"A monster! A monster is roaming the city!" screamed a red-nosed man, the stench of wine wafting from him. "A giant of stone! A Panir! We saw him with our own eyes!"
A woman beside him screamed, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and excitement. "He ordered pork! He sat at the table and ate as if he were one of us! Then he said... he said the experience was the price!"
"He was speaking our language!" a third added. "But his voice... it was like the sound of grinding rocks!"
The two guards stood rigidly, their polished black armor reflecting only mockery. "Go back to your holes, you drunkards!" one of them said with contempt. "We have no time for your fairy tales. The Panir went extinct a century ago. Are you going to tell us next that you saw a dragon flying over the bridge?"
On a high balcony in the palace, the shadow of a young man stood, watching the scene from afar with clear boredom. He wore black silk embroidered with silver, his long hair tied back tightly. But upon hearing the word "Panir" repeated, and when he heard the strange description of its behavior, he leaned forward slightly. The look of boredom in his eyes transformed into a sharp glint of interest, the look of a hunter who has found the trail of a mythical prey he had thought was just a tale. He said nothing, but turned slowly and returned to the shadows of the palace, his mind already beginning to weave its plans.
Meanwhile, "Dream" was striding through the muddy alleys of the "Swamp of Shadows." His steps were heavy and steady, each one imprinting a deep mark in the sticky clay soil. Hong Min's memory told him that this place was synonymous with despair, fear, and cold. But "Dream" sensed only data.
He reached the gates of the House of Despair. The dilapidated building seemed to groan under the weight of its own memories. Hong Min's memory told him that this was class time; the corridors and courtyards should be completely empty. He pushed the heavy wooden door, which let out a long creak like a moan, and entered.
He was wrong.
They were all there, gathered in the main reception room. The smell of the room was a suffocating mix of cheap soup that was beginning to turn sour, the dampness of the stones that never dried, and the faint odor of dozens of small bodies crammed into one space. There was also tension in the air, a metallic smell like ozone before a storm, emanating from the collective fear of thirty children and a few female staff as they sat in anxious silence before their new director.
When "Dream" entered, everyone froze at the same moment. The murmurs stopped. A small wooden doll with two braids fell from a little girl's hand, making a muffled sound on the stone floor. Eyes widened in terror. They didn't see the weak "Prometheus" they knew; they saw the nightmare that had walked through the door. They saw the monster whispered of in legends.
A portly man rose from a chair at the front of the room. He wore better clothes than the rest, his greasy hair carefully styled. He was the new director. He took a hesitant step forward, trying to hide the trembling of his hands. He tried to make his tone sound confident, but it came out a higher pitch than he intended. "Sir," he said. "What do you want from this humble place? Are you a guest of the Gu Clan?"
"Dream" advanced toward him slowly. The echo of his stone footsteps was the only sound in the room. He was analyzing.
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He stopped in front of him and looked down with his empty, grey eyes. His massive body blocked the light from the entrance, casting a long shadow over the trembling director.
"I want feelings," "Dream" said in his deep, quiet voice that sounded louder than any scream.
Then he attacked.
In a single, swift, blurry motion that no one could follow, he grabbed the director's head with both hands. The man had no time to scream, just a sudden gasp of air. With a simple, calculated pressure, the sound of neck bones snapping was heard, dry and sharp in the absolute silence. The body fell to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Terror erupted in the room. The high-pitched screams of children began, a mixture of panic and disbelief.
"Deny..." "Dream" muttered, and looked at the body. It was his first attempt at collecting data this way, and it had failed. His cold logic told him the hypothesis was flawed or the execution method needed adjustment. Perhaps the specimen was unsuitable. Perhaps the emotions needed to be stronger at the point of termination.
He turned slowly, his grey eyes scanning the faces of the terrified children and the maids who were trying to flee. Rich data. Fear. Despair. Confusion. But it wasn't enough. He didn't want to observe it. He wanted to taste it.
The "Ash Blade" emerged from its scabbard with a faint hiss, the black blade absorbing the dim light in the room.
And the harvest began.
He moved with unimaginable speed toward the nearest maid, a middle-aged woman who was trying to push two children behind her back. She didn't scream for long. In a single, arcing motion, her head separated from her body. Warm blood flowed over his cold stone hand. It wasn't a painful or pleasant sensation. It was just data.
"Accept..." "Dream" said in a quiet voice as he advanced toward a group of children who were retreating in panic toward a corner of the room, stumbling over each other. "Accept."
"No! Please don't kill me!" a small child cried, his face covered in tears and snot as he fell to the floor.
"Brother!" a slightly older child screamed, perhaps ten years old, his face thin, stubborn, and covered in freckles. He stood in front of his younger brother with his thin body, raising his arms as a fragile shield. "Leave him! Take me!"
"Dream" stopped before them for a moment and tilted his head. The scene was illogical.
But the feeling emanating from them... was different.
He raised the blade. Two heads fell together onto the cold stone floor.
It was a cold, methodical massacre. There was no anger, no hatred, no pleasure. There was only a being conducting an experiment, confused as to why these specimens refused to cooperate and offer their data willingly. He stabbed a little girl who was clutching her wooden doll tightly, her face a mask of silent terror even in death.
"Accept... accept..." he would repeat in a quiet voice as he moved among them, the black blade drawing deadly black arcs in the air, cutting through flesh and bone as easily as it cut through air.
When the last body fell, silence returned, a silence broken only by the slow dripping of blood onto the stone floor. The sharp, pungent smell of iron filled the air, suffocating and strong. "Dream" stood in the middle of the room, amidst this horrific scene of scattered corpses. He looked at the blood-covered "Ash Blade." He took out a clean piece of cloth from "Dio's" black clothes and began to clean it with slow, robotic precision, indifferent to the blood covering his own stone hands.
"I don't understand..." he muttered in the absolute silence. "Why do you refuse? I am relieving you of the torment of this place. I am offering you salvation. You should have accepted."
He returned the clean blade to its scabbard, turned, and walked out of the House of Despair, leaving behind a silent tomb that was once a home for broken dreams. He had come to collect feelings, and all he had found was silence.
His experiment... had failed.
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