The eternal darkness that had momentarily snatched away his consciousness, floating his soul in the silence of another dimension, suddenly suffered a violent shock. As though yanked by an invisible steel wire, Arya's consciousness was dragged forcibly back through the tunnel of time, hurled straight back into his fragile physical shell.

Hah!

Arya jerked violently, inhaling the heavy night air with raw greed. His chest heaved erratically, pumping oxygen into his burning lungs. His tightly shut eyes snapped wide open.

He blinked rapidly, struggling to clear his vision from the fog of hallucinations that had paralyzed his common sense. The pungent reek of developer chemicals and the sharp acid of the fixer pierced deeply into his nostrils. The sound of water dripping from the sink faucet returned—drip... drip... drip—signifying that he had not drifted off into eternity.

He was still here. Inside this underground darkroom.

"I... am I still alive? Or is this a brand-new kind of hell?" Arya whispered shakily. His voice sounded terribly raspy, hoarse, and cracked within the room illuminated by the dim, red glow of the safelight.

He found himself still kneeling before the photographic processing tray on the workbench. His violently shaking hands still gripped the edges of the wooden table tightly. Cold sweat mixed with tears soaked his entire face, making his hair limp and plastered against his forehead. His mind was plagued by extraordinary mental confusion along the razor-thin line between life and death. Had he just dreamed a terrible nightmare? Or did death itself reject him, leaving him trapped forever in an endless cycle of psychological torture?

Amidst the confusion and pounding dizziness in his head, Arya's gaze inadvertently drifted toward the plastic tray filled with chemical solution before him.

Inside that tray, the pristine white photographic sheet he had just submerged was undergoing a chemical reaction.

The emulsion on the photographic paper's surface began to react slowly. Black silhouette lines began to creep and form across the white paper's surface, redrawing the corners of the darkroom where he currently stood—from the chemical bottle racks and the edge of the workbench to the shadow of the antique camera tripod in the corner of the room.

An overwhelming tension gripped Arya's chest. He held his breath tight, his eyes wide with horror, staring intensely at the tray. Something was terribly wrong with this printing process. Those black lines were not forming normally; their strokes looked intensely aggressive, as though drawn by an invisible pen moving on its own within the chemical solution.

"No... not again. What else do you want to show me?" Arya whimpered in terror, his fingers gripping the edge of the table tighter until his knuckles turned white.

He wanted to throw the tray away, wanting to spill its chemical liquid onto the floor to halt the printing process. Yet his body remained rigid, locked by a deep-seated terror. He was trapped in a sickening curiosity—a morbid urge to witness how the final image would form to perfection.

Those silhouette lines grew clearer. The darkroom within the photo looked so real, exactly like a mirror reflection of the reality where he was breathing right now.

Yet right as the shadow of the workbench inside the photo formed completely... an anomaly defying the laws of physics unfolded before his eyes.

The black emulsion on the photographic paper did not stop at shaping inanimate objects. Those ink lines thickened, creeping upward from the bottom of the tray to form a highly detailed anatomical shape.

And at that exact second, Arya's heart felt as though it had torn clean out of his chest.

The black lines on the photographic paper did not merely form the darkroom; they also formed a human hand gripping the edge of the tray from inside the paper.

A dark hand with long fingers and sharp, black claws emerged from the surface of the chemical solution, clutching tightly to the side of the photo tray, as though the unseen entity within the paper were attempting to crawl out, tearing through dimensions straight into the real world.