The horrifying whisper from the pale-faced vendor still resonated inside the minds of Rian, Maya, Gani, Dika, and Sita, shattering whatever mental defenses they had left. The air within the phantom market aisle felt increasingly heavy, thick with the stench of iron-rich blood and damp incense.

Yet amid the blinding panic and gripping terror, a far more bizarre and terrifying scene unfolded before them.

Dika, who moments before had been standing closest to the old vendor’s stall, no longer showed any signs of fear. His gaze—previously frantic and wild—suddenly softened, turning hollow and glazed over with an unnatural, ecstatic euphoria. Without a care for the warnings or the high-stress situation around him, Dika suddenly stepped up to the wooden bench in front of the stall and sat down calmly, as though he were just taking a seat at a normal neighborhood coffee shop.

"Dika! Are you out of your mind?! Get up!" Rian shrieked hysterically, lunging forward to clamp his hands tight around Dika’s jacket sleeve. "Wake up, Dik! This isn't a real shop! Do you want to die?!"

Gani scrambled in behind Rian, slamming his hands onto Dika’s shoulders to haul him up by force. "Don't touch a damn thing here, Dik! Let’s get out of here right now before it’s too late!"

Yet, unexpectedly, Dika batted Rian and Gani’s hands away with a surge of strength far surpassing normal human limits. Dika’s face flushed red, his eyes narrowing into a sharp, deeply offended glare at his friends, as though Rian and Gani were actively interrupting a moment of pure bliss.

"What is your problem? Get your hands off me!" Dika snapped in a raspy voice, violently shoving Gani back. "I'm starving, exhausted, and thirsty! There's warm food right here, why the hell are you stopping me?!"

"Dika, snap out of it! That isn't human food!" Maya cried out from the rear, her voice fracturing on the edge of tears. She pointed a trembling finger toward the clay bowl resting before Dika—a bowl filled with a pile of ashen-gray meat chunks submerged in a thick, pitch-black liquid that billowed steam reeking of rot. "Look at what's in that bowl! That isn't food, Dik!"

Dika looked down at the bowl before him, then broke into a wide smile. The expression looked hollow, stiff, and utterly alien on his face. He picked up a tiny wooden spoon, scooped up a portion of the contents, and shoved it straight into his mouth without a shred of hesitation.

"Good..." Dika muttered, eyes fluttering shut as he savored his first bite. He swallowed the meal with ravenous hunger. "I swear... this is the best food I've ever tasted in my life. My body... the exhaustion just vanished instantly. It feels so warm..."

"Dika, please don't eat that!" Sita whimpered, standing frozen beside Maya, clamping a hand over her mouth in horror as she watched black fluid ooze past the corners of Dika’s lips while he chewed.

Gani refused to waste another second. He lunged forward, wrapping his arms around Dika’s torso from behind and putting his entire back into lifting the boy forcibly off the wooden bench. "That's it, you're entirely under the spell of this place! We're dragging you out of here by force, Yan!"

"Help me pull him, Gan!" Rian shouted, grabbing Dika’s right arm and heaving with all his strength away from the vendor’s table.

Yet the moment Dika’s body cleared the wooden bench by a few centimeters, an insane, logic-defying anomaly struck.

Dika’s body instantly turned impossibly heavy—his weight multiplying a hundredfold in a fraction of a second, as though his entire frame and bones had driven deep roots straight through the dirt floor of the phantom market to fuse with the underground tree roots below.

Thud!

Gani and Rian were violently flung backward onto their backs, losing their balance completely as they tried to hoist a body that had suddenly acquired the weight of a mountain boulder.

"Ugh! Damn it... so heavy!" Gani groaned through clenched teeth, wincing in sharp pain as he cradled both hands, which felt dangerously close to snapping under Dika’s absurd, impossible weight.

Dika settled comfortably back onto his wooden bench, chewing his meal with ravenous abandon while entirely ignoring his friends sprawled on the ground. He turned his dead, empty eyes toward Rian and Gani.

"You guys go on ahead if you want to head down... I'm done walking," Dika whispered in a flat, dual-resonant voice. "This place is nice... peaceful... I want to rest here forever with them."

Across the table, the pale-faced vendor stretched her smile into an even wider, more horrifying grin—the tears at the corners of her mouth tearing open further to expose a gaping, blackened maw as she glared at Dika with the triumphant malice of a predator securing its prey.

"Dika... don't leave us..." Maya sobbed openly, watching her completely compromised friend with a heart shattering into dust.

Rian pushed himself up to his feet, his chest heaving with ragged breaths as rage, terror, and despair collided inside his chest. He whipped his head around to check for help or locate Maya and Sita, ensuring the girls hadn't fallen prey to the curse of the place as well.

Yet the instant Rian’s head swung toward the spot where Maya should have been standing...

Rian froze. His breath caught in his throat.

Maya was gone.

The exact spot where Maya had stood seconds before was completely empty, leaving behind only the small print of her boots in the dusty earth.

"Maya...?" Rian called out in a raspy voice, sweeping his gaze across the dim, blue-green, fog-choked market aisle. "Maya! Where are you?!"

No answer came from Maya.

Instead, amid the suffocating silence of the vendor alley, Rian’s ears faintly caught the sound of someone he knew intimately calling his name from a narrow gap tucked between two vendor stalls draped in heavy fog curtains.

“Rian... help me... it's so dark in here...” Maya’s voice whimpered softly, begging for assistance from deep within the shadowed alley.

"Maya!" Rian panicked, breaking into a desperate sprint away from Gani and Dika to chase the voice down.

"Yan! Don't go in there! It's a trap!" Gani roared from behind in a strained, cracking voice.

Yet Gani’s warning arrived a fraction too late. The moment Rian planted his foot inside the mouth of the narrow fog-veiled alleyway to search for Maya, a violent vortex of freezing wind slammed into him.

In a heartbeat, Rian’s figure was violently sucked away, swallowed completely into the dense, choking fog of the mystic market, leaving Gani screaming in raw hysteria as he called out his best friend's name while shadowy entities began closing in from every direction.