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The sight I missed appeared.

No, it was a sight I never wanted to see again.

The pale moonlight shining down.

An unshakeable, unidentified chill that lingered.

Darkness with a will that obscured even a step ahead.

It was the hellish Seoul Forest that existed in my memories.

*

It’s cold.

I shouldn’t be able to feel the cold, but it was too cold.

I was getting soaked in the pouring rain in the dimly lit forest at midnight.

Even though it was raining, the unidentified full moon was visible above.

I felt out of breath despite there being no ruins.

With bare hands, I endlessly dug into the ground.

My soft gray skin was torn and crushed from picking up stones and digging up the earth.

My hands were covered in wounds.

From the wounds on my hands, yellow flames flowed like blood.

I wished for the life of an object, but this wasn’t the life I hoped for….

Since I opened my eyes in the forest, I always felt as if I was rolling near death.

Even my bare feet on the ground were covered in scars.

My soft soles were easily torn and pierced in the forest.

Even a regular twig could easily puncture my sole.

I opened my mouth.

In my suffocating mind, I opened my mouth to scream like in my human days, but no sound came out.

If I could have let out a hearty shout, maybe I would’ve felt a little better….

I kept digging into the ground, but the end was nowhere to be seen.

To kill the mole that dies when touched by the light of the full moon, I just dug down where the mole slept.

To survive in this harsh forest.

I continued to dig deeper.

My hands and feet, softer than a human’s, became ragged each time they dug into the hard ground.

My heightened senses, finer than a human’s, made me writhe even at light scratches on my skin.

I couldn’t even cry out like a human.

The biting cold wouldn’t leave me.

This dark night seemed like it had no intention of ending.

No matter how much I dug, the land where the mole slept was still out of sight.

*

While I was continuing to dig, a thought suddenly struck me.

What on earth am I doing right now?

This painful sight was something I had already been through.

It was before I fell into the forest and went to the Sehee Research Institute.

It was a time when I was killing objects desperately to survive.

Now, I should be enjoying a happy life in the institute….

What I saw now was a memory of the day I kept digging to kill a sleeping mole.

The memory of days spent chasing after a mole and digging.

If my memory serves me right, today’s memory was one of victory.

It was the day I reaped the fruits of my long efforts to kill a mole.

A night when the full moon shone down, even through the raining sky.

It was the memory of the day I dug into the mole’s den, shooting moonlight at it.

The mole burned in the moonlight and turned to ash, and it was the moment I finally obtained the ghosting I longed for.

It was tough, but it was a moment of success, so I remembered it clearly.

If the Seoul Forest before obtaining ghosting was an irresistible horror thriller, then the one after obtaining it was a blockbuster where the protagonist had a chance to win.

As I realized this, the world began to distort.

Ah, it was a dream.

I felt the throbbing of the golden tree flowing beneath this fake Seoul Forest.

As the world shattered, I woke up.

*

When I woke up, what lay before me was the Golden Reaper’s punch.

Thud, thud.

The worried-looking Golden Reaper was throwing punches at my cheek.

Is it trying to wake me up?

The Golden Reaper, who continued throwing punches, stopped when it realized I had opened my eyes and clung to my cheek.

I got up and looked back at the golden tree; nothing had changed.

Ah, so waking up doesn’t count as a human waking up?

It seemed only when a true human woke up would the conditions be met.

Quite a bit of time had passed in the brief moment I dozed off.

It would be bad if a whole day passed like this….

The time when the mayfly Golden Reaper would disappear was approaching.

Even if I were to recreate the Golden Reaper, I couldn’t be sure it would act the same as now.

It was hard to predict what it was thinking, it couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t control it freely, so I hesitated to make predictions.

Worried that the destruction conditions might change, I placed my hand on the golden tree and checked the destruction conditions again.

[The human will overcome the nightmare of the tree.]

Just as it was.

But there was something that had changed.

The destruction conditions hadn’t changed, but I sensed something different from the throbbing of the tree.

Now, I felt like I could invade someone else’s dreams somehow.

Riding on the pulse that flowed through the tree, I felt like I could enter someone else’s dreams.

Was it a phenomenon that appeared because I overcame the nightmare of the tree once?

I gently patted the Golden Reaper stuck to my cheek.

It was a sign not to worry, even if it fell again.

After giving the Golden Reaper’s head a few pats, I entrusted myself to the pulse of the tree once more.

Zzz

*

Clumsily built structures created by impoverished imagination.

A poorly depicted outskirts of a city that looks half-finished.

It didn’t capture anything properly except for the man fleeing with a desperate expression.

This must be in the dream of that man who is running away right now.

The man was fleeing in terror, running away as if possessed.

Fleeing from the monster that was destroying the city.

“Graaaaagh!”

The thing that toppled the buildings with its booming sound was….

A gigantic Gray Reaper.

No, what in the world does that man think I am?

The distracting difference in appearance between the gigantic Gray Reaper and myself made me feel even worse.

The man who was frantically running away was reduced to ash and died from being hit by the flames spewed from the giant Gray Reaper’s mouth.

And this clumsy world began to rewind.

The collapsed buildings returned to their places, and the burnt vehicles and trees reappeared.

As the man who had fallen on the asphalt reappeared in midair, the time of this world began to flow again.

“Ahhh! Save me!”

Seeing the silhouette of the giant Gray Reaper beyond the building, the man screamed.

Then the man began to flee from the giant Gray Reaper.

The giant Gray Reaper spewed fire and chased after him, and inevitably, the man was trampled to death or burned alive.

Then, how should I make the man overcome this dream?

Should I just help him survive?

I planned to help him survive by running away together for now.

As the man had his whole body soaked in cold sweat appeared in midair, I rushed toward him and waved my hand.

But the man’s reaction was different from my expectations.

“Gah! G-Gray Reaper!”

However, when the man saw my figure, he clutched his heart and collapsed on the spot.

When I approached, I saw the pale-faced man was already dead.

Another heart attack?

Why is it that every time I appear, they keep dying on me?

As the man’s heart stopped, the dream city began to rewind again.

This object isn’t as easy as I thought….

*

Jumping around.

The Golden Reaper was jumping on the belly of the sleeping Gray Reaper.

The Golden Reaper, having fun, suddenly looked at the sky.

Then, with a disappointed expression, it turned to the Gray Reaper and, with a determined face, began to walk towards somewhere.

It was the second golden wave.

The place the Golden Reaper rushed to was the outskirts of the exhibition hall.

It was where the objects fled from the Golden Reaper.

The objects hostile to the Golden Reapers and humans faced each other.

The expressions of the Golden Reapers were serious as if they were about to wage war.

The objects also seemed to feel the unsettling atmosphere of the Golden Reapers as a tense atmosphere loomed.

No specific signal was given, but they all rushed at each other simultaneously.

The first to vanish were the objects without physical immunity.

They were swept away in the golden wave and disappeared first.

Next to vanish were the non-regenerative physical immunity objects.

Objects that had physical immunity, but their destruction conditions were no different from ordinary items, machines, or creatures.

The Golden Reapers eagerly threw themselves to destroy the bodies of the physical immunity objects.

Of course, the much smaller Golden Reapers met their demise the moment they intertwined.

Countless Golden Reapers vanished into a handful of flames.

As even the physical immunity objects disappeared, only a few hostile objects to humans remained.

Objects that couldn’t be killed without special methods.

Golden Reapers, which did not have “eyes,” couldn’t kill those objects.

Only such objects remained.

Instead, the Golden Reapers had “firewood” like the Gray Reaper.

Only a small amount remained, but “firewood,” the fuel for “eyes.”

The remaining Golden Reapers rushed in all at once.

The objects that were caught in the overlapping had their volume diminished by the size of the Golden Reaper.

Damages that didn’t fulfill the conditions of death were naturally expected to recover.

But at the spot where the Golden Reaper died, a small ember of firewood remained.

A very small golden flame.

That flame couldn’t kill them but made it impossible for them to recover.

Literally, the Golden Reapers fought by burning their own bodies.

Until all hostile objects were unable to move and until every last Golden Reaper vanished in flames….