Radit landed hard on something that felt like concrete, though he couldn't see anything in the darkness. The air was damp, thick with dust. His notebook pressed into his chest as he struggled to sit up, clutching it like it might vanish too.
A faint glow pulsed in the distance. Radit crawled toward it, ignoring the sharp pain shooting through his knees. As his eyes adjusted, he realized he was in what looked like an underground tunnel — but the walls flickered, as if they were made of static, trembling between real and not real.
He tried to stand, but the floor shifted beneath him. For a second, the tunnel walls melted into a blank white void, then re-formed again. He could hear a faint scratching sound, like a thousand pens scribbling on paper at once.
"Hello?" he called out, voice hoarse.
No answer. Just the scratching, growing louder.
He flipped open his notebook. The pages were blank — every record he had made for the past year, gone. His hand shook as he wrote a single sentence on the first page:
*The apartment disappeared around me.*
The moment the pencil left the paper, the tunnel stabilized. The flickering stopped. The scratching noise fell silent.
Radit stared at the words he had just written, breathing hard.
He whispered, "What the hell is this place…"
Then a voice behind him, soft and close: "You're in the story now."
Radit spun around, but there was no one there. Only empty, dark tunnel — and a thin crack in the ground, slowly widening beneath his feet.
He clutched the notebook tighter, and ran.