled like water stirred by a midnight breeze, a sharp fragrance drifted through the room.

Wet pine needles.

Frozen dew.

And something ancient, sweet yet deadly, like freshly spilled blood freezing upon pristine white snow.

From within the mirror, a voice whispered her name.

The sound carried a deep vibration that seemed to cross the boundaries of an empty dimension, shaking even the wooden floor beneath Harin's feet.

Drawn by a curiosity tangled with her own profound despair, Harin took an involuntary step forward.

She reached out with trembling fingers and touched the glass.

It wasn't cold as ice.

It was warm.

The moment her fingertips made contact, the mirror swallowed her whole.

The sensation of falling came without any violent rush of wind. Instead, it happened within an absolute silence that pressed against her chest, crushing the breath from her lungs.

When Harin struck the ground, she felt no concrete dust beneath her skin and heard no shattering glass.

Instead, she landed on a thick layer of soft, cold leaf litter.

Gasping, she clutched her chest and crawled across the damp earth.

The air here was completely different. It was purer, denser, and filled with a strange energy that made the fine hairs on her skin stand on end.

Slowly, Harin lifted her head.

This was not the sky above Seoul.

The moon hung overhead, three times larger than it should have been, casting down a sharp, blood-red glow. Its light stretched the shadows of enormous trees across the forest floor, their exposed roots resembling the knotted bones of ancient giants.

Far beyond the pale mist crawling across the ground stood the magnificent silhouette of an ancient city.

Its buildings rose in multiple tiers, their curved rooftops adorned with blue lanterns that floated in midair without chains or supports, each flame glowing with an eerie, otherworldly brilliance.

This wasn't an ordinary nightmare.

Her consciousness was far too clear, and the pain throbbing in her knee was far too vivid to be dismissed as a mere dream.

"Human?"

A deep, heavy voice, thick with an unsettling hint of bloodlust, shattered the silence of the forest.

Harin froze.

She stiffly turned toward the sound, her movements halting as she caught sight of a figure emerging from between the towering tree trunks.

The man wore a pitch-black robe embroidered with delicate silver thread along its collar. An almost terrifying serenity surrounded him, an unsettling contrast to his sharp golden eyes, which burned beneath the crimson moonlight.

But it wasn't his flawless, handsome face that made Harin's blood turn to ice.

It was what moved slowly behind his back.

Nine enormous, snow-white tails swayed with the graceful rhythm of a reaper's wings, radiating a bone-deep chill that seemed to seep into the very marrow of her body.

The man stopped several steps away and tilted his head slightly, studying the intruder who had trespassed into his territory.

His sharp eyebrows drew together.

He looked as though he had caught the stench of something that had no right to exist in this sacred place.

"How does a little lamb wander into a wolf's den?"

He murmured softly.

His voice echoed directly inside Harin's mind, shattering the last fragile pieces of her sanity in a single second.

The silence surrounding the forest wasn't merely an absence of sound.

It was an oppressive force that crushed against her lungs with every breath, demanding absolute submission.

Harin collapsed to her knees. Her fingers dug into the damp soil and decaying leaves beneath her, the only evidence she could cling to that she wasn't trapped in a feverish hallucination.

Above her, the nine enormous white tails radiated an unmistakable chill, their elegant yet deadly movements altering the currents of the night air.

The man standing before her regarded her as though she were nothing more than a worthless speck of dust.

"How did you cross into this place?"

The question came effortlessly, delivered with the detached finality of an exhausted executioner reading out a death sentence.

Harin bit her lip until it split.

The metallic taste of blood on her tongue helped her hold on to the last scattered fragments of her reason.

The suffocating air of her boarding-house room and the terror of debt collectors in Seoul suddenly felt impossibly distant.

All that remained was the primitive instinct to survive.

"I'm definitely dreaming..." she muttered hoarsely, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the reality unfolding before her.

"Wake up, Kang Harin. Come on. Open your eyes."

"This is not a dream."

The man's footsteps carried him closer, the sharp crack of dry branches beneath his feet striking her eardrums.

"The ground beneath your hands, the poisonous air burning your lungs—all of it is real."

He paused.

"And the one thing you cannot deny is..."

The corners of his eyes darkened as they absorbed the crimson moonlight, his golden irises blazing with an even more intense radiance.

"The stench of a rotting human emanating from your body."

Human.

The moment the word left his lips, an invisible shock wave swept through the forest.

The cries of countless nocturnal beasts in the distance abruptly ceased.

He was Seo Doyun, the ruler of the endless Limba Forest.

Without so much as lifting a finger, he radiated an authority powerful enough to paralyze every joint in Harin's body.

Doyun's gaze suddenly dropped to the rectangular object clutched in her hand.

"What is that dead object? Some sort of protective talisman from your world?"

His eyebrow arched slightly.

With a casual sweep of his hand through the air, a subtle distortion of space enveloped the area between them.

Harin flinched and stumbled backward, but Doyun made no move to attack her.

Instead, he reached into the empty air and closed his fingers around something invisible.

Suddenly, Harin's smartphone lit up in the darkness.

Its cold blue glow illuminated both their faces.

Rows of warning messages and red numbers from her mobile banking app appeared on the screen, their reflections clearly visible in Doyun's golden eyes.

"What are these numbers?" he murmured.

"Are your ancestors cursing you through this flat object?"

A strange confusion crept into his voice.

Having lived for centuries in isolation from the outside world, he had never encountered the technological wonders of the future.

"It's not a curse."

Harin's trembling voice cut through the silence.

The last remnants of her pride forced her to speak up.

"It's debt. Money I have to pay back."

"Debt?"

A short laugh escaped Doyun's lips.

It sounded like a blade scraping across ice.

"So this is the price you must pay for the insolence of setting foot upon my territory?"

His hand moved so quickly that Harin couldn't even see it.

The smartphone in her grasp suddenly grew scorching hot.

A small explosion cracked through the air as the lithium battery melted, releasing a stream of black smoke.

In a matter of seconds, the only link connecting her to the modern world was destroyed.

"Hey! What the hell are you doing?!"

Harin forced herself to her feet, her knees threatening to buckle beneath her.

It was the reckless courage that sometimes emerged when a person had been pushed to the absolute edge of despair.

It was also the only shield she had left.

Yet Doyun remained completely unmoved.

One of the white tails behind him extended with fluid grace, coiling around Harin's waist before lifting her effortlessly into the air until her face was level with his.

The air seemed to vanish from her lungs.

"How interesting."

His golden eyes narrowed.

"It has been a long time since a mortal dared to raise their voice at me."

Doyun's face drew closer, stopping just a few centimeters from hers.

The scent of pine mingled with the metallic tang of blood, overwhelming Harin's senses.

"But your very existence is an anomaly."

His voice grew quieter, more dangerous.

"For the past three hundred years, not a single person from your world has crossed this boundary. And certainly not someone who possesses not even the slightest trace of spiritual power."

His pupils widened for an instant.

Behind him, the tips of his swaying white tails trembled almost imperceptibly.

Something inexplicable was happening.

The destructive energy that usually enveloped his body was beginning to subside the moment it came into contact with Harin's presence.

It was as though her very existence was suppressing a force that had plagued him for centuries.

Doyun's brows furrowed even deeper.

He seized Harin's chin with one hand and forced her face upward, compelling her to meet his gaze.

"Why..."

The word escaped him like a whisper meant only for himself.

"Why is this curse... weakening simply because you are near me?"

Harin struggled desperately, trying to wrench herself free from his icy grip.

"I have no idea what you're talking about! Put me down right now! And send me back to my world!"

"Send you back?"

Doyun's lips twisted into a cold, crooked smile.

"The gateway that brought you here has already disappeared."

His golden eyes studied her with renewed interest.

"And in a world where you should never have existed in the first place, you have just become the most fascinating mystery I have encountered in centuries."

The tail around her waist loosened.

Harin dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

Suppressing a groan, she clutched her aching waist and looked up.

The nine-tailed fox had already turned away, disappearing into the thick mist as though the forest itself were swallowing him.

"Follow me, human."

His voice drifted back through the darkness.

"If you have even the slightest intention of seeing tomorrow morning's sun."