Something with many legs seemed to be crawling over his body, sending shivers down his spine.

Only his ears, aside from a faint wind, picked up nothing else.

Utter silence.

No sounds of people or cars at all.

But most of all, what Kim Haru couldn't ignore was the sharp pain and itching feeling that was assaulting his body from head to toe!

His eyelids felt like they were weighed down with lead, impossible to lift.

What the heck is going on?!

Could it be that after his computer exploded, no one had come to rescue him yet?

That's impossible.

Sure, his neighborhood wasn't a high-end luxury area, but the security and other amenities were pretty top-notch—no way something this big happened and there's still no rescue!

But nothing about his current situation felt like a hospital.

Which hospital has beds as hard as the floor?

Which hospital has such poor hygiene, and such an awful stench?

Is this some kind of hospital in a dump site?

The pain in his body and the unfamiliar surroundings weighed heavily on Kim Haru.

He tried so hard to force himself to open his eyelids, higher and higher…

Finally.

Kim Haru opened his eyes!

…

Ha, ha, haha.

This must be a joke, right?

It has to be a dream.

He must have opened his eyes wrong.

Let's try again!

But no matter how many times Kim Haru closed and reopened his eyes, the scene before him didn't change one bit.

It was a desolate street, with buildings on either side in various states of disrepair.

Doors and windows were crooked, and many of the buildings didn't even have doors or windows left.

The wrecked cars that had been abandoned littered the roadside, scattered haphazardly, with several of them even having crashed halfway into buildings on both sides of the road, with no sign that anyone had attempted to clean it up.

The place that should be filled with green lush trees is now filled with dried and barren branches.

The few remaining patches of green leaf were trembled in the cold wind.

It was so fragile that it was unclear whether they were alive or dead.

Everywhere, on the streets, in the buildings, on the tops of cars, piles of trash, dust, and dead leaves were scattered about.

Kim Haru himself was currently lying on the side of this very road.

But that wasn't the main issue.

The main issue was the dried, dark-red bloodstains that dotted the area within his line of sight.

And the numerous mangled, unrecognizable corpses!

Those were human bodies…

Kim Haru had seen all kinds of corpses before, but only in games, or as reference images and videos while he was writing a scene for his book.

He had never encountered the real one in real life.

Kim Haru stared intently at the closest corpse.

It was inside a car with the window rolled down.

The upper half of the body hung outside the car, while the lower half remained inside.