“……”

The ground began to swallow his feet again. Uijae forced his legs to move and pushed past the memory. He couldn’t stop here. He wanted to know everything about Lee Sa-young.

Most of the memories that followed were the same. The white room, the blacked-out vision. The white room again, the black void again. Sa-young’s memories of that time were mostly black and white, the only differences in sound.

Footsteps echoed. Sometimes the click of leather shoes, sometimes the squeak of rubber soles. After the recital of experiment notes came the sounds of struggling, choking, the hiss of escaping breath, ragged wheezing. Uijae clenched his teeth. But he couldn’t stop. He had to keep moving, if he didn’t want to sink.

As he kept passing those monochrome fragments, at last a colored scene came into view. Uijae stopped before it.

Sa-young stood in the middle of a forest, late at night. He was standing on white flooring, while all the white buildings around it melted slowly into poison. And soon, the outside was revealed. He slowly turned his head, taking in the surroundings—the violet night sky, the trees and grass swaying in the wind, the stir of birds on branches, the darting of squirrels along the boughs. He felt it all.

His hair, long and tangled enough to brush his shoulders, blew across his eyes.