"Ah!"
In the city, an alien suddenly awoke from his sleep with a start.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and quickly lit the oil lamp on his bedside table. By its flickering light, he turned toward the pitch-black sky outside, unease gripping his mind.
"So many years have passed… and I'm still having nightmares!"
Since the world was destroyed and their city captured by the "alien god," three years had passed.
He hadn't expected that even after three years, he would still dream of that year's horrors.
"Sigh… is this the shadow left by the war?"
He wiped the sweat from his forehead, unaware—and unable to notice—that beneath the city, in this late-dark age about to enter the steam era, shadow-colored mists were silently rising.
The reason for his nightmares was simple: his mental strength far exceeded that of most aliens in the city.
---
"But at the end of that nightmare, before I died, I think I saw a pile of swirling mist on the battlefield?"
He lit his pipe and sat on the edge of his bed.
"That doesn't match my memory. I saw the entire war from start to finish, and no mist appeared."
Coughing from smoke, he quickly extinguished the pipe and set it aside.
"Forget it. It's just a dream. None of this matters…"
He lay down again, closing his eyes.
"Sigh… the fall of the world will forever be a pain I cannot forget."
He drifted back into sleep.
---
Some unknown time later, the alien awoke again.
This time, it was a scream that roused him.
"Mist from the dream?"
He got up but immediately noticed something wrong.
His room was filled with dark-colored mist—so much it was staggering.
Not just inside, but outside the window as well, the shadow-colored mist stretched endlessly.
It was so dense that he couldn't see the buildings across the street.
"What is happening?"
Before he could react further, the scream that had awakened him echoed again, this time from the next room.
"Landlady?"
Recognizing the voice, the alien scrambled toward the door.
The hallway was thick with smoke, but guided by memory, he found the landlady's door. Fortunately, it wasn't locked.
He pushed it open.
"Landlady! Where are you?"
"Help… help… ugh ahhh!"
The scream continued, and he ran toward the sound, stumbling over unknown objects, until he reached her room.
---
When he pushed open the door, he froze.
"Help…"
What he saw was terrifying beyond words.
The once-graceful landlady was suspended from the ceiling by countless black "web threads," her body covered with white, constantly wriggling "pustules."
No, they were not pustules. They were eggs.
Her cheeks had melted away, grotesquely pulsating like water-filled balloons.
"Help… me… ugh!"
Before she could finish, she vomited—vomiting the things she feared most: spiders.
Each white egg hatched, and a live, terrifying spider emerged from her mouth.
---
The alien looked at the pleading eyes of the landlady and turned to flee.
Fear had fully seized him. His only thought was to escape.
"This world has gone mad!"
He ran out onto the street to call for help, but someone else's scream reached him first.
Following the sound, he saw a person trapped in a narrow gap between a wall and the street.
Their abdomen was stuck, features twisted beyond recognition.
Yet they were still alive, bleeding none, as if naturally meant to be there.
They futilely cried for help with their distorted mouth.
---
Just as his sanity teetered on the edge, another horror struck.
A group of his fellow aliens screamed as they ran past, but were being devoured mid-flight.
Some were consumed by grotesque mouths that appeared from thin air, others dragged away by unknown tentacles in the mist, screaming as they were eaten.
One even was devoured by its own "food" in retaliation.
Every street, every person in the city—each was being torn apart by the manifestation of their deepest fears.
The mists turned subconscious terrors—monsters, disasters, misfortune, or indescribable beings—into reality, tormenting and killing them.
---
"Oh… no…"
Horse hooves sounded, and the already terrified alien collapsed.
In the distance, within the mist, a warrior appeared, a dozen alien heads skewered on his steel spear.
"No… no…"
This was his greatest fear—the most terrifying, brutal invader he had seen survive the battlefield.
As if mocking him, the eyes on the spear-impaled heads stared straight at him, filled with real hatred, silently questioning:
"Why did you survive?"
"Why not die?"
The hatred vanished the next second as the survivor himself was skewered onto the spear.
The invader rode off into the shadow-colored mist, the city intact, but all its inhabitants drowning in terror.
A consciousness, drawing from the deepest fears of every being, was quietly awakening.
It was becoming a newly formed… hidden existence.