Pal-Bong hadn't left his room in sixteen months.
Not even to eat with the others. Not to check the mailbox. Not to see the changing sky. Not even to look at the pretty girls who lived next door. Time passed for him in pixels and flickers, backlit by a cracked phone screen and the soft mechanical hum of an aging fan spinning in rhythmic struggle overhead.
He lived in a room that had once been meant for a boy but had long since become a sealed tomb for a spiritless ghost of a man.
The wallpaper was peeling in one corner—he'd scratched at it absentmindedly in his darker moods. One window, never opened, was shut tightly behind a blanket nailed over it. It wasn't about sunlight anymore. It was about denial. A deliberate erasure of the world beyond his door.
He lay on his side on a sweat-stained floor mat, scrolling without thought. Memes. Clips of strangers eating too much. Ads for skin cream. News of disasters. Other people's smiling faces in waterparks, malls, campus grounds and theatres. And above all, silence.
Well, almost.
From beyond his thin, rotting door, the voices came like clockwork.
"Yah! Pal-Bong! Are you dead in there or what?!" his father shouted. "Even dogs bark back at their owners, you damned idiot!"
His mother's voice followed with a shrill, scorn-laced tone. "Why did I even carry you in my belly for nine months? You were born crying and never stopped being a burden!"
Pal-Bong didn't react. He blinked slowly and let the screen blur into abstract colors.
His father's voice turned gruff. "Get a job, Pal-Bong. You're twenty-six! Your sister's younger than you and already married. What are you doing in there?! Playing with yourself like a pig?!"
"You should be ashamed to even breathe in this house!" his mother screeched again, the kitchenware clinking behind her words. "Other sons bring honor to their families. What did we raise? A parasite!"
Their words had become like radio static. Noise he no longer translated into meaning.
But sometimes, when the house quieted—when the insults were spent and the night pressed its cold face against the windows—Pal-Bong would hear himself whisper silently back.
'I didn't choose this. You just never listened.'
But even in his own mind, his voice sounded weak.
He imagined having a system—like in those games he used to play. A system that gave him a purpose, that noticed his progress. That spoke back.
The fantasy returned to him like an old itch: leveling up, earning stats, receiving missions that mattered. That world had rules. Clear ones.
Not like this one.
Tonight was no different. Dinner had been slid into his room on a chipped tray—rice, kimchi, and soup that had gone cold before he even touched it. The tray now sat forgotten beside his mattress.
He resumed scrolling, letting the images flick past with that familiar numbness. Ads. Videos. Text posts. Nothing caught his attention until—
The screen jolted.
Flickered.
Then a new profile appeared.
A red icon. Glitchy. Pulsing, almost alive. It hadn't been there before. The username read in jagged, flickering English—
The Nightmare Never Ends
Pal-Bong blinked. Tapped the screen once.
It didn't respond.
Then, it blinked violently, turning to a full red overlay. His phone began to vibrate in pulses, and just under the username, a message appeared:
"ENTER."
Pal-Bong frowned. This wasn't like any app he had downloaded.
"What the hell is this?" he muttered aloud for the first time that day, his voice cracking slightly. He tried to back out of the screen. Nothing happened. His thumb hovered over the prompt.
It's probably malware… he thought.
But deep inside, something stirred.
Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's finally… different.
He pressed his thumb on the red glow.
In an instant, everything snapped.
No transition. No animation. No audio cue.
Just black.
The phone dropped from his hand, but he didn't hear it hit the floor. His room vanished. The warmth of his stale air, the buzzing fan, even the scent of instant noodles—gone.
Pal-Bong was floating.
No wind. No gravity. No sensation at all.
His limbs flailed instinctively, but there was nothing to touch, no resistance. Only endless blackness. But ahead of him—or beneath, or around—lines began to appear. Red lines. Thin, glowing, like a cracked circuit board forming beneath his feet.
He dropped. Softly, soundlessly. Landed in a space that looked like nothing he had ever seen. A grid that went on forever in every direction. And above him, a void. No stars. No sun. Just absence.
Then, a sound boomed, heavy and robotic, without source or mercy:
"Subject Pal-Bong. Welcome to the Nightmare System."
He stumbled back, eyes wide. His mouth opened, and this time his voice came out in a shaky rasp. "Wh—What is this…?"
No reply.
He turned in place, heart hammering.
"Who are you?!"
Still nothing.
"I didn't agree to anything!"
The voice returned, ignoring him completely.
"This is not a game. This is not a dream. This is not a request."
"You will receive directives. Completion is mandatory. Failure is not tolerated."
Pal-Bong's mind raced.
This must be a hallucination. Maybe I'm asleep. Maybe the screen fried my brain. This can't be real. This can't be real.
He shouted again. "Can I leave?! Hey! System! What the hell is this?!"
"Directive loading."
He clutched at his temples. "Please. Answer me. What am I supposed to do?! Why me?!"
But the system remained cold. Mechanical. Unmoving.
A red shape flickered before him now—an impossible floating glyph. Symbols rotated inside of it, patterns shifting like a Rubik's cube inside a heartbeat.
Pal-Bong stood frozen, panting, the air around him suddenly thick with the scent of rust and static. His knees weakened.
"No… no, I want to go back. Even that hell is better than this—"
"Escape is not permitted."
Then silence again.
A longer silence. A waiting silence.
He looked down at his trembling hands.
Maybe this is what I wanted, he thought bitterly. A world where someone finally noticed me. Even if it's to punish me.
In the distance, a faint, almost imperceptible noise echoed—like someone
weeping beneath a thousand floors of concrete.
Pal-Bong took one step forward, trembling.
The nightmare had begun.
And it would never end.