The horrifying reflection with the lip-less grin that sneered right across his shoulder in the sink mirror seemed to shatter the remaining shards of Arya's consciousness. With a choked shriek trapped in his throat, he thrashed violently, turning his face away from the mirror before stumbling backward until his spine slammed hard against the chemical rack. Several glass bottles clinked loudly, nearly tumbling to the floor.

Arya collapsed, his breathing erratic and frantic, pumping a soaring panic straight to his temples. His violently shaking hands gripped the cold concrete floor tightly, trying to find support to steady his rubbery, jelly-like limbs. Cold sweat mixed with the damp water from the sink poured heavily down his temples, stinging his wide, terror-dilated eyes.

"No... no, please stop this! What does this thing actually want?!" Arya whimpered hysterically, his voice cracking and echoing hollowly against the narrow walls of the subterranean laboratory.

His subconscious was battered by a torturous identity crisis. Amidst this oppressive silence, the boundary between reality and illusion had completely dissolved. He began to question the very essence of his existence. Was he genuinely a living human being, breathing and lost inside this photo studio? Or... or had he actually been lifeless for a long time, now merely a part of an old film negative played on an endless, eternal time loop?

Those terrifying questions slithered into his mind, gnawing away at his sanity down to its deepest roots. If what he saw in the mirror was a shadow, and those film rolls recorded the present as if it were the past, then who was he really?

Driven by morbid curiosity mixed with a horrifying trance-like compulsion—a mechanical surrender he could no longer fight—Arya forced his heavily shaking legs back to their feet. He walked unsteadily, dragging his steps toward the workbench illuminated by the safelight's red glow.

On that wooden table, the antique biscuit tin stood wide open. With limp hands, he reached inside and pulled out the seventh film roll.

No more hesitation. No more resistance. What remained was a cold vacuum.

Without wasting a single second, Arya developed that seventh roll in a frantic rush. His movements were intensely mechanical, obeying unseen instructions invading his motor nerves. He mixed the chemicals, dropped the film strip into the developing tank, and then clamped a pristine white photographic sheet to submerge it into the developer tray.

Beneath the safelight's red glow, the paper's emulsion began to react. Contour lines formed slowly, revealing the corner of the underground laboratory where he currently stood.

The moment those high-contrast tones formed completely, Arya lifted the print with wooden tongs and brought it close to inspect.

Instantly, the blood in his veins stopped flowing altogether.

The print from that seventh roll displayed a scene that successfully shattered whatever soul remained in his chest. In the middle of the underground lab within the photo sat a young man brooding at the desk chair with an expression of utter despair, clutching his own head with both hands.

His sitting position, the angle of his head, the curve of his body, down to the folds of the green jacket he wore—everything was identical to what Arya was doing at this very second, in the real world.

"T-this... this is impossible..." Arya whispered heavily, his eyes widening in horror at the photo in his hands. He lowered his hands slowly, staring at his own reflection on the photographic paper before touching his own body.

Everything matched. Every minute detail was captured to perfection.

He was no longer a mere observer. He was the subject being photographed and printed right at this very moment.

That psychological confusion reached its boiling point. Arya felt his world crumbling into pieces. He screamed inside his heart: Who is the person in that photo? Am I the one inside the paper, or am I the one standing here? Or are neither of us real?!

Yet before Arya could catch his breath or hurl the photograph from his grasp, an event defying the laws of physics and human reason unfolded right before him.

The young man depicted on that photographic paper—previously nothing more than a dead black-and-white shadow—slowly turned his head outward toward the edge of the paper.

The dark eyes within the image gazed sharply straight at Arya. And from the surface of the photographic sheet wet with chemical solution, a soft, cold, and horrifyingly echoing voice glided outward, slipping through the darkroom air to ring with crystal clarity inside Arya's ears:

"You cannot get out; we have been dead since the first roll."