The threatening sentence carved into the back of that 1982 photograph—"It can see you through that lens"—continued to spin wildly inside Arya's head, shattering the fragile remnants of sanity he had struggled so desperately to maintain. His breath came in ragged, uneven gasps, pumping hot air reeking of pungent acid and the coppery stench of blood from his scratched finger. He panted heavily, his back pressing tight against the surface of the workbench while his eyes stared unblinkingly and in horror at the photo on the table.

"Through... through what lens? What does that mean?" Arya whispered brokenly, his voice raspy, fractured, and swallowed by the suffocating silence of the underground laboratory.

The cramped room illuminated by the red safelight glow had now transformed into a steel box pressing down upon his chest. A wave of suffocating claustrophobia suddenly surged upward, making his airways feel tighter than ever. The concrete walls seemed to shift slowly, crowding in and hemming him in from every direction. Arya gripped his head tightly in his hands, cursing his own stupidity for failing to bolt out the door when it had briefly stood open a while ago.

Yet amidst the oppressive, psychological tension of the chilling lab, Arya's ears suddenly caught an alien sound—a noise that instantly froze the blood in his veins.

Swish... tap... swish... tap...

The sound came from directly above the darkroom ceiling.

Arya froze. He slowly lifted his head, staring upward at the aging wooden planks that served as the barrier between this underground chamber and the ground floor of the studio above.

Amidst the pitch-black silence of the night, the sound of those heavy, dragging footsteps echoed with terrifying clarity. Someone—or something—was pacing back and forth across the floor of the studio upstairs, a space that should have been completely empty and sealed up tight.

Swish... tap... swish... tap...

The rhythm of those footsteps sounded deeply bizarre. The cadence was unnatural, as though the feet dragging across the floor were of uneven lengths, or the weight of the entity above was so massively immense that it made the aging wooden floorboards groan heavily beneath the strain. The sound paced back and forth from the eastern corner of the upper room, sliding slowly toward the center, then turning around to tread back and forth relentlessly.

"N-no way..." Arya whispered, tears of terror once more welling up in his burning eyelids. "The studio upstairs is empty. The front gate is locked from the outside. Grandfather is dead. Who... who is up there?"

His subconscious instantly conjured the image of that tall, strangely proportioned shadow in a tattered suit with a featureless face he had just seen in the photo. The scale of that nightmare leapt wildly through his head: that towering entity was pacing right above his head with heavy strides, as though preparing to stomp down and crush the very room where he hid.

The glaring tension between the subterranean activity and the mysterious sounds above forged a psychological terror that tortured his soul. Down here, he was trapped in a vicious cycle of chemical solutions and bloody photographs; up above, that physical threat paced back and forth, testing his mental endurance to its absolute breaking point before finally claiming his life.

"Stop... please, just stop," Arya whimpered, pressing both palms hard against his ears stained with dried blood. He shook his head hysterically, praying that the dragging footsteps were merely an echo born of his exhausted brain's hallucinations. "Stop walking up there! Go away! Get out of here!"

Yet the sound refused to stop. Those footsteps grew progressively clearer, heavier, and dangerously closer to his current position. Every time a shoe sole or claw dragged across the wooden floor overhead, flakes of dust and tiny wood splinters rained down onto Arya's shoulders, heightening the horror as though the barrier between the worlds above and below were beginning to collapse.

An overwhelming terror compressed his throat, making Arya want to scream at the top of his lungs to vent his despair. Yet his voice caught in his throat, choking into a pathetic, muffled sob. He felt like a rat cornered inside a tight maze while a giant cat prowled its roof, biding its time for the perfect moment to pounce.

Until finally, the nightmare he dreaded most actually happened.

The dragging footsteps pacing back and forth above Arya's head abruptly ceased entirely.

Silence clamped down over the room. No more wood sliding. No more floor creaking.

The sound stopped directly above one precise spot—right above the exact place where Arya was huddled in terror beside the darkroom workbench.

Arya held his breath tight, his heart skipping a beat for a fraction of a second, his wide eyes staring straight up at the wooden ceiling overhead.

And the next second, a sound far more horrifying echoed throughout the room:

Tap... tap... tap...

The sound of long fingernails tapping rhythmically against the wooden ceiling from above—slow, yet driving deep, as though the entity up above were knocking on a door to greet the prey hiding below.