Emerging from the Forest of White Silence, Adin was met by an infinite ultramarine night and, beneath it, golden dunes undulating with a surreal, feverish heat.

  In stark contrast to the sterile whiteness of the forest, this desert was decadently brilliant, yet it carried an underlying sense of profound foulness.

  The smoke from the ignited Solet traced a path through the frigid air like a slender, silver crack. Adin took his first step toward that faint signpost.

  The air brushed against his skin with a chill that felt as intrusive and unsettling as the touch of a stranger, but the sand seeping into his boots held a bizarre, tepid warmth—like freshly spilled blood.

  Crunch, crunch.

  The sound beneath his feet was far removed from the natural providence of rock grinding into dust. Adin stopped and grasped a handful of sand. It was not mineral powder.

  The texture was sharp yet slick. This was the wreckage of 'Memory Hourglasses' discarded by the elites of Ivory over tens of thousands of years—shattered remains of high-density synapse data particles colliding against one another.

  This vast desert was a gargantuan emotional sewer, formed from the accumulation of human ugliness and cowardly lingering attachments that Ivory had excised to maintain its ‘Refined Serenity.’

  What Adin stood upon was not real sand, but the fragmented shards of broken lives.

  …

  “No, it was definitely here. Those five minutes... when my daughter first called my name and laughed. Why did I trade that for work! Please, please, just once more!”

  A wailing lamentation, reeking of filth, shattered the silence. An old man was frantically digging into a sand pit with hands bloodied and nails torn away.

  He was a ‘Specter of Loss,’ a soul wandering this desert for eternity, agonizing over the memories he himself had discarded. But the pit he excavated was only a foul mixture of countless other memories; the purity he sought had long since been contaminated.

  Watching his despair as if it were a performance, a man sat leaning against a dune, polishing another hourglass. He was a ‘Predator,’ a breed of human addicted to voyeurizing the most private shames of others.

  “Old man, stop that caterwauling. I can’t hear the decisive memory over the noise.”

  The man held the stolen hourglass up to the artificial moonlight, a chilling smile spreading across his face.

  “Look at this, friend. How this noble elder dismantled his own young nephew... Compared to the pleasure of peeking into this electric truth, reality is nothing but trash. Pick one for yourself. This is a hell open to everyone.”

  The man was gorging on the secrets of others to fill his own soul, and across from him stood another class of addicts.

  Their life force was mortgaged to the hourglasses, trapped forever in a single point of pleasure—the fleeting moment of hearing a confession of love—as they slowly flickered out.

  The sand in the woman's hourglass surged backward as soon as it fell, imprisoning her time in an eternal loop. It was a graveyard for those who had lost the present by being buried in past glory.

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  Adin walked silently through these miserable clusters of humanity.

  Perhaps it was the arrogance of believing he was different, or a fastidious resolve not to be swayed by such ugly obsessions, that sustained his steps.

  Yet the desert night was agonizingly long, and the cold silence incessantly provoked the void hidden deep within him. Through a crack in that void, a sweet yet bizarre fragrance seeped in.

  “Your scent is truly peculiar. The exterior is cold as dawn frost, but inside hides a longing like the warmth of a freshly slaughtered beast.”

  A cluster of light floating in the air condensed into the form of a sprite with transparent wings. It was a ‘Scent-Tracker,’ a parasite living off the emotions of the desert.

  The sprite flitted around Adin’s neck, whispering a foul truth.

  “That smell you are desperately suppressing... it’s about the woman named ‘Lou,’ isn't it? You claim you want to protect her, but your heart desires to imprison her entirely within your territory. That suffocating possessiveness, which even you haven't realized, is melting the chill of this desert.”

  “Be quiet.”

  Adin’s voice fell cold and low, but the sprite had already snatched an hourglass emitting a particularly dense golden glow from the sand and dropped it into his palm.

  “This is a memory discarded by her fiancé to justify himself. Don't you want to know what foul predation her 'peace'—which you believed to be so noble—was built upon?”

  The hourglass in Adin’s palm felt heavy with significance. The moment he flipped this over, he would become no different from the madmen digging in those sand pits.

  Adin's first sin of plundering another’s secret.

  At the threshold of that immorality, Adin hesitated. Behind the noble pretext of saving Lou lurked an unbearable jealousy toward the fiancé and a transgressive curiosity to know every detail of her life.

  Ultimately, Adin flipped the hourglass. It was a choice to discard his boyish purity and shoulder a sin in order to become a man.

  Ssssh.

  With the sound of flowing golden sand, Adin’s consciousness drifted away from the physical timeline of reality and was sucked into ‘Extended Time (+Alpha).’

  There, Adin saw Lou’s childhood. Around the young, trembling Lou, who had lost her parents, there had been many people.

  But Lou’s fiancé had designed a massive glass greenhouse in the name of love. Using his power, he cut off everyone she could lean on and erased every voice she could raise toward the world under the guise of 'protection.'

  He systematically deleted and reassembled her life so that her world could only be viewed through a single window: himself.

  It was not devotion. It was a ‘predation,’ and 'perhaps violence,' a manipulation that isolated a human soul so that he alone could be her only God and salvation.

  The serenity Lou believed to be her sanctuary was, in truth, merely a process of losing her true self while anesthetized upon a meticulously woven spiderweb.

  When the memory transfer ended and he returned to the cold silence of the desert, the intensity in Adin’s eyes had shifted entirely.

  He had seen what should not be seen and committed a sin that should not be committed. The moment he decided to bear the weight of that first sin, a massive emotion surged within him like a tidal wave.

  It was not mere pity or curiosity. It was the solemnity of being the only man who knew her tragic truth, and the agonizing growing pain of a boy becoming a man.

  Adin did not brush off the golden dust on his palm but clenched his fist tightly. In that moment, an uncontrollable emotion overwhelmed him.

  ...Suddenly, he missed Lou intensely.

  They had only met a few brief times. Yet a feeling he had hidden much deeper than that overflowed in this unexpected moment, in this desolate place, no longer able to be contained.

  Adin, for whom everything was a first, was now trapped alone in a massive hourglass named 'Lou,' wandering a dark and long path without direction, relying solely on thoughts of her.

  Indeed, this was what the desert was. It meanly touched the weakest or strongest parts of a human, dragging the thoughts and memories blooming from within right before one's eyes with all its might.

  Adin, who until moments ago could not understand those foolish humans obsessed with their own memories and regretting their actions.

  But at this moment, Adin, wandering as he was consumed by a great yearning for Lou and forgetting all else, was no different from them.

  The golden desert he stood upon was once again undulating, driven by Adin's own obsession.

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