"Am I dead?" Rhys opened his eyes and looked around in confusion. His gaze wandered, half-expecting familiar laboratory walls to snap back into place.

The last thing he remembered was lying on a table, with countless machines surrounding him and beeping in uneven rhythms. His mind and body had been in unbearable pain, the kind that flooded every breath.

Then, in the next moment, he was somewhere else, inside a world he had never seen or experienced before. There had been no clear transition, no doorway, no falling. There was only a sudden arrival.

He glanced down and saw a red liquid covering his feet up to his ankles, thick enough to cling to his skin. It rippled slowly around his legs whenever he shifted.

Lifting his head, he tried to find where it was coming from, and that's when he understood it wasn't a puddle or a pool.

It was an ocean.

This red liquid… no, more accurately, this red sea stretched as far as the eye could see, swallowing the horizon and surrounding him on all sides. It lay perfectly flat, broken only by faint, sluggish waves that rose and fell with a slow, steady pulse.

Above it, the sky carried the same reddish hue and reflected the sea like a mirror. A lone crimson moon hung there too, sharp-edged and watchful, set in an eerie silence that made it feel at home in this endless red.

Rhys hadn't been someone with faith throughout his life. Still, like anyone else, there were quiet moments when he wondered whether heaven and hell existed, moments he never spoke about.

Now, standing here, he couldn't stop wondering. This place made him think he really might have died and come to hell.

"So? Where are the devils supposed to judge my sins?"

He accepted his ending and looked around, searching for any sign of presence besides himself. There was nothing, only the empty stretch of red and the distant, unreachable line where sea met sky.

The whispers from before, the voices that had pressed painfully against the inside of his skull, were gone. With them, the pain that had filled his body vanished as well.

Without thinking, he tested his body and found no ache, no weakness. He felt perfectly fine.

So he started walking.

Slow steps carried him through the heavy red liquid. Each movement tugged at his ankles before releasing with a faint, syrupy pull.

There was nowhere to go because everything stretched the same way toward the horizon. So he chose the only thing that stood out. He fixed his eyes on the red moon and made it his target, the way a lost traveler might cling to a single star.

One step, then another, and another.

At first he counted, but then he stopped because there were too many steps to track.

Somewhere along the way, he noticed a change. Moving through the thick liquid was becoming easier, his steps growing lighter as his pace picked up. It felt as if the sea was thinning beneath him, or as if his body was forgetting what resistance meant.

The moon never seemed to get closer, not even a fraction. Still, the lightness in his steps gave him courage and hope, and he kept going, letting that small improvement convince him he wasn't walking for nothing.

Little by little, his mind loosened and the constant tension unwound. He pushed every earthly thought aside. His past, his goals, the memories of his loved ones—everything slipped away until only one thought remained.

Walk, and reach the crimson moon…

There was no day-and-night shift here, no sun, no shadows, and nothing to measure time. It felt like the very idea of time didn't exist, yet he could tell he'd been walking for a long time now. His body moved on its own while his thoughts dimmed in the background.

Days? Weeks? Maybe years? He didn't know, and he didn't care. Because he thought he was going through the easiest period of his life.

At some point, he started to think maybe this place wasn't hell at all, but heaven instead, a quiet world where nothing demanded anything from him except forward motion.

No depressing thoughts about his soldiers followed him here.

No fear that they would die every day on the battle lines. No more training sessions to keep his body fit and ready. No aching muscles. No strict routines that began before sunrise.

Political problems were gone too. So were the meetings, the careful words, and the threats hidden behind polite smiles. Everything he disliked about his previous life had simply… disappeared.

His life became simple, with one goal and one direction.

He held onto it so hard that, eventually, everything else began to slip.

He forgot who he was. He forgot what kind of life he had lived. Names and faces washed clean from his mind, leaving only emptiness behind.

His eyes grew dull, staying fixed on the moon that never came closer no matter how far he walked. He blinked less, stared more, and still kept moving.

After a while, his movements changed too. His steps fell into a steady rhythm. He walked sluggishly, and the way he carried himself no longer matched the person he used to be. He looked hollow, left behind with nothing but habit.

With no memory of his past, his muscle memory began to fade as well. The instincts that once guided his stance and breath slipped away. He was losing himself completely, until it felt as though nothing would be left at all.

He gradually fell deep into a state that had a name: Absence.

Then a small light returned to his dull eyes. A faint awareness surfaced, like someone breaking the surface of deep water and dragging in air.

That tiny return sharpened his focus. He looked back at the crimson moon, remembering what he was supposed to be seeing.

But his eyes caught on something else, something that hadn't been there before.

It appeared from nowhere, hanging in front of the moon and leaching the red out of the sky.

It was far away and, at the same time, close. It looked like nothing—no color, no shape—as though this was what nothingness would look like if it had a form.

Yet it felt familiar, more like a thought you couldn't finish than a thing you could name, something you almost recognized but couldn't hold.

Rhys's awareness climbed back piece by piece. He stopped walking and could only stare, his body locking mid-step, afraid that any movement might make the thing disappear.

And then the world began to fall away.

The crimson sea vanished from his sight. The reddish sky collapsed under the weight of the Absence.

The crimson moon lost its allure, as if it had never been there at all. Everything was swallowed by something that could not be felt or seen, leaving no edges, no landmarks, and no direction.

Whatever that shapeless form was, it pulled him, not roughly, not gently, but with a certainty that left no room to resist.

And then he was elsewhere. He found himself floating in a deep, formless void, weightless and unsupported, with no sense of up or down.

In this place where nothing existed, his memories returned.

They rushed into him in chaotic waves of faces, voices, orders, pain, and laughter, too fast to hold at first. But with every fragment that came back, relief spread through him, warmth returning to his numb mind.

Only then did he understand what had almost happened to him and what the silent crimson moon had been drawing out of him, step by step. He had nearly lost himself.

He wasn't afraid of dying, but disappearing, being erased from existence, was different. It was deeply disturbing, especially when it happened slowly, when you could feel the process in every detail, like watching your own identity being scraped away piece by piece.

"Where am I now?" The words left his lips, but no sound reached his ears, as though the void swallowed even that.

His eyes could see nothing. His ears could hear nothing. His body could feel nothing.

Still, he didn't feel desperate. His thoughts were still with him, sharp enough to hold onto.

As long as he could keep his self-awareness, he believed there had to be a way back from this strange experience, even if he couldn't imagine it yet.

—

Meanwhile, while Rhys went through these trials and forced his mind to stay awake, the laboratory remained tense and watchful.

The researchers stood around the table, their attention shifting between the monitors and the unmoving figure in front of them. They watched every change his physical body went through, afraid to miss the smallest sign.

Rhys's body, under the effect of Grace's healing light, looked almost completely restored. Only a few dark spots remained, scattered across his skin like bruised shadows, reminders of how close to death he had been, and those were fading too.

But despite the recovery, he showed no sign of waking. As time dragged on, the researchers began to wonder whether they were looking at a healed shell with a mind that had already collapsed.

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