Gani’s frantic screams calling out Rian’s name echoed among the narrow, shadowy aisles of the phantom market, but no answering voice returned. Rian had been swallowed entirely into the swirling vortex of white fog down the adjacent alley, leaving Gani completely alone amid a crowd of pale entities closing in for the kill.

Gani froze for a second, his chest heaving as he fought for breath. Cold sweat slicked down his frame, mixing with a suffocating brew of raw terror, desperate panic, and boiling anger.

"Damn it... damn it all!" Gani snarled in a raspy voice, clenching his fists so tight his knuckles turned translucent.

He spun on his heel, intending to dash back toward the stall where Dika sat to drag his friend out by force. Yet the sight awaiting him stopped the blood in Gani’s veins dead in its tracks.

In the corner of the alley, Sita—who had been trudging in a trance-like, semi-conscious state with hollow, unseeing eyes—had stopped moving. The girl stood rigid, staring straight ahead into the dense wall of fog hugging the left flank of the market.

From behind that churning white curtain, the faint, comforting voices of Sita’s relatives and family members drifted softly, calling out her name with deep warmth, begging her to come home and reunite with them.

"Sita... sweetheart... come here, honey. Mom and Dad are waiting for you at home... let's go home..." those gentle voices echoed, hypnotizing a mind already standing at the absolute precipice of mental collapse.

"Mom... Dad..." Sita whispered brokenly, a single tear slipping down her pale cheek. A hollow, vacant smile tugged at her lips.

"Sita! Don't listen to that voice! Snap out of it, Sit!" Gani shrieked in panic, lunging forward with everything he had, desperate to snatch Sita's hand before she wandered any further.

Yet Gani’s desperate lunge missed by a fraction of a second.

Sita stepped past Gani, drifting through the crowd of market entities that parted silently to clear her path. The exact second Sita’s body brushed against the heavy fog wall at the market's edge, a terrifying anomaly unfolded before Gani's eyes.

Sita’s skin slowly turned translucent, radiating a faint, fading white luminescence. In a matter of seconds, her physical form dissolved completely, melting into fine particles of mist that were sucked down into the mystic dimension without leaving a single trace behind.

"Sitaaa!" Gani screamed in hysteria, grabbing blindly at the empty air where his friend had stood a second before. He dropped to his knees in the dirt, chest heaving in ragged, broken gasps.

Before Gani could process the simultaneous vanishing of Sita and Rian, a horrific transformation rippled across the entire landscape.

Krrrr... THOOOM!

A concussive shockwave rumbled from the deep belly of the earth. The night market sky—previously choked with flickering greenish-blue oil lamps—plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness in a single heartbeat.

The bustling, grand traditional vendor stalls suddenly shrank, rotted, and collapsed into ruin. The wooden tables warped and mutated into thick clusters of venomous, thorny brush, while the oil lamp posts transformed into jagged, skeletal dead trees whose branches morphed into the razor-sharp talons of giant beasts.

The true, horrifying face of the mystic market was finally laid bare—a sheer drop of a death ravine, its floor choked with heaps of sun-bleached skeletal remains of past mountaineers scattered across the black, sucking mud.

"No... no way..." Gani whimpered in fractured, shaking disbelief, staring out at a landscape that had mutated into a gruesome mass grave.

Amidst the grotesque transformation, Gani's terrified gaze locked onto one final focal point—the coffee stall where Dika had been left behind.

Dika still sat upon the rotting wooden bench in the corner of the death canyon. Yet his form was no longer fully human. The lower half of Dika's body had fused directly into the twisting roots of the thorny trees, while the bowl of pitch-black fluid remained clutched in his lap.

Gani swallowed hard past a bone-dry throat, crawling backward inch by trembling inch. "Dika... let's get out of here, Dik..." Gani whispered, paralyzed by fear.

Slowly, Dika’s head—which had been bowed over the bowl in his lap—began to move.

Crack... crack... krrrck...

The loud, sickening pop of snapping cervical vertebrae echoed through the air. Dika’s head swiveled a full 180 degrees backward without his torso twitching an inch, locking his dead gaze straight onto Gani as he crawled in terror.

Dika’s face had turned ashen blue, dark veins bulging violently across his temples. What pushed Gani to the absolute brink of unconsciousness were Dika’s eyes—the entire surface of his eyeballs had bleached to a solid, milky white, utterly devoid of pupils, irises, or corneas, gazing out with a chilling, vacant stare.

Dika parted his torn, bloody lips, unleashing a high-pitched, mocking shriek of laughter that tore through the deadly silence of the ravine.

And with a dual-resonant voice that filled the entire canyon slope, Dika glared straight at Gani—representing every malevolent entity lurking in the dark—and screamed aloud:

"You're next to pay the toll!"